[Miracles] Precis - Final

If Naturalism—the belief that only Nature, as an interlocking system, exists—is correct, it should be able to explain any event as a necessary part of a Total System. If anything exists wholly independent of that System, then Naturalism is false.

All knowledge beyond immediate sensation is the result of inference, which requires the validity of inference--also called reasoning. If knowledge through inference is possible, it follows that any philosophy which denies external truth known through reasoning cannot be argued for. It turns out that this is what Naturalism is bound to do.

Reason, to the Naturalist, must be a series of necessary causes and effects within the human mind, and any beliefs must be assented to as necessary parts of the Total System, not as reflections of truth which supersedes the System. In short, a Naturalist allows for the mental process of reasoning, but weakens it to be irrelevant to the knowledge of truth.

Before examining knowledge any further, one must consider two types of relationships: Cause and Effect and Ground and Consequent. The former indicates a necessary connection between events; the latter indicates a logical connection between beliefs (psychological events) attained through inference and the grounds for those beliefs. Naturalism by definition demands that any event in Nature be the Effect of some Cause. Additionally, our beliefs must be a rational Consequent of some Ground in order to be valid, yet also the Effect of some Cause in order to occur at all.

The current difficulty is that lack of logical grounds cannot prevent a belief's occurrence in a Naturalist world, since any belief can be excused as a necessary Effect of some Cause. The Naturalist responds that the mere existence of a Ground for some belief is sufficient to cause that belief, thus introducing an event (belief) which is both the necessary Effect of some Cause and the rational Consequent of some Ground. But this cannot be, since we are not caused to believe all possible Consequents when we perceive the existence of any Ground. The Naturalist counters that an event can cause a belief by being seen to be a Ground for it. That is, a belief is the necessary Effect of a Cause, and the Cause is the perception of the relationship between a Ground and its Consequent.

This argument leads to the conclusion that beliefs are distinct from other events in that (1) they are about something external and (2) can be true or false. (It is false in the case that the Consequent does not follow from the Ground.) The Naturalist holds that beliefs are subjective events in a person’s psychological history. According to his argument, however, a belief is the perception (whether true or false) of an implication external to the believer. The Naturalist cannot discredit the second point of view without discrediting all human knowledge and cannot accept the second point of view without allowing for an “act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known,” but such an allowance would admit something beyond Nature.

Next, Lewis addresses whether Nature alone can give rise to rational thought. Naturalism makes the claim that human thought has not always been rational comprehension of objective truth, and that rational thought is a result of the process of evolution. The difficulty of this proposition lies in the distinction between response to stimuli and insight which leads to knowledge. Responses cannot become insight simply by increasing the frequency of useful responses. Thus, insight cannot possibly be explained as a result of Nature’s course over billions of years.

A Naturalist may make the claim that rational thought is merely a string of inferences drawn from repeated experience. However, this allows for only an expectation of future correlation, it does not allow for a true understanding of the connection between a Cause and its Effect. The former requires only animal instinct; the latter requires rational thought. Here again we see the need for understanding of the relationship between a Ground and its Consequent in order to make a valid judgment of truth. This understanding cannot be a result of repeated experience, since it must be the judge of repeated experiences.

Ultimately, the Naturalist may concede that our thoughts are useful for life but may not be aimed at external truth. The difficulty here is that there is no clearly useful purpose for belief in Naturalism, and the belief itself cannot therefore be argued or even relied upon. This is the Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.

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