I have not encountered the Argument from Reason before, will spend some time reading that CS Lewis article.
Is it similar to the Problem of Induction? Which is a basic belief assumed by all of logic and science (basically you cannot say that what was oberved in past will necessarily hold true in the future)
O.k., finally here is my response to your post. The argument takes several forms, but you already subscribe to it when you said before in this thread “the lack of free will really does lead to an impossibilty of proving any statement is true or not”. In the same vein, my article that you like argues that without genuinely free choice rationality is impossible. This basically comes down to C.S. Lewis’s classical argument that Ground and Consequent in rational thought processes must be in some sense independent from cause and effect (in the brain).
From C.S. Lewis’s article, “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”:
philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/Intro/csl3.html
“But unfortunately the two systems [ground and consequent, cause and effect] are wholly distinct. To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting a person’s opinions is to explain them causally–‘You say that
because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a woman’. The implication is that if causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them.” {End quote]
The remainder of the article is just as hard-hitting.
Other forms of the argument from reason relate to abstract thinking, the recognition of absolute truth (for example certain mathematical truths), and comparison of the human mind with computers. Stephen Barr argues along those lines in his book that I mentioned. It is really worth having – one of the very best books on religion and science out there, without a doubt.
The problem with something like absolute truth or complex abstract thinking is that it is not reasonably explainable by survival value in evolution. Even the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel says in his excellent book on the objectivity of rational thought,
The Last Word, that the evolutionary explanation of the human mind is (verbatim quote) “laughably inadequate”. It is puzzling that other atheists simply don’t see that.
Actually, I must say that I don’t really have many reasons for believing that God exists - it’s more a case of I believe in God as if I don’t there’s no free will, morality and life and existence makes no sense - if I went out to a school and shot a dozen children it would be any different at all to just living a normal life.
Yes, atheists have to live as if they had free will, because there is no other way in practical life. However, if there is no free will, then life is just a Grand Delusion. So who is living in a delusion, theists or atheists?
I did think that the cosmological argument was quite good but now it seems that it may be explained by brane theory and multiverses (which would also answer the fine tuning argument).
I explain in chapter 1.4 of my cosmological article
home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/cosmological-arguments-god.htm
why the multiverse does not solve the design problem. The argument (which is not originally mine) must carry weight, since in discussions at
commonsenseatheism.com other parts of my article were ferociously attacked (with insubstantial arguments in my view), but never this part.
The cosmological argument still holds since, as I show in chapter 2 of my article, eternal matter and eternal fields would have to behave very differently from what we know from science about actual matter and fields – an atheist needs to
negate data from science if s/he wants to believe in a naturalistic origin of the universe. (So much for the “scientific worldview”!)
I do also find it strange that the basic physical equations are so simple and elegant and how the sense of natural order to the universe. However quantum physics does pose a problem to this as it seems to be completely the opposite case, undeterminate and complex.
That quantum physics is indeterminate does not make the basic physical equations complex, as far as I know (I am not an expert).
