Alvin Plantinga is well known for his argument against naturalism, for instance, in his Warrant and Proper Function (1993). Briefly summarized, Plantinga argues that naturalism is incoherent, because we have no reason to suppose (from a naturalistic, evolutionary perspective) that our cognitive capacities would be truth-tracking. Now, I seem to remember that Plantinga credits C.S. Lewis for this idea (I don't have a copy of Warrant and Proper Function handy), but I only came across Lewis' version very recently, in his book Miracles (1947). [I have recently read a lot of his nonfiction as well as his fiction. My daughter and I have just finished all the Narnia Chronicles, I'm now reading some of his fantasy for adults, as well as Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy and Miracles). It is interesting to see the argument against naturalism in Lewis' words, so I would like to share it here (see below).
I think C.S. Lewis' work in philosophy of religion very interesting and worthy of more attention (I'm also thinking of his version of the moral argument in Mere Christianity, amongst other things). What I find particularly striking is that already in Lewis' formulation, we have all the elements of the argument against naturalism that have figured so prominently in recent debates. These include the claim that natural selection is not concerned with tracking truth, that naturalism is self-defeating, and that only a supernaturalist ontology can provide warrant. In a famous debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, Lewis felt forced to revise the argument in subsequent editions in Miracles. All quotes are from chapter 3 of Miracles:
"…a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: 'If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209 […] [Naturalism] offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behaviour; but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.[…] It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even sentience, and life itself are late comers in Nature. If there is nothing but Nature, therefore, reason must have come into existence by a historical process. And of course, for the Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behaviour that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood. The type of mental behaviour we now call rational thinking or inference must therefore have been 'evolved' by natural selection, by the gradual weeding out of types less fitted to survive.[…]
Once, then, our thoughts were not rational. That is, all our thoughts once were, as many of our thoughts still are, merely subjective events, not apprehensions of objective truth. Those which had a cause external to ourselves at all were (like our pains) responses to stimuli. Now natural selection could operate only by eliminating responses that were biologically hurtful and multiplying those which tended to survival. But it is not conceivable that any improvement of responses could ever turn them into acts of insight, or even remotely tend to do so. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. But neither this improvement nor any possible improvements we can suppose could bring it an inch nearer to being a knowledge of light. It is admittedly something without which we could not have had that knowledge. But the knowledge is achieved by experiments and inferences from them, not by refinement of the response. It is not men with specially good eyes who know about light, but men who have studied the relevant sciences. In the same way our psychological responses to our environment-our curiosities, aversions, delights, expectations-could be indefinitely improved (from the biological point of view) without becoming anything more than responses. Such perfection of the non-rational responses, far from amounting to their conversion into valid inferences, might be conceived as a different method of achieving survival—an alternative to reason. A conditioning which secured that we never felt delight except in the useful nor aversion save from the dangerous, and that the degrees of both were exquisitely proportional to the degree of real utility or danger in the object, might serve us as well as reason or in some circumstances better. [...]
On these terms the Theist's position must be a chimera nearly as outrageous as the Naturalist's. (Nearly, not quite; it abstains from the crowning audacity of a huge negative). But the Theist need not, and does not, grant these terms. He is not committed to the view that reason is a comparatively recent development moulded by a process of selection which can select only the biologically useful. For him, reason--the reason of God--is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. For him, the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine reason. It is set free, in the measure required, from the huge nexus of non-rational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation, if there were any, were designed to do so.
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