CS Lewis Quote: EAAN

Isn't that the power of his word?

Nope.

who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
 
You're missing the point. The thread isn't about proving NS. The point here is rather that NS is the explanation Lewis fails to recognize which would explain why our cognitive faculties are generally reliable even if not given to us by God.
If what you say is your opinion, it strikes me that it's you who fail to recognize that your brain cells are randomly originated, and therefore your faculty for thought unreliable.
But, your attempt at justifying your lack of capacity to have rational thought just demonstrates that you are genuinely clueless, and think what you have to say on the matter..... matters.
 
Nope.

who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
Well, depending on what bible you read.
 
If what you say is your opinion, it strikes me that it's you who fail to recognize that your brain cells are randomly originated, and therefore your faculty for thought unreliable.
But, your attempt at justifying your lack of capacity to have rational thought just demonstrates that you are genuinely clueless, and think what you have to say on the matter..... matters.
That's the argument I am refuting in the OP.
 
That's the argument I am refuting in the OP.
clearly it fails.

the reason I know my thoughts are valid, and not random, is because there is a creator, who imparted his order, and reason on the cosmos, and humans.

So, that God has given you mental faculty, and you use that mental faculty to claim he's not real, and that you're a random accident..... seems to me that you've simply lost your marbles.
Perhaps we can call Peter Pan into help you find them.
 
clearly it fails.
Yes, the EAAN fails. If you meant that my rebuttal fails then you'd need to explain why.

the reason I know my thoughts are valid, and not random, is because there is a creator, who imparted his order, and reason on the cosmos, and humans.
The other alternative is that our cognitive apparatus has evolved to be reliable for general purpose intelligence.
 
Look what I found when I went to the first page of the Atheist forum!! My favorite argument for an intelligent designer.

“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” C.S. Lewis
The problem with this crude formulation of the argument is that it completely fails to acknowledge the non-random role of selection in evolution. Of course a purely random event is highly unlikely to produce a reliable mind or an accurate map of London. But suppose there were a naturally-occurring iterative procedure whereby whatever small part of the spilled milk that did look a bit like London were kept, and the rest cleaned up and spilled again. Then, if repeated over millions of trials, one could easily eventually end up with a map of London.
How easy would it be? What would the probability be of that happening? Why would your formulation be better than Lewis'?

How can natural selection be anything but random if there is no intelligence involved in the "selecting"?

Could it also make an image of Christ on the cross?

Lewis is considering how a natural process works with the basic building blocks of nature to bring about a brain that can think immaterial thoughts. How can random chemicals and atoms moving around in our brain, like the circuit board of a computer program, produce a consiousness that reasons, imagines things it has not seen, and expresses those thoughts in spoken words? How did it all come together in such a way as to make us the way we are? How do we know that constant spillage will bring about something amazing with structure and purpose?

For those of us who have met our Creator and understand that our immaterial souls are made in his image...it all makes sense. We have meaning, purpose, and a future hope after the physical dies. We can trust what we think because our consciousnesses are not made of atoms and are not affected by the laws of nature. Our minds are the way they are because we are his children, all of us, and we are like Him.
 
I was expecting a response on the Kalam thread rather than a necro-bump to a three year-old thread, but I'm happy to respond.

How easy would it be? What would the probability be of that happening? Why would your formulation be better than Lewis'?
Easy for who? Spilling milk a few million time is going to take some effort. The probability is 100% given the right selection pressure and sufficient time. I wasn't offering a different formulation of Lewis' argument, so much as pointing out that it fails by not taking into account the role of selection.

How can natural selection be anything but random if there is no intelligence involved in the "selecting"?
Because the environment automatically selects for those variations that are better suited to survive in that environment.

Could it also make an image of Christ on the cross?
With the right selection pressure, sure.
 
Lewis is considering how a natural process works with the basic building blocks of nature to bring about a brain that can think immaterial thoughts. How can random chemicals and atoms moving around in our brain, like the circuit board of a computer program, produce a consiousness that reasons, imagines things it has not seen, and expresses those thoughts in spoken words? How did it all come together in such a way as to make us the way we are? How do we know that constant spillage will bring about something amazing with structure and purpose?
No, I'd say that is a very different question from that raised by the EAAN. Lewis is asking how an unguided natural process can provide us with reliable cognition, whereas you are asking about the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. how mere physical brain activity can produce the phenomenal subjective states of our experience. I'm answering Lewis in the OP. Your question is much harder, and I don't think anyone has particularly good answers to it yet.

For those of us who have met our Creator and understand that our immaterial souls are made in his image...it all makes sense. We have meaning, purpose, and a future hope after the physical dies. We can trust what we think because our consciousnesses are not made of atoms and are not affected by the laws of nature. Our minds are the way they are because we are his children, all of us, and we are like Him.
To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, this solution has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. It's easy to 'explain' consciousness if we start with a magically always-existing, yet existing for no reason, conscious mind from which all others are derived. Just as an always living God can't explain the origin of all life, an always conscious mind can't explain the origin of consciousness - it instead just assumes it as an axiom. The problems of mind and matter don't go away on a theistic view either, as the nature of mind-body causal interaction must still be accounted for (and preferably in a way consistent with modern neuroscience).
 
CS Lewis' formulation of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN):
Shows that CS Lewis didn't know what he was talking about.
He dismissed many possible lines of thought, either because he didn't understand them or because he didn't like them.

How do we know that we haven't evolved in a niche favouring adaptive behaviours and beliefs regardless of their truth?
I'd suggest that the general belief in theism shows a skewing toward that very thing.
 
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.”
To explore his analogy a little further, it is worth noting that countless generations have navigating the streets of London using his split milk as a map, and for the most part have done so very successfully. It may be the product of random chance, but it has a proven track record of working very well.
 
To explore his analogy a little further, it is worth noting that countless generations have navigating the streets of London using his split milk as a map, and for the most part have done so very successfully. It may be the product of random chance, but it has a proven track record of working very well.

We can't just take your word for it. Elaborate. Tell us the details of when, where and how they have supposedly done that.
 
We can't just take your word for it. Elaborate. Tell us the details of when, where and how they have supposedly done that.
People have been using their minds for countless generations, and by and large it has served us well. For example, look at this internet thing we are communicating on. We can do that because mankind tends to get stuff right about the world. We can build bridges, fly planes and even just walk down the street because our minds work reliably.

However our minds came about, and despite what Lewis says, we actually have good reason to think they are reliable.
 
People have been using their minds for countless generations, and by and large it has served us well. For example, look at this internet thing we are communicating on. We can do that because mankind tends to get stuff right about the world. We can build bridges, fly planes and even just walk down the street because our minds work reliably.

However our minds came about, and despite what Lewis says, we actually have good reason to think they are reliable.

A map of London found on the side of the street is reliable for navigating the streets of London, but not for determining how the map itself got on the side of the street in the first place.
 
Last edited:
A map of London found on the side of the street is reliable for navigating the streets of London, but not for determining how the map itself got on the side of the street in the first place.
Right, and the analogy breaks down there. The map of London is good for navigating London; that is the nature of maps of London. Brains are good at thinking, and that does include thinking about where said brains come from.
 
Right, and the analogy breaks down there. The map of London is good for navigating London; that is the nature of maps of London. Brains are good at thinking, and that does include thinking about where said brains come from.

Absolutely. Without revelation from outside our brains we can think till the cows come home about where those brains came from; but to no avail.
 
Back
Top