In Miracles, C.S. Lewis sets forth the following argument against materialism (that physical matter is all that exists):
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like “must be” and “therefore” and “since” is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling “in” our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them – if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work – then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would destroy its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound – a proof that there are no such things as proofs – which is nonsense.
Thus 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.’
Chesterton, in his Orthodoxy (see Book List), and Hick, in his The Fifth Dimension (again, see Book List) make very similar arguments. Hick adds on an allowance for “quantum randomness” which some think get us around the problem of materialism (=determinism?) and the validity of reasoning:
To avoid the dilemma some have suggested that there is sub-atomic randomness within the causal processes in the brain, and that it is this randomness that makes free will possible. But this does not help. Randomness or chaos are just as incompatible with free will as rigid causal determination. If every thought is either rigidly or randomly determined, we could never be in a state of rationally believing this to be the case. For rational believing presupposes a degree of intellectual freedom, the freedom to exercise judgment, and if all thoughts are the result of either physical determination or random chance, we have no such freedom. In short, we cannot rationally believe ourselves to be totally determined entities. There is an existential self-contradiction in this analogous to that of someone who says, ‘I do not exist’ – for in order for him to be able to say this, what he says must be false! So we are left with the mysterious but undeniable fact of consciousness as a non-physical reality, a reality which we have to assume is capable of free self-determining activity. This opens a window into the possibility of the kind of non-physical reality to which the religions point as God, Brahman, the Dharmakaya, and the Tao.
While I understand that there are incredibly complicated arguments on both sides (but what branch of philosophy isn’t this true of?), I remain convinced of this argument against materialism. It seems that if material reality is all that exists, it’s hard to get around the fact that our “logic” and “reasoning powers” are simply illusions…byproducts of chemical reactions in our brains. In which case, any argument we try to make is nonsense.
As Chesterton puts it:
“Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape. The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”
What do you think?
