Evidence for Theism
15
The Argument from Adequation
The regularity of the world is something we tend to take for granted. To recall that ice melts, rocks sink and fire burns is unlikely to elicit astonishment. However, science has discovered that the many “phenomenal” regularities of everyday life arise from a handful of more fundamental regularities that are rather more mysterious: A small subject to four forces and two laws. The whole matter can be compassed in a few sentences. Atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons which are in turn made of quarks. These are governed by gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Add to this the constraints of General Relativity and Quantum Theory and our picture of physical reality is virtually complete: [1] A few simple laws governing the unobservably tiny building blocks of the world.
The Argument from Adequation [2] unfolds from four facts attending this scientific discovery: That such regularities exist at all; that they are best understood as laws; that the laws are expressible using elegant mathematical equations; and that these equations have been discovered by the human mind. In what follows, I shall argue that each of these four facts is completely inexplicable and unexpected on physicalism but completely explicable and expected on theism. It will therefore be my concern to show that the rational structure of physical reality and the adequation of the human intellect to it is further evidence for the existence of God.
The Rational Universe
Regularity
To observe that objects always fall to the ground is no explanation of why they do so. This point can be generalised by saying that inductive knowledge describes but does not explain. The mathematician David Berlinski relates an instructive anecdote in this connection: Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok. "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws?" Primack asked. Turok was said to be surprised by the question and recognized its force. “Something,” writes Berlinski, “seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature and what makes this observation odd is that neither ‘compulsion’ nor ‘obedience’ are physical ideas.”
Consider the fact that, say, every positron in the universe attracts every electron with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Just as we would seek to explain all the coins of the realm having an identical pattern by means of a common mould, so, suggests Swinburne, we should seek to explain physical objects having an identical form and behaviour by means of a common source. On physicalism there are three explanatory options: The universe is infinitely old and every substance is caused by a preceding substance with the result that, “there can be substances with exactly the same properties only because there always has been;” or it began in a state of finite density and consisted of a very large number of substances of very few kinds; or it began in a state of infinite density and there was a point endowed with the power to decay into a large number of substances of very few kinds.
Theories of the universe as a whole have identical scope. Swinburne therefore notes that, “simplicity is the sole indicator of intrinsic probability.” Clearly, the theory that the universe began with a single substance is more probable on this criterion than the theory that it began with many substances. But postulating a point with the power to produce substances of few kinds is far less parsimonious than a point with no power or only the power to produce one substance. And so the theory that the universe developed many substances of few kinds having identical powers is just as improbable as the theory that there always were such substances. “Such a coincidence,” concludes Swinburne, “cries out for some single common source with the power to produce it.”
On physicalism the undeviating regularity of elementary particles must be taken as a brute fact. Countless identical coins of the realm just exist. There was no mould. There is no explanation. On theism it is precisely to be expected and can, furthermore, be imputed to a single and supremely simple explanatory entity [3]: God, to create an orderly physical substrate for life, ensures an arrangement of substances of the right kind and thereafter sustains them in existence. This is close to the view of medieval theology. Deus est ubique conservans mumdum: "God is everywhere conserving the world."
Laws
Because these regularities are universal, mathematically precise and “tied together” they are usually thought of as laws. This poses a second difficulty for physicalism. The inverse square law of gravity, for instance, is not a metaphor. We did not invent it and we did not impose it. “These laws,” says Paul Davies, “really exist.” And an inescapable entailment of this view is that rationality is among the very stuff of which our world is made—an attribute of the universe as substantive and concrete as its carbon or its hydrogen. As Einstein was moved to remark, the universe is, “reason incarnate.”
However, Davies further notes that the laws of nature are not observed directly but extrapolated from mathematical theory and experiment. The question arises: How can rationality be “incarnated” in mindless matter? This problem has inspired theistic intuitions in the greatest scientists who have contemplated it. Thus Einstein felt that the laws of the universe inspire belief in, "a spirit vastly superior to that of man." And he was not alone in feeling this way. As Flew notes, "the progenitors of quantum physics, Planck, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, have all made similar statements." [4] More recently, and dramatically, Allan Sandage ("widely regarded," says Lennox, "as the greatest living cosmologist") converted to Christian theism under the same conviction. [5]
A second difficulty for physicalism concerns the modal nature of the laws. We can begin to appreciate this by first noting that not every universal truth is a law. Thus, No man on broad the Titanic had prosopagnosia and No diamond is larger than the moon may be both true and universal but do not qualify as laws. The difference between a law and a universal truth, says Plantinga, is that universal truths are accidental and laws are thought to be in some way necessary. But in what way is a law of nature necessary? It is not logically necessary since something is logically necessary only if its negation entails a contradiction. Thus 2+3=5 is logically necessary because its negation (say, 2+3=65) is absurd. But it is not logically absurd in this way to suppose that the sun will not rise or that a pair of particles will on occasion not attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. [6] “All we’re ordinarily told,” complains Plantinga, “is that this necessity is weaker than logical necessity but still stronger than mere universal truth.”
Here, again, theism can offer important explanatory resources. The laws are necessary and contingent. They are necessary because they are decreed by an omnipotent mind and no finite power can act against and falsify them—they are, as Plantinga puts it, “finitely inviolable;” [7] and they are contingent because they could, logically, be otherwise: God could have created a world in which, say, the speed of light was half c or in which Newton’s laws did not hold for medium sized objects. [8]
Theism, then, tidily explains how laws of nature are grounded and what they are like; physicalism stands mute before them.
Mathematics
The laws of nature are in essence mathematical structures and this raises further problems for physicalism; namely, the applicability, ontology and accessibility of mathematics itself.
Eugene Wigner spoke of the, “unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences.” The logic of his much-discussed remark is nicely captured by the following examples: Consider the fact that Maxwell's equations modelling electrical and magnetic phenomena also describe radio waves discovered after his death; or that Einstein’s equations inspired by a daydream of falling elevators led to a description of space and time that has been confirmed by observation and experiment for one hundred years; or that Peter Higgs should sit down at his desk extrapolate from mathematical equations the existence of a particle which, 30 years later, is empirically detected.
Mathematical concepts have an uncanny applicability to an unexpectedly large class of phenomena in the natural world. You may object that, however the universe turned out, it would be mathematically describable. Correct. But what is unreasonable, Wigner says, is that the universe should be explanatorily amenable to general mathematical laws of both deep complexity and simplicity. Suppose all that exists is an inert and amorphous goo. A mathematical description of it would be possible but uninteresting. Suppose events occur in chaotic succession with no discernible pattern. Here, too, a mathematical description is possible (Event A lasted 10 seconds; Event B had twice as many components as event A, and so on) but uninteresting and bereft of predictive power. Suppose, finally, that surface chaos is underlain by an inaccessibly deep order or surface order arises from an underlying chaos. In both cases mathematics would be inefficacious. [9]
Wigner concludes his paper by describing the efficacy of mathematics as a “miracle” that we should accept with uncomprehending gratitude. The theist, once again, can bring explanatory resources to the mystery. “God,” Paul Dirac opined, “is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” On this view the deep concord between mathematics and the natural world is entirely to be expected.
A second problem: Mathematics, naturally enough, uses numbers and sets. But both available intuitions about the ontology of numbers and sets are, as we shall see, inexplicable on physicalism.
The first intuition views numbers and sets as abstract objects. These strange entities differ from concrete objects in two important respects: They do not occupy space and do not enter into causal relations. The number 5, for instance, exists necessarily, unchangingly, and somehow immaterially, whether or not there are minds to apprehend it. But this creates a puzzle for the physicalist. It is reasonable to think that all the objects we can know must stand in a causal relationship to us. We know about lions because we perceive them: Light waves from an approaching lion form an imagine on the retina that induces electrical activity in the optic nerve and registers, finally, in the brain. Abstract objects, if they exist at all, would seem to be things we could not know about on physicalism.
The second and far more widespread intuition finds it incredible that numbers should exist independently of the mind. Abstract objects are thought of as ontologically dependent upon the mental: They just are thoughts, or else, could not exist if not thought of. But here, too, is a puzzle for physicalism: Since there are infinitely many numbers, sets and propositions, it is not possible for them all to be mentally instantiated in finite minds. And this entails, absurdly, that most of the theoretical resources of mathematics and logic do not exist.
Both intuitions are unproblematically compatible with theism. Numbers and sets exist as divine thoughts which explains their ontology and also their accessibility. The imago dei, Augustine said, entails the capax dei. Because we are made in the image of God we are capable of receiving and partaking of God.
Adequation
And why, finally, should any of this have been discovered by human minds? On physicalism our cognitive faculties come to us through natural selection winnowing random genetic mutations on the Pleistocene savanna. “Boiled down to essentials,” Churchland says, this equips us to accomplish the “Four F’s: Feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction.” Current physics, meanwhile, requires powers of cognition in profligate excess of what is required for survival. Berlinski makes the same point rather colourfully when he asks,
Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of the matter of mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin.
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Here is yet another enigma for the physicalist and yet another datum to be expected on theism. Rationality is basic to the theistic ontology. God, the Basic Being, created the world and us in his image. He further ensured that the two were in accord so that the heavens might declare his glory to us and the sky proclaim his handiwork. Medieval theologians understood this as the adequatio intellectus ad rem: “The adequation of the intellect to reality.”
Worldview Compatibility
Physicalism
We have seen that both the rational structure of the universe and human knowledge of it lie beyond the explanatory scope of physicalism. On physicalism the phenomenal and fundamental regularities of the universe are an inexplicable coincidence; the existence and modal properties of the laws of nature extrapolated from those regularities are a brute fact; and the applicability, ontology and accessibility of the mathematics underlying those laws are without explanation.
The physicalist who undertakes to object to the foregoing point-by-point will have a further difficulty to address: Plantinga has extended all these ideas to show that physicalism undermines the rational basis of belief of every kind, including belief in physicalism. This is his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and I will briefly summarise it now.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Our cognitive faculties include memory, perception and rational intuition. In science as in every day life, these work together to produce beliefs. It is natural to assume that our cognitive faculties produce beliefs that are mostly true. But Plantinga says that, on physicalism, this assumption is unsafe.
Consider: The physicalist believes the mind “just is” the brain and so takes a belief to be something like a long-standing structure in the nervous system. The problem is that neurology can produce behaviours that increase fitness whether or not the beliefs annexed to that neurology are true. Survival, to be sure, does require cognitive devices that track crucial features of the environment and are appropriately connected to intention and muscular reflexes. That is not disputed. What is disputed is the necessary annexation between those cognitive devices and true beliefs. In fact, adaptive behaviour does not require true belief—or belief at all. Think of an organism fleeing from a predator. Undoubtably, its cognitive devices are tracking the predator and producing a useful response. But “tracking” itself is not belief and, so long as the neurology of the organism causes it to flee, the belief annexed to its neurology need not even contain a predator and it certainly need not be true. “It could be true,” says Plantinga, “it could be false; it doesn’t matter.”
Darwin himself was troubled by this. “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy,” he wrote in a private correspondence. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? The problem was also noticed by C. S. Lewis, the chemist J. B. S. Haldane [10] and atheist philosopher John Gray. "Modern humanism," Gray writes, "is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true, this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth."
Plantinga’s argument applies to all beliefs but with a force that increases as beliefs become irrelevant to survival. Perception, for example, is especially relevant to feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction and so beliefs directly informed by perception may be taken to be more reliable. Beliefs about physics, aesthetics and philosophy, on the other hand, are irrelevant to survival. These must be regarded as far less reliable. Metaphysical beliefs, including both physicalism and theism, fall into this second category.
What then is the likelihood, on physicalism, that some belief p instantiated in an organism is true? Plantinga suggests that, since the alternatives seem about equiprobable, we should give it a probability of about a half. And what, in that case, is the probability that its cognitive faculties are generally reliable? Plantinga suggests we consider his cognitive faculties reliable if they generate true beliefs 45 percent of the time. He writes,
Worldview Compatibility
Physicalism
We have seen that both the rational structure of the universe and human knowledge of it lie beyond the explanatory scope of physicalism. On physicalism the phenomenal and fundamental regularities of the universe are an inexplicable coincidence; the existence and modal properties of the laws of nature extrapolated from those regularities are a brute fact; and the applicability, ontology and accessibility of the mathematics underlying those laws are without explanation.
The physicalist who undertakes to object to the foregoing point-by-point will have a further difficulty to address: Plantinga has extended all these ideas to show that physicalism undermines the rational basis of belief of every kind, including belief in physicalism. This is his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and I will briefly summarise it now.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Our cognitive faculties include memory, perception and rational intuition. In science as in every day life, these work together to produce beliefs. It is natural to assume that our cognitive faculties produce beliefs that are mostly true. But Plantinga says that, on physicalism, this assumption is unsafe.
Consider: The physicalist believes the mind “just is” the brain and so takes a belief to be something like a long-standing structure in the nervous system. The problem is that neurology can produce behaviours that increase fitness whether or not the beliefs annexed to that neurology are true. Survival, to be sure, does require cognitive devices that track crucial features of the environment and are appropriately connected to intention and muscular reflexes. That is not disputed. What is disputed is the necessary annexation between those cognitive devices and true beliefs. In fact, adaptive behaviour does not require true belief—or belief at all. Think of an organism fleeing from a predator. Undoubtably, its cognitive devices are tracking the predator and producing a useful response. But “tracking” itself is not belief and, so long as the neurology of the organism causes it to flee, the belief annexed to its neurology need not even contain a predator and it certainly need not be true. “It could be true,” says Plantinga, “it could be false; it doesn’t matter.”
Darwin himself was troubled by this. “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy,” he wrote in a private correspondence. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? The problem was also noticed by C. S. Lewis, the chemist J. B. S. Haldane [10] and atheist philosopher John Gray. "Modern humanism," Gray writes, "is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true, this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth."
Plantinga’s argument applies to all beliefs but with a force that increases as beliefs become irrelevant to survival. Perception, for example, is especially relevant to feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction and so beliefs directly informed by perception may be taken to be more reliable. Beliefs about physics, aesthetics and philosophy, on the other hand, are irrelevant to survival. These must be regarded as far less reliable. Metaphysical beliefs, including both physicalism and theism, fall into this second category.
What then is the likelihood, on physicalism, that some belief p instantiated in an organism is true? Plantinga suggests that, since the alternatives seem about equiprobable, we should give it a probability of about a half. And what, in that case, is the probability that its cognitive faculties are generally reliable? Plantinga suggests we consider his cognitive faculties reliable if they generate true beliefs 45 percent of the time. He writes,
If I have one thousand independent beliefs, for example, the probability that three quarters or more of these beliefs are true will be less than 10^–58. And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only one hundred beliefs, the probability that three-quarters of them are true is very low—something like .000001
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The rest of the argument follows by tautology: If I cannot trust my cognitive faculties, I cannot trust any belief they produce and especially not any metaphysical belief; but physicalism itself is a metaphysical belief produced by my cognitive faculties; therefore, I cannot trust physicalism. Plantinga concludes by saying that physicalism is self-referentially incoherent and cannot be rationally affirmed.
I think it is worth dwelling for a moment on the inescapable circularity of every possible objection to this argument: Any theory p which purports to prove the reliability of your cognitive faculties is itself a product of the cognitive faculties whose reliability it seeks to prove. Thomas Reid memorably analogised this problem by observing that, "If a man's honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to that man's own word whether he be honest or not." In a like case, Reid said, it is absurd to try and, "prove by reasoning that reason is not fallacious.”
Theism
Theism clears with ease every stile at which physicalism falls. It explains the phenomenal and fundamental regularity of the world by means of a single parsimonious cause; it accounts for the existence and modal properties of natural law; and it explains the efficacy, ontology and accessibility of mathematics. However, these points were ancillary to the central mystery of this chapter: The human apprehension of the deepest truths at the heart of physical reality. Here the explanatory superiority of theism was at its most striking. The adequation of rational minds to the rational structure of the universe implicates the Rational Being who created both.
Conclusion
The foregoing discussion can now be formalised into an abductive syllogism,
I think it is worth dwelling for a moment on the inescapable circularity of every possible objection to this argument: Any theory p which purports to prove the reliability of your cognitive faculties is itself a product of the cognitive faculties whose reliability it seeks to prove. Thomas Reid memorably analogised this problem by observing that, "If a man's honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to that man's own word whether he be honest or not." In a like case, Reid said, it is absurd to try and, "prove by reasoning that reason is not fallacious.”
Theism
Theism clears with ease every stile at which physicalism falls. It explains the phenomenal and fundamental regularity of the world by means of a single parsimonious cause; it accounts for the existence and modal properties of natural law; and it explains the efficacy, ontology and accessibility of mathematics. However, these points were ancillary to the central mystery of this chapter: The human apprehension of the deepest truths at the heart of physical reality. Here the explanatory superiority of theism was at its most striking. The adequation of rational minds to the rational structure of the universe implicates the Rational Being who created both.
Conclusion
The foregoing discussion can now be formalised into an abductive syllogism,
The surprising fact p is observed
If r were the case, p would follow as a matter of course Therefore, probably, r |
The surprising fact p is the adequation of the human intellect to a rationally structured universe. My discussion compared and contrasted the probability of p under two worldviews: physicalism and theism. Physicalism was shown to be in conflict with four key features of p and generally. Theism was found to be unproblematically compatible with the same. The Argument from Adequation therefore provides evidence that there is a God who created the universe and the beings who contemplate it.
[1] “Probably,” adds Swinburne, “the laws of electromagnetism and the weak force derive from the more general laws of an “electroweak theory.”
[2] As I am calling it. No single name for the argument is used. Swinburne discusses it under the argument from consciousness; Craig has called it (after Wigner, though somewhat clumsily) “the argument from the unusual efficacy of mathematics” and C. S. Lewis defended a related, “argument from reason.” My discussion is a summary of Plantinga. See Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.
[3] Mental substances, being nonphysical, lack the "heterogeneity of parts" which Dawkins recommends as the indicator of complexity. Recall, further, Swinburne’s argument that a hypothesis ascribing zero or infinite value to some entity is simpler than hypothesis ascribing a finite value when both hypotheses are compatible with the data: In the second case, one postulates both a force and a constraint; in the first case, one postulates only the force. And since a person having zero powers would not be a person at all, it follows that in postulating a person with infinite powers (that is, God) the theist is postulating the simplest person logically possible.
[4] Even Darwin can be added to this list. He confessed that in contemplating, "this immense and wonderful universe" he felt, "compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to man,” concluding that, “I deserve to be called a Theist."
[5] The case of Flew himself is equally impressive. After a lifetime of influential philosophical writings on atheism, he declared himself a theist.
[6] G. K. Chesterton noticed this. To say an apple hit Newton’s nose, he wrote, is to say that Newton’s nose was hit by an apple. That is an inviolable law because the one cannot logically occur without the other. “But,” Chesterton continues, “we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose of which it had a more definite dislike.” Newtonian equations, like all scientific “laws,” provide a description but leave us without an explanation. They are not laws at all but, "mere facts." And Chesterton completes the thought with these memorable words,
[2] As I am calling it. No single name for the argument is used. Swinburne discusses it under the argument from consciousness; Craig has called it (after Wigner, though somewhat clumsily) “the argument from the unusual efficacy of mathematics” and C. S. Lewis defended a related, “argument from reason.” My discussion is a summary of Plantinga. See Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.
[3] Mental substances, being nonphysical, lack the "heterogeneity of parts" which Dawkins recommends as the indicator of complexity. Recall, further, Swinburne’s argument that a hypothesis ascribing zero or infinite value to some entity is simpler than hypothesis ascribing a finite value when both hypotheses are compatible with the data: In the second case, one postulates both a force and a constraint; in the first case, one postulates only the force. And since a person having zero powers would not be a person at all, it follows that in postulating a person with infinite powers (that is, God) the theist is postulating the simplest person logically possible.
[4] Even Darwin can be added to this list. He confessed that in contemplating, "this immense and wonderful universe" he felt, "compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to man,” concluding that, “I deserve to be called a Theist."
[5] The case of Flew himself is equally impressive. After a lifetime of influential philosophical writings on atheism, he declared himself a theist.
[6] G. K. Chesterton noticed this. To say an apple hit Newton’s nose, he wrote, is to say that Newton’s nose was hit by an apple. That is an inviolable law because the one cannot logically occur without the other. “But,” Chesterton continues, “we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose of which it had a more definite dislike.” Newtonian equations, like all scientific “laws,” provide a description but leave us without an explanation. They are not laws at all but, "mere facts." And Chesterton completes the thought with these memorable words,
When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned into horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a “law” for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening, we have no right to say that it must always happen. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. The sun shines because it is bewitched.
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[7] Thus Roger Cotes, from the preface he wrote for the second edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica:
From this fountain it is that those laws, which we call the laws of Nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces indeed of the most wise contrivance but not the least shadow of necessity.
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[8] It is worth noting the here the similarities and differences between moral law and natural law. Both are degreed by God. But moral laws arise from the nature of God and are for free creatures who can obey or disobey them: They are logically necessary but finitely violable. Natural laws arise from the free will of God and are for the inanimate world of matter which cannot disobey them: They are logically contingent but finitely inviolable.
[9] It may be necessary here to anticipate an objection: In these alternative universes, conscious life could not exist and therefore mathematics of any kind would be impossible. However, the question Plantinga is asking is: What sort of mathematics is in principle possible in alternative universes. The fact that some of them don't allow for the existence of actual mathematicians does not affect this. See, also, the sixth footnote to Chapter 12.
[10] Haldane complained that if the thoughts in his mind were just the motions of atoms in his brain (a mechanism that has arisen by a motiveless and unguided mechanism) why should he believe anything they tell him—including the fact that his brain is made of atoms? Lewis, for his part, wrote,
[9] It may be necessary here to anticipate an objection: In these alternative universes, conscious life could not exist and therefore mathematics of any kind would be impossible. However, the question Plantinga is asking is: What sort of mathematics is in principle possible in alternative universes. The fact that some of them don't allow for the existence of actual mathematicians does not affect this. See, also, the sixth footnote to Chapter 12.
[10] Haldane complained that if the thoughts in his mind were just the motions of atoms in his brain (a mechanism that has arisen by a motiveless and unguided mechanism) why should he believe anything they tell him—including the fact that his brain is made of atoms? Lewis, for his part, wrote,
If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair.
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