Eric Hedin writes:
Do we believe that rational thought is possible?
We may at times reason badly, but we do not thereby mistrust the existence or efficacy of reason.
There are those, however, who do dismiss reason. “There is a thought that stops thought,” wrote G. K. Chesterton.[i] It’s the idea that there is no fundamental basis for reason. Such a self-destructive thought is aided and abetted by thinking nature is all that there is. If nature is only particles in the void obeying mindless regularities, where in that scenario is there any room for rational inquiry?
The atheist rejects faith in God and holds that reality is limited to objective scientific reasoning within the constraints of the laws of nature and the material universe.
Perhaps not all who call themselves atheists are consistent atheists, but a consistent atheist would necessarily adhere to the view that the thoughts in his brain are only the result of interactions between charged particles governed by the laws of physics.
G. K. Chesterton wrote, “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”[ii] Thought itself requires a separateness from the mechanism of thinking. If naturalism is true, then our thoughts are not real in themselves; they are only random physical states of the molecules which make up the neurons of our brains. With such an assumption, we could not think. Our thoughts would only be interactions following the laws of nature, unguided by anything higher than the forces between atoms.
What becomes, then of “you”? Naturalism allows no identity of the individual beyond the probabilistic output of the three pound collection of atoms between our ears. “You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought,” Chesterton continued. “Descartes said, ‘I think; therefore I am.’ The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, ‘I am not; therefore I cannot think.’”[iii]
Our minds, however, are unnatural in at least one important sense: they have the ability not only to comprehend nature, but also to transform nature’s elements into objects and machines that would never assemble themselves in that way. This fact is underscored by the common distinction between natural and artificial, between nature and artifice.
Years ago, I read something that brings the claims of naturalism into a stark light: Naturalism insists that hydrogen gas, given enough time, will turn into people. And since people make the technological marvels of our culture, we can extend this claim of naturalism to say that hydrogen gas, given enough time, will turn into cars, computers, and cathedrals. That’s one explanation on the table. The question is whether we are willing to consider another possibility, that mind is as much behind our finely tuned, unfolding universe as it is behind cars, computers, and cathedrals—the possibility, as C.S. Lewis put it, that “human thought is… God-kindled.”[iv] If so, then reason has a foundation far better than hydrogen gas, far better than particles in the void.
[i] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Hollywood, FL: Simon & Brown, 1908, 2010), 28.
[ii] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (2010), 28.
[iii] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (2010), 29.
[iv] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Harper Collins, 1947, 2001), 44.
Excerpted and adapted from Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, by Eric Hedin (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021), ch. 11.