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Darek Barefoot

Darek Barefoot

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A Response to Nicholas Tattersall's "A Critique of Miracles by C. S. Lewis" (2001)

Barefoot criticises Tattersall's defense of naturalism, supporting C.S. Lewis' argument that reason cannot be produced by any mechanical organism and therefore must be supernatural.

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A Response to Richard Carrier's Review of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2007)

C. S. Lewis's argument from reason (AfR) claims that the process of inference by which consideration of premises causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone. In C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert maintains that the argument still poses a strong challenge to naturalism. However, Richard Carrier has attempted to refute Reppert's version of the AfR by invoking developments in cognitive science and computational theory. In this essay Darek Barefoot argues that advances in cognitive science do not affect the AfR since there is an absolute conceptual divide between rational mental causes and physical computational ones. Furthermore, if the AfR is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism.

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The Riddle of the Four Faces: Solving an Ancient Mystery (2000)

It seems problematic that there are four (and only four) gospels in the NT canon. Barefoot seeks to provide a more objective reason for thinking that Ezekiel's mysterious "four faces"==the man, lion, ox, and eagle==play a hand in the selection of the canonical four gospels in the early history of the Church.

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See Also:

Darek Barefoot's Kiosk Articles



Published on the Secular Web


Modern Library

A Response to Richard Carrier’s Review of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea

C. S. Lewis's argument from reason (AfR) claims that the process of inference by which consideration of premises causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone. In C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert maintains that the argument still poses a strong challenge to naturalism. However, Richard Carrier has attempted to refute Reppert's version of the AfR by invoking developments in cognitive science and computational theory. In this essay Darek Barefoot argues that advances in cognitive science do not affect the AfR since there is an absolute conceptual divide between rational mental causes and physical computational ones. Furthermore, if the AfR is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism.
Kiosk Article

The Riddle of the Four Faces: Solving an Ancient Mystery

It seems problematic that there are four (and only four) gospels in the NT canon. Barefoot seeks to provide a more objective reason for thinking that Ezekiel's mysterious "four faces" -- the man, lion, ox, and eagle -- play a hand in the selection of the canonical four gospels in the early history of the Church.