Causes and Reasons: The Argument from Reason and Naturalism
Arguments from reason are philosophical arguments against naturalism that claim that if we held the human mind to be a physical entity, then our thinking processes would be causally determined, mechanical ones, which would then make them unreliable as guides to objective truth. Our ability to grasp the ground-consequence relation couldn't be a material-causal power, the argument goes, but should instead be explained as the working of some sort of immaterial, spiritual entity (i.e., God, or a soul/spirit created by God). In this article, Miklós Szalai critiques this argument as it has been put forth by C. S. Lewis, Victor Reppert, Darek Barefoot, and others, ultimately defending a naturalistic analysis of the concepts of representation, truth, and inference.