C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Reason

I am intellectually indebted to a brilliant Christian thinker from the twentieth century who taught me how to defend the Christian faith. He taught me how to prove the supernaturalism of Christianity by proving—you might say—the impossibility of the contrary. That is to say, he taught me not only that supernaturalism is a credible belief, but also that its denial is downright incredible, since naturalism (supernaturalism’s alternative) cannot attempt to prove anything without contradicting itself. This thinker showed not only that reason helps us to weigh arguments for the existence of God; he helped me to see how reason, indeed, is an argument for the existence of God.

Now, at this point, I could forgive the informed reader for assuming that the figure I am describing is the late, great, Dutch-American theologian, Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), but he would be wrong. I have been describing C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). To be sure, Van Til taught all of these things as well, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for reinforcing these lessons, but Lewis gets credit for introducing them to me, and for showing me what they look like in a number of literary settings. In this essay, I shall consider Lewis’s argument from reason. Contrary to what some modern reformed thinkers may insist, this feature is not a unique contribution by Van Til or the “presuppositional” school of apologetics he pioneered. While Van Til was a valiant defender of this argument (or something very much like it, which has come to be known as the “transcendental argument”), and while he did bring in some creative subversions in his deployment of this argument against Kantian idealism, he was not its originator, nor even its best practitioner. Additionally, while some modern presuppositionalists may appeal to the argument as a kind of alternative to natural theology, I will show how Lewis puts it to use as a natural theological argument.

The Matter of Anscombe and the fate of “the Argument from Reason”

Reason—the reason of God—is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. Click To Tweet First, a very brief aside. It would be very easy on this article about Lewis’s argument from reason to divert our attention into a no doubt fruitful, but nevertheless distracting, rabbit trail. Now, I for one, am a great lover of the personal essay precisely because of its meandering feature. In fact, after briefly extrapolating Lewis’s argument from reason in his apologetic work, Miracles, I think I shall indulge myself in some good-spirited meandering. But such a romp through the wilderness of my imagination will not take me into the forest we might label “the Anscombe affair,” nor in the prairies of “contemporary articulations of the argument.” This failure to venture that far off my well-trodden thought-paths is owing chiefly to the fact that, so far as my own imagination goes, these areas are rather barren. I do not feel I am well-versed on either of these areas to do them any justice, even in the spirit of “meandering,” though I do feel comfortable enough to say this much: while it seems clear that Lewis was flatly defeated in his debate with the Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, when they argued over this very issue at the Oxford Socratic Club (which Lewis himself started), it seems equally clear that some of the accounts of this debate’s aftermath are overblown. Lewis did not cower from the realm of philosophy and hide in the safety of children’s fiction. Not only did he continue to engage in apologetics more broadly, he did not even relinquish this particular argument. Lewis revised the argument from reason in the second edition of his book, taking Anscombe’s criticisms on the chin and using the debate to sharpen, rather than forfeit, his argument.[1] It is Lewis’s strongest version of the argument I wish to interact with here. Which brings me to that other area I do not plan to touch on: the state of the argument from reason today, and whether it has been strengthened since Lewis. That is a question I leave to others.[2]

The Argument from Reason

For Lewis, the argument from reason was developed within a much larger argument in defense of the Christian affirmation of miracles specifically, and Christianity more broadly. The argument is laid out in his third chapter, “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” This particular leg of his argument endeavors to debunk naturalism, in favor of supernaturalism (both terms he defines for the reader in chapter two, “The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist”). This work of debunking will take several chapters, and each of them take on the same shape as this one in particular, though considered through the lens of different transcendentals. If the argument from reason debunks naturalism on the grounds of Truth—i.e., naturalism cannot account for reason without contradicting itself—the argument from morality (chapter five, “A Further Difficulty in Naturalism”) argues the same on the grounds of Goodness, and the argument from beauty (chapter nine, “A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary”) does the same on the grounds of Beauty. This is to be expected if God is one—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to which our truthfulness, goodness, and beauty conform (see chapter eleven, “Christianity and ‘Religion’” and chapter fourteen, “The Grand Miracle”). But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

By the time chapter three rolls around, Lewis is only concerned with comparing the relative viability of two very broad outlooks, naturalism and supernaturalism. “If naturalism is true,” he says in his opening statement, “every finite thing or event must be (in principle) explicable in terms of the Total System.”[3] The caveats of this statement are important. Lewis is not saying that a naturalist must personally account for every finite thing or event. That’s where the “in principle” caveat comes in. Nor will Lewis go on to make the argument that naturalists cannot reason simply because reason is inexplicable in naturalism as a Total System—quite the opposite in fact. That’s where his second caveat comes in (i.e., “explicable in terms of the Total System”). The point is that since naturalism is predicated on a universal denial—the rejection of any supernatural cause for any finite thing or event, and therefore the denial that anything finite can be predicated on anything outside of the Total System of the natural world—it cannot allow even one exception without disproving itself. Lewis may seem harshly unfair to lay such a strict criterion on naturalism, but we must understand that naturalism does this itself. Naturalism, not Lewis, has made matters so challenging for naturalism.

So, how does naturalism fair under these terms? Lewis begins where any exploration of a system of belief must begin: the notion of reason. “Unless human reasoning is valid,” says Lewis,

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 have destroyed 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.[4]

In contrast to Van Til, rather than issuing a combative dare, Lewis instead opts for an invitation. Click To Tweet This, maintains Lewis, is precisely what naturalism does. For the rest of the chapter, Lewis considers various accounts of reason a naturalist might give, which would not violate the principle of naturalism itself (i.e., the notion that nothing beyond the system of nature exists), showing how they each amount to vain attempts to kick the can down the road. For example, Lewis considers the notion that reason is explicable as a result of informed inferences, based on repetitive experiences. This won’t work, according to Lewis, since “the assumption that things that have been conjoined in the past will always be conjoined in the future is the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior. Reason comes in precisely when you make the inference, ‘Since always conjoined, therefore probably connected’ and go on to attempt a discovery at that connection.”[5] In other words, inference cannot itself explain reason, because once inference is used to attempt to explain reason, it is itself the tool of reason and cannot itself give rise to reason. “If the value of our reasoning is in doubt,” says Lewis, “you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.”[6]

Toward the end of this chapter, Lewis makes reference to the explanatory power of Christianity, which he will develop far more earnestly in subsequent chapters. Here, however, Lewis simply invites his readers to consider how “the cardinal difficulty of naturalism” is no difficulty at all with theism, and in particular, Christian theism.

[The theist] is not committed to the view that reason is a comparatively recent development molded by a process of selection which can select only the biologically useful. For him, reason—the reason of God—is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. For him, the human mind in the act of knowing is illumined by the Divine reason. It is set free in the measure required, from the huge nexus of nonrational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation, if there were any, were designed to do so.[7]

It is here that Lewis’s argument from reason moves from its polemic to its constructive form. No longer does he use it simply to undermine Christian theism’s starkest alternative (i.e., naturalism), he uses it to positively bolster up the trustworthiness of Christianity by showing the latter’s justification of reason. Not only does Christianity accord with reason, it accounts for reason. Therefore, this argument is not an alternative to natural theology. Rather, it is the natural theological justification for all natural theology, since “the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation, if there were any” (such as arguments of causation, cosmology, or teleology) “were designed to do this.”

But earlier, I gave some indication that there was some interplay between Lewis’s argument from reason and Van Til’s transcendental argument. Where might this interplay lie? This last question will take some teasing out.

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