“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. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Charles Darwin
Letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1897; repr., Boston: Elibron, 2005), 1:285.
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.”
― C.S. Lewis
In Sunday School we have been reading and reviewing this book together,
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Darwinism-Flawed-Disastrous/dp/1436383684/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8
Windchy, brings out the Darwin quote and Lewis only teased it out its implications.
1.) Incoherency of Materialism
In the end Materialism (Naturalism) is inherently contradictory and so irrational since it the idea of truth is itself a non-corporeal, non-material idea. Further, the very second that the Materialist begins invoking “logic” to support their position they have at that point overturned their materialist position since logic itself is immaterial. Further still, as the materialist disavows the “mind,” instead choosing to embrace the material brain. But all the brain is a bio-chemical entity that has evolved over time. How can a bio-chemical entity ever develop anything like the non material concept of true truth?
2.) Materialism Attributes the supernatural to the natural
Materialism denies the supernatural and then turns around and imbues the natural with supernatural categories. Matter becomes eternal, omnipotent, having aseity, infinite, etc. Naturalism then doesn’t void the supernatural, it instead, merely tucks it away inside the natural.
The implication of this is that a absolutized Nature that is impersonal, irrational, and without purpose creates an effect — a world that is allegedly personal, rational, and purposive — without supernatural means that is greater than its cause. Materialism wants to insist that a non supernatural and mindless world brought forth a rational world that is inhabited by beings brought about by a time + chance + circumstance natural selection that can rationally reflect on their irrational origins. So, Naturalism, posits rational, self-aware human beings that have brains but no minds who can rationally and meaningfully reflect on their irrational origins.
The well where we wish
Creation subsumed,
With legs of a fish
Our thinking entomb.