This excerpt is an excerpt within an excerpt. The author is James Sire, and he quotes both Charles Darwin and C.S. Lewis.
For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God...there is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers.They 'arose,' but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?
Charles Darwin himself once said, 'The horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my own origin is to be trusted.
Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or a set of propositions to be true.
C.S. Lewis puts the case this way:
'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us--like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that Nature is uniform.'"
--James Sire, The Universe Next Door
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| C.S. Lewis |
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| James Sire |
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| Charles Darwin |
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