An outrageous chimera

I'd like to talk about C.S. Lewis' argument against Naturalism in chapter 3 of his book Miracles. It's an argument that God used to save my faith; in fact, the book itself I credit with making Christianity as a whole more sensible. It's impact on my life is incalculable. I can't help but resort to lines of reasoning in this book when in times of intellectual doubt or even spiritual despair. There's a charm about it that lures you, almost like the perfume of a beautiful woman wafting your nostrils as she thoughtlessly passes you by.  The prose are down to earth and yet you find, latching onto it, a fiery dialectic and a stealth rhetoric, that sneaks in through the trapdoor of my prejudices like a ninja.  

Perhaps the most telling and obvious and believable fact about our experience of the world is that contact with a spiritual realm of any sort is close to nil. That bump in the night our scientific minds quickly render a natural fluke. Tales of ghosts we greet with justified suspicion but with a curious fascination, and we marshal forward the best case we can to salvage what just might be a glimpse into that aspect of reality which would be the indisputable proof that Nature isn't all there is. But at the end of the day, our reason is left unsatisfied, and our imagination is left wanting more, thinking that even if the proof could sate, the banality of it threatens to make it uninteresting. If there's anything I'd like to believe more, it's that the spiritual world outshines the physical, like going to an actual Pearl Jam concert outshines listening to a live bootleg on my ipod.

All Lewis tries to do in the chapter is prove that something we do everyday, something as intimate as breathing, is enough to sound the death knell for Naturalism: Reasoning. How can something so obvious escape the notice of the mass of philosophers, or maybe not escape their notice: it's significance is just a chameleon and they lack the eyes to see Reasoning's distinct character. Notice what I've written so far. You see the words strung together in (I hope) a meaningful way in order to illicit my intended point, a point I hope to be rational, and that sufficient attention to the flow of the argument could end in the persuasion of your mind, a faculty driven by reason. But notice these strange mystical concepts I'm using: mind, reason, rational, faculty. Aren't these concepts homeless stragglers in the Naturalistic Universe's ghetto? But in my imagination, don't these concepts incessantly try to find a home, as frantically as the fly in a frenzy on the windowsill, beating in a fury against the window pane, seeing the promised land, and yet shoved back by some impermeable, transparent barrier? How can any of this mishmash of words, phrases, concepts, and sentences be anything more meaningful than a vomit, a sneeze, a cough, an ulcer, if they weren't guided along by something behind, more than, other than mere matter? Would we have any reason to trust it? Wouldn't all our so called reasons be just as vulnerable to such a suspicion? The naturalist slits his own throat. He gives an account of how the brain got to where it is today, but the account takes away any credentials the brain might have to tell us anything rational about what the world might really be like. It's like the definitive volume formulating the airtight case there is no such thing as language, or books, or proofs! It's an enraged pacifist conquering neighboring lands in the name of pacifism!

Our brain must have some sort of mystical capacity to rip through the fabric of mere Nature in every act of reasoning. It must be straddling two lands, foreign to each other, like the voice in a radio is to the radio.  It must link up to, be in constant contact with, rub shoulders with, this other reality. It must be free of this sticky spider web of causality, this incessant procession of dominoes; it has to differ from it in kind. If it lacks this capacity, our language is stripped of rationality. How does Nature account for rationality? What story can it tell us? That evolution gives us the illusion of rationality so we can survive? But even in that account, we're left with the illusion of rationality, and in that case, what reason do we have to believe that evolution gives us this, or even that evolution is true?

There's got to be something more.