Epistle to Ansgar Letter 10: God and Reason
26 Jan 2025 AD
Feast Day of Sts Timothy and Titus
Dear Godson,
Today we celebrate Saints Timothy and Titus, first bishops of Ephesus and Crete, who followed Saint Paul on his apostolic journeys. One was a Jew, the other Greek, one was circumcised according to the Law of Moses, and the other not, which was a matter of stark controversy in the Church in first years after the Ascension. Despite any differences, both followed Christ faithfully to sainthood, and are among the very earliest number of saints assuming the thrones vacated by the fallen angels in heaven.
The verse from scripture, “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom” distinguishes traditional Jewish and Greek approaches. Jews rely on the revelation of sacred books, whereas Greeks follow philosophy and science — the love of wisdom and knowledge — to discover what human reason can reveal.
And yet both paths, properly followed, lead to Christ hence to God. One might use Timothy and Titus as symbols of this twofold brotherhood of faith and reason. There is no war between them.
Today, we follow the Greek way. Reason brings forth proofs for God, especially these seven: the argument from design; from the nature of being; from the nature of reason; from free will; from first causes; from beauty; from conscience. My two previous letters addressed these first two. Here we turn to the argument from the nature of reason.
The “Argument from Reason” is not an argument merely saying it is reasonable to believe in God. Belief in God is reasonable, to be sure, for it is backed by historical and physical evidence, intuition and common sense.
But here we are offering a more abstract argument, namely, that without God, reason is unreasonable.
If reason is reasonable, then human reason reflects reality. Reality is also rational. If same Creator who man rational made creation comprehensible to reason, hence fitted man with the rational faculty fit and trustworthy for this end.
The only other alternative is to claim a rational creature, man endowed with trustworthy rational faculties, could arise via irrational process in an irrational universe. Hence, in the atheist world, reason arises in man for no reason.
Before we proceed, let us clarify one point: in the modern age men use the word reason only to mean the faculty of judgement to distinguish logical from illogical statements, hence true from false. This is too narrow. The ancients, more properly, use the word also to refer to the faculty by which right and wrong moral judgments are made, as well as aesthetic judgments. Reason includes the capacity for seeing truth, virtue, beauty.
Recall from a prior letter that all arguments presuppose a Law of Sufficient Reason, namely, that every event must have a cause sufficient to bring it about. What, then, is sufficient to bring about the existence of the faculty of reason?
The atheist holds nothing to be supernatural, that is, nothing to be outside nor above nature, no mind directing it. If no mind, there is no aim, no purpose, no direction, no intent to any natural operation. This stance is called Naturalism.
The problem is that, if nature is aimless, no natural process can account for rationality. No irrational thing is sufficient to bring about reason. Nature cannot give a reason for reason.
Atheist and theist agree that, as cosmic history unrolled, living creatures arose in a lifeless world, and one kind of rational creature, man, arose in a world of irrational creatures. Man can reach rational and true conclusion concerning the cosmos in which he finds himself.
Absent God, nothing in nature is directed by a directing intelligence toward an end goal, nothing in nature is created by creator, nothing in nature is well-crafted by a craftsman, nothing in nature is the artwork of an artist.
Nature neither thinks, reasons, nor is aware of anything. She is dead and blind, merely matter in motion. It is misleading even to call these motions “mechanical” because machines are designed with an end in mind.
Any appearance of craftsmanship in the aeronautical design of a wing, the optical engineering an eyeball, elegant intricacy of neural interconnections of the human brain, the choreography of the molecular dance in the nucleus of a living cell, the artistic genius of stars and planets, are all of them illusions. Mere illusions.
We are seeing design, engineering, elegance, choreography and artisanship in nature, in man, and in man’s design, including his faculty of reason, where there is none.
Note here that this illusion is a prime example of the faculty of reason not being reasonable.
For this illusion afflicts not one man, nor many, nor most, but all. All tribes and nations, civilization and generations, see the works and wonders of nature, and quite reasonably concludes the wing is designed for flight, the eye for sight, the mind for reason. All parts of living organisms are designed for life, growth and reproduction.
The sight of order and beauty in nature is universal. Even the most celebrated atheist of my generation, advertising an ill-advised idolatry of science to replace religion, volubly exulted the splendor of the universe, expressing awe and wonder, particularly of astronomical wonders, without realizing his own logic condemns this as a fallacy.
It is a fallacy, because expressions of awe, in a godless world, can be nothing other than an unintentional side effects of irrational molecular motions in the brain, the seep and wash of neural chemicals, ergo subjective, arbitrary, irrational. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder is an illusion: no more real than the pink elephants seen by a drunk in a soggy delirium.
Expressions of awe are reasonable when beholding what is awe inspiring, and otherwise unreasonable.
To call a waterfall sublime, a fair maiden, a delicate flower, a dramatic storm or majestic mountain or lofty falcon in flight is reasonable if and when these things are sublime, fair, delicate, dramatic, majestic, lofty. Otherwise is it unreasonable, that is, it shows bad judgement or an ill-formed sense of taste. To laud stinking dungheaps or maggoty corpses as subline is unreasonable, for it shows perverse judgment.
In a godless world, expressions of awe can be neither appropriate nor inappropriate, right or wrong. The sentiments prompting such expression are the an outcome of unintentional chemical actions on the brain. The sublime beauty allegedly perceived is no more than a drunk’s pink elephant. An allusion.
Not just perceptions of beauty, but all perceptions of design, of purpose, of engineering and craftsmanship in nature, according to atheism, must also be illusions: things we humans falsely attribute to nature which are absent from nature. It is a fallacy of anthropomorphism, a mechanism in the brain that sees faces in clouds or butterflies in Rorschach blots.
This mechanism has an evolutionary use, for example, giving men, above all primates, the ability to see through the striped and spotted camouflage of snakes in the grass. But here the mechanism has gone awry, and gives a false report. It gives a false report when we might see majestic mountains and splendid comets, the beauty of roses, the design of the spiderweb, when there can be no majesty, splendor, beauty, nor design.
For awe and wonder can be nothing but meaningless chemical discharges in the brain if nothing in nature has meaning, for then the brain itself and any brain activity can have no meaning. The brain is a blind machine that operates without an operator.
Or, again, the brain is not even a machine: the brain is merely molecular gyrations inside an soggy knot of cauliflower-shaped electric flesh, galvanized to jerk and spasm and spurt out nerve chemicals as stuttering clouds of thoughts and passions with no point nor purpose, like so many hypothetical monkeys on infinite typewriters never producing the complete works of Shakespeare.
Why indeed the human brain was evolved to see design where there is no design is a paradox for atheists — because either the brain is prone to hallucinate, or it is not.
If it is prone to hallucinate, no conclusions can be trusted, including the conclusion that the brain is prone to hallucination.
If it is not prone to hallucination, then the conclusion that life is meaningful, the bird wing is designed for flight, the eye is designed for sight, mind designed for reasoning, the starry heavens are sublime, is sound and correct. Simply look.
If the human brain is so prone to illusion, the atheist has no cause to think his power of thinking is sound and reasonable.
The atheist by definition is an irrationalist, for he holds all natural phenomena, and man among them, come into being by blind and irrational natural forces, by means of motions without point or purpose. This conclusion follows inevitably from Naturalism. But if man’s brain is comes into being by blind and irrational forces, then man’s thought is blind and irrational, including thoughts of Naturalism.
Like the idiot gardener who scaled a tree to sit on the branch he is busily sawing off, the atheist position disproves itself by itself.
To say that the universe can arise from nothing, when by definition nothing has no power to bring forth anything, is a self-refuting statement. To say nothing comes from nothing is a self-evident statement.
To say life arises from non-life attributes to non-life a power no observation and no evidence supports or suggests. If bacteria could spring out of sandhills, or amoeba spontaneously appear in empty saltwater, they would do so on a daily basis, and we would see it just as we see grass springing from grass seed. If the claim is that non-life had the power to give rise to life under the conditions of the early world, when the composition of seawater and atmosphere differed, but not now, the we could reproduce those conditions in a lab and create life like Frankenstein, artificially. We do not and we cannot.
To say irrational creatures can father rational creatures is absurd, because a child cannot inherit a trait its parents do not possess.
Darwin, to the contrary, claims that the variation of traits between generations, combined with the statistical pressure unintentionally favoring certain traits over others, could bring forth new breeds of creatures, and that sufficiently diverse creatures form new a species, with new traits. Hence his claim is that simple organism can spontaneously generate traits in children they themselves do not possess, as bacteria can produce multicellular organisms, invent sexual reproduction, becomes fish, who then grow wings becoming birds and beasts, including apes and ape-men and men. In effect, Darwin claims all traits create themselves spontaneously from parents lacking those traits.
Again, even if Darwinian evolution were true, and operated as claimed, then it operates in an aimless fashion, then every trait and instinct of every fish and fowl, bug and beast from greatest to least is aimless. No trait aims at any use, therefore the usefulness of a wing for flight is an accident, the usefulness of the eye for sight is an accident, the usefulness of reason for reasoning is an accident.
Tools are instruments that aim at ends. A hammer aims at pounding nails. A screwdriver aims at driving screws. What makes a tool a tool is that it is designed with an aim in mind.
An aimless process cannot have an aim. An mindless process cannot have an aim in mind.
Therefore an aimless, mindless process cannot produce a tool. Reason is a tool. But if man arose by blind natural processes operating without aim, without deliberation, without purpose, then man cannot be equipped with the tool called reason.
One might object that aimless Darwinian processes might produce a brain, which by accident has the capacity for reason, and that man picked up and used this brain as a tool for reasoning, the way a cave man might pick up a rock and use it as a hammer to hammer open a nutshell. The rock is not designed to be a tool, not made with that end in mind, but a clever caveman can use it for a tool. The non-tool is suitable to be a tool, but its suitability for that purpose is accidental.
This proposes an irrational creature is born with a mutant brain fold or something, which gives him the capacity to reason even though the brain fold is not meant to be used for reasoning, nor meant for any purpose whatever. The irrational creature has no instinct to use this new brain fold, not found in his forefathers, nor can their example teach him. It is like the rock that can be used by the cave man as a hammer, even if it is not designed to be a hammer.
But the irrational creature is irrational, whereas the caveman is rational, and can make and use tools. If the brain fold were designed and aimed at the purpose of allowing the use of reasoning, the beast could and would then use it, for natural instinct tells beasts how to use their organs and faculties.
But no beast can invent new uses for things not meant for those uses. A creature with no free will cannot freely decide to invent free will and bestow it upon himself. A creature without reason cannot reason out the puzzle of how to become a rational creature.
Moreover, this brain fold allegedly can be used for reasoning, but the only thing Darwinism establishes about it, is that the brain fold aids in fecundity or survival rates. We have no reason to suppose or trust that the brain fold of reason is trustworthy in any other field or for any other reason. The power of the brain fold to employ rational brain processes is an accident, unintentional, a mistake. There is no reason, and indeed, no way, an accidental brain fold could be used to solve the Pythagorean Theorem and then to be sure this reflected reality.
Likewise for all question of astronomy, biology, philosophy, archeology: if atheist thinking reaches the conclusion that reason arose and an accidental, unintentional aberration of an ape-man nervous system, all thinking, not just atheist thinking, is unreliable.
There may be one exception here: Only reasoning directly relating to mating and survival can be trusted: so the reasoning process can be trusted that supports monogamy, but forbids divorce, abortion, contraception, and teaches the peace and forgiveness and respect for law needed for bands and tribes of man to live together in prosperity. This means Catholic moral teachings are the only prosper use of reason that can be trusted, since only here is found the means to maximize human life and fertility. In no other area is reasoning trustworthy, since pondering triangles has no Darwinian survival benefit.
To sum up the objection. Nothing comes from nothing. Reason cannot arise from an unreasoning natural process. If aimless natural process produces rational man from apeman, then reason is aimless and mindess, hence cannot be used as a tool for reasoning, or as a tool for anything, since tools by definition are designed with an aim in mind.
But even if the faculty, by accident, could be used for reasoning, it could only be used for topics where reason aids survival and fecundity, which means, only Catholic teaching. And Catholic teaching teaches that God exists.
Appealing to the myth of Darwinian improvement of breeds over time will not serve to answer this objection. No addition of any number of horizontal magnitude produces even one inch of vertical magnitude. Likewise, ten or ten thousand or ten million aimless and mindless and undirected motions cannot produce an instrument or organ designed with an aim in mind. Tools can only be designed by designers.
Imagine you saw a bookshelf containing a children’s primer, a pulp adventure, a Regency romance, a theological treatise, written by Doctor Seuss, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Austin, Thomas Acquinas.
None of these books can read themselves. None can write themselves.
Suppose some aimless process could change the letters in these books, and an equally mindless filtration process acting natural selection would erase any misspelled word. The aimless, mindless process would change letters: “shot” becomes “spot” and is passed on to the next edition. But “spot” becomes “spox” and is erased. In another book, “shot” becomes “hot” and is kept. And so on.
Let us then set the selection process so the words grew ever longer: “hot” becomes “hotel” becomes “brothel” becomes “bootheel.”
No matter how many words are added to the children’s primer, if added aimlessly, it cannot become a pulp novel.
Perhaps some other process would have to be added to judge the sentences and paragraphs and chapters, passing on clear and clever sentences, and erasing ungrammatical or ugly ones, if we wanted to increase the complexity of the books over time. (No doubt a clever computer programmer could design make a process mechanism aimed at judging clarity and grammar at the sentence level, but we are assuming processes with no programmer, no aim, no mind.)
However, even if we could have a aimless process make the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters longer and more complex, we cannot evolve the primer into a pulp novel into a Regency romance into a theological treatise.
But let us suppose we could. All books evolve from primers to treatises. At what point does the treatise become so erudite, so complex and technical, so intelligent, that the faculty of reason enters the pages and makes the volume self aware?
And, no matter how intelligent and erudite the theological treatise, it is not smart enough to come to life, read itself, and reach further and wiser conclusions on its chapter topics, and rewrite itself. If the primer and pulp and the romance do not have the power to reason inside themselves in potential, the treatise cannot bring that potential into actuality.
Neither can Darwinian processes, if aimless and mindless, create a tool, for each tool is designed with an aim in mind. If the power to reason is not in nature, and nothing supernatural outside nature exists, then the power to grant reason also cannot be in nature.
Or, to put the same thing another way, since the power to grant reason is not in nature, and yet nature granted man the power of reason, then there is a supernatural being outside nature wise and powerful enough to grant reason to man.
Reason, as said above, includes the power not merely to make sound judgments of logic and fact, but of matters of conscience and aesthetics. The mere existence of trustworthy power of reason proves a supernatural creator exists. Similar arguments can be made from the mere existence of conscience and aesthetics, but these must wait for future letters.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright