Addendum to “Austin Cline on C S Lewis”

[Note: This refers to the previous post on Austin Cline's review of C. S. Lewis's Miracles.]

Now that I have C. S. Lewis’s book, “Miracles”, in my possession, it is clear that Lewis did, indeed, address quantum issues, right there on pages 18 –20. Cline must have ignored or not read those pages, because he quotes page 22 where Lewis, in turn, quotes Haldane.

Even there, Cline misses the actual argument being made by Lewis. I’ll try to summarize that here, although I recommend getting the book for your own view of it.

First, Lewis says,

”All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning.”

Next,

”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 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 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.”

This is Lewis’s actual argument. Then he proceeds to the quote provided by Cline:

”Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’

Presumably Haldane was conflating mind and brain.

A page later, Lewis goes on:

”Now a train of reasoning has no value as a means of finding truth unless each step in it is connected with what went before in the Ground – Consequent relation.”
[Lewis had already addressed the “because” statement in mathematics: A = C because we have already proved that they are both equal to B]
“If our B does not follow logically from our A, we think in vain. If what we think at the end of reasoning is to be true, the correct answer to the question, ‘Why do you think this?’ must begin with the Ground –Consequent because.

This represents only the beginning of Lewis’s argument, up to page 23 out of 273. There are only a few possibilities here. Either Cline didn’t read the book, or he read the book with his brain turned around backwards. I think he didn’t read the book, because he claims that Lewis did not address the probabilism of quantum theory, when it is obvious that Lewis did just that. And as an interesting serendipity here, there is an article over at Massimo Pigliucci’s blog that addresses Cline’s “Frequentism”. In short, because something is declared unmeasurable now does not mean that it is unmeasurable permanently, or even in principle. While I’m not sure about that myself, I’m sure that Scientism would take that view rather than the rigid view of Cline. So even materialists don’t necessarily agree with Cline, much less those who actually read Lewis’s book.