Victor Reppert
Encyclopedia
Dr. Victor Reppert is an American philosopher best known for his development of the Argument from Reason
. He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003) and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.
Dr. Reppert is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Glendale Community College
in Arizona. He holds a Ph.D.
in philosophy (1989) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
.
claimed to be more rational than believers, Christians like C. S. Lewis
claimed not only that their belief is more rational than unbelief, but that the Argument from Reason shows that the very capacity to reason is itself a reason to think that the naturalism
espoused by unbelievers is false. When he read G. E. M. Anscombe
's critique of Lewis's argument, Reppert became persuaded that the argument could be formulated in such a way as to overcome Anscombe's objections. His paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues" was the result.
In 1998 Dr. Reppert posted his paper "The Argument from Reason" to the Secular Web. In 1999 a slightly revised version of the same paper appeared, with a response by Jim Lippard
, in the humanist journal Philo
. In the same issue, Keith M. Parsons, the then editor of Philo, presented some arguments against Reppert's conclusions in the course of a review of Thomas Nagel
's The Last Word, so in 2000 Reppert wrote a "Reply to Parsons and Lippard", to which Parsons responded by writing the first full-dress attempt to refute Reppert's argument. Reppert's reply to Parsons was the paper "Causal Closure, Mechanism, and Rational Inference", which, since he felt it was time that more Christian philosophers were familiarized with the argument and related issues, appeared in 2001 in Philosophia Christi. In 2003 Philosophia Christi featured a "Symposium on the Argument from Reason", consisting of a paper by Reppert, responses by Theodore M. Drange, William Hasker
and Keith Parsons, and a second paper by Reppert replying to these three critics.
Also in 2003 Dr. Reppert published his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. The title alludes to Daniel Dennett
's Darwin's Dangerous Idea
, in which Dennett contrasted two types of explanation: one type is "mind-first," that is to say, "in the last analysis ... purposeful and intentional," whereas the other type "makes the explanation a feature of the system that in the last analysis is a product of the mindless system of physics and chemistry." For Dennett, Reppert observes, Darwin's dangerous idea is that the latter "are the only acceptable types of explanation," a position that "has become orthodoxy in such varied disciplines as evolutionary biology, cognitive science
and artificial intelligence
," as well as "in Anglo-American philosophy in general." C. S. Lewis's dangerous idea, by contrast, is that the attempt entirely to account for the world in such terms "overlooks something very important: the world thus analyzed has to have scientists in it. And scientists draw their conclusions from evidence
, and in so doing they engage in rational inference
.... Lewis's contention was that ... if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system, you end up describing something that cannot genuinely be called reasoning." In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett calls Darwin's idea "wonderful," "magnificent," "the single best idea anyone has ever had," and says his admiration for it is "unbounded." Reppert observes that "If Darwin's dangerous idea is a true explanation of how Darwin got his dangerous idea, then the idea cannot possibly be the intellectual monument that Dennett supposes it to be."
C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea attracted a lot of response, including some comments by critics, most notably Richard C. Carrier, who on Internet Infidels
called the book "surely the most extensive defense of the so-called 'Argument from Reason' yet to appear in print." Carrier's review "is about as long as the book itself," Reppert noted only half-jokingly, before going on to respond to some of Carrier's criticisms. Another response to Carrier's review came from Darek Barefoot, who, while he did not "find all of Reppert's arguments to be persuasive and all of Carrier's criticisms to be off-target," believed that the core of the Argument from Reason "is sound and that Reppert's book is a landmark contribution to the subject." Barefoot argued that Reppert had made a strong case for Lewis's claim "that the process of inference by which consideration of premises
causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone." Furthermore, if Reppert's version of the Argument from Reason "is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism."
Jim Lippard, reporting a lecture by Daniel Dennett at Arizona State University
in 2009, recounted that Dennett had coined the disparaging term "mind-creationists" for those who argue that original intentionality
is an irreducible feature of the world. Lippard noted that the "mind-creationists" whom Dennett had in his sights included atheists like Thomas Nagel, John Searle
and Jerry Fodor
as well as believers like Victor Reppert.
with Catholic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, over the soundness of the theistic argument he presents in his book Miracles
. It has been alleged that Elizabeth Anscombe, in her presentation of the perceived problematic areas in Lewis's argument, had so thoroughly discredited his argument that Lewis sank into apologetic and theological obscurity. It has also been suggested that this friendly encounter led Lewis to not only reject the Argument from Reason, but also significantly question the validity of Christianity altogether. Dr. Reppert, in his critique of the "Anscombe myth", points out that Lewis merely revised his argument for later editions of Miracles, rather than reject it. Furthermore, Reppert notes that Lewis continued to proactively maintain the argument, as evidenced by the publication of several post-Anscombe-debate articles; chiefly in Christian Reflections and God in the Dock
. Reppert also points out that Lewis's spiritual tenor in his later writings doesn't significantly differ in tone or substance from his earlier Christian material.
Argument from Reason
The Argument from Reason is an argument for the existence of God largely developed by C.S. Lewis.-The argument:C.S...
. He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003) and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.
Dr. Reppert is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Glendale Community College
Glendale Community College (Arizona)
Glendale Community College is a community college in Glendale, Arizona USA. GCC opened its doors in 1965. Since then more than 350,000 students have taken credit classes. Programs include associate degrees, certificate programs, industry-specific training and university transfer. The school...
in Arizona. He holds a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in philosophy (1989) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
.
The Argument from Reason
Reppert first became interested in the Argument from Reason after a conversion experience at the age of 18. He became aware that while unbelievers like Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
claimed to be more rational than believers, Christians like C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
claimed not only that their belief is more rational than unbelief, but that the Argument from Reason shows that the very capacity to reason is itself a reason to think that the naturalism
Metaphysical naturalism
Metaphysical naturalism, also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those...
espoused by unbelievers is false. When he read G. E. M. Anscombe
G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe , better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher from Ireland. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations...
's critique of Lewis's argument, Reppert became persuaded that the argument could be formulated in such a way as to overcome Anscombe's objections. His paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues" was the result.
In 1998 Dr. Reppert posted his paper "The Argument from Reason" to the Secular Web. In 1999 a slightly revised version of the same paper appeared, with a response by Jim Lippard
Jim Lippard
James Joseph Lippard is an American skeptic and activist freethinker who has written and spoken widely.Lippard works for Global Crossing as its head of information security....
, in the humanist journal Philo
Philo (journal)
Philo is a peer-reviewed academic journal with a focus on the discussion of philosophical issues from an explicitly naturalist perspective. The journal publishes articles, critical discussions, review essays, and book reviews in all fields of philosophy, and welcomes work on the philosophical...
. In the same issue, Keith M. Parsons, the then editor of Philo, presented some arguments against Reppert's conclusions in the course of a review of Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
's The Last Word, so in 2000 Reppert wrote a "Reply to Parsons and Lippard", to which Parsons responded by writing the first full-dress attempt to refute Reppert's argument. Reppert's reply to Parsons was the paper "Causal Closure, Mechanism, and Rational Inference", which, since he felt it was time that more Christian philosophers were familiarized with the argument and related issues, appeared in 2001 in Philosophia Christi. In 2003 Philosophia Christi featured a "Symposium on the Argument from Reason", consisting of a paper by Reppert, responses by Theodore M. Drange, William Hasker
William Hasker
R. William Hasker is an American Christian philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Huntington University. For many years he was editor of the prestigious journal Faith and Philosophy. He has published many journal articles and books dealing with issues such as the...
and Keith Parsons, and a second paper by Reppert replying to these three critics.
Also in 2003 Dr. Reppert published his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. The title alludes to Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
's Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a book by Daniel Dennett which argues that Darwinian processes are the central organizing force that gives rise to complexity...
, in which Dennett contrasted two types of explanation: one type is "mind-first," that is to say, "in the last analysis ... purposeful and intentional," whereas the other type "makes the explanation a feature of the system that in the last analysis is a product of the mindless system of physics and chemistry." For Dennett, Reppert observes, Darwin's dangerous idea is that the latter "are the only acceptable types of explanation," a position that "has become orthodoxy in such varied disciplines as evolutionary biology, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
," as well as "in Anglo-American philosophy in general." C. S. Lewis's dangerous idea, by contrast, is that the attempt entirely to account for the world in such terms "overlooks something very important: the world thus analyzed has to have scientists in it. And scientists draw their conclusions from evidence
Scientific evidence
Scientific evidence has no universally accepted definition but generally refers to evidence which serves to either support or counter a scientific theory or hypothesis. Such evidence is generally expected to be empirical and properly documented in accordance with scientific method such as is...
, and in so doing they engage in rational inference
Inference
Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
.... Lewis's contention was that ... if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system, you end up describing something that cannot genuinely be called reasoning." In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett calls Darwin's idea "wonderful," "magnificent," "the single best idea anyone has ever had," and says his admiration for it is "unbounded." Reppert observes that "If Darwin's dangerous idea is a true explanation of how Darwin got his dangerous idea, then the idea cannot possibly be the intellectual monument that Dennett supposes it to be."
C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea attracted a lot of response, including some comments by critics, most notably Richard C. Carrier, who on Internet Infidels
Internet Infidels
Internet Infidels, Inc. is a Colorado Springs, Colorado-based nonprofit educational organization founded in 1995 by Jeffery Jay Lowder and Brett Lemoine. Its mission is to utilize the Internet to promote the view that supernatural forces or entities do not exist...
called the book "surely the most extensive defense of the so-called 'Argument from Reason' yet to appear in print." Carrier's review "is about as long as the book itself," Reppert noted only half-jokingly, before going on to respond to some of Carrier's criticisms. Another response to Carrier's review came from Darek Barefoot, who, while he did not "find all of Reppert's arguments to be persuasive and all of Carrier's criticisms to be off-target," believed that the core of the Argument from Reason "is sound and that Reppert's book is a landmark contribution to the subject." Barefoot argued that Reppert had made a strong case for Lewis's claim "that the process of inference by which consideration of premises
Premise
Premise can refer to:* Premise, a claim that is a reason for, or an objection against, some other claim as part of an argument...
causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone." Furthermore, if Reppert's version of the Argument from Reason "is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism."
Jim Lippard, reporting a lecture by Daniel Dennett at Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...
in 2009, recounted that Dennett had coined the disparaging term "mind-creationists" for those who argue that original intentionality
Intentionality
The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not...
is an irreducible feature of the world. Lippard noted that the "mind-creationists" whom Dennett had in his sights included atheists like Thomas Nagel, John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
and Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
as well as believers like Victor Reppert.
The Anscombe myth
In addition to explaining and expanding Lewis's theistic argument for God, Dr. Reppert has also made an important contribution to Lewis studies by deconstructing what he calls the "Anscombe myth". Roughly, the "Anscombe myth" arose, in part, from an actual encounter C. S. Lewis had at his Socratic ClubSocratic Club
The Oxford Socratic Club was formed in December 1941, at Oxford University, by Stella Aldwinckle of the Oxford Pastorate and a group of undergraduate students, in order to provide "an open forum for the discussion of the intellectual difficulties connected with religion and with Christianity in...
with Catholic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, over the soundness of the theistic argument he presents in his book Miracles
Miracles (book)
Miracles is a book written by C. S. Lewis, originally published in 1947 and revised in 1960. Lewis argues that before one can learn from the study of history whether or not any miracles have ever occurred, one must first settle the philosophical question of whether it is logically possible that...
. It has been alleged that Elizabeth Anscombe, in her presentation of the perceived problematic areas in Lewis's argument, had so thoroughly discredited his argument that Lewis sank into apologetic and theological obscurity. It has also been suggested that this friendly encounter led Lewis to not only reject the Argument from Reason, but also significantly question the validity of Christianity altogether. Dr. Reppert, in his critique of the "Anscombe myth", points out that Lewis merely revised his argument for later editions of Miracles, rather than reject it. Furthermore, Reppert notes that Lewis continued to proactively maintain the argument, as evidenced by the publication of several post-Anscombe-debate articles; chiefly in Christian Reflections and God in the Dock
God in the Dock
God in the Dock is a collection of essays and speeches from C. S. Lewis. Its title implies "God on Trial" and is based on an analogy made by Lewis suggesting that modern human beings, rather than seeing themselves as standing before God in judgment, prefer to place God on trial while acting as...
. Reppert also points out that Lewis's spiritual tenor in his later writings doesn't significantly differ in tone or substance from his earlier Christian material.
Selected bibliography
- C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defence of the Argument from Reason. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8308-2732-3
- "The Green Witch and the Great Debate: Freeing Narnia from the Spell of the Lewis-Anscombe Legend," in Gregory Bassham and Gerry L. Walls (eds), The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy: The Lion, the Witch and the Worldview. Chicago, Illinois: Open Court, 2005: 260-272. ISBN 0812695887
- "Defending the Dangerous Idea: An Update on Lewis's Argument from Reason," in David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Gerry L. Walls (eds), C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008: 53-67. ISBN 0830828087
- "Confronting Naturalism: The Argument from Reason," in Paul CopanPaul CopanPaul Copan is a Ukrainian-American Christian theologian, analytic philosopher, apologist, and author. He is currently a professor at the Palm Beach Atlantic University and holds the Pledger Family Endowed Chair of Philosophy and Ethics...
and William Lane CraigWilliam Lane CraigWilliam Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism...
(eds), Contending with Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists & Other Objectors. Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Academic, 2009: 26-46. ISBN 0805449361
Further reading
- John Beversluis. C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1985. ISBN 0-8028-0046-7
- G. K. ChestertonG. K. ChestertonGilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction....
. OrthodoxyOrthodoxy (book)Orthodoxy is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetics. Chesterton considered this book a companion to his other work, Heretics...
. New York, New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 2007; originally published in 1908. See Chapter III: "The Suicide of Thought". - C. S. Lewis. Miracles. London & Glasgow: Collins/Fontana, 1947. Revised 1960. (Current edition: Fount, 2002. ISBN 0006280943)