C. S. Lewis vs Psychology

Scott Blacker

Admin

16.VII.2023

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C S Lewis - Miracles

Jez Austin

Evolution would not furnish us with a brain well adjusted to discovering truth, but rather a brain which confers advantage. This seems consistent with the kinds of error we find our brains are in fact susceptible to. If our brains were designed to think rationally, how come it takes so much effort and training to do so?

Simon Skinner

Jez Austin Good point. Our many cognitive biases, issues such as anxiety due to scanning for predators, pattern recognition apophenia and pareidolia all point to our origins. We weren't designed perfect from a blank sheet of paper, we're the cumulative product of survival. Our psychology says as much about our evolutionary roots as our biology does.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Simon Skinner "Our many cognitive biases,"

If you pretend these invalidate Christian metaphysics, why don't they invalidate yours, the one they depend on?

Simon Skinner

Hans-Georg Lundahl Are you really asking why the existence of cognitive biases doesn't invalidate physics ?

Ron Eclavea

Simon Skinner

It’s prudent to trust in revelations from God, most especially for atheists and agnostics when scientific empirical evidence most definitely supports these.

Genesis 1:1 👍🏻

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Simon Skinner Why would physics be different from other intellectual pursuits?

And why do you equate your own metaphysics with physics?

Jez Austin

Hans-Georg Lundahl I think science (particularly physics) is on a firmer epistemological footing than metaphysics & other intellectual persuits, because experiments are reproducible.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Jez Austin why would that not just be another cognitive bias?

If you accept that cognitive bias as leading the right way, why fight all the other cognitive biasses (apart from the ones known to produce errors)?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Jez Austin To clarify my meaning.

Some things are known to produce error, like the danger signal, we all know of false alarms. But that's not what you normally mean by "cognitive bias" ... it is more like things about cause and effect (every effect requires an adequate cause) or substantiality (an act doesn't exist apart from the acting entity and a quality not apart from the entity having it - barring miracles).

These are more basic to our idea of reality than the idea "experiments can be repeated, therefore the one interpreting interprets them right" ...

Jez Austin

Hans-Georg Lundahl Any observation might be an illusion. When the illusion is perfectly consistent with reports from other observers, and coherent with the therories we've been developing to explain previous observations, even then however tempted we might be to accept it as a true observation, it might still be an illusion.

I can't absolutely prove that it isn't, I just doubt it that's all, and I think you should too: The more repeatable an experiment proves to be, the more credence it deserves. Cognitive biasses don't need to produce consistency & coherence; if they do, it's a coincidence, an increasingly slim one as more observations are collected.

Whereas Christian metaphysics is not based on consistent & coherent observations: reports of contradictory observations are readily available.

Ron Eclavea

Jez Austin
Not true at all….

Especially if one examines consistent observations from other observers.

This again verifies and confirms the cosmology and cosmogony of Genesis.

Genesis 1:1 👍🏻

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Jez Austin "Any observation might be an illusion."

1) We were talking of cognitive biasses, not observations.

That a given observation might be an illusion is not an argument to doubt it, unless there is a positive reason to think it probably is so.

2) Not true of the observation that we make observations

"The more repeatable an experiment proves to be, the more credence it deserves"

That's a cognitive bias. Obviously, one I share. And, as obviously, one I limit to experiments.

"Whereas Christian metaphysics is not based on consistent & coherent observations:"

Yes it is;

"reports of contradictory observations are readily available."

I think you refer to the Bible, and you are wrong on that one too. But Christian metaphysics is a venture intellectually (though not personally) independent of believing the Bible. It's based on consistent observations, like the fact we think logically (as mentioned by CSL in quote above) when our thinking at all merits the title of thinking (as also mentioned by CSL, same book, but not in the quote).