Cartesian Circle
April 16, 2011 Leave a comment
Cartesian Circle? One man, a materialist, says that by reason, logic and objective science he can prove there is no God. This man assumes that his reasoning process and his human intellect, which he insists are products of chaos’ fine tuning, are both valid and adequate to determine such things. But, can material determine anything? If trial and error is the course corrector for materialism, how is the right outcome determined? Through survival? Can the author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, a materialist, determine that there is no God by using survival techniques? Maybe he is really trying to salvage his atheism (stands to reason).
God is so Other from us that no one can reason him into existence or out of existence.
At some point in creation’s evolutionary process originated by God, God the Creator endowed man with intellect and a spiritual dimension. God then proceeded to make Himself clearly knowable through the Bible, through nature and certainly through the incarnation of His Son, Jesus.
In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis, Christian apologist, speculated on evolution’s material process and on the origins of human beings:
“For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say ‘I’ and ‘me,’ which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past. This new consciousness ruled and illuminated the whole organism, flooding every part of it with light, and was not, like ours, limited to a selection of the movements going on in one part of the organism, namely the brain. Man was then all consciousness.”
Cindy Wity 