The Limits of Reason, Question of the week from Dr. Craig

Dear Dr Craig

I am an atheist but still a big fan of yours. I always defend you against dumb internet atheists who never bother to read anything yet think they can ridicule a man with two PhD's and two dozen books.

You defend the classic God proofs so well. But I think you are relying on commonsense and intuition too much in this day and age. We are not in an age where we can be confident that the laws of reason are the same as the laws of reality, like people in the time of Aristotle believed. If that was the case, we would never have had to abandon Aristotelian physics. It sounded perfectly intuitive but turned out to be false even on the simple idea of inertia, which is a principle that our brains will just not accept because of how we are wired apparently.

So we can just see how reason is limited in understanding physics, then how much more would it be limited in understanding the creation and God. When thinking about the beginning of time and about creation and God our reason actually generates contradictory ideas. It is not satisfied with the idea that the past should be infinite, yet at the same time not with the idea that time has a beginning either. They both sound absurd and we are forced to believe the opposite, yet its opposite is also equally absurd. Furthermore reason demands that the causal chain to the past should not go on forever, but it cannot really make sense of the very idea of a "first cause" either. And also it demands that contingent things must ultimately be explained by a necessary being, but it finds the very idea of a "necessary being" incoherent at the same time. It wants to have God as the creator of time, yet it cannot comprehend the idea that there can be an agent that acts like create, yet has no time dimension of his own, while at the same time in our own experience we can act precisely because we are in time; it is what makes any action possible in the first place.

These examples should be an indicator that we shouldn't really pursue our intuitions to their logical conclusions beyond the limits of the natural world. Because reason wants to follow the train of thought to the end, but apparently it is trying to deal with a realm that doesn't work in human logic after a point. We may feel we are onto something, but that is just an illusion, and we shouldn't take such feelings seriously.

I will admit that atheism comes with its own problems. It is obvious from how we atheists have to either accept positivism or postmodernism and they both have fatal problems. Postmodernism is self-refuting as you explain in your great book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. And positivism apparently is just logically immature and on its way to postmodernism if one has to be consistent. Like Wittgenstein matured and abandoned his positivism to become a postmodernist. And that is the end of the road.

So it seems the debate between atheism and theism  is a stalemate. But if you still say that I must reject atheism because it ends up in the absurdity of postmodernism and I must therefore adopt its negation that is theism, well, then I will have to remind you of fatal problems in your worldview such as JEDP theories for the origin of Torah and the academic success of Darwinism which demands acceptance.

Best Regards

KS

Turkey

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