Natural Order and Science

[Neo-Scholastic]

If I, as you do in an aside in your response, entertain the idea that the mind came about through evolution, my knee jerk conclusion would be that it needs a "logical" world in order to produce reliable reason.

In practice and for hominids at least, it seems that evolutionary pressures favor reliable sense organs and accurate reasoning. Yet, sometimes fearful response to fantasy produces a safer, though perhaps less ideal, result than level-headed assessment and deliberation. In theory only, no one can confirm a necessary relationship between how we think about reality and how reality actually is. You either believe there is such a relationship or you don’t. Even saying that it is a ‘reasonable’ assumption begs the question. The fact is such considerations follow behind the prior commitments people have made in response to the human condition.

That is why I am now alternately frustrated and amused when someone asserts that their worldview (whether atheist or theist) is the most rational. They do not recognize the prior commitments that inform his or her worldview. Everyone starts from the basic a priori human condition – being someone in a world of otherness and facing two basic questions: Who am I? and What is Other? Life compels us to answer, to take stands prior to reasoning about or attempting to justify them.

… what it would mean for the world to be unintelligible… What criteria does the universe have to fulfill…for the label "intelligible" to be justified?

The world is unintelligible when no reason accounts for its apparent order. It just is, as it is, but could be otherwise. The world is intelligible when the apparent order is actually so by necessity. For some reason it could not be otherwise. The human condition is such that no criteria can justify one stance over the other. If someone says to you that the world is accidentally ordered and reason is unreliable, it doesn’t do you any good to object by saying that what he or she has said is self-refuting. They can simply reply by asking you why everything has to be logical.

Because this is a forum about atheism, I will say this. The question of whether or not there is(are) god(s) comes up much later than these basic existential stands. Ontological/cosmological arguments and their objections rest on prior existential commitments, as do many other metaphysical questions concerning free will, moral agency, and meaning. I believe that reality is both intelligible and that reason is reliable. Based on my prior commitments, I accept the conclusions of the Scholastic philosophers. Every time I hear philosophical objections to Thomism, they nearly always rely on some prior commitment denying either the intelligibility of the world (most frequently) or the unreliability of reason (less often). For example, the 4th Way of Aquinas depends on accepting the idea that causes are necessarily linked to effects. If someone believes that no reason accounts for that link the argument of the 4th Way has no force. It makes no sense to argue the point one way or the other (such as by appealing to the Principle of Sufficient Reason) with people who take the opposite existential stance. That impasse is why I no longer participate much in those (and many other) AF threads.