Does Reason Require God? 

Friday Forum: 16 November 2007

Well ladies and gentlemen it is a privilege to be speaking to you here today at the Friday Forum.  I want to examine a worldview which I believe to be the single most powerful philosophy prevailing in the West today, namely naturalism.  Naturalism essentially boils down to the conviction that this universe, in the words of the popular American TV scientist, Carl Sagan, “is all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be.”  This space-time universe is, always has been and always will be a closed system of purely physical cause and effect – nothing which happens can happen without reference to matter and the physical forces which govern matter.

Very quickly, though there is an important distinction between atheists and naturalists, the overlap is so great that I hope you will allow me for present purposes to refer to naturalists as atheists, if only to avoid the suggestion that people who hold these views like to do so without any clothes on.

Naturalism, I want to argue, is an illusion; but it is a very powerful illusion. Its power derives in large measure from the fact that its merits and its coherence as a philosophical position are very rarely put under the spotlight as a worldview.  And I want very briefly to do just that by examining the very cornerstone of its philosophy, namely the faculty of human reason.  Reason as we know is the great battle cry of atheists today, and how our ears have been ringing with it in the last year or so. 

There are two questions I’d like to put to those who hold this worldview: 

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