I think we are all, at our worst, quite inattentive and absent-minded when it comes to divine distillations; for even the most intelligent atheists in the world must be able to see this incongruity which we are now going to discuss. If naturalists are claiming that the universe has no meaning; that there is no God; that we came about from an accidental explosion (the big bang) and then (much later) from an accidental stellar collision; that everything happened by accident; and that everything is purposeless - then they are claiming that every living thing is an accident. 

 

If so, then every bit of reasoning, every thought (including the one that I am having now and the many that each of you are currently having) have been accidents, purposeless events occurring in one big accidental mix. If this were true, why, then, should we believe one accidental thought over another, much less believe that one accidental thought is superior to another, or that some accidental thoughts explain this grand accident better than other accidental thoughts? 

 

Do you see the problem? If we are asked by naturalists to believe this, we are being asked to believe something which is contrary to every part of our reason, for we all know, and have known for most of our lives, that reason does not work in that way. Reason under these premises of irrationality, would surely be self-refuting. Asking us to believe that one accidental thought (which calls itself sound) can explain the falsity of another accidental thought is not sensible logic. It is like expecting that a passer-by observing a broken window could tell from looking at the broken glass who broke the window and why. 

 

Of course, naturalist evolutionists will probably say that observational thought came about, and was crystallised, over a long period of selective development; in fact, over many millions of years, but they would be going beyond their evidence. And even if it were true, it has no explanation of how corrective reason came about, or indeed, how we are able to predict and anticipate complex things. 

 

In the second place, if critical thought is an entity that evolved over millions of years of gradual improvement, why then, is it anomalous, inconsistent and indiscriminate - varying drastically from person to person, even within one family? And why has not natural selection (over the millions of years) worked faster towards the eradication of erroneous thoughts? For if nature had her way, you would expect us to be a lot more error-free than we actually are. But if what we are is a combination of God kindled rationale and human free-thinking, then creatures like us is exactly what you would expect to see moving around the globe. 

 

If observational thought comes from crude beginnings, anticipation and corrective rectification must be stimulated by something bigger than thought itself. I suppose the relationship between thought and matter is a little like the relationship between water and other objects that it causes to be wet. Reason cannot itself be any of the things that we are reasoning about, just as water cannot be a wet sponge. 

 

And it seems to me that any material explanation of reasoning, however complex and at whatever sub-atomic level, cannot itself be a true description of what reason is, just as water, whatever objects it wets, cannot get wet itself. When we add more water to an object we can observe that the object is getting wetter, but we cannot add one glass of water to another and expect the first part of water to be wetter because of the second. And I think that the same applies to reason; however much we explain reason, the explanation itself cannot be the same as the reason that we are trying to explain. 

 

The laws of cause and effect, when operating in the thoughts of individuals, can be summarised thus; ‘Because of A, therefore B’ - but the laws tell us nothing about where the transpositional relationship is coming from, for ‘A then B’ conclusions need a sort of meta-explanation all by themselves. The connection cannot itself be either of the two; if it were, what, then, is causing the connection? A bigger and much greater actuality must be supplying the connection. 

 

If we are to hold thought as a solid and verified actuality, then there is no conceivable means whereby something random and chaotic could produce it. If I set up a program on a (hypothetically eternal) computer which randomly produces, say, five hundred letters per minute and left it running for a considerable length of time; eventually a complete sentence would appear - and if I left it running for eternity, then eventually every single sentence that has ever been written by mankind would appear somewhere - in fact every essay that could be translated from the letters on the keyboard - every poem, every science book and every religious text ever written would appear an infinite amount of times. 

 

Going one step further, there would even be present, within the random letters, every thing that could possibly be written - every unanticipated sentence, every unwritten philosophical treatise, and every previously unknown scientific discovery that could be transcribed. There are some who doubt that this would happen, but it is not a matter of doubt; it is a mathematical certainty (eternity, of course, by its very nature, includes all closed systems). But every combination of words, every innovative sentence, and every stupendous treatise that this eternal program produced, would mean absolutely nothing if thought were taken out of the equation. 

 

If anything of any worth is to exist at all, then the absolute fact of the things; that is, the explanation that makes them exist - beyond that of random nothingness - must be an ultimate actuality, capable of making each of these things a reality. The words, by themselves, will never be anything without thought itself. But however long the program of random words is left to run, however many letters, and however many random words are produced - nothing resembling ‘thought’ itself will ever be produced. 

 

That, to me, is the big problem with naturalism. However long naturalists carry on claiming that all of nature is accidental and purposeless, they are claiming that truth itself is a vague and nebulous ideal rather than an ultimate fact. They are claming that thought is one of the ultimate actualities produced by an accidental and random program. In which case, all statements mean exactly the same within the framework of this randomness. The statement ‘I do not believe in God’ is in no closer proximity to ultimate truth than the statement ‘Cambridge is in Italy’, for the second statement is only erroneous within the accidental ideal of generality that we have forged for ourselves within the framework of this big accidental universe. 

 

Anything that is derived from an irrational activity cannot tell us anything about entities outside of ourselves. If thoughts are merely ideas about us, like our impulse to yawn or sneeze, we have no reason to believe any of our perceptions about nature and ultimate realties. We can only know about ultimate realties if the deepest and most concrete fact of all is the source of all of our thoughts; in fact, if it is an entity operating in the same system in which our own thoughts are operating - otherwise there is no explanation for our designs on correction and our revulsion to error. Every time we think a rational thought, it is, I believe, God working inside us, for all the atoms in the universe, if left to themselves, would produce nothing of the kind. 

 

Any scientific conclusion about the nature of thought can itself be thought about, or observed; in which case, there must be a type of thought operating outside of that which is being thought about or observed. Every single thing which has, or can have, a naturalistic explanation must have something outside of itself; and indeed, if every thing has the potential to be thought of, then thought itself must be something outside of nature. 

 

In other words, if thought is an entity operating entirely within nature, with nothing from outside of nature guiding it, there would have to be thoughts operating within nature which themselves could not be thought about. But this is not sensible logic, for whatever shows itself to be part of nature, whether material or immaterial, has to be able to be subjected to thought, just as all objects in nature can be subjected to water, except water itself. I do not mean that there are no things beyond the design of our thinking, for there certainly are such things at a quantum level. But this does not mean that they are beyond thought itself, otherwise it means that we can never produce or develop anything that could create an interrelation, and that must be nonsense. 

 

Positive conclusions about any thing have to be determined by the truth of its distinction from truth itself. Either it comes from something outside of nature, or else it is wholly extricable from thought itself, in which case it would be a nonentity; in fact, non-existent - just as a dream ceases to be a dream when we awake to think about it. This is nothing like what my experiences tell me. If the totality of my thoughts is merely a leaf blowing about in the breeze, then nothing I say has any validity whatsoever. But if, however, the leaf is not detached, but part of a big tree; that is, if I am not the sole custodian of my thinking but merely the leaseholder - it is easily explainable how I am able to think thoughts and employ reason. The leaf is, indeed, part of a big tree, the origin of the thoughts, because they are connected to the branches, the trunk and, further back - the roots. And God, who is at the root of the universe, is at the root of all thought. 

 

But, you might be thinking, if this is true, why do only some of us know about it? At first this seems like a reasonable objection; if God is the source of all our thinking, would we not all be aware of it? In one sense, yes. In one sense, we are all aware of it, it is just that we have forgotten or overlooked exactly what it is that is happening to us. In the first place, you do not need to know every single thing about a situation to know some of what is happening. We can enjoy a nice rest in our armchair after a hard day at work without fully understanding what exactly it is that our body is doing to make us feel relaxed. We can make full use of medicine without understanding quite how it works. We can enjoy a flight to Paris without having to understand how the pilot flies the plane or how the mechanical parts function together. 

 

But all these things are obvious to us; that is, we know that they are happening, despite not fully understanding how they are happening. The same applies to our thinking; we know what we are thinking, but we have forgotten what a miraculous thing it is that we are thinking; for nature, by herself, never planned for any such thing. It is very easy to overlook things which are primary and simply concentrate on secondary things. The fact that you are enjoying the flight with a nice glass of wine and a good book is quite secondary to the mechanical operations in the plane, but it is the secondary things which are at the forefront of our consciousness. 

 

To many of us, the fact that God is stimulating our thoughts remains secondary to the fact that we are thinking; that is, it is what we are thinking about, not why we are thinking that is prominent in our minds. And if we are at all surprised that inattention is so commonplace within our own minds, we shall be equally shocked to find that our thinking, even when it is attentive, quite often leads us into perceptual trickery. A good example is when someone asks us to estimate a particular number of some fact which is to them (and, they suppose, to us, quite surprisingly large), and we estimate a number far higher than the actual number in question. We have overestimated, yet after a little thought, and once the embarrassment of the questioner has dissipated, we are still surprised to hear the real piece of trivia or real fact. 

 

I turn now to another possible objection. Why should we be worried about the origin of thought? In other words, if what we think about the universe works for us, why bother asking from whence it came? But the problem here is that the naturalists do not stop there. Having brought themselves to admit that all thought arose from irrational entropy, they then claim to have colonised their own type of rationality which is capable of explaining away ultimate realities. You might contend that each thought, each faction of our own reality that we have engendered within our universe, needs no ultimate explanation or no superimposing origin, but that would only be putting the problem back a stage further. That is, the contention itself would still be an inexorable part of the non-rational accidental whole - itself unable to explain that non-explanation of which all accidental thoughts are accused. 

The contender cannot escape the tautology; the means by which one thought becomes efficacious is immediately invalidated by the whole accidental system. We may, if we wish, simply stick with the thinking that we have got; we may say that each thought, each part of our reasoning, remains true to its minimalist cause. That is, we may say that it merely enables us to communicate with each other - one man understands what bricks are, therefore the next man understands what a house is and so on. Furthermore, we may happily conclude that reason itself has evolved microcosmically, aiding us towards practising new types of thinking within our understanding of what thought is; but if we do this, we must give up thinking about ultimate realties. We must wave goodbye to science, to philosophy, to theology, to everything that purports to explain ontological things. 

 

If thought is only useful for such explanations, it is no use trying to invoke explanations of the bigger picture of existence, for any part of nature’s ultimate reality that could be absorbed by the imagination must emanate from bigger inferences than the type of thought that we are describing. And here we have seen what I think is the biggest crisis in naturalism; a crisis which leaves atheists with nowhere to go, unless they posit that we should abandoned thinking altogether.   

 

They are attempting to claim that thought can be valid because, they say, both the great accidental origins of thought, and our contemporary thinking (contemporary with the time-scale that we are using), are necessary accompaniments or necessary results and the inheritance of one to the other is able to create a universal situation where both the origin of thought and thought itself entail each other despite being generated from a purposeless and non-rational accident. And this, under any showing, must be nonsense. The atheists are left with an insuperable problem which is strong enough to sweep away their comfort blanket in one big swoop; and from this, they have nowhere to go but backwards.