For a long time now, I've complained about how other apologists have misrepresented C.S. Lewis' argument from reason. The mistake a lot of people make is in thinking that Lewis argued that determinism undermines reason, when Lewis argued no such thing.
But it turns out I've had a misconception about his argument myself. What's worse is that my misconception lead to me being inconsistent in my epistemology, and I only recently noticed my inconsistency.
For a long time, I've treated Lewis' argument as if it showed that naturalism undermines all knowledge. I've argued that if our beliefs are caused by blind mechanistic forces, then they can't be rational. The inconsistency in my epistemology was that I also have defended the notion that certain items of knowledge (the foundational a priori ones) are hard-wired. We are essentially caused to believe them. Yet they are rational, and we are justified in holding those beliefs. They count as knowledge.
What's worse is that the way I have attempted to demonstrate that the distorted version of Lewis' argument that a lot of apologists use is a fallacious argument is by pointing out that there are justified true beliefs we have that are both caused and determined, for example, by our sensory perceptions, like my belief that there's a cat on my lap.
I've got it all straightened out now, though. I still think my criticism of those other apologists is sound. I think the way they attempt to defend the argument from reason is fallacious and wrong. You can see my reasons here.
What Lewis argued, wasn't that any belief that is caused is non-rational. Rather, he argued that reasoning would be impossible if naturalism were true. The consequence is any belief that depends on reasoning can't be justified since it wasn't really reasoning that lead to the belief.
This makes good sense because the process of mechanistic cause and effect is completely distinct from the process of logical deduction, seeing that a conclusion follows from premises, or inductively extrapolating. The relationship between "All men are mortal," "Socrates is a man," and "Therefore, Socrates is mortal," is not a causal relationship, but a logical relationship. The conclusion doesn't happen by the laws of nature the way a domino falls because of the laws of collision and gravity. Rather, the conclusion is arrived at by rationally "seeing" the relationship between the propositions and drawing the conclusion through the laws of logical inference.
If naturalism is true, then all of our beliefs can be fully accounted for by appeal to blind mechanistic cause and effect, leaving no room for reasoning. Reasonining is an illusion, so any belief we appear to have arrived at through a process of reasoning cannot be a rational belief. That includes naturalism itself as long as naturalism is a belief supposedly arrived at through reasoning. One can't sensibly argue and reason toward naturalism because the position itself would undermine the process that lead to it. So naturalism is a self-defeating position to hold. It could still be true, of course, but it can't be rational to believe it.
The best a naturalist can say is that while the two modes of arriving at conclusions are distinct in kind, they actually run in parallel in the human brain. They're just two different ways of explaining the same thing. That's how calculators work. Math is a kind of logic, but calculators operatate, at their most basical level, mechanistically according to the laws of nature. I explained in another post why this is not an adequate response to the argument from reason.
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