J.R.R. Tolkien, the great writer and Oxford don, had a very high opinion of myths. In contrast to his close friend and colleague, C.S. Lewis, who also highly valued myths, but saw them as the best (in the moral sense) lies humanity ever told, Tolkien saw myths as the most truthful stories that humanity ever told. Tolkien saw myths as more truthful, in their own way, than written history, because myths capture basic facts about human nature that history never could. I myself love myths — I find them fascinating. The other day I found myself thinking about one myth in particular: the story of the birth of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. I realized as I reflected upon it that this story illustrates myth as Tolkien saw it: a truthful account of human reason.

Athena was not, strictly speaking, born. Her “father,” Zeus, once had a splitting headache that would not go away. In desperation he ordered his son, Hephaestus to crack open his skull and release whatever was inside it that was causing him such pain. What was inside was Athena, who sprang out from his exposed mind a goddess, fully grown. As a story it is very instructive. I realized for the first time while I reflected on it that through this myth the Greeks managed to both explain the nature of human reason and anticipate atheism’s flawed account of it.

The Greeks, like most ancient peoples, either personified important qualities or phenomena or considered them to be gods. Hence, love was a goddess (Aphrodite), war was a god (Ares), and wisdom, or reason, (Athena, or Minerva, as the Romans, who stole the Greeks’ mythology from them in the days before intellectual property rights, called her) was a goddess. The truth that the Greeks told through the tale of Athena’s birth is that human reason does not arise naturally – it is not its own cause nor is it self-sustaining. Its source must be found beyond physical nature.

In contrast, the atheist account of human reason is based on a system of thought that can fairly be called materialism: the belief that nothing except material (i.e. physical) things exists. Julian Baginni, an atheist philosopher, offers a concise explanation of the materialist perspective in his book, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. “What atheists … believe,” says Baginni, “is that, although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short, the full gamut of the phenomena that gives richness to human life.”

To most people today, the Greeks’ account probably seems ridiculous and the materialists’ account eminently believable. Thousands of years ago, perhaps, people could believe the way the Greeks did. They believed a lot of strange and ridiculous things back then. They thought a 25-ounce piece of meat, the heart, was the seat and source of human emotions. They knew so much less in those days. Hundreds of years of experience and experiments with modern science have demonstrated pretty clearly, though, that human reason comes from the mind. Which is to say that it comes from the brain: a clearly natural, material origin. Or, as the famous writer and biologist, Richard Dawkins, puts it in his anti-theistic book, The God Delusion, “Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain.” That, to most people, probably seems obvious.

But should it? We seem to think that our thoughts have meaning – real meaningful meaning – independent of their physical origin as electrochemical signals originating in our brains. Why do we think this, I wonder, if all thoughts ultimately come from the brain? A lot of electrochemical signals come from the brain – signals to breathe or to blink our eyes, for instance. These signals, however, have no meaning, we say. We say that different signals have real meaning – say, those that provide a list of groceries to buy at the store, or those that tell us that chopping an annoying person’s head off is wrong. The very notion that completely unconscious mental signals that expand and contract our diaphragms have meaning strikes us as complete nonsense. On what basis do we judge it as such, however? What standard do we have to judge between meaningful and non-meaningful electrochemical signals in the brain? Reason certainly can’t provide us with one: reason itself is “on trial” as it were. How, then, do we come by such a standard?

We could think really hard and come up with one, I suppose.

Perhaps, if a thought is the product of conscious thinking, then it has meaning. That would get rid of the rather ridiculous prospect of meaningful blinks. It would eliminate the possibility of meaningful unconscious thought, though, which is a problem given how much thought happens unconsciously (recognizing people’s faces, snap judgments about whether we should trust someone, etc.). It also raises the problem of how we would differentiate between conscious and unconscious thoughts in the first place.  We’d still need a different standard to judge that.

Or we could say that thoughts that are in accordance with the world that we observe are meaningful, and those that aren’t are not. This allows us the enjoyment of many of our scientific observations and other observation-based vocations like journalism. It robs us of our ability to distinguish (in terms of value) between a biologist studying the human genome to find a cure for cancer and a dog studying a puddle of urine to find out whose territory it’s in, however. (Both are studying the material in front of them, after all.) We’d still need a different standard to judge between them. We’d have to think about it some more.

Ah, yes – there’s the rub. We’d have to think about it. We’d have to assume that our thoughts about which thoughts are meaningful are themselves meaningful before we could even begin to devise a way to differentiate between meaningful and meaningless electrochemical signals. We’d have to assume the validity of our conclusion before we ever began to demonstrate it. We’d have to … well … we’d have to do exactly what most atheists claim that theists do: we’d have to make unsupported arguments on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence.

In his famous book, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, another Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, examines the conundrum materialism finds itself in, vis-à-vis human reason. To Lewis, the biggest problem for materialism is explaining rational inference. Without rational inference, human thought is indistinguishable from animal thought. Lewis point out, however, that nothing can be rationally inferred if it can be fully explained by non-rational causes. If I’m firmly convinced that I hear aliens speaking to me from outer space, and, after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given drugs that correct the chemical imbalances in my brain, I stop hearing the aliens’ messages, it is clear that there was no meaning in the “messages.” They were completely explainable as chemical processes gone awry in my brain. They weren’t real “thought.”

What Lewis makes quite clear, however, is that, if materialism is true there is no thought we can have that is not basically like the aliens’ messages. Since everything “emerges” from “one kind of stuff,” as Baginni and Dawkins describe, and since that material is inherently non-rational, nothing that comes from it can ever be rational: it will always, everywhere, be fully explained by non-rational causes. There is no way to differentiate between the ramblings of a lunatic and the writings of Shakespeare if the only source and standard for both is a 56-ounce piece of meat: the brain. (Yes, the biochemical interactions in the brain are very complex. So are those in the liver. The degree of complexity is irrelevant if we’re still talking about entirely non-rational phenomena.)

This seems to be a truly fatal problem for atheism, or for any ideology based on materialism. If materialism is true, if there is nothing beyond the physical matter that we can observe, then there is no higher standard for what reason is than the brain itself. The brain is simply another organ in the body, however, (though certainly a very complicated one) producing chemicals in response to external stimuli. If “thinking” just means “what the brain does” in the same way that the liver breaks down fats and the stomach breaks down proteins, then our thoughts cannot have what most people consider meaning, anymore than the enzymes in our stomach have meaning. To persist in any line of thought that only accepts a completely material, non-rational, source for human reason is intellectual suicide – all thoughts then become equally meaningless.

The only other option for atheists to even begin to refute Lewis’s charges is (as explained above) equally invalid, however, although it’s the one most often chosen: they must assume that their reason is valid without ever really explaining how it is valid. (”Invalid” doesn’t mean uncaused, however. This is an important distinction. Science could figure out the physical or biochemical pathways that give rise to “thought,” but that wouldn’t lend any validity to materialists’ explanations of reasoning, since thinking would still flow completely from non-rational processes.) This means implicitly assuming that their reason essentially spontaneously generated as a meaningful, valid phenomena – that it began on its own. It means assuming that their reason sprang up from their minds, fully developed, of its own accord.

Hey, that idea sounds very familiar.

Maybe the two stories – the Greek myth and the atheist’s account – aren’t so very different. Or maybe the Greeks weren’t so wrong on this point after all. At least they had a somewhat credible source for human reason given what they knew and believed (Zeus’s head). The atheists must come up with a credible source given what they know and believe. All they have, however, is a bodily organ, a 56-ounce piece of meat. But why should I follow the dictates of a 56-ounce piece of meat? Is it because it weighs twice as much as the 25-ounce piece of meat people used to think they obeyed? Or should I follow the dictates of this bodily organ because the biochemical interactions within it are very complicated? But so are those in the liver. Does that mean I can obey my liver, too sometimes — maybe 1% of the time? Does that make sense? What reasons can anyone give me to help me out here?

Oops.  Maybe that’s a question I shouldn’t ask anymore.