Consciousness and Reason: Naturalism’s Achilles Heel

Much of the impetus for the worldview of naturalism comes from the apparent success of science in progressively edging out teleological explanations and replacing them with explanations that are framed exclusively in terms of physical mechanisms and forces. But what happens when naturalism attempts to take the final step in its journey, and explain consciousness and reason — which are the very conditions of our being able to do science — in purely physicalist terms? In this talk, we examine the ways in which consciousness and reason pose a fundamental challenge to naturalism, resisting its attempts to fit them into its categories.