Normative Reasons vs Causal Explanations

Rationality is normative: it concerns what one ought to believe given evidence and argument. Naturalistic explanation, by contrast, is causal: it concerns what events produced a belief. These operate at different explanatory levels.

One may fully understand the causal history of a belief while still asking whether that belief is justified. Explaining how a belief arose does not, by itself, explain whether it ought to be held.

If atheism collapses normativity into causality, then “rational belief” becomes indistinguishable from “whatever my neurons caused me to think.” In that case, the concept of justification is displaced rather than explained.

This matters because atheistic critiques routinely rely on standards of rational assessment such as coherence, validity, and non-question-begging inference. These standards are irreducibly normative. A worldview that explains belief-formation solely as the output of causal systems must still account for why some belief-formations count as good reasoning rather than mere events.

Theism provides a natural metaphysical home for normativity: reason reflects a rational order grounded in a rational source, rather than an accidental byproduct of blind causation.

Formal Argument

P1. Epistemic justification is normative: it concerns whether a belief is supported by reasons.

P2. Causal explanations describe how beliefs arise but do not determine whether beliefs are justified.

C1. Therefore, causal explanation is not sufficient for epistemic justification.

P3. Strict naturalism treats belief-formation exhaustively in causal terms.

C2. Therefore, strict naturalism is incomplete with respect to the normativity of rational justification.

Analogy

Suppose an engineer explains that a bridge collapsed because of metal fatigue and cyclic loading. That causal account may be correct, but it does not answer a separate normative question: “Was the design sound?”

Likewise, a neuroscientist might explain that a person believes proposition X due to upbringing, dopamine responses, and social reinforcement. That causal story may be accurate, but it does not address whether X is true or whether the person had good reasons to believe it.

If one insists that the causal story is the whole story, rationality has not been explained; it has been replaced with etiology.