Victor Reppert

Victor Reppert (born 1953) is an American philosopher best known for his development of the "argument from reason". He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003) and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo, and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.

He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy (1989) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reppert first became interested in the argument from reason after a conversion experience at the age of 18. He became aware that while unbelievers like Bertrand Russell claimed to be more rational than believers, Christians like C. S. Lewis claimed not only that their belief is more rational than unbelief, but that the argument from reason shows that the very capacity to reason is itself a reason to think that the naturalism espoused by unbelievers is false. When he read G. E. M. Anscombe's critique of Lewis's argument, Reppert became persuaded that the argument could be formulated in such a way as to overcome Anscombe's objections. His paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues" was the result.

In 1998, Reppert posted his paper "The Argument from Reason" to the Secular Web. In 1999 a slightly revised version of the same paper appeared, with a response by Jim Lippard, in the humanist journal Philo. In the same issue, Keith M. Parsons, the then editor of Philo, presented some arguments against Reppert's conclusions in the course of a review of Thomas Nagel's The Last Word, so in 2000 Reppert wrote a "Reply to Parsons and Lippard", to which Parsons responded by writing the first full-dress attempt to refute Reppert's argument. Reppert's reply to Parsons was the paper "Causal Closure, Mechanism, and Rational Inference", which, since he felt it was time that more Christian philosophers were familiarized with the argument and related issues, appeared in 2001 in Philosophia Christi. In 2003 Philosophia Christi featured a "Symposium on the Argument from Reason", consisting of a paper by Reppert, responses by Theodore M. Drange, William Hasker and Keith Parsons, and a second paper by Reppert replying to these three critics.

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