C. S. Lewis continues his patricidal/fratricidal assault on classic dualism this week, and this time he’s got a really good argument. Not flawless, mind you, but clever and even a little surprising, at least for me. As before, his reasoning suffers significantly from his failure to consider any non-superstitious alternatives, but he proposes, or at least popularizes, a view of evil that many modern evangelicals still promote today, and so it’s worth taking a look at in the light of the real-world evidence.

One of the problems with popular Christianity is that Evil, as personified by the devil and his demons, tends to be more of a cartoon villain than a realistic opponent. By that I mean that Satan is envisioned as being someone who exults in evil for its own sake, wantonly sowing destruction and corruption for no better reason than to do as much evil as possible. Evil, described in such terms, is easy to communicate and popularize, but childishly one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Lewis, to his credit, recognizes this as a problem, and tries to take advantage of it.

If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they…have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety.  But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things.

Notice how Lewis gets things right here. He takes the superstitious notion (that evil is due to a supernatural Person), and measures the plausibility of that claim by comparing it to what we actually experience in reality. Bravo, Prof. Lewis! But look where he goes with it.

[W]ickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness… In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled… you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this Bad Power, who is supposed to be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to love badness in the same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere bogy. In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be getting both from the Good Power.

Hence Lewis’ conclusion that Evil is not independent; it can only exist as a kind of moral parasite attached to a Good host. And many today echo that same claim (especially as it applies specifically to atheists).

I’ve got to admit, that’s actually a pretty clever refutation of dualism. Not flawless, like I said before, but very clever and even persuasive. It sounds so reasonable. A devil who loved being bad would be inconsistent, because love is good and hate is bad. The devil ought to hate being bad, because by definition he prefers bad actions (hating) to good ones (loving). But if he hates being bad, that’s good! Yikes!

This works as a refutation, not because dualism is less reasonable than monotheism (as we shall see shortly), but because dualism, like monotheism, is a superstition, an attempt to understand evil by imagining a supernatural Person behind it all. And that’s not what “evil” really is. The facts don’t fit the story because the story is not an accurate description of the facts.

Lewis tries to make Christianity sound like a superior alternative to dualism, but in doing so he creates new and even worse problems for himself. That’s partly because he’s not proceeding from a very sound foundation. For example, he’s assuming his conclusion that all things were originally good and remain good by default unless and until they are corrupted by the evil one. But would it not be more correct to say that most things (such as pleasure, money, power and safety) are morally neutral, and only become good or evil according to how they are used?

It’s just a slight change in viewpoint, yet it is crucial to Lewis’ argument, because once you admit the possibility of morally neutral things, it becomes possible that either Power could have created them for its own purposes, only to have them subsequently suborned by the other Power. At that point Lewis’ argument falls apart: the Evil Power no longer needs to depend, parasitically, on the Good Power for things He can put to evil purposes. We’re back to a pair of alleged deities, at least potentially equal in power.

He also assumes that the good things must have come first, and then the Evil One perverted them. That’s not necessarily a given. Let’s imagine, for example, a Klingon theologian, for whom Satan is the true and mighty God, and Jehovah the perverted parasite, whose goal is to take the strength and power of the True God and weaken it, burdening it with arbitrary constraints like mercy and comfort. By this sort of theology, it might very well be Lewis’ “evil” things which came first, and which were then turned into something contrary to the will of the True God. Could our Klingon theologian make the same argument as Lewis, only with the 2 gods reversed? Indeed he could, and it wouldn’t be all that difficult, given a harsher and less comfortable definition of “good.”

The bigger problem for Lewis, though, is that he proposes a kind of unequal dualism in which the Good Power and the Bad Power do both exist, but one is much stronger than the other. Think about it. Lewis is proposing that God must have come first, and then Satan came along and corrupted what God had done, because you can make a good thing into a perversion, but you can’t make a perversion into a good thing. In other words, the Evil Power has the ability to transform good things into evil, but the Good Power has no ability to turn evil things into good ones. Evil thus has more power than Good! Yikes again!

That’s not at all what Lewis wants to say, of course, but he’s committed to it regardless. Otherwise, if it were possible for God to take Satan’s evil creations, and turn them into good things, then Lewis’ whole argument falls apart yet again. He argues that “you can explain the perverted from the normal and cannot explain the normal from the perverted,” but how does he know which version is the “normal” one and which the perversion?

If God had the power to “pervert” Satan’s “normal” design for evil things, and turn them into good things, then it’s just as possible that evil is “normal” and that “good” exists only as the result of a parasitic God “perverting” Satan’s original creation. Lewis would be right back in the same problem he had last week: without a reality-based standard of right and wrong, there’s no non-tautological way to define which side is really the right one, and hence no way to prove which Power is the host, and which the parasite.

There are bigger and deeper issues here that Lewis does not even allude to. For example, Lewis claims that the Evil Power cannot provide himself with either good things to desire or good impulses to pervert, and therefore “must be getting both from the Good Power.” What’s more, Lewis proposes that, “To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will,” all of which, according to Lewis, are given to him by the Good Power. Yes, that’s right: it’s the “Good” Power that is secretly empowering and enabling the Evil one!

That’s a pretty corrupt “Good” Power, wouldn’t you say? Lewis wants to make a distinction between Zoroastrian-style dualism and Christian-style dualism, but the only way he can do that effectively is to make the Good Power ultimately responsible for the existence and activities of the Evil power. Doing so brings him a bit closer to the truth, but it’s a truth that contradicts the Christian premise of a God Who is purely good. Good and evil come from Alethea, from Reality itself, and not from any superstitiously invented supernatural powers. No matter how you distance Him from His Zoroastrian ancestry, the Christian God is still just a myth.

Lewis also has problems distinguishing between evil as a cause and evil as an effect. It’s all very well to speak of evil as being some good thing that was pursued “by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much.” That doesn’t really account for the existence of evil, though, because if you were a perfect angel, created by God to be perfectly good, then why would you ever want to pervert good things in the first place? Lewis tries to belittle Satan as a mere corrupter of good things, but who corrupted Satan? To say he corrupted himself is to assume that he must have been evil first, so that he would want to corrupt himself. But if he was already evil, then the original question is still unanswered.

Nor does it help to introduce the idea that Satan was somehow flawed, and the flaw led to his downfall. To make that one work, Lewis must argue that flaws are somehow good, and/or that it is good for God to create flawed angels. Remember, evil is not really evil, it’s just something good pursued in the wrong way. That’s Lewis’ definition anyway, and it doesn’t really apply to flaws, so flaws must be good (or God must be evil).

But then, assuming Lewis’ definition of evil were correct, how would we explain the doctrine of eternal judgment? If you’re an omnipotent God, and you see one of your angels pursuing good things in an incorrect manner, what’s the point of becoming angry and creating a lake of fire? Just show them how to do it the right way, and then they can continue to pursue the good things. If You’ve created flawed angels, just correct the flaw. There’s no need to go all violent and everlasting on them.

Thus, Lewis invents an explanation of evil that works, for the nonce, as a refutation of classical dualism, but in the process he leaves God without a good reason for allowing evil to exist all. Not, of course, that God ever had a good reason. The superstitious account of Good and Evil never has gotten around that one sore point.

Reality provides us with both good things and bad things, and the better we understand the real world and the real source of good and evil, the better we’ll be able to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Christianity is of no help, and is indeed a rather malignant distraction, in the search for that better understanding, as Lewis demonstrates by wasting his cleverness trying to make one superstitious myth sound better than another.

According to C. S. Lewis, we have a problem.

What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless.

In the real world, this is hardly a problem: meaning is inherent in the law of cause and effect, because it creates predictable (and therefore meaningful) connections between causes and effects. Likewise, meaning is inherent in the fact that truth is consistent with itself: the self-consistency creates relationships between truths, and these relationships are what we call “meaning”. Lewis’ problem is simply that he has a superstitious answer to sell, and therefore he needs to manufacture some sort of question he can respond to.

Predictably, he recognizes only two possible explanations for this “problem.” One is the Christian view that the world is a good creation gone bad, and the other is Dualism, “the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad,” each one believing itself to be the “good” god. No non-superstitious explanations need apply, apparently. Everything has to be “explained” in terms of magical, invisible beings. Oh well.

It might be interesting, given Christianity’s ancestry, to explore the conflict between Lewis’ beliefs and classical dualism. Unfortunately, Lewis makes a very serious strategic mistake: he attacks dualism from the perspective of asking what makes the good deity good and the bad deity bad. In a way, it’s a natural extension of his rhetoric in book 1, but it’s a fatal error nonetheless.

Lewis praises dualism for being, in his words, “the manliest and most sensible creed on the market,” though he doesn’t explain why he thinks so. I presume it has something to do with the fact that Christianity is also dualistic, except for the part about the good deity and the bad deity being co-equal and co-eternal. So what’s not to like, eh? Here’s Lewis explaining what he sees as being “the catch.”

[W]hat do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer one to the other—like preferring beer to cider—or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If ‘being good’ meant simply joining the side you happen to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.

But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God.

If you just experienced a loud bang, a sudden flickering light, and a noisy crash, that was C. S. Lewis shooting down his own Moral Law argument in flames. The strategic error Lewis made here is in attacking one of the many areas that dualism has in common with Christianity. In book 1, Lewis made the claim that the universe was created by a “good” God; here in book 2, he points out the flaw in that reasoning. Dualism’s “evil god” is irrelevant, because with or without a dualistic alternative, the crucial question remains: what does it mean to call God “good”?

Lewis points out the two ways we could answer this question. We could say that God simply chose whatever He preferred, for no particular reason, and called it “good” (and arbitrarily imposed that definition on us as well). Alternatively, we could say that “good means what [He] ought to prefer,” and therefore God demonstrated His goodness by defining “good” according to that standard.

In the first case, it is meaningless to call God “good,” because He’s just doing whatever He happens to fancy, for no real reason. In this case, His self-professed “goodness” is only an arbitrary, selfish, tyrannical “good,” with no true moral merit. On the other hand, as soon as you say God was only doing what He ought to do, you are putting into the Universe a power greater than God, a Being who made a standard that even God has to measure up to. That being would have to be the true God, and for Lewis’ Moral Law argument to work, He would have to be a good God as well. But what does it mean to call this new God “good”?

Such is the trap that superstition lays for the naive and shallow-minded. God cannot both be “good” in any meritorious sense of the word, and also be the Author of the standard of what “good” is. Either “good” is entirely arbitrary and up to whatever God’s whim is at the moment (in which case it doesn’t deserve to be called good), or else there is some greater power than God, and that greater power is setting standards that even God has to obey. But if that greater power is to be called “good” in any meaningful sense, then there must be an even greater power above that, and so on ad infinitum.

Lewis has dug himself into a hole he cannot dig himself out of, but there are actually two ways a more rationally-minded person could escape this dilemma. One is by acknowledging that Alethea must be the Ultimate God: Reality itself is the supreme power that imposes standards which even gods (lesser gods) must live up to, or fail. Alethea alone is the God Who can define both good and evil without Herself being altogether good or altogether evil.

Or if you prefer to address the issue in less mystical/mythic terms, you could just say that good is defined by the shared experiences of countless individuals interacting with one another and seeking a common approach that benefits everyone. There’s a certain Darwinian dynamic at work, because a moral principle only spreads when people see some sort of benefit in it, and that’s more likely to happen if the principle has some real, tangible benefit. Principles that benefit more people will spread to more people, whereas if a principle tends to harm more people than it helps, fewer people will want to adopt it, and more people will want to actively discourage it.

Thus a moral consensus will emerge that is neither “whatever we humans happen to like at the moment” nor some divine list of do’s and don’ts. It may be good and wise, or it may be tainted with superstition and cultural biases, but it won’t be a matter of individual/arbitrary preference nor will it be some universal Moral Law that applies equally to all men at all times in every circumstance. It’s a consensus based on common, real-world experiences, relentless, undirected, and inescapable. Some of us can influence it, but no one, not even Jesus, can control it.

That’s why not even God can be good unless He (or She) conforms to our accumulated “moral” experience of what’s really beneficial and what isn’t. The ancient slave-owning Israelites could have a “good” God who had no problem with slavery, but that’s because of their narrow and self-centered concept of “good,” which only took the slave owner’s benefit into account. After the Enlightenment and the rise of humanism, with its views on the equality of all men, a pro-slavery God could no longer be “good,” and God had to change. Reality, including the reality of human experience, is a God that even Jehovah must submit to.

It’s sad, really. Not only is C. S. Lewis smart enough to have the potential to see the flaws in his Moral Law argument, but here in this chapter he explicitly details one of them for us. He not only should know better, he does know better. And yet, because of his Christian faith, he has compartmentalized this information out of the way, isolating it from the things he wants to believe, and using it only as a criticism of a very similiar religious belief.

There’s just no way around it. Christianity does not make you less intelligent, but as Prof. Lewis demonstrates, it can prevent you from enjoying the benefits of a good mind. Truth is knocking at the door, but Jesus has thrown the bolt.

When I was young, I happened to encounter a layman’s version of Occam’s Razor, which told me that, other things being equal, the simpler explanation was more likely to be correct. I was skeptical at first. It seemed too good to be true, like some kind of magic was going on to make life easier for humans to understand. And how could the blind forces of nature know what a human would or would not find easier to understand?

The answer, of course, is that the forces of nature don’t know. Nevertheless, the Razor is right, because the difference between truth and falsehood is that truth is consistent with itself, whereas falsehood is not consistent with the truth. Any false explanation will therefore produce further inconsistencies that require additional explanation, thus making the false explanation inevitably more complicated than the true one. Q. E. D.

The catch is that the Razor is a tool for making comparisons between two competing explanations, not a tool for assessing the validity of one explanation taken in isolation. In this week’s installment of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis takes two approaches to try and dull the edge of the Razor: he uses last week’s rationalization to arbitrarily dismiss atheism in toto so that we have no alternatives to choose from, and he then argues that it’s not wrong for a religion to be, in his words, “complicated.”

Last week, you may recall, he claimed that atheism was “too simple” because it failed to explain where justice came from. Or rather, he tried to make that claim—his argument started to fall apart the farther he got, and he ended up appealing to the superstitious idea that “meaning” must be created by some kind of god. But whatever. Atheism is “too simple,” and we’ll just have to take his word for it.

Meanwhile, let me share with you some writing that is really quite good.

[R]eal things are not so simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of—all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain—and, of course, you find that what we call ‘seeing a table’ lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of… If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something more is not simple.

Marvelously clear thinking from Prof. Lewis, and it’s too bad he didn’t put this at the front of his book instead of trying to reduce morality to a simple list of rules that people are just supposed to follow no matter what. But alas, while I can praise the clear thinking that Lewis put into the above discussion, I can’t praise his application of it, because the only reason he brings it up is to dismiss the concept of “simple religion.”

[A]nother view that is also too simple…is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right—leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption…

A child saying a child’s prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not—and the modern world usually is not—if you want to go on and ask what is really happening—then you must be prepared for something difficult.

The problem with Christianity is not so much that it is complex, but rather that it embodies the accumulated inconsistencies and contradictions of literally millennia of myth-building. Mix a tribal blood-sacrifice cult with Zoroastrian monotheistic dualism and a mish-mosh of pagan ideas about the afterlife, and you end up with a God Who loves us enough to become one of us and die for us, and yet Who finds associating with us so distasteful and onerous that it’s presumptuous to even notice His failure to show up in person in our lives. And that’s just the first sip of an ocean of Christian “difficulties.”

Lewis tries to brush off this problem by painting critics (and liberal believers) as silly critics who are trying to make Christianity too simple. In fact, he takes it even further. In a passage that must surely be quoted in the Fox Employee Handbook, he writes:

Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity.

OMG, it’s a conspiracy! Having read the first part of Mere Christianity, I’m almost tempted to call that a confession, because Lewis is certainly insisting that Christian morality requires a much simpler explanation than the real-world is willing to support. But perhaps “projection” would be a better word than confession. Lewis doesn’t come right out and admit that he’s sinning against the truth, but he has no trouble charging others with his own tactics. For example, here’s how he describes people who object to the inconsistencies (or “difficulties” as he calls them) in Christian teaching.

You must be on your guard against these people for they will change their ground every minute and only waste your time.

Yo, dude, I so have been there. (Hi, cl! )

Unconscious irony also abounds. Having railed against those who expect simplicity in a world where the truth is more complicated, it turns out that it’s really very simple, after all, to know that that Christianity is true. Yeah, really. Reality itself tells us.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect…

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed.

Quick, out of Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Rastafarianism, Pastafarianism, Scientology, and Fred Phelps’ church, which of them is the religion you would have guessed? Amazing, isn’t it, how only one religion is actually false, and all the rest are true? I would never have guessed that this was the truth about religion. Hey, that means that must be true too! I would never have guessed it would all be so simple…

What Lewis is doing here, of course, is trying to create at least a feeling of having addressed (sorta) the inescapable “difficulties” that arise when you try to treat Christianity like it was the truth about the real world. Christianity is never the simplest explanation, and thus by a trivial application of Occam’s Razor it is an obvious falsehood. To rationalize his refusal to accept this conclusion, Lewis first isolates Christianity from its most potent competitor (atheism), and then attempts to downplay the value of simplicity in determining which explanation is more likely to be true.

Lewis is superficially correct in stating that reality is often more complicated rather than less. Where he fails to be intellectually honest is in treating simplicity as an issue to be addressed in a vacuum, rather than as a criterion for comparing two competing explanations. Rationalization has an infinite capacity for extending the complexity of the “explanation” as each new falsehood introduces new inconsistencies that require additional explanation. It’s no good claiming “reality is complicated” as an excuse for preferring a rationalization over the simpler, self-consistent truth.

But Prof. Lewis is damn well gonna try, even if—despite everything he has just said—his attempt requires oversimplifying the problem and artificially excluding reasonable alternative explanations. Stay tuned.

Last week, Prof. Lewis was informing us that Christianity is “a fighting religion.”

It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

Isn’t that just like Christianity? God screws up, and it’s up to Man to fix things. God’s the one in charge, the sovereign almighty ruler, under whose infinitely wise and powerful leadership the world goes to Hell in an almost literal fashion, and yet somehow it’s our job to straighten things out again. Because God is making such a fuss about it. In my book, that’s not a fighting religion, that’s a perverse religion.

And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?

A very good question indeed, which is probably why Lewis spends the rest of Chapter 6 completely and utterly failing to address it.

In fairness to Prof. Lewis, it makes good sense to avoid this question, because there is no good answer. The Bible tells us that God started with a Creation that was already perfect and led it down a path that ended up with the entire cosmos in bondage to sin and suffering, and most of His beloved children eternally damned. And this is the guy we’re supposed to look to for hope that everything will turn out all right? If He couldn’t keep the place nice when there was no mess, how’s He going to manage now that things are crap? It’s just not a discussion that’s going to edify the faithful.

Instead, what Lewis gives us is a personal anecdote. Immediately after asking, “why has it gone wrong?” above, he writes:

And for a good many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’

Two more very good questions, albeit rhetorical ones. And two more questions that, once again, Lewis dodges. Instead he tries throwing out a red herring to see if he can distract us from the good questions by asking a rather silly one.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

He goes on and belabors this point for a while, trying to make it sound like a terribly vexing conundrum, so that he can whip out his superstitious answer, and claim that our idea of justice must come from some kind of supernatural, divine concept-of-justice Inventor. But it’s really a very trivial question: concepts like justice arise spontaneously out of human experiences and interactions, just like morality, fads, and market prices do. As he did with the idea of Moral Law in Book I, Lewis ignores the simple and obvious natural explanation in favor of the biased and superstitious answer.

Oh, he tries to make it sound like there are real problems with the idea that justice is a social convention. But, once again, his argument requires us to look at the situation through a peculiarly twisted and arbitrary bias, in order to create the illusion of a problem.

Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.

Wow, so few words and yet so much fail. He starts with a false dichotomy: either “justice” exists as a divinely appointed standard, or else it is just a private idea of my own. Next, he puts the burden of proof on the skeptic, assuming “God exists” as the default position and then demanding that the skeptic prove His non-existence. If the atheist’s argument collapses, then God must exist, right? And thus by setting up a strawman argument for the alleged atheist, we “prove” God by showing our contrived argument is bad.

But did his argument really collapse? Careful: by the time we get to the punch line, we find that, surprise! Lewis has substituted a completely different question, i.e. whether the world makes sense.

Let’s just pause for a minute and trace our steps. Prof. Lewis is quite an intelligent man, as is shown by the excellent questions he raises (and by his position at Oxford). Yet under the influence of his Christian faith, he responds to the question, “Why did God’s Creation go wrong?” by saying, “When I was an atheist, I thought God was unjust, but He can’t be, because I found at least one concept that makes sense.”

Wait, what the hell??

It sounds like Lewis has gone ’round the bend, that he’s lost his marbles, that he’s <insert your favorite “crazy” euphemism here>. And yet, he’s sane enough to dress himself and go out in public and hold down a prestigious teaching position at a major university. What gives?

What’s happening is that Lewis’ view of reality is seriously distorted by a whole framework of biased assumptions known as “the Christian worldview.” In Lewis’ worldview, atheists all believe that life has no meaning and that there is no morality and justice. It doesn’t matter that this is untrue in the real world. Lewis only sees what his worldview allows him to see, and in his worldview, morality and justice and meaning all fall under the same heading, “Things Atheists Reject.” If he happens to use these things interchangeably, it’s because in his worldview, that’s what they are.

Inevitably, the result is nonsense. The existence of “meaning,” and of “justice” and of God simply aren’t interrelated in the way Lewis needs them to be. You can’t follow the logical connections from one step to the next because those connections don’t exist. Lewis is just juxtaposing ideas whose only relationship is the artificial one imposed by the Christian worldview.

“Meaning” exists because we use words and concepts to refer to things, and because the law of cause and effect implies that we can anticipate the effects by understanding the causes. It doesn’t take a miracle to make the material world a meaningful place! That’s just one of the inherent properties of material reality (meaning comes from materialism, woot!). Note too that this is entirely separate from the question of whether or not justice exists: meaning can exist just fine without justice existing, and likewise justice can exist without individual persons (or Persons) being just.

Thus, the fact that “justice” has “meaning” is completely irrelevant to the question of whether conditions in the cosmos reflect the existence of a just and loving God. If this “difficulty” is the best objection Lewis can muster against the atheist’s argument, then Christianity hasn’t really got a case. (On the other hand, if Lewis did have a better objection, why didn’t he raise that one instead?)

As a Christian, Lewis’ goal was to try and prove that atheism was too simple. Ironically, he ended up demonstrating the validity of Occam’s Razor instead. He was trying to make atheism sound inconsistent, but he ended up exposing the inconsistencies in his own worldview, compounding the original inconsistencies (i.e. perfect Creation gone wrong) that he was trying to explain away.

Truth is always simpler than a lie, because there aren’t any inconsistencies that need explaining. And that’s why the simplicity of atheism wins. Well, rationally speaking, anyway. And that’s what’s so sad. Lewis can think rationally. He is intelligent. He could see the problems in his apologetic, if it were just a matter of intellectual ability. But he’s bound by a worldview that twists his perceptions and won’t permit him to think straight. Whatever good he might have contributed to the world through clear and intelligent reason has been lost, due to his religion. And though him, all the evangelical Christians who have been influenced by his writings, have been bound and blinkered as well.

We may never know what Christianity really costs us (though the anti-marriage amendments on 30 state constitutions give us a hint). But reading Mere Christianity, I get the impression that we may be losing quite a lot.

Did you ever notice how some people can take a perfectly innocent and neutral fact, and make it sound incriminating, just by how they phrase it? For example, here’s C. S. Lewis observing that, when we consider all religions throughout history, both Christians and atheists can find things they think are right and things they think are wrong:

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

Clever, isn’t it? Notice how you can reverse the nouns and say pretty much the same thing: atheists don’t have to believe that all religions are wrong all through, and Christians do think that the main point in all other religions is simply one huge mistake (with the possible exception of Judaism, but that’s Christianity’s ancestor, so naturally they can’t call that wrong).

Here’s another way of looking at it. He could have looked at Greek mythology and Norse mythology and all the many, many gods of the past, and said, “Of all the people who have ever agreed with me about gods existing, at least the vast majority have been wrong about their gods, whereas of all the times atheists have said that someone’s god was a myth, they’ve been right the vast majority of the time. In fact, by Christian standards, there’s only one case where there’s even a possibility that the atheists might have been wrong. So from a historical perspective, theism has been wrong most of the time, and atheism has been right most of the time.”

Of course, that would also be a biased discussion of the facts. Put this version next to Lewis’ version, though, and I think you get a fair and balanced view: you get to see how liberal Christians become when they believe in gods, and you get to see the true value of being liberal minded about gods in a world where such beliefs have historically been found to be wrong at least most of the time.

Having bragged about how open-minded Christians are, Lewis is immediately struck by a sudden twinge of monotheism.

But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

In other words, Christians also believe that “most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most.” The difference is that when atheists believe this, that’s a bad thing, but when Christians hold the same view, it’s a good thing. He then tries to soften the obvious hypocrisy of his argument by comparing religion to math: there’s only one right answer, but some wrong answers are nearer to being right than others. Which is true, but is hardly a uniquely Christian perspective: the only difference in the atheist position is which right answers you’re comparing the wrong answers to.

That’s just the warm-up though. The main point of this chapter is to divide humanity into two groups, or more specifically, to divide mankind in some way that makes Christianity look superior to all other alternatives.

The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority…

…who, even by Christian standards, have been wrong in at least most of the cases where gods have been proposed. He doesn’t point out that particular “qualification” of course, but he does seem to feel like it’s not really a strong enough recommendation for Christianity, so he builds on it.

Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject. One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil… The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.

Isn’t it fascinating how all the polytheists, all the bulk of the majority Lewis used in his first division, have suddenly ceased to exist, and indeed seem to have never existed at all? By the second division, all theists are monotheists, either pantheistic monotheists, or Judeo-Christian(-Muslim) monotheists. Even the Hindus have somehow lost Vishnu and Krisha and all the rest, and become believers in a solitary, pantheistic He Who Is Beyond Good and Evil.

I find it fascinating that Lewis would choose this particular distinction to make when there are so many others he could have made. He wrote this during WWII; is he motivated, perhaps, by anti-Nazi sentiments, seeking to blame the war on pantheistic Prussian philosophers? Or is he, perhaps, worried that, by engaging polytheism, he might dilute the case for theism, and might raise issues that would make Trinitarianism a doubtful proposition?

Regardless, this is the division Lewis chooses to make, and it, too, is fascinating, because once again he has painted himself into a corner: God cannot be the Creator of moral standards like Good and Evil unless He Himself is indeed above and beyond such standards. With a bit of thought, Lewis ought to have been able to see that the pantheistic position is not only superior, but inevitable. Any tyrant can declare himself “good” on the grounds that, being tyrant, he can define “good” however he likes. That doesn’t make him “good good,” it just means he’s praising himself. If God is that kind of “good” tyrant, then there’s no real merit in His “goodness,” because He’s just stacking the deck to His own arbitrary advantage.

The only way God can be truly good is if some higher power, beyond Good and Evil, establishes an objective standard of goodness that God can measure up to. Such a higher power, however, is by definition a God greater than Jehovah, since Jehovah must obey and be judged by this God before He can be found “good.” (I call this God Alethea, but that’s just for our human convenience.) So already Lewis’ argument implies the superiority of the pantheistic God he wants to reject.

Lewis compounds this problem by discussing how a pantheistic God is the universe, and the Christian God is not. The Christian God is the creator of the universe, and exists apart from, and in contrast to, His creation. That means that there is indeed a greater power than Jehovah, because there exists a Reality, containing both Creation and Creator, of which the Creator is only a part. Jehovah, and the things Jehovah can do, are bound by Reality, because Reality (aka Alethea) encompasses all that is real, whether visible or invisible. Thus Jehovah can never be greater than Alethea, because She comprises everything that He can do that is real, and Alethea is always greater than Jehovah, because She comprises everything that’s real about Jehovah plus everything that’s real about Creation.

Lewis tries to paint the pantheist in a bad light (just as he did with atheists at the beginning of the chapter), as though pantheists were apathetic about the difference between Good and Evil. It’s not really fair. True, pantheists do say that good and evil are neutral from God’s point of view, but that’s not the pantheist’s attitude. The pantheist is simply reporting the fact that God does not actively promote Good and suppress Evil in the real world. Even Christians have to acknowledge that God does not intervene to prevent disasters like 9/11 or the Christmas tsunami or ebola or what have you. To say that God is beyond good and evil, and that both are part of the same pantheistic God is simply to say “Evil is real.” But that’s obviously true, so why would anyone be ashamed to say it?

The Christian reply, according to Lewis, is “Don’t talk damned nonsense,” with a footnote explaining that by “damned nonsense” he means nonsense that will literally damn you to Hell.

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made, and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

Call me biased, but it seems to me that the term “damned nonsense” would be better applied to the idea of fighting for a religion, to the point of twisting the facts and slandering your opponents, when pantheism is a better fit for the facts, and when your own religion is based on blind faith in the words of men. In fact, if you’re looking for nonsense, why not consider the fact that you’re claiming an all-powerful, all-good Creator, and yet admitting that things have “gone wrong” with His creation. Why would such an awesome God become such an epic fail? That’s Lewis’ next topic, but we’ll have to save that for next week. Stay tuned.

At the beginning of Chapter 5, Prof. Lewis started to address those of us who might have “felt a certain annoyance” at his wild leap to the conclusion that there must be some supernatural What or Who behind morality. “You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw’.” In response, he said he had three things to say, the first two of which we’ve already seen.

The third point is, in some ways, a bit surprising. The real surprise, though, is that this third point isn’t just a brief aside on the way to a well-reasoned conclusion. It is the conclusion! He just got done telling us that his argument thus far hasn’t brought us “within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology,” and yet now, apparently, he’s ready to conclude that the Someone “behind” the so-called Moral Law is the Christian God. And he sees nothing wrong with arriving at that conclusion via sloppy, subjective, and unfinished reasoning! Simply astonishing.

Lewis’ third point is, surprisingly, more or less a confession.

Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.

Except that he explicitly rejected real-world facts as a reliable means of discovering the truth about the origin of moral feelings. He called them mere “external observations,” as contrasted with the “inside information” we have about our feelings because we’re the ones feeling them. Despite his denial of trickery, he admits that his whole argument up to this point is, not an objective inquiry into the facts, but simply an attempt to manufacture a subjective mind-set within which Christianity might make sense.

The way he does that is by taking the standard “religious jaw” of Christian dogma and carefully wrapping it up to look like philosophy. It’s not that he’s providing us with an intellectual framework within which he defines the terms used to describe Christian concepts. He’s not trying to explain Christianity at all, he’s just trying to create a “felt need” for what Christianity is selling. (Rather an interesting use of the phrase “make sense,” in my opinion.)

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know that they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.

In other words, you can’t sell your snake oil to people unless they think they’re sick. Lewis may have paid lip service to at least the vocabulary of rational objectivity, but everything he said, every fact he pointed out, every fact he ignored, every spin he put on his interpretations, was all designed to make us feel like sinners rebelling against God’s will, and in need of a Savior, in the classic Christian tradition.

So in other words, the only way Christianity makes sense, Lewis proposes, is if you first condition your audience to reject scientific facts, to rely on subjective feelings, and to assume that the Gospel is true. Could there be a greater indictment against Christianity than C. S. Lewis’ defense of it?

Let’s do a quick review of some of the ways Lewis’ Moral Law argument falls short.

1. He fails to consider simpler, natural explanations like empathy, peer pressure, and anticipation of consequences, working together in a larger social context.
2. He fails to observe that feelings of guilt are unreliable as indicators of actual guilt (just as remorselessness is unreliable as an indicator of innocence).
3. He fails to identify any particular source for his claim that “philosophers” used to speak of a “Law of (Human) Nature,” nor does he offer any reasons why we ought to accept the ancient philosophers’ conclusions as true.
4. He acknowledges that different moralities exist, but fails to address the implications this fact has for his “Moral Law” conjecture. Instead, he merely dismisses all such differences by claiming that the moralities are not entirely different, and therefore the differences don’t matter. You know, like the way poisonous mushrooms are not entirely different from edible ones, and therefore the differences don’t matter.
5. He assumes that when we feel like we “ought” to do something that we’re unwilling or afraid to do, this feeling of “oughtness” is the Moral Law speaking directly to us. Unfortunately, he completely fails to explain how we can all be getting our Moral Law by direct, subjective intuition, and yet not all get the same definitions of right and wrong. Either this intuitive sense of morality is infallible, in which case there should never be any differences in our morality, or it’s unreliable, and we ought not feel guilty about letting our better judgment overrule it now and then.
6. He fails to explain how the same thing can be both right and wrong at the same time, for different groups of people (e.g. befriending people so that you can betray them to their enemies).
7. He fails to explain why some choices have no right/good answer (e.g. abortion).
8. He acknowledges that genuine laws of nature describe patterns that we consistently observe in the real world, and he even acknowledges that his proposed Moral Law does not describe any observable real-world patterns. Instead of acknowledging that his conjecture does not fit the facts, however, he invokes a completely gratuitous supernatural realm, and proposes that the discrepancies are due to this “Law” coming from “outside” the observable universe.
9. He fails to provide an objective way to determine what right and wrong and good and evil are (other than just taking some guy’s word for it), and yet consistently assumes that his definition of right and wrong is true and correct.
10. He consistently prefers superstitious attributions over natural/scientific explanations, even when the more mundane explanations are a better fit for the facts.
11. He bases at least part of his argument on the assumption that matter cannot think, even though the only known instances of thinking occur in biological brains made of matter.
12. He fails to acknowledge the existence of scientific analysis and the whole gamut of procedures, tests, and methodologies that allow us to look beyond the immediate observations to the underlying causes and forces at play. Worse, Lewis proposes a crippled version of “science,” limited to observations only, and makes that the basis for arguing that we should trust our subjective feelings more than we trust science, as the basis for understanding morality.

Well, I could go on, but 12′s a nice round number. C. S. Lewis set out to find a plausible, rational, objectively-factual basis upon which to present the skeptic (or at least the believer) with a valid reason to believe in the Christian Gospel. The fact that he made such a bloody hash of it—and became renowned as a defender of the Faith for it—just goes to show how far the Gospel is from having a rational, objective, and factual basis.

And that’s it. Bad as it was, incomplete as it was, this was Lewis’ whole argument for why we ought to think Christianity is really true. The next chapter starts “Book II – What Christians Believe.” We’ve finished the apologetics part, and now it’s on to the unvarnished dogma. That will probably come as a bit of a relief, for Lewis and for us, since he can stop pretending his arguments are rational and objective.

Ever since I was an evangelical Christian, I’ve always thought of Lewis as a champion defender of the Christian faith, and even after I left the faith, I still saw him as a leading Christian apologist. That’s a big part of why I picked Mere Christianity as my next book to work through. But now that I see what his apologetics are like, I can no longer call him an apologist. C. S. Lewis is a good writer (as in “easy to read”), but his true role is as a popularizer of Christian thought. He’s not deep, he’s broad, and that’s what makes him so famous. He tells people what they like to hear, says it smoothly, and doesn’t press any uncomfortable issues.

It’s a bit disappointing, but never fear, we’ll drive on. Next week, we’ll start Book II, What Christians Believe. Given his offhand remarks about how Christianity has nothing to say to anyone unless they’re damned souls in need of salvation, it should be interesting.

We come now to one of the more interesting things C. S. Lewis has said in the entire book so far. It’s an off-hand remark, a casual comment tossed in as a obvious truism, and one that you’ll hear echoed by an astonishingly large number of ordinary rank-and-file believers. And yet, despite all the people who take it for granted that things must be this way, it’s fairly trivial to show that it’s nonsense. Logically, rationally, it means something that can be called true in only the most trivial and even tautological sense. And yet people take it as one of the most fundamental Absolute Truths a person could base their life on. Why?

This is a very interesting question to me, and I’ve got a few ideas that I think are at least part of the answer. But still something about it mystifies me. I’d be interested to hear other people’s comments on this topic.

As you may recall from last time, Prof. Lewis has “not yet got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person.” Yet despite this, the next part of Lewis’ argument assumes that this “power” is indeed a person, with likes and dislikes, and a very strong preference for “Good.”

[Y]ou know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests [evil] behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. That is the terrible fix we are in.

Not half so terrible as the fix Lewis himself is in, rationally speaking. Not only has he failed to provide any reason why this “power” would be capable or interested in “loving” or “hating” anything, he’s trying to assess the “goodness” of this power by measuring it according its own definitions. It need not have “good” reasons for requiring us to be “good,” nor is it really even meaningful to use the term “good” to describe the fundamental definition of what “good” means. Ask anybody in marketing: arbitrarily designating something as “good” is no guarantee that it really is good!

There is a deeper, more fundamental definition of “good,” by which we instinctively judge whether things like the Moral Law or even God Himself—erm, excuse me I mean “the mysterious power behind the Law”—can rightly be called Good. And, in a bit of poetic justice, Lewis finds that he must rely on this real-world standard of Good and Evil/Right and Wrong, in order to spin his argument to favor Christian doctrine. If this real-world standard exists independently of the Law, however, then Lewis’ whole premise is mistaken and/or misleading, whereas if it does not exist, then he cannot correctly appeal to it here.

That’s pretty much where we left off last week, but now for the interesting bit.

If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.

This may be the most fascinating statement in the whole book. Notice how Lewis (and millions of other believers) make two assumptions here which they assume to be absolutely and incontrovertibly true:

1. The universe is governed by an absolute goodness, and
2. This is necessary in order for us to have hope in the long run.

These two assumptions are why it is practically impossible for an atheist to win an argument with a believer over morality. The atheist must be wrong, because the universe must be governed by an “absolute goodness” (i.e. God), because without God, all our efforts are hopeless in the long run. Or in other words, “it must be true because I don’t want it to be false.”

Fascinating, isn’t it? Lewis tosses it off as though it were a common-sense observation, even though it’s fallacious nonsense in all but the most trivial of senses. Yet somehow this “observation” provides a powerful psychological motive that drives the moral reasonings of millions if not billions. What’s behind it? Is it simple denial? Some kind of psychological insulation to shut out the realization that “someday I will not be”?

That’s a big part of it, I think. Logically and rationally, it’s easy for the atheist to highlight just a small portion of the real-world evidence that’s inconsistent with the idea that the universe is governed by an absolute goodness. Trying to show that to a believer, however, is the psychological and emotional equivalent of saying “the universe is out to kill you, and someday it will succeed.” People tune that out, and tune out the atheist along with it. That makes C. S. Lewis’ job a walk in the park.

I think there may be another important dynamic here as well, a more tribal dynamic. Remember, moral laws are primarily social laws. “Good” behaviors and “evil” behaviors are defined relative to how they affect other people. Different groups within society, however, may have different standards of right and wrong. Especially among believers, the defense of Moral Law goes hand in hand with the assumption that our definition of goodness is the definition of goodness. To champion a particular moral code is to assert the supremacy of the cultural group that “owns” that standard. In that light, those who argue for “absolute goodness” as the supreme authority are merely taking the idea of a Christian Nation and applying it to the whole physical universe. “We are the rightful arbiters of morality, because the entire cosmos is subject to a Ruler whose opinions are the same as ours!”

This is a particularly vexing dynamic because it means that if you have a believer wise enough and self-aware enough not to let fear of death cloud their consideration of morality, they will still have a very powerful psychosocial motive for advocating the validity of Moral Law. Defending this kind of moral reasoning means going up in the esteem of your peers. Propagating it means raising the status of your group in society as a whole. Even if it’s a transparent rationalization and hopeless self-contradiction, you can gain politically and socially by selling it to the “unwashed masses,” who are not at all reluctant to swallow it. “We are the Good guys, led by the Hero, and we’re going to win.” Who wouldn’t want to jump on that bandwagon?

What can we, as unbelievers, do to counter this kind of diseased thinking? I’m open for suggestions. One thing I think we can do is to simply raise awareness of the issues. For example, it’s nonsense to claim that “all our efforts are hopeless in the long run” unless the universe is governed by “absolute goodness.” Hope, by its very nature, is an expectation of change for the better. If any state would rightly be called hopeless, it would have to be heaven, or some other variation on eternal bliss, since you could never hope for things to get better there. And that in turn shows us that it’s pointless to hope for things to be better than they can be.

Hope, and meaning, and purpose, and all the things that believers associate with having some kind of eternal objective, are all things that, in fact, lose their significance in the context of eternity. The purpose of eating is to satisfy the need of the moment, not to achieve some eternal satisfaction in which you never hunger. And likewise with other appetites, like the desire for beauty, or mental stimulation, or challenge, or achievement. The true meaning and purpose of things are rooted and nourished in the changeable, imperfect, ephemeral world in which we experience them, not in some eternal and unchanging perfection that’s effectively indistinguishable from death. We have hope, we have purpose, we have meaning, because we live in a world where there is room for improvement, and the possibility of achieving better things by our efforts.

Now, if you say, “But that still leaves us without a reason to hope that we will live forever in ceaseless bliss,” then I will reply that this is true, in the exact same sense that a detox clinic will try to leave a drug addict without a reason to hope he can stay high for the rest of his life. Ok, one difference: drug-induced euphorias do exist in the real world, whereas the evidence for heaven, not so much. But the point is, hope can be a bad thing if your hope is simply a form of denial and rejection of the real world. If you routinely write checks based only on the hope that your account will have enough to cover the draft, you’ll get to know your bank manager—if not your parole officer—on a first name basis. It is far better to embrace reality as it really is, and to find your meaning and purpose and hope in the real-world truth.

And that’s it for now. I don’t feel like it’s quite enough, and I’m sure there’s lots more that could be said (and probably should be). It’s a bit of a tangent from our main topic, though, so I’m going to keep it to just one post. Next week we’ll pick up back in Chapter 5 again.

It’s getting increasingly difficult for Prof. Lewis to pretend that he’s doing anything more than hiding traditional Christian dogma inside a secularized vocabulary. He still struggles gamely to maintain appearances, but in Chapter 5 he’s getting more and more careless about slipping openly Christian assumptions into his ostensibly objective “inquiry.”

[T]he being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is ‘good’. But do not let us go to fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is ‘good’ in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic.

It doesn’t? How would Lewis know that? Remember, his “rational” argument thus far has been based only on the observation that people sometimes have feelings that they ought to do certain things, and yet they don’t do them. Unfortunately, as Lewis himself has argued, we don’t find any basis for this “Moral Law” anywhere in the facts of the universe, which means these subjective feelings are our only connection with the Moral Law. And these subjective feelings shift and conflict in so many ways that it’s impossible to know what’s actually in this so-called Moral Law. So how can Lewis be so sure he knows what it does and does not give us grounds for?

Lewis knows (or thinks he knows) about the Moral Law because what he’s really talking about is the Christian ideal of an absolute and eternal Moral Law as typically summarized by the Ten Commandments. He’s proceeding, not from the evidence he has cited, but from ordinary dogma. Notice how his discussion of the Moral Law echoes Jesus’ teachings about the Law of Moses and the even stricter divine law behind it:

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

As you may remember from last week, the context of this argument is that Lewis is trying to “discover” something about the Someone or Something allegedly behind the Moral Law. The reason Lewis thinks the Moral Law is hard as nails is because he assumes that the God of the Old Testament is behind it. Were he to look at the evidence instead of at Christian dogma, he would have less reason for certainty: that same inner feeling that tells people they “ought” to be doing certain things is just as likely to also indulge them with a selection of reasons why its ok not to in this particular case. More often than not, feelings are a very self-indulgent guide.

Of course, you can interpret that indulgent voice in a Christian framework, and claim that it’s actually a different source, say a sin nature or a demon. But there’s nothing qualitatively different between one subjective moral feeling and another. You’re just interpreting them differently, based on Christian traditions. Which of course you are free to do, but at that point you ought to give up and admit that you’re not really following the evidence wherever it may lead, and that you’re simply assuming Christianity to be true, and adjusting the facts as needed to fit your desired conclusion. Which, by the way, pretty much sums up Lewis’ approach here.

He soldiers on anyway, and, without intending to be ironic, takes the tone of an unbiased observer cautioning the reader not to jump to any conclusions.

It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a ‘good’ God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive. And we have not yet got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person.

For example, it might be more like a committee, or a war. But you won’t find Prof. Lewis raising any polytheistic possibilities, except possibly trinitarian ones, because we’re not being nearly as objective as Lewis would like to pretend. His careful disclaimers notwithstanding, we are headed straight for the conclusion that God is a good, forgiving God. That’s why Lewis is already introducing the assumption that God is the Person behind the Moral Law, despite insisting that we have not yet got as far as a personal God. There are large gaping cracks in his logic that let his dogmatic agenda shine through—and that’s not the worst of his problems.

[I]t is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort—an impersonal absolute good—then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in.

Here is the problem: Lewis is setting up a conflict between “sinners” and the Moral Law, a “terrible fix” that (ta-da!) Jesus can ride in on a white horse and save us from. In order to pull that off, though, he needs to portray the Moral Law as unmerciful, inflexible and unforgiving. That means that the Moral Law, which supposedly defines Right vs. Wrong and Good vs. Evil, does not include mercy and forgiveness on its list of things that are Good and Right. If it did, then we wouldn’t need a Savior, because the Moral Law itself would already provide at least the possibility of a just and right forgiveness.

Forgiveness and mercy, in other words, are not technically “good” in this system. The Moral Law requires that you can’t be good unless you “really and unalterably detest [sinful] behavior,” which means that to be merciful and forgiving is to be “indulgent” and “soft” in the most negative possible connotations of those words. To exploit some loophole in this Law in order to help a sinner escape the Law’s demands does not merely violate this Law, but makes it irrelevant. If the Moral Law defines what is Good and Right and Just, then there’s no way God could be doing good by flouting what this Law requires.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis takes a stab at solving this problem by proposing that there is an older and deeper Law that takes precedence over the Moral Law, and allows for “ransoms” to be paid for sin. That way, it would still be “legal” for Aslan/Jesus to save us from the penalty of sin, even though it was not legal to let the offender escape the justice demanded by the Moral Law. (The moral issue of using human sacrifice to enable the sinner to escape the Law is a question we’ll leave for another time.)

This solution only compounds the problem, however,  because even if we did have some more powerful Law overruling the Moral Law, would that “deeper Law” be something we could legitimately call “good”? The definition of Good and Evil, remember, are supposed to rest within the Moral Law, so even if the other Law did manage to overthrow the Moral Law, this would not be a good thing according to the “official” definition of “good.” (Think about it: how could it possibly be “good” to overthrow the Law that defines what “good” is?)

What Lewis needs to do is to somehow reconcile these two Laws in a way that allows both Laws to be “good.” In order to do that, however, the two Laws need to refer to some external standard of Right and Wrong that they can both share in common. That means, however, that the Moral Law is not the true standard of right and wrong, good and evil. For all of Lewis’ carefully-crafted argument, his main thesis shipwrecks on the shoals of forgiveness. If you’re going to define righteousness in terms of some kind of supernatural, inflexible, and unforgiving Moral Law, then you have made it impossible for God to remain righteous while exploiting some devious loophole in order to thwart the requirements of the Law. Abort, retry, fail.

All C. S. Lewis is doing is manufacturing a contrived crisis in order to motivate us with a false fear that we’re in some kind of “terrible fix” so that we’ll be eager (and uncritical) when the time comes for him to offer us his genuine patented remedy for what ails us. In reality, the “fear” he’s feeding us is nothing to be afraid of at all: in the real world, good and evil are driven by consequences, and by a common consensus about which consequences are worth pursuing or avoiding.

In any group consensus, compromise is a useful and legitimate virtue, provided it’s not being used as an excuse for one party to force their will on the others. In such a realistic moral system, forgiveness and mercy, when appropriate, are entirely natural and beneficial. We need no Savior because there is no “absolute good” to take offense at our actions. There are only complicated consequences, and people trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got at the moment. Confusing the issue with unrealistic fears only makes a hard job harder.

As we saw last week, C. S. Lewis would like us to believe that he is “not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches,” and that we are simply seeing what we can discover “under our own steam” about the source of his so-called Moral Law. Whether he is consciously trying to deceive us, or whether he has merely deceived himself, the result is a web of assumptions and superstitions so complicated that even Lewis himself gets tangled up in it, and he can’t seem to remember from one sentence to the next whether he’s posing as the unbiased objective observer, or is simply dishing straight Christian dogma.

Last week, he averred that we had not gotten as far as any particular God, let alone the Christian one. We had only, he claimed, “got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law.” Strictly speaking, we hadn’t even gotten that far—Lewis just took a cherry-picked assortment of biased observations, and twisted them until they more or less fit into an anonymized Christian worldview.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we have reached the point where it seems likely, or at least possible, that “someone or something” is behind some kind of moral law. Lewis has some conclusions that he thinks follow logically from this “observation.” Let’s consider his analysis in the light of two questions: (1) are his conclusions supported by verifiable fact? and (2) how long can he maintain the pretense of objectivity without lapsing into frankly Christian dogma?

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made.

Right off the bat, he slips into the assumption that Moral Law’s source is not Some Thing, but Some One. Not just any Somebody, either but the Creator of the Universe Himself. Remember, Lewis’ argument is that the Moral Law must come from some “other reality,” because even though he presented this so-called Law as being a Law of (Human) Nature, it doesn’t fit the pattern of genuine natural laws, and therefore there must be some other reality whose laws have characteristics that the Moral Law can be consistent with.

Fine, for the sake of further argument, let’s assume (again) that Lewis is not just blindly denying his theory’s failure to fit the facts, and that we’ve arrived at the conclusion that this universe, this reality, is contained within some greater Reality, whose laws transcend the physical laws of nature. Why, then, would we assume that this greater Reality contained only one person? or that only one of the inhabitants there ever created anything? Why assume, in other words, that the Universe and the Moral Law must both have the same Creator? Lewis has already noted how the character of the Moral Law is markedly different than the character of the Laws of Nature. So why leap immediately to the conclusion that the same Somebody is behind them both?

Lewis, clearly, is leading us down the Romans Road without openly identifying it as such. The Bible teaches that God is the Creator of the universe and the author of morality, therefore Lewis knows, without even looking at the evidence, that the universe and the Moral Law have the same Creator. He’d like us to think we’re discovering things “under our own steam”, but the steam is coming from an engine running down tracks laid by Christian apologetics. We’re not about to slow down or turn aside from the planned destination, regardless of where the steam is coming from.

If we used [Creation] as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place).

Now, somehow, we’ve learned not only that it’s a Somebody, but we’ve also determined this Somebody’s sexually reproductive role. He’s a male. Where did Lewis get that bit of rhetorical procto-logic? Is it just a coincidence that the Bible also happens to present the Creator as a male, you think?

Interestingly, the existence of sexual reproductive roles in this Somebody is a further indication that we shouldn’t be assuming there’s only one Creator, since sexual reproduction is designed to provide beneficial inherited characteristics for the offspring by mixing the gametes of different males and females, which implies the existence of different male and female gods. Sexual characteristics in a deity are otherwise fairly futile, unless they have some sort of masturbatory purpose. For a monotheistic Creator to be male betrays a theology with roots deep in polytheism and/or human narcissism and/or self-lust. On the other hand, if there were a truly monotheistic deity Who had a penis and no place to put it, He might indeed be inclined to screw with our minds, by way of compensation. But I digress.

The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence  than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

Did he just say—? Oops, yeah, he forgot that “we haven’t gotten as far as…God” yet. Though he pretends to be posting an unbiased job posting (“Wanted: Creator of Moral Law”), even Lewis himself sometimes lets it slip that he just took God’s resume and changed a few pronouns. He even left in God’s name here and there. It’s a set-up, and not a very subtle one.

Now, from this second bit of evidence, we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness.

Really? Honesty and truthfulness?

In that sense, we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is ‘good’.

And here’s where Lewis’ railroaded steam engine becomes a train wreck, because there’s a very important section of track missing. Lewis has given us no standard by which to measure “good.” He has suggested that such a standard ought to be contained within the Moral Law, but that leaves us with no way to determine whether or not the Moral Law itself is “good” in any non-tautological sense.

But worse than that, the evidence Lewis himself has marshalled fails to provide us with any reliable means of verifying the contents of this so-called Moral Law. Even if we do say that “good” is defined in the Law, we still have no way to determine what “good” is, because we can’t access this Law to determine what definitions it contains.

That’s bad, because that puts us into a position of mandatory gullibility. Anybody could come along with a cobbled-together list of do’s and don’ts and claim that their book was a Scriptural revelation of God’s Moral Law, and we’d just have to take their word for it. Even Lewis’ own list—fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness—is somewhat arbitrary, impossible to verify, and prone to interpretational issues. Is it wrong to lie to the police? about where the Jews are hiding?

As we’ve seen before, the Moral Law cannot be the standard of “good” versus “bad/evil”, because the Moral Law cannot objectively exist. To be workable as a Law, it must state a set of general principles that apply to a broad range of circumstances. Circumstances, however, are too broad, and you therefore end up with exceptions (like deceiving the police into thinking you aren’t hiding any Jews). Honesty is usually the best policy, but life is complicated.

Meanwhile, if we try to enumerate all the exceptions and incorporate them into the Law, we have two problems: it would take an omniscient being to enumerate them all, and it would also take an omniscient being to remember them all, even assuming there was a finite number of them. A law that spelled out every possible combination of circumstances that could arise throughout all eternity would cease to be a law that we could know and obey, and would end up being an unlimited number of special cases with no general applicability.

We could suggest that God selectively imparts small portions of the incomprehensible Law to us, as we need it, but then our lives would end up being a succession of special cases, and our “good” behavior would be reduced to that of a robot, clicking from step to step as each new special case required the “good” action that applied to those unique circumstances. We, as mortals, could not predict in advance what course our lives would take, since the Moral Law would be too complex to allow long-range charting. We would have to wait until we magically received our programming, and then execute it. Hallelujah, bleep bloop.

Nor, of course, would it be possible to assess the morality of other people’s actions under such an incomprehensively vast and complex Law. If each Right and Wrong is a special case, there’s no way you can know that what’s Right for you, under your unique circumstances, would necessarily be Right for someone else whose circumstances aren’t quite the same as yours. Each individual case would be unpredictably unique, and therefore you could never truly know what was right or wrong for someone else to do.

That might actually be a good thing in a way, but overall it would put a serious damper on social conventions. Things like a criminal justice system, or even traffic laws, depend on declaring what it is right and wrong for people to do. Such mortal laws by their limited nature would necessarily be inconsistent with a fully-enumerated Special Case Moral Law, and thus these mortal laws would by definition be Wrong. Oops.

And, by the way, why would there ever be any moral debates in a world where each of us was magically being fed the perfect moral answer to every moral dilemma whenever it arose? As nice as it might be to have God magically poofing infallible moral answers into our heads, there’s no real-world evidence that any of us (let alone all of us) are really doing anything more than just judging according to whatever seems right in our own eyes. Moral Law is a nice fairy tale, but the more we try to make it work, the less it looks like the real world.

We’ve given Lewis the benefit of our assumptions multiple times, but there’s still no holding his sham together in any kind of real-world pragmatic sense. Lewis drives on, heedless, trying to explain what it means for God to be “good,” as his pretense of objectivity falls to pieces, and more and more of his explicitly Christian bias shows through. But we’ll stop here for now, just to catch our breath. Tune in again next week, when Prof. Lewis will tell us:

If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.

See you then.

C. S. Lewis is famous both as a Christian apologist and as the creator of a number of charming and popular fantasy worlds. He put both talents to good use in Chapter 4, and now he’s going to back-track just a bit before moving on to the next leg of his epic quest.

I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance… You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back.

Lewis has three things to say to those of us who have caught on to the fact that he’s just “wrapping up” religion to make it look like philosophy, but I suspect we’ll only fit in one or two of them today.

First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? … [P]rogress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer… There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake.

Lewis originally wrote these words during World War II, so it’s easy to understand the almost tangible longing to go back to a time before there was any war. But what is the “big mistake” here, and to what more-idyllic time would Lewis have us turn back the clock? World War II was, in the West, a war between the Christian nations of Europe. Granted, after the Enlightenment, it might be more accurate to call them post-Christian nations, but was Enlightenment the big mistake? Is Lewis saying that perhaps we ought to undo the Enlightenment, and go back to the union of Church and State that held sway during the Dark Ages? Do we need to undo the Protestant Reformation (which resulted in so many wars), and unite the West under one Pope, with so much power that he could command kings? Does the world need another Holy Roman Emperor?

Like I said, Lewis wrote this under the stress of war, so it’s easy to understand his longing for a better time. The problem is finding any point in history where things were ever genuinely improved by abandoning science and reverting to superstition and to the rule of men whose authority rested on a “reality” that could not be seen and was not part of the world we find around us. Don’t forget, those “good old days” gave us wars with names like “The Thirty-Years War” and “The Hundred Years War”! I sincerely doubt that, for all his blurry-eyed nostalgia, even Prof. Lewis would seriously wish for a return to the days when science was held accountable to religion rather than the other way around.

What I find interesting about the history of Christian Europe, especially in the context of Mere Christianity, is that in all of this long history of Christian nation warring against Christian nation, God and His Moral Law so consistently encouraged both sides to believe that their own cause was right and just, and the enemy’s was evil. That’s exactly what we’d expect to find if people were defining right and wrong in terms of how they felt about the consequences. “Hey, if we win this one, it’ll be really great! Well, for us, at least.” That’s not just predictable, it’s virtually inevitable.

It’s a pretty poor fit, though, for the idea that, in some “reality” above and beyond the material universe, there’s an absolute and universal Moral Law that not only defines right and wrong for every man, but also mystically communicates that definition to man so that he knows when he’s doing something he shouldn’t. Think about it: of all the wrong things you could do, declaring open war on your fellow Christians ought to be fairly high on the list, don’t you think? Yet the long traditions of hostility and warfare that lead to WWII show no sign of any such Moral Law declaring, for all to see, which side was right and which was wrong.

As Lewis himself says, if you’re headed the wrong way, going forward does not bring you closer to your goal. There’s nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake, even a mistake with a multi-century tradition behind it. You can tell yourself that there’s a supernatural force that mystically shows each man the difference between right and wrong, but if you find that following that fantasy only leads you down a road of endless violence, persecution, and war, then maybe you are the one who should consider an alternate route.

Let’s move on.

Then, secondly, this has  not yet turned exactly into a ‘religious jaw’. We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.

This is very nearly true. What we’ve got so far is not any particular religion, it is merely a primitive form of animistic superstition, the instinctive and thoughtless tendency to assume that complex phenomena are the result of conscious decisions by some kind of invisible person or persons (aka spirits, gods, angels, demons, etc). Lewis does not understand how complex moral codes can arise among people without there being some kind of intelligent, deliberative edict-making behind it, so he thoughtlessly assumes that our moral codes must reflect some supernatural person issuing specific edicts defining for us what right and wrong are.

So far so good, then. Lewis is correct that he’s only laying a superstitious framework on which to build a Christian apologetic later on, and has not yet started the explicitly Christian portion of his presentation. He’s being less than honest, however, when he claims that he’s not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches. He may believe that he’s not taking anything from Christian traditions (in which case he’s being less than honest with himself), but it’s quite plain that, while he’s giving the appearance of working things out “on our own steam,” he is in fact only considering those alternatives which are consistent with the Church teachings he wants to arrive at, and is bending and twisting the facts in order to fit them into the plan he has in mind.

Why, for example, does he always refer to the Moral Law and the Somebody Who designed it in the singular? If we want to be superstitious about morality, we could just as easily say that there are several Somebodies, each with his or her own Moral Law, each of which gets mystically urged on some portion of mankind through the windows of the soul (or whatever). Suddenly the wars of Christian Europe become understandable: there were two Gods (or more), and two or more Moral Laws, and each one was taking a different side, assuring the troops that they were doing what was right and good and just. If we were really free to see where we can get “under our own steam,” it would seem that this would be a much more fruitful approach to reconciling superstition with reality.

We’ve also seen that Lewis takes an extremely biased view of the evidence, in that he uses the evidence both to argue that the Moral Law is a law of nature, and also that it proves the existence of the supernatural by its very failure to behave like a law of nature. Wouldn’t it have been more rational to admit that this Moral Law is not, in fact, a genuine law, since it fails to behave like one? That would have left him without an argument to use in making a case for Christianity, though, so he does not even consider that alternative. Though he does not acknowledge the role Christianity plays in his argument, it nevertheless defines his argument.

Granted, he’s not explicitly telling us that we ought to just accept Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, yet it’s quite plain that even the initial postulate is aimed in that direction. Remember from the end of Chapter 1, the two “facts” he cited as being “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” These “facts” are (1) that we each have the “curious idea” that we ought to behave in a certain way, and (2) that we do not behave the way we think we should. You could say much the same thing by quoting “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” and that’s pretty much what Lewis is doing. He’s just re-phrasing it to make it sound like it’s coming from objective observation rather than from the Bible.

This is a very long ways away from genuinely proceeding under own own steam and seeing where it takes us. Notice how Lewis insinuates guilt into what he pretends are unbiased observations: we ought to behave in a certain way, we do not do what we ought to do. The clear implication is that we have an implicit obligation to behave in a certain way, and we deliberately failed to fulfill that obligation. We’re guilty, in debt, wrong. It’s a perfect setup for the Four Spiritual Laws. Think that’s just a coincidence? And that’s the opening of his argument.

If we take the original observation—that people sometimes do things they feel they shouldn’t—there are questions we should ask that Lewis doesn’t bother with. For example, when people feel obligated to behave a certain way, are these legitimate obligations? Is it really wrong to lie to the police about where the Jews are hiding? If we consider the possibility that these impulses might be wrong at times, we come to rather different conclusions than Lewis does regarding the existence of some perfect Moral Law.

Or we could ask, to whom are these obligations owed? Lewis leaps easily and naturally to the conclusion that there must be some supernatural Person who is offended when we “disobey,” but is that logically where we would go under our own steam, or is Lewis just letting Christian teachings tell him what he ought to believe? The more obvious “Who” would be other people, since they’re the ones who are going to call the police if you walk outside with no clothes on (or not, depending on which culture you happen to be in at the time). Lewis doesn’t merely avoid this possibility, he tries to dismiss it by pointing out that people didn’t consciously sit down and write out the laws of morality. But who sits down and consciously writes out the laws of fashion, or stock market prices, or what types of fiction will sell well and bring in profitable movie rights?

No, Lewis is quite clearly presenting a straightforward and unmistakably Christian apologetic from the get-go. His initial premise assumes in not-very-subtle terms that we are all sinners in need of a savior, and he builds on that to create (manufacture?) a foundation for precisely the kind of heavenly Being Who could fill this messianic role. His attempts to try and disguise this as an objective and unbiased inquiry merely diminish my respect for him.

Last week, C. S. Lewis led us down a rather strange path, in search of some kind of supernatural “reality” that would be more consistent with his “moral law” than the reality we observe. He started off by offering us a hamstrung science incapable of any analysis or observation beyond taking note of what he called the “observed facts” of the natural world. Then he suggested that, if there were a (supernatural) power behind the observed facts of Nature, it could not be any of those observed facts, in the same way that an architect cannot be one of the walls of the house he’s designing. That brought us to the conclusion that we must rely on our own inner feelings, and our subjective interpretations of those feelings, as the sole available guide to whether this supernatural power exists. (It also ruled out any possibility of Biblical miracles being true, but that’s one of the occupational hazards of trying to prove the supernatural, and it’s customary to ignore such trifles.)

So where does all this lead us? Let’s let Prof. Lewis give us his “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking” speech.

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears to me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.

He has, in other words, brought us nearly to the point of believing in primitive, superstitious animism as the reason for our subjective feelings of guilt. So far so good, eh? But there’s a catch. In order for animism to work, you need more than just a supernatural law. You need an thinking, purposeful supernatural Being to drive it. And that’s the next leg of our journey. Just what is this supernatural power anyway?

I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But of course it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person.

Somehow I’ve got more than just a hunch that Lewis is going to “discover” his mysterious supernatural law creator is very much like a Person indeed, don’t you? He may not be “within a hundred miles” of his destination, but given the care with which he has eliminated not just the possible alternatives, but the scientific means of even looking for other alternatives, it’s pretty clear where he’s headed.

But what about his assumption here—that “you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.” Is that reasonable? Does Lewis even realize what he is saying? Granted, he was writing in the 1940′s, and DNA was discovered in the early 50′s, so he could not have been aware of how marvelously its particular molecular structure manages to provide living organisms with a complete set of instructions for assembling themselves out of simpler molecules.

But even so, beer existed even back in the 1940′s. Take anything we know of, that could reasonably be called an instruction, and it’s quite plain that the instruction originated in a bit of matter, aka “the brain.” The brain gives out instructions all the time; drink enough beer to shut down the material functions of the brain, and the thinking stops too. All the instructions we know about are instructions that were originally given (as far as we can detect) by a bit of gray matter.

Now, you can speculate that there exists some kind of supernatural spiritual mind “behind” the material brain, and that this immaterial mind is the ultimate source of the instructions. But the point is, we have never observed any such immaterial, disembodied intelligence. It is mere superstition to ascribe neurological functions to what is essentially a magical power. What we actually observe is thinking matter. We don’t have to imagine it, we observe it, every day. Ordinary beer is sufficient to demonstrate that thinking is a material process that can be influenced by material substances, as well as by material injuries, environmental conditions and so on. Instructions that originate in matter are the only instructions we’ve ever seen or heard of, at least in the real world.

What Lewis is doing, of course, is sidestepping that whole problem by assuming that the real thinking is being done by the presumed supernatural, immaterial mind. An educated man, let alone an Oxford don, ought to be able to recognize how very foolish it is to assume the existence of the supernatural in order to prove the existence of the supernatural. By assuming that all thinking is being done by supernatural/immaterial minds, he ensures that his conclusions will reflect the same premises he started with, regardless of whether or not any of them are true. But Lewis doesn’t let that bother him. In the same calm, common-sense tones, he just tells us he assumes the moral law must originate in a mind, because you can’t imagine thinking matter.

At this point it should be apparent that Starship Lewis has left the realms of observable, objective reality and is blasting off into some kind of subjective fantasy with no particular connection to real life. Where the facts are not in line with his intended destination, he simply steers around them and replaces them with superstitious assumptions. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to “discover” the God he set out to prove, and never mind what scientific and even theological cargo needs to be jettisoned along the way.

In this edition of Mere Christianity, Chapter 4 ends with a kind of footnote/addendum having to do with the original question of materialism versus animism (what Lewis calls the Materialist view and the Religious view). It turns out that, in Lewis’ mind at least, there was also a third view being proposed by some of his contemporaries. This view Lewis dubs “Life Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution.”

People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the ‘striving’ or ‘purposiveness’ of a Life-Force.

Kind of a 1940′s “New Age” precursor, sounds like. As any biologist will tell you, there is no long-term goal to evolution. Life tends to survive because things that endure longer end up playing a greater role in the ecosystem than things that don’t, and things that reproduce themselves tend to endure longer than things that never pass on their unique characteristics. This unguided interplay of natural forces happens to have produced us, but that was never its “goal” or “purpose.” In a sense, then, Lewis is right to critique this view, because it does have flaws. Then again, so does Lewis’ critique:

When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then ‘a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection’ is really a God, and their view is identical with the Religious. If they do not, the what is the sense in saying that something without a mind “strives’ or has ‘purposes’?

Bear with me while I play devil’s advocate and argue with myself, because in a way, it almost does make sense to say that mindless Nature “strives” to accomplish certain “goals,” and has (apparent) “proposes” in many of its natural mechanisms, including evolution.

Think for a moment what we mean when we say that a mind has motives and purposes. What do these motives and purposes consist of, and why does the mind have them? We could say that the mind is responding to attractions (positive forces) and repulsions (negative forces). In other words, whatever state we are in now, there are a number of alternative states we could be in. Some of these states represent a positive change in our condition, and these are the conditions we are “striving” to obtain. Others represent a negative change in our condition, and these we try to avoid. Our “propose,” then, consists of navigating a sequence of states so as to maximize the “desirable” levels and minimize the “undesirable” ones.

My language may be rather stilted and contrived, but I think perhaps you see my point. The complex interactions of relatively simple natural forces tend to form patterns roughly similar to the function of a mind choosing between “desirable” and “undesirable” circumstances. All it takes for Nature to manifest something that looks like purpose is for current conditions to allow for a number of alternative changes in state, such that some changes are favored by the natural forces involved, while others are not. And indeed, it becomes easier and more intuitive for us to understand these complex interactions if we express the transitions from one state to another in terms of this mechanism being “designed” to cause that result. Nature, like thinking minds, responds to changes in “pressure” by making some outcomes more likely than others. In minds, we call that “preferring” one outcome over another, or “making choices.” It makes sense to refer to Nature in the same terms.

Thus, though Nature does not actually have genuine intentions and purposes, it has functions that are very similar, not to say analogous, and therefore it’s not entirely wrong to speak of design in nature (just as it’s not entirely wrong to describe the sun as rising and setting). Lewis, of course, takes a different tack: he claims that the reason people propose a Life-Force philosophy is because they want “much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.” In other words, the little heathens just want a license to go sin. This self-indulgent little slander lets him dismiss the likes of George Bernard Shaw with what may turn out to be the most ironic question in the whole book. In fact, let’s close with that. Here is how Lewis ends Chapter 4.

The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

There are some questions a Christian apologist should never ask, for fear of getting honest answers.

Last week, we watched a rather sad spectacle, as Prof. C. S. Lewis, Oxford don, tried to convince us all that science can never answer any questions beyond certain basic, elementary observations (e.g. “at such-and-such a time, I saw so-and-so through my telescope,” or “when I heated this substance to such and such a temperature, it melted”). Why would an intelligent and educated man be so eager to blindfold science, and to deny the existence of the various analytical, theoretical, and experimental techniques that define what science is?

Rhetorical question, I know. Lewis wants to persuade us to believe in something that hasn’t got a chance of withstanding any sort of scientific scrutiny, so he’s anxious to get science out of the picture, and to propose an alternative “reality” beyond the reach of science. He wants to make sure we have no way of verifying the truth of what he claims, so that we have to just take his word for it, prompted and consoled by our own (carefully manipulated) subjective feelings and biases. That may not sound very intellectually honest, but you can’t deny that, in marketing terms, it has proven to be extremely effective.

There’s a certain natural pattern in the process of fleecing the gullible. First, you sow doubts and suspicions about the reliability of anyone or anything that might expose your hoax. Then, when you’ve got people wondering whether there’s really anything they can trust, you offer them your exciting new system, that they can trust 100%, and that they can verify by examining it in the light of their own feelings. (You might recognize this pattern, for instance, if you’ve ever spoken with Mormon missionaries for any length of time.)

Lewis follows the same pattern: he spends most of the beginning of Chapter 4 trying to make us doubt that science can answer any kind of “why” questions about the real world at all. That means we’re ready for step 2.

Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.

Slick, eh? Take that, psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists! Science doesn’t know anything about Man, because science can only make “external” observations, and report what it observed. But we know more than science does about Man because we are men. I notice that he doesn’t claim that because we are men, therefore we understand women! Funny, that. Perhaps he might have overstated his case here just a bit.

The problem, or one of the problems, is that, in fact, most of what we know about men does indeed come from external observation. I don’t really know what it is like to be you, and you don’t know what it is like to be me. I know what it is like to be me, but even then, it is a very rare individual who truly understands even himself. Lewis is mistaken: we don’t know Man, and we don’t know as much as we’d like about the one person we do know “from the inside.” And that’s not really a good basis to go on, at least not for this type of question. We might as well say, “Let’s just be superstitious and self-centered” and leave it at that.

Notice, too, the subtle psychological manipulation going on here. Lewis wants us to trust in his biased interpretation of our subjective feelings. He’s priming us with the notion that, whenever we’re unhappy with our choices, and feel some kind of nameless dread regarding present or future consequences, the name of this vague disquiet is “guilt.” All through the book thus far, he’s been planting the suggestion that we should be interpreting our ambiguous feelings within the framework of a supposed “moral law” that we have intentionally violated. And now he appeals to that suggestion, which he himself planted, as being our own personal, subjective, inner validation of the existence of such a moral law. We’re “in the know,” you see, and therefore we should trust this (manipulated) subjective impression as being more reliable than science in determining certain types of “truth.”

Let’s look, once again, at this idea that we know there is a moral law and that we’ve deliberately violated it. Consider, for example, the 98-pound weakling who says to himself (with a certain amount of dread), “Gosh, I should never have let the quarterback’s girlfriend kiss me.” I submit to you that the emotion the weakling feels is the very same feeling that Lewis is calling “guilt.” If we wanted to mess with the weakling’s head, we could tell him that there is a “moral law” that says wimps are not allowed to compete with jocks for girls, and that he is now feeling guilty for violating that moral law.

The truth, of course, is that he’s just worried about what kind of vengeance the 240-pound bully will exact. He did not actually do anything immoral, but he’s feeling the same feelings. And they’re fearful, anxious feelings that are not all that hard to manipulate. Give the poor kid a copy of Mere Christianity, and he’ll identify right away. This is easy stuff. And Lewis has no compunctions about using it.

Mind you, this isn’t to say that people never have any reason to feel truly guilty. Bad behavior does lead to bad consequences, and if the bad consequences haven’t happened yet just because you haven’t been caught yet, then guilty feelings are entirely appropriate and accurate. But the point is, the actual feelings themselves are an anticipation of the negative consequences, not a reflection of some kind of secret knowledge of some kind of moral law that we’ve knowingly and deliberately violated. This “law” is just a superstition that Lewis attributes guilty feelings to, instead of identifying actual, real-world causes.

Let’s move on.

The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason, or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

Isn’t it fascinating how coincidentally the only way we could detect Lewis’ alleged metaphysical reality just happens to be the specific case he is arguing right now? Funny old world.

One of the hazards of trying to reject science wholesale is that there’s no way to anticipate just how many babies are going to go out with the bathwater, and I think Lewis has missed a rather large preschool here. The goal he’s after is to propose that there’s an important body of knowledge that can only be detected by explicitly rejecting the scientific method and putting your trust exclusively in your own subjective (and possibly manipulated) feelings and emotions. In the process of pursuing this goal, however, he has declared that it is impossible for there to be any valid scientific approach that can tell us whether or not the universe is the product of an Intelligent Designer.

I’ve never heard Bill Dembski or Mike Behe or any of the other luminaries at the Discovery Institute try to address this argument, but it clearly pulls the rug out from under their whole enterprise. The whole point of ID, and indeed of creationism in general, is to try and claim that there exists scientific evidence that the universe was created by a Person. Lewis, in Chapter 4, is categorically denying that such a thing is even possible. It has to be impossible in order for his whole “moral law” argument to work.

After all, if it were possible for science to examine the evidence and draw verifiable conclusions about this moral law, and whether it comes from some other “reality,” then Lewis would be in trouble, because the evidence comes nowhere near supporting his claims. It doesn’t support his claims regarding what this “moral law” even is, let alone backing up his argument that it must come from a supernatural source.

Considering that two of the most popular arguments for Christianity right now are Intelligent Design and “moral law,” it’s a bit ironic that they contradict each other so strongly, don’t you think? But it goes even deeper than that. Notice that Lewis says that this supernatural power “could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe”—part of his argument against allowing science to get close enough to examine his evidence. That fine, but did you notice he just threw out the entire Bible? None of those supernatural powers can show up as facts of the universe, so miracles, prophets, incarnations, resurrections, and so on, are all frauds. God’s only possible interaction with the real world is via some kind of secret, inner knowledge that makes us feel guilty. The Bible stories thus can only be lies. Oops.

It says in the Bible that God is not mocked, and that’s true, except the God is Alethea, not Jehovah. When you take up arms (or arguments) against the truth, God will not be angry. She’s never angry. But She will get even, and the loser will be the one who challenged Her. So sorry, Prof. Lewis, but I think in this case God has had Her revenge.

Once upon a time, a man met three students, and asked each of them, “Why did Jesus die?” The pre-med student replied that Jesus died because he had lost a lot of blood during his beatings, and because of the physiological effects of crucifixion, and because he was stabbed with a spear. The political science student replied that Jesus died because he ticked off the wrong group of guys, and was becoming popular enough to pose a credible threat to the political establishment. And the theology student replied that Jesus died in order to save mankind from sin.

All three answered the same question. All three gave answers that their professors (at least) would count as correct. None of the three contradicted the other two. And yet they gave completely different answers. How can this be? Once we understand the answer to that question, we’ll be ready to look at C. S. Lewis’ claim that science can never answer the question “Why is there a universe?”—or at least, not to his satisfaction.

Lewis, as you may recall, is arguing that there are certain questions science can’t answer. Sure, it’s ok for making observations, and telling us how the world is.

But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question… The statement that there is such a thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make… After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?

The whole idea of “meaning” in life, of searching for some kind of “purpose” for the universe, has become a fairly dominant expression of religious yearning, and something that many, many Christians today appeal to as a justification for their faith. It’s worth spending a little time on, because once we understand the roots of this appeal, we’ll understand a lot better why Christians cling to it, and what it really implies for their faith.

Let’s begin our own quest for meaning by examining the meaning of the word “why.” When we ask “why?” what exactly are we trying to find out? As the introductory story shows, “why” encompasses at least two different types of question. The first question is “what chain of cause-and-effect led to the event or condition we’re asking about?” For example, if I ask my doctor, “Why do I have a rash on my elbow?” my doctor will examine my elbow and try to find some sort of injury or infection that would be likely to cause a rash.

Obviously, that’s the sort of question science is particularly well-suited to answer. Indeed, you could do a lot worse than to summarize all of science as being the process of answering the question “Why does the world go on as it does?” So when C. S. Lewis describes “common sense” as telling us that science ought to be unable to answer a question like that, it’s clear that Lewis must have some other kind of “why” in mind, because this kind of “why” is science’s bread and butter.

Let’s go back to our three students. The pre-med student gave us the scientific “why” for Jesus’ death by describing the cause and effect relationships that lead to his demise, but the political science major and the theology major gave us a different kind of “why” by describing the motives of those responsible. This is the other kind of “why” question: the question of goals and desires and agendas. In other words, the “social why.” And yet, here too the questions are not immune to scientific inquiry, as witness the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and yes, even political science (not to overstate my case, but it is political “science”).

Notice, though, that we frequently distinguish between “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry, and “soft” sciences like sociology. It’s not that these fields are necessarily less scientific, but rather, the number of variables, and the subtle interactions between the variables, become difficult to manage. Samples, summaries, approximations, and margins of error assume a much more significant role, and researchers are more likely to resort to (dare I say it) intuition for their insights into the problems they’re working with.

So, not to stray too far from my main point, there is a different sort of science that deals with the more social sort of “why” question. But here’s the rub: all of us, by virtue of our membership in a sentient, socialized species, are naturally gifted at answering “social why” questions. Our socially-oriented minds automatically draw instinctive conclusions based on approximations and trends and intuitive pattern detection. We do a very crude version of this sort of “soft science” every time we interact with other people, reading their moods and inferring their motives.

It’s understandable, then, that Lewis would turn to something other than (hard) science for answers to “social why” questions. Even if there are soft sciences like psychology and sociology, you don’t turn to science for answers to questions like, “Who should I marry?” or “What would my kids like for a Halloween costume this year?” The soft sciences tend to give broad, general answers, not individual specifics, and are a lot more error prone (at least on the scale of the single individual) than are relatively simpler sciences like subatomic physics.

In this sense, Lewis is justified in appealing to common sense as proof that there are some questions that science cannot answer. When it comes to concrete cause-and-effect relationships like those that govern physical events in the material universe, then science can give hard, specific answers with very low margins of error. When it comes to people having agendas and desires and social obligations and pride and so on, pure science is less able to give specific individual answers to questions like “why did you do that?”

The catch is that you have to be dealing with a person who has motives and fears and so on, before you can ask a “social why” question. That is, by asking a “social why” question, you are implicitly assuming that some sort of person is involved in producing the event or condition you are asking about.

Let’s go back to the first question that (according to Lewis) cannot be answered by science: “Why is there a universe?” If we ask the “scientific why” question, we can see that the correct answer is that the universe ultimately does not have a cause. Lewis himself would cheerfully explain this to you, if you were to ask him “Why is there a God?” In Lewis’ theology, God has always existed, and has no cause, therefore it makes no sense to ask why there is one. But, as science is currently documenting, material reality itself has the properties Lewis ascribes to God: it has existed for all of time, and has no beginning and no cause. The question “Why is there a universe?” therefore, is not a meaningful question.

So much for the first “why,” then. But what about the social why? This is where our instinctive animism comes into play. If you ask “Why is there a universe?”—meaning “why” in the social sense—you are assuming that there is some kind of person involved in causing the universe, and that this person has motives and agendas in mind for the cosmos. It’s a loaded question, designed to prevent any atheistic answers from being offered.

Clearly, science cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question, because it is a question based on false premises. Science also cannot explain why baseball has more little green men from Mars than soccer has. It’s the same problem. Any answer that would satisfy the question (and its implicit assumptions) would have to involve describing a real-world process in which actual little green men (or actual Cosmic Creators) played a significant role. Science, however, is limited to what it finds in the real world, which sadly does not contain any observable Martian men (or Divine Creators). So while it is true that science cannot answer these sorts of questions, that’s a deficiency in the questions, not in the science.

It all comes back to the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Science is the systematic application of this principle, used to acquire knowledge of new truth based on its consistency with the truth we already know. It’s because of this inherent self-consistency that it’s even possible to ask questions and get meaningful and accurate answers. All real-world truth is interconnected and self-consistent, and therefore science is able to follow the connections, and test for consistency, and make valid discoveries.

This, unfortunately, leaves science without any way to arrive at the animistic conclusions Lewis would like to reach, and therefore he declares science to be incapable of answering certain questions. He proposes a different reality, one that lies outside the reach of science, that he hopes to discover by means of subjectivism (as we’ll see next week). Unfortunately, since truth is consistent with itself, that means all of reality is going to be consistent with the truth as well. Any reality outside of this would have to be a “reality” that was not consistent with the truth (otherwise it would be part of this reality). So the bottom line is that Lewis is rejecting science in order to better pursue a lie. And what better place to find a lie than inside your own head?

Stay tuned.

Professor C. S. Lewis is a highly intelligent man who started out not believing in God and ended up a believer. His book Mere Christianity would like to lead the rest of us down the same path. So far, though, the road has taken some bizarre twists and turns. He began, in Chapter One, by informing us that there is a Law of Right and Wrong, or a Law of (Human) Nature, which he claimed was a universal and objective law like the laws of Nature. Then he noted that, in fact, this Law of (Human) Nature was really not very much like a scientific law of Nature after all. Yet, rather than admit that his so-called Law was not real, he jumped to the conclusion that there must be more than one reality, in order to provide some way his “Law” could be real in some sense. And in last week’s post, we saw him begin to deny, or at least doubt, the idea that the scientific laws of nature are truly real.

It’s fascinating, in a watching-a-train-wreck sort of way. Step by step, the gifted thinker, writer, and Oxford don is leading himself to turn his back on such truth as can be learned by studying the real world, and to embrace instead a sort of “truth” that springs from superstition, subjectivism, and gullibility. Having borrowed the authority of real laws of nature in order to lend legitimacy to his own fanciful Law, he then turns around and rejects the reality of the laws he started from, and embraces his own creation as the sole Real Law. “I reject your reality, and substitute a Truth of my own invention.” And thus the road to faith is paved.

Lewis continues this myth-building process by presenting us with what he calls two views regarding what the universe is and how it got here.

First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.

Note that Lewis is writing this in the 1940′s, roughly a decade before the emergence of the modern creationist movement, which probably explains why he uses relatively small numbers like “thousand” instead of making up a number with so many zeros that we don’t have a name for it. Each generation of denialists needs a bigger number, in order to impress the rubes, but this is a very primitive form of creationism that hasn’t yet learned to manipulate arbitrary statistics effectively.

Like the modern creationists, though, Lewis pushes the mistaken notion that materialists credit random chance with the emergence of life on earth. Granted, it might seem random to a superstitious observer, because a superstitious observer will be seeking some kind of plan and purpose behind the operation of natural forces, while scientific observation finds no such intentional direction in Nature.

The absence of intentional direction, however, does not mean that there is no direction at all. The things that happen in the real world are directed by the natural laws that constrain them. Just as gravity makes falling more likely than flying, other natural laws make some possibilities more likely than others; working in concert, they produce a “directed” property of nature without producing or requiring any “intentional” property. It is precisely because nature is directed, and not merely random, that science is able to study natural phenomena and discover the laws that are directing it. A truly random universe, where things happened only by chance, would be the kind of chaos that would leave science helpless and useless. Fortunately, despite Lewis’ biased and mistaken assessment, the material universe is not that sort of universe at all.

The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself—I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

You have to admire the careful precision with which he makes that last claim. It is indeed true: whenever you find a culture that produces a genuine thinker—a Socrates, for example—you find both a tendency to define “truth” in terms of what can be observed in the real world, and also the “religious” view. Whenever society fails to produce such thinking men, you typically have only the religious view. So it is technically quite true that whenever there have been thinking men, both views turn up.

I don’t want to be too hard on religion, though. What Lewis describes as “the religious view” is actually something a bit more specific than that. The word Lewis ought to have used is animistic. Humans are a social species, with some fairly well-developed social instincts to allow complex social interactions to work. Animism puts those highly-developed social instincts to work as tools for understanding the equally complex interactions between man and nature. Primitive man had no scientific understanding of meteorology, so he understood the weather in terms of the moods of some kind of invisible, magical mind behind the weather, and likewise for diseases, farming, and a gazillion and one other things that people have gods and spirits for.

It’s something that social instincts are surprisingly good at. After all, we learn to read people’s moods by noticing and learning subtle signs in their body language and facial expression; how much harder is it to apply the same technique to subtle signs in the clouds and the direction of the wind? Even if it does not predict the future as reliably as we’d like, at least it supplies a context in which we can relate our observations to something we’re familiar with, and that means a lot to most people.

So yes, it’s true that wherever there have been thinking men, a more materialistic view of the universe has turned up alongside the usual animism that arises among the ignorant and superstitious and gullible. (Notice I did not say stupid—animism does sorta kinda work in the absence of anything better. And besides, intelligence isn’t necessarily incompatible with animism, since you can always use your intellect to create sophisticated rationalizations for animistic beliefs.) But where Lewis really goes off the rails is in his next statement:

And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,’ or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.’ Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question.

It would be hard to over-emphasize how wrong Lewis is in making this claim. In fact, if you wanted to be as wrong about Christianity as Lewis is about science, you would have to say something on the order of “Jesus was an atheist.” That’s how wide of the mark Lewis is with his statements about science.

Science is all about discovering what lies behind the things we observe in the real world. Observations are a part of science, just like being good to your neighbors is part of Christianity. But to claim that the whole necessarily boils down to just this one part is to do violence to what the whole is really all about. The whole point of science, the focus of all its tools and techniques, is the discovery of the truth about why the universe is the way it is and how it got that way, in the same sense that the whole point of Christianity is finding a way to get right with God and obtain salvation.

Could Lewis be unaware of the real focus of science? Could Richard Dawkins be unaware of Christianity’s belief in God? That’s the level of cluelessness we’d be talking about here. It is inconceivable that a middle school student could get a passing grade in middle school science without being at least aware of the fact that science probes for the causes behind the observations. Well, ok, maybe some students might be that dull, but an Oxford don like Professor Lewis?

I think what we’re seeing here is a great mind in denial. Lewis knows better than to deny that science is both willing and able to address exactly the questions he proposes. But he also knows that the scientific answers are not going to tell him what he wants to hear. Thus, he convinces himself that science cannot even ask the questions, leaving him carte blanche to simply ignore those answers when they do turn up. Intellectually, he ought to know better, but his intellect is overruled by his toxic faith, and hence he turns to blind denial instead.

I’ve got more to say on this topic, and Lewis develops it further in the next part of Chapter Four, but we’re out of space for this week, so stay tuned.

We come now to Chapter 4 of Mere Christianity, and I’m going to steal a little of Lewis’ thunder by giving away the plot. As we’ve seen in the first three chapters, Lewis wants to claim that there exists some sort of “real” Moral Law which he can then attribute to an invisible, magical Being, or Lawgiver. Trouble is, if we take any sort of rational and objective look at the actual evidence, we find that it’s fundamentally inconsistent with his claims. Instead of admitting that the facts don’t fit, however, Lewis argues that this glaring discrepancy is proof that multiple realities exist, and that his so-called Moral Law must come from the other one.

In making this argument, Lewis has implicitly thrown reason and science out the window, but in Chapter 4 he goes on to make this more explicit. Appealing to the age-old expedient of declaring that this new “truth” lies beyond the reach of science, he declares that we must reject and ignore any sort of reasonable, scientific evaluation of the “evidence” he tries to use to back up his claims. The problem with abandoning science and reason, though, is that it becomes very difficult to make a coherent argument without them, as Lewis is about to demonstrate.

He begins by taking a very peculiar position with regards to what is and is not real.

When you say that nature is governed by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real—anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe.

Here Lewis is either hopelessly confused about the nature of reality, or else he is flatly wrong. The “so-called laws” of Nature are simply those properties of the real world which constrain the way it works. As properties of the real world, they are, by definition, real. It would be rather difficult to imagine a reality whose attributes were not real, after all! But being properties of the natural world, they are also “above and beyond” the specific, individual instances we observe as facts.

That’s a bit abstract, so let’s take a more familiar example. As we all learned in geometry class, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is π, or approximately 3.14. This fact is almost too trivial to call a law, but we’re going for simplicity here, so let’s use it anyway. The thing about π is that it’s not a number we made up ourselves. We couldn’t, in fact, because it’s not humanly possible to know exactly what π is. We can get better and better approximations of π, but we’ll never know the exact value to the last decimal place because it doesn’t have a last decimal place.

The thing is, π is more than just what Lewis calls the “actual facts which we observe.” You can observe that this circle happens to have a diameter of 1 and a circumference of about 3.14, and that circle has a diameter of 2 and a circumference of 6.28 (approximately), but these individual observations are not, themselves, the “Law of Pi.” Even if you observed a million circles of different diameters, these observations would not prove that the next circle you observe might not have a diameter of 10 and a circumference of 50. That would be the way to bet, granted, but that wouldn’t be the natural law.

The “Law of Pi” is simply a manifestation of an inherent property of the mathematical nature of reality itself. We do not arbitrarily define π, nor is it merely a summary of the circles we’ve observed thus far. That’s why we can calculate π without constructing and measuring actual circles. π is a natural constant, an inherent property in the real world itself, and therefore we can use the appropriate branch of science (mathematics) to study it.

The real world has certain self-consistent properties, and these properties govern the ways in which natural phenomena can manifest themselves. These are real properties, or real laws, above and beyond the specific natural manifestations that they govern. And because truth is consistent with itself, we can use science and reason to dig backwards from the outward manifestations to the underlying real properties that give them their distinctive form.

This isn’t all that hard a concept to grasp, especially for an Oxford don, so I suspect that Lewis is either deliberately trying to fool us, or else has sadly deceived himself. The real world isn’t telling him what he wants to hear, and consequently he is tempted to abandon science and reality-based reason in favor of a more self-pleasing alternative. Denying the reality of natural laws is merely a way of opening the gates to superstition and subjectivism.

Needless to say, you can’t discover genuine truth by running away from the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Whatever warped and ambiguous definition of “real” Lewis is using for the laws of nature, it’s clear he cannot apply the same standard to his own so-called Moral Law. And he doesn’t.

The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

Now, suddenly, it’s so easy for a “law” to be real that it no longer even needs to be an accurate description of anything! How cool is that? So natural laws, which reliably describe real conditions, are not real themselves, because being right all the time means there’s nothing there except all the facts that you’re so tediously right about. But “Moral Law” is real, because it is obviously unreliable when it comes to describing actual conditions, and therefore there must exist some Higher Reality in which dwells a God Who Disapproves of our “disobedience.” QED. Or something.

This is what I mean by “toxic faith.” Lewis is a modern, educated, intelligent man, but his faith is telling him to embrace a rather crude, self-centered and primitive superstition. It’s a toxic faith, not in the sense that it immediately destroys his mind, but “toxic” as in “intoxicated”—a more subtle poison that distorts the mental processes while at the same time convincing its victim that he’s being remarkably clever and insightful. And thus he ends up convincing himself, in all sincerity, that natural laws—the properties of reality itself—are not real, and that some cocked-up, subjective, and self-righteous “Moral Law” is.

It’s all the worse for Lewis being both a gifted thinker and a gifted writer. He has a great mind, but intelligence is no defense against a desire to surrender to superstition. In this case, the believer turns his own intelligence against itself, and finds subtle and devious arguments to use as rationalizations. Lewis was good at a lot of things, and here, sad to say, he is at his best.

His next argument tries to set up an artificially-constrained version of materialism to use as a gulag for scientific thinking, but that’s going to take more room than I have left in this post, so we’ll end it here this week. Stay tuned!

Christian apologetics is a quest, a search for something in the real world that leads reasonably and logically to the conclusion that the Christian God exists. So far, no such Grail has turned up, which is why more modern apologists, like Lewis, keep trying different approaches. Lewis’ attempt is as doomed as the rest, though, because his preconceived conclusion keeps interfering with his ability to think reasonably and logically about the evidence he’s trying to use.

Today’s section is a good example. Lewis began his argument by trying to tell us that “just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.” Right away his thesis is in trouble, because he wants to suggest that there is some kind of Moral Law, on the same level as the law of gravity and other natural laws, and yet the very first and most obvious observation one makes about morality is precisely that it is not like the laws of nature at all.

In today’s reading, Lewis returns to this sore point, and tries to make sense of it in some way that does not involve admitting the fundamental error in his basic premise. It’s rather a jaw-dropping exercise in rationalization and self-befuddlement, despite Lewis’ clearly superior intellect.

Lewis begins by reviewing what we already know: that the true laws of nature are categorically different from what he wants to call the Law of Human Nature, the Moral Law, the Law of Right and Wrong, etc.

When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means ‘what stones always do’? You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall… The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean ‘what Nature, in fact, does’. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter.

Which is what we have been observing all along. He wants there to be a Law of Human Nature, i.e. some fundamental principle akin to the laws of physics and biology and all the other natural laws. Scientific laws, however, describe a universally consistent pattern in the way things behave in the real world. Our subjective and unreliable perceptions of “right” and “wrong” do not. At this point, it ought to be clear to Lewis that he’s barking up the wrong tree. There is no Law of Human Nature such as he imagines.

Sadly, though, he does not acknowledge this, and proceeds instead to try and find some rationalization that will reconcile the discrepancy between what he wants the truth to be, and what the truth actually is. He starts by looking at some of the difficulties we face in trying to use some simple principle to explain our perception of right and wrong.

For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean … that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.

He uses a similar example of a man who accidentally trips you versus one who intentionally tries to trip you and fails. You blame the second, even though he failed to hurt you, but not the first, even though he did hurt you, thus proving that we do not define right and wrong in terms of simply hurting someone. And that’s true, as far as it goes, but let’s add one more example just to follow this through a little further than Lewis did.

In the early part of the movie Gandhi, there’s a scene where Gandhi is thrown off a train in South Africa, because he was “guilty” of being in a first-class car despite not being white. How do we define “right” and “wrong” in this case? To the white conductor, Gandhi was wrong, because he was a “colored” man sitting in what was legally a whites-only carriage. To Gandhi, he was right to be there because the railroad had sold him the more expensive ticket without a qualm, and besides, he was a British citizen, not a native South African.

Is it wrong to break the law? Is it wrong to break an unjust law? Or to us another of Lewis’ examples, during a war, is the traitor a good guy or a bad guy? Can you even answer the question without knowing which side he betrayed?

These are complex issues, and not the least because there is no underlying Law of Nature that spells out for us what is right and wrong in every combination of circumstances. As I mentioned before, it’s not even possible for such a law to exist, because not every combination of circumstances has a “right” outcome. And even if it did, no law could enumerate all the Right choices, because there would either be innumerable exceptions to the law, or the law itself would consist of so many special cases that it would get lost in its own details, and thus be effectively useless.

But I digress. The point is, we can’t reduce “right and wrong” to some clear, universal principle precisely because there is no clear, universal Law behind it. Once again, Lewis is correctly observing the problem, and then totally failing to grasp the significance of what he has observed. He ought to have noticed by now that the data just does not fit the framework he’s trying to force it into. But he can’t, because he’s an apologist, and thus everything must somehow relate to his goal of making the Christian God sound like part of the real world.

Let’s move on. Lewis drives home his point by raising the ultimate ethical question.

If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’ — which simply brings us back to where we started.

Sounds like a nice rebuttal, and the way he says it does expose a fallacious logical circle. But here again, Lewis misleads himself by making wrong assumptions. He assumes that (a) you ought indeed to be unselfish and (b) you ought to care what’s good for society even when it does not benefit you personally. I’m going to disagree on both points.

It is “selfish” to eat healthy foods, get some exercise, and practice good personal hygiene. That is, these are things we do to benefit ourselves. It doesn’t particularly help you when I avoid superfluous calories, it just makes life better for me, myself, personally. “Selfish” by itself is neither bad nor good, we simply call it wrong when we perceive that someone is profiting at someone else’s expense. (And even then we don’t always call it wrong—sometimes we call it “a free market,” for example.)

Likewise, we care what’s good for society because it benefits us personally. Indirectly, sometimes, but it still concerns us. The caveat is that there needs to be a balance between what society demands of the individual and what the individual demands of society. It’s too easy to enslave a nation by appealing to the idea that everyone must sacrifice their own individual benefit “for the good of society.” Without a certain rebellion against the idea of blind “unselfishness,” individual liberty will whither and perish.

And now we get to the part where Lewis really jumps the track. I promised you jaw-dropping, and here it is: Lewis has confronted again and again the fact that our perception of right and wrong doesn’t really fit the pattern of Things Governed By Universal Principles, and yet he still insists that Right and Wrong are governed by a Universal Principle. And how does he rationalize the conflict between his claims and the actual evidence?

[T]his Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing — a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves… It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real — a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.

Did you catch that? The real world clearly fails to fit the picture he’s trying to paint, and yet he’s not admitting that his idea of a Moral Law is actually incorrect. No, he’s insisting that it is a Law, and that the glaring discrepancies between the laws of nature and the Law of Human Nature are conclusive evidence that there is more than one kind of reality!

Wow. Lewis makes a claim. The facts are inconsistent with the claim he is making. Therefore there must be another reality above and beyond this one, so that this “Law” can be consistent with the other reality instead.

I’m just going to leave that where it is for now. Any comment I could make here seems pretty superfluous. I have to say, though, that I can’t wait to see where he takes this carefully-planted seed in Chapter Four.

Last time, we wrapped up Lewis’ attempts to address a few objections to his theory of Moral Law, and now he’s going to go back to developing his main thesis, which is that human morality stems from some kind of supernatural list of everything that’s Right and everything that’s Wrong. It’s a thesis dictated by the conclusion he wants to reach, so not surprisingly he has to work to make it all fit, even when he’s only using a carefully selected subset of the facts. Today he brings up another fact that would like very much to inform him about what’s wrong with his theory, but sadly he’s still not listening.

We’ll get to that point momentarily, but first here’s an interesting question: who controls the price of stocks on the stock exchange? On the one hand, it’s obvious that the answer is “people”—nobody else is there making offers or asking for bids. And yet, if people control the prices of stocks in the stock market, why would the market ever crash? A market crash does tremendous harm to the very people who are setting the stock prices, so if they control the prices, why would they ever create their own disaster?

Obviously, though stock brokers technically set the stock prices, they have only limited control over which prices they set. Other factors influence the price at which any given stock will actually sell, and these factors are complex enough to make market prices “volatile” and sometimes wildly unpredictable. Though stock brokers give the market its very existence, they cannot control it, and often must follow it and react to it as though obeying the dictates of some kind of Higher Being.

And yet, ultimately, the stock market is a purely human phenomenon. It responds to outside circumstances, it responds to primal human instincts (like greed and competition), but it there’s nothing magical or supernatural about it. In particular, it is not controlled by some outside, supernatural force. It’s just the complex behavior of a large number of humans trying to anticipate which of their choices will lead to the best results—human actions generating a force that humans themselves cannot control.

Morality is the same way. It’s the emergent property of a large number of humans trying to anticipate which of their choices is most likely to lead to the most desirable outcomes. We generate morality by our own activities and decisions, but, like the stock market, we can’t really control it.

This is a basic fact that Lewis has failed (or declined) to grasp, and that’s why he’s going off on these tangents, trying to rationalize the facts about human morality with his naive and superstitious desire for a magical list of Real Rights and Real Wrongs, written down by a divine Law giver to guarantee that in any circumstance there’s always a Right thing to do (i.e. a thing that will lead to the most desirable outcome).

I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so. Now some of you may wonder why I called this odd… In particular, you may have thought I was rather hard on the human race. After all, you may say, what I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong… only means that people are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave. But that is not my job at all. I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out the truth.

The key word here is “blame.” Lewis claims that he is trying to find out the truth (or at least making it look like a “discovery” when we reach his desired conclusion), but if that were his actual goal, then he might learn a lot by taking a closer look at what “blame” really means.

I compared morality to the stock market, and it’s a remarkably parallel comparison. And yet, there is a flavor of good and evil attached to the concept of morality that goes beyond the purely financial values of profit and loss, as we see them in the market. (We can make moral judgments about the stock market, of course, but I’m talking about comparing moral values to values of “good for the market” versus “bad for the market,” which is not the same thing.)

The difference between morality and the stock market is that we blame people for their immoral behavior, in a way that we do not blame the stock market for its ups and downs. And blame (aka guilt) is an interesting concept. It’s a stigma that we attach to people, and that affects the way we treat them. Blameless people are entrusted with greater responsibilities and greater authority (leading to greater reward). If you’re looking for a suitable spouse, you’d rather have a blameless mate than some scumball loser. People would rather do business with a blameless merchant, rent an apartment to a blameless tenant, and recruit blameless new members into their social clubs. And the list goes on and on.

Blame, thus, is rather a large factor in how we decide to invest in the moral stock market. We want to avoid acquiring any shares of blame, and we want to unload any shares we already have. The problem is, the moral stock market isn’t quite the same as the financial stock market. We can’t buy just any individual stock we want, we have to choose from the options we find within our reach, and some of those options come an unavoidable amount of blame attached. And if that weren’t bad enough, sometimes the blameless alternatives involve compromising ourselves in some way, e.g. by surrendering our independence or self-respect.

Of course, it’s also true that we sometimes just give in and grab what we want, heedless of the blame, because we’re weak-willed and greedy. It’s not as though morality is always wrong or unfair—far from it! But neither is it true that there’s always a Real Right thing to do. Sometimes, the choice is between two or more evils, because there is no one alternative that achieves a profitable goal with no blame.

Hence our persistent feeling of having failed to always find the Right thing to do. We haven’t always found it because it isn’t always there. If Lewis is indeed trying to find out the truth, then he needs to stop right here for a moment and realize that failing to do the morally right thing is as inevitable as failing to always make a profit in the stock market, and for much the same reasons. This is a perfectly normal and natural (i.e. non-supernatural) circumstance.

Lewis, sadly, does not seem to have any interest in making this sort of observation, so the rest of this chapter is going to be a somewhat embarrassing attempt to rationalize his way from the actual facts to the superstitious conclusion he’d like them to point to. Stay tuned.

This week we wrap up Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity with Lewis’ somewhat feeble attempt to address the morality of witch-burning. Until a few centuries ago, it was a rather popular practice among Christians, and—well, let’s let Lewis speak for himself.

I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between different moralities], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?

This is an amazing apologetic. Notice, he’s not quite arguing that Christians were doing the right thing by burning witches. He merely wishes to argue that we have made scientific progress, rather than moral progress, in ceasing to put witches to death. He ends Chapter 2 with the observation, “You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.” He’s neither justifying nor accusing the witch-burners; he’s merely arguing that we today are no better, because we would burn witches too, if we thought they were real.

Sadly, he got that part exactly right, at least as far as believers are concerned. There are Christian evangelists in Africa today who are spreading witch rumors and inciting people to violence against them, just like in the Old Days. Women and even children are dying, or being savagely tortured and/or driven from their villages, because Christians believe that “these filthy quislings” deserve it. Lewis is exactly right in saying that this morality shows no signs of being any better than that of the 17th century witch burners.

But let’s look at Lewis’ underlying assumption. He’s taking it for granted that everyone would agree that, if you believe in witches, the Right thing to do is to put them to death. He assumes that obviously real witchcraft would deserve the death penalty, and that this is true even today, even for believers like himself. Sure, there’s no such thing as a real witch, but if there were, why then fetch the rope and kindling boys! And be quick about it!

I’m going to disagree with Lewis on two counts. First of all, a civilized and just society should never penalize anyone for being the wrong thing. Justice, including the death penalty, must be limited to punishing people for doing the wrong thing. If a real witch used supernatural powers to murder someone, then society ought to accuse her of the murder, prove her guilty of the murder, and then punish her for the murder—not for being a witch. If she used magic to make it foggy so no one would see her flying around on her broomstick, you don’t burn her for being a witch, and you certainly don’t demand a death penalty for making it foggy at night, even if she really and truly did bring bad weather by magic.

The second and larger point centers around that crucial word “believe.” Lewis’ argument goes like this: We don’t kill witches because we don’t believe there are any. If we did believe they existed, then surely (or at least, Lewis is sure) we ought to agree with putting them to death. See anything missing in that line of thought?

What’s missing, obviously, is any consideration of the question of whether or not our beliefs were actually correct. The witch-burners of 17th century England believed they were putting real witches to death. According to Real Morality, was it Right for them to do so? That was the specific question that was asked of Prof. Lewis, and that is the specific question which he adroitly side-stepped and never answered. Yes, yes, it’s true that we now know there are no witches, but that means we also know that the people who got burned at the stake were, in fact, innocent. What does Real Morality say about murdering innocent victims on account of Christian beliefs, Professor Lewis? Professor Lewis?

Granted, this is an especially tricky question and it’s not surprising that Lewis would prefer to avoid it, because once you realize that Christian beliefs led to the murder of large numbers of innocent victims, the moral question becomes, “Who led the murderers to believe in killing witches?” Take a wild guess what the answer is.

Exodus 22:18 — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Yup. We could also add the Old Testament prophets who praised King Saul for putting to death all the witches in Israel (except the famous witch at Endor). Even the New Testament lists witchcraft among the acts of the sinful nature. Christians believed in witches, and in killing witches, because the Bible taught these things as though they were true. Now the moral question becomes, “If you believe God’s Word, and act on it, are you morally guilty, or does the guilt belong to God?” If we know that the Bible can be wrong about life-and-death issues, can Real Morality ever allow us to act as though Scripture must necessarily be true?

Remember, too, that the witch-burners typically were not relying on the Scriptures alone. They first “obtained” a confession from the accused witch, and then executed her. Perhaps we should ask Prof. Lewis about the morality of using torture to elicit confessions from the accused? Assuming he gave a similar answer, he might say something like “if we really thought they were Al Qaeda supporters witches, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved torture, then these filthy quislings did?” Once again, though, the justification is based on our own (possibly erroneous) belief, rather than the wrongdoing (if any) of the accused.

This is the problem with faith-based moralities, with moralities that are based on some unseen and unverifiable list of Rights and Wrongs. It’s too easy to punish people because of certain wrong beliefs on our part rather than any wrong behavior on theirs. And it keeps coming back to haunt us. Christians tortured suspected witches in the 17th century, but oh yes, we know better than that now, because there are no witches. But did we really learn, or are we just using the same 17th century moral rationalizations today, now that we want to hurt those we suspect of being terrorists?

And of course, Christians today are literally killing “witches” once again, in Africa, with support from American churches. And it all comes back to their failure to make significant moral progress since the 17th century. To be fair, the Bible does make it hard to advance beyond that point. How can one Bible-believing Christian credibly tell another Bible-believing Christian not to believe the clear teaching of the Bible, and not to obey its clear commandments? There’s just not a lot of room to maneuver without exposing certain doubts about the believability of the Bible.

This puts Lewis in an even more insecure position, morally speaking, because not only does he fail to condemn witch-burning on moral grounds, but he does acknowledge that “God’s Word” is wrong about witches being real. That means the Scripture is factually wrong about at least some life-and-death moral issues. Lewis’ purported and invisible Real Morality thus becomes a standard that we cannot obtain even by divine revelation. Lewis claims that we all know we fail to keep this Moral Law, but how could we know whether we’re keeping it or not, if even the Bible itself cannot reliably tell us what it is?

All that Lewis has left, in the end, is some kind of subjective, mystical perception of Right and Wrong, an inner sense that boils down to “whatever seems right in my own eyes.” It’s dressed a little fancier, and it’s a bit pretentious, in that it presents itself as something engraved on our heart by God Himself, but bereft of both a real-world standard of morality and a reliable Scriptural standard, it’s the only standard he has left. The believer has no alternative but to accept his own personal opinions of right and wrong as the sole measure of Real Morality.

Maybe that’s why Lewis is so popular: he gives people a way to view their own personal morality as “coincidentally” being the same as Universal Moral Law, thus allowing them the pleasures of self-righteousness without the burden of having to live by someone else’s rules. Not a terribly high-quality ethic, but damn clever marketing, eh? No wonder so many modern apologists choose him as their patron saint.

According to C. S. Lewis, “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” lies in assuming the existence of a natural Law of Morality. This isn’t just some arbitrary, human legislated regulation either. It’s a real Law of Nature that defines a real standard of Right and Wrong—a standard, moreover, that we all fall short of.

This week, Lewis looks at one last objection to that premise.

Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here… We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

He also compares it to which side of the road we drive on, which (unlike math) is a convention. In America, we drive on the right-hand side of the road; in England, on the left. There’s no natural law that says things have to be that way, and we might just as easily have decided on different conventions. So the question is, when we learn morality, are we learning about a pre-existing law, as in mathematics, or about a mere convention, as in driving?

Lewis, not surprisingly, favors the former, and he gives us two reasons.

His first reason will probably sound familiar:

The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imaging—and you can recognize the same law running through them all, whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent.

That’s a rather un-mathematical assessment. “Not very great”? In whose opinion? It seems to me that that the kind of morality that condones selling your daughters for sexual purposes, mutilating the genitals of babies, and committing acts of genocide, is very different from the kind of morality that finds these things abhorrent. But have I disproved Lewis’ point? We can’t really say, because he hasn’t really given us any objective guidelines for measuring the amount of difference between two moralities, let alone setting a specific point at which the difference would be great enough to falsify his claim. All Lewis is really saying is, “I know moral conventions are different in different times and cultures, and I hereby declare those differences irrelevant.” This is one avenue of investigation that he simply filters out.

What he ought to have noticed, had he been willing to look, is that our moral standards are not merely different today than they were in ancient times, they’re better. We’ve improved, to some extent, on the morality of our forefathers. We’ve even improved on God’s morality (which may explain some of Lewis’ reluctance to probe too deeply into this part of the evidence).

As I’ve said before, morality is rooted in our perception of the likely outcomes of different behaviors. As we live and learn, and as our society gradually acquires the collective experience of its members, we get better at understanding how some behaviors that originally seemed like a good idea (e.g. slavery) are actually more detrimental than beneficial. As a species, we’re a bit thick. It can take centuries of painful experience to convince us that we really don’t like the consequences of certain previously-sanctioned behaviors. But we do learn from those consequences, eventually. And that accumulated experience becomes our new and improved morality.

Thus, it’s not because we’re being guided by the timeless wisdom of the Ten Commandments or some other mystical list of simple rules. Experience itself is teaching us. And sometimes, what it teaches us is that certain situations don’t have a simple, clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. Sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Other times, the right solution requires making an exception to the so-called “Moral Law.” Not everyone is going to feel right about making such exceptions, especially if they buy what Lewis is selling here. Belief in a Moral Law can prevent you from doing the right thing, and can drive you to do the wrong thing. Thus, secular morality is better than the kind of superstitious morality Lewis wants us to believe in.

Oops, he overheard us, and now he’s going to use this argument against us.

The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality… The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Rather fascinating, isn’t it? Lewis has very nearly declared that Christian morality is not Real Morality, and can thus be improved upon. A fairly obvious observation for anyone versed in real-world secular morality, but a fairly astonishing conclusion for Lewis to come to, given that Mere Christianity attempts to use this idea of Moral Law to prove the existence of a divine Law Giver. I can’t help but think that Lewis would object here, and would try to deny that Christian morality is different from Real Morality, but that’s the thrust of his argument. Otherwise, how could you ever compare Christian morality to any other morality (even Nazi morality!) and say that it was better? His whole point is that for one thing to be better, it must be different from the standard it’s being measured by.

The other possibility would be that he is merely playing devil’s advocate: “If you think that one morality is better than another, then you must think there is some Real standard of morality.” In 0ther words, he’s not agreeing that he thinks we’ve made moral progress, or that one morality can be better than another, he’s just saying if all y’all liberal types want to say that, then you have to agree that Moral Law really exists. Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality. Oops.

The problem here (besides the above) is that Lewis completely overlooks the fact that anyone who compares one morality to another is inevitably going to favor whichever morality is most like his own. Let’s take, for example, the question of gay marriage. Is it moral to allow it? Is it moral to forbid it? There are, within the Christian faith, within even the conservative, evangelical Christian faith, those whose morality would give an answer that was the exact opposite of what the rest of their fellow believers would say. Never mind secular versus pious; within Christian morality itself, there are questions for which you get opposite answers at the same time, depending on which Christian you ask.

This is how we know Lewis’ so-called Moral Law is not a natural law like the laws of mathematics. The question “What is 2 x 12?” does not give different real-world answers depending on who you ask: two dozen eggs is 24 eggs, just like two dozen homeopaths are 24 quacks. Count ‘em: the laws of multiplication are laws because they give the same answers to the same questions, no matter who does the asking or the answering. And, more importantly, you can check the answers, and determine whether or not the first person came up with the right number. There’s a consistent real-world referent for your answer, and that’s how we know Real Multiplication exists.

Lewis’ alleged Law of Human Nature doesn’t work that way. For instance, the obvious retort to gay Christian morality is to deny that gay Christian morality is Real True Christian Morality™—which is an easy claim to make, but how are we going to check your answers? Lewis believes in a “real Right,” meaning an invisible, mystical standard defining Right and Wrong for all circumstances, but we don’t have a written copy of that standard, nor can we determine it experimentally UNLESS we abandon Lewis’ superstitious and imaginary Law in favor of a secular morality based on a practical consideration of behaviors and consequences. The “Moral Law” approach, by itself, cannot tell you when your moral standards are wrong; it merely encourages you to look down on the morality of others.

Thus, there are (at least) two different moralities: a real-world, secular morality that needs no God, and a superstitious and subjective morality that tries to give God credit for moral answers that are secretly being borrowed from the secular kind. Because the superstitious morality often resorts to secular morality, the two moralities have a certain amount of overlap. Where they don’t overlap, as in the case of circumcision or gay marriage for instance, the superstitious morality is wrong, meaning it promotes as “good” things that have bad consequences, and forbids as “bad” things that have good consequences (or at least neutral ones).

The big difference between secular morality and superstitious morality is that the superstitious moralist has no consistent real-world referent for his moral answers (unless he resorts to secular morality). Thus, as I mentioned above, if you ask a superstitious moralist to compare two moralities, he has no choice but to favor whichever one is most like his own. We don’t have a copy of The Divine List of Do’s and Don’ts (if it were even possible for such a thing to exist), and without resorting to secular morality, he can only judge by whatever seems right in his own eyes. That’s why Lewis’ mathematical corollary fails, and why even Christian morality can give opposite answers to the same question depending on which Christian you ask.

Secular morality, by contrast, does not have this problem, because it’s based on a secular consideration of real-world consequences. Granted, the answers won’t always be easy, and some problems may not have any Right answers at all. The answers you do get, however, have the benefit of being based on real-world truth, rather than on subjective assumptions about what God’s preferences ought to be. That’s important, because when your morality is not based on real-world truth, moral issues boil down to “might makes right,” and you end up with the majority ganging up on minorities and oppressing them, as is being done right now to gays.

In summary then, and contrary to Lewis’ eloquent and misguided rhetoric, we can compare morality with mathematics and clearly see that morality (as Lewis envisions it) is not some kind of natural law that always gives the same answers to the same questions. There is more than one Morality, with the secular one being far better than the other. The alternative, advocated by Lewis, is to take the results of secular morality (e.g. “murder is wrong”), superstitiously ascribe them to an invisible magical Law Giver, and then sweep in a bunch of arbitrary, prejudiced, and self-serving “moral Rights” that end up harming people (especially minorities). This is detrimental to society as a whole, not just to the victims, and therefore it is, in secular terms, immoral.

Next week: Witches (see Servants of Satan, Burning). Stay tuned.

Last week, Lewis tried to convince us that morality is not merely some kind of herd instinct, which is partly true. Unfortunately, he was not able to discern the true role of instinct in human morality because he’s limited by the preconceived conclusion that he’d like to drive us to. He’s not trying to understand how psychological and sociological factors influence our moral thinking, he’s merely trying to make morality sound mysterious and unexplainable so that he can superstitiously give God credit for it.

These same constraints limit his arguments this week, as he proposes two more answers to the “morality as a herd instinct” objection.

Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses… And surely it often tells us to try and make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is.

This, sad to say, is not C. S. Lewis at his finest. While he was undoubtedly a fine scholar, and probably not consciously attempting to mislead anyone, it must be said that this particular argument presents us with observations so subjective and distorted as to be deceptive. Like all half-truths, there are elements of it that do reflect a certain real-world experience, but without giving us a complete or accurate picture.

According to Lewis, if you see a man drowning, your instinct for self preservation is stronger than the herd instinct calling you to rescue him. Then, some magical Moral Law “speaks” to you and tells you that you ought to make your weaker instinct stronger, until you are willing to help. Indeed, in this portrayal, Lewis gives “Moral Law” many of the same behaviors and personal traits as are traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit—a polytheism as ironic as it is inadvertent.

This is nothing more than plain old ordinary superstition: seeing something you don’t understand and giving credit to some magical, supernatural cause (he even personified it for us!). But it’s really not that hard to understand. We see imminent tragedy unfolding in front of us, and we’re distressed by our inability to do more to help. We desperately want to believe that there is something more we could do to help, but that’s just a kind of psychological denial of our own weakness and limitations. Sometimes we experience a misplaced and irrational sense of guilt, the feeling Lewis describes as the “Moral Law…telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses.” It’s not really that some anthropomorphic principle was telling us we should have helped, we’re just suffering from feelings of inadequacy, sublimated as guilt.

Notice, too, that Lewis arbitrarily designates the helpful impulse as being always weaker than the instinct for self preservation. Read the stories of any number of dramatic rescues, though, and you’ll see that this simply isn’t so. Often, the instinct of self-preservation does not manifest itself at all, or does so very weakly. Then again, remember that when we read the stories of how people reacted to incipient disaster, we only get to read the stories of the survivors—those whose survival instinct kicked in soon enough to let them live to tell their tales. Our sample is necessarily biased against those whose helpful instinct overruled the dictates of self-preservation.

Now granted, I too am oversimplifying a complex psychological phenomenon. There are other factors involved as well, like social status, family ties, personality traits, and so on. The main point I want to make here is that Lewis’ appeal to superstition is fundamentally hostile to finding a practical and accurate understanding of what is really going on in the mind of a person making a split-second life-or-death decision about whether to risk himself for the sake of another. Understanding how it really works means we have one less excuse for appealing to the magical/supernatural alternative. Lewis’ argument works best in the absence of any useful understanding of the truth. But let’s move on.

Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good,’ always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage.

Lewis puts his finger squarely on the central flaw in his whole thesis, and doesn’t realize he’s done it. He cites sex, maternal love, patriotism, and “fighting instinct” as things that are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and he says this goes to show that instinct doesn’t always get the right answer. He’s still laboring under the misapprehension that there will necessarily always be a right answer, known to the Moral Law, against which we can measure our natural impulses.

The reason why instinct cannot be trusted to always give the morally “correct” answer is because there is no moral rule, or law, that is always right under all circumstances. You cannot say, for example, that one should always be patriotic and defend one’s country. That would be a moral law that you could apply to a variety of circumstances, and sometimes the outcome would be desirable, and sometimes not. Sometimes it might even lead to an outcome that one group would find desirable while another would not. And each would declare that Moral Law confirmed their opinion about whether the patriotism was “right” or “wrong,” morally speaking.

Instinct is merely a pattern of behavior. If the world were such an uncomplicated and reliable place that it were possible to write down a Moral Law that would infallibly dictate the best possible behavior under all possible circumstances, then there’s no particular reason why we couldn’t or shouldn’t develop moral instincts to fit the same pattern. As Lewis himself observes, that’s not possible, because the morality of an action depends on the circumstances in which it takes place. The same action, taking place in different circumstances, can lead to different consequences. What was good in one situation might be the worst possible thing in another.

Lewis actually makes a statement that is quite profound, once you strip it from his superstitious presuppositions and consider it in the light of real-world morality:

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another.

That’s a brilliant insight, and only Lewis’ Christian faith prevents him from realizing what he has stumbled across. An impulse—an intention to behave in a certain way—is not right or wrong in and of itself. That is, there is no universal rule that says “these kinds of impulses are always moral and those are always immoral.” Morality is a question of what kind of consequences will result from a particular course of action in a particular set of circumstances. That’s not the kind of problem that can be reduced to a manageable number of applicable Laws: either there will be some circumstances that the Law does not cover (meaning the “Law” will not always be right), or else it will have to enumerate every possible combination of circumstances, resulting in a virtually limitless list of special cases so picky that none of them would be suitable as a general guideline for human behavior.

Laws are, by nature, simplified rules that make certain assumptions about the circumstances under which they will be applied. These assumptions won’t always be correct, because no simple description can cover all possible circumstances. That’s why we have courts, and judges, and pardons and so on. Laws are inherently imperfect, and thus there can be no Perfect Law. As Lewis observes (without quite realizing the implications), “the point is of great practical consequence.”

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.

As history has shown time and time again, that includes the common superstitious impulse that tells us we ought to obey God and His so-called Moral Law. An impulse is just an intention to act, and there is no law, no rule of how to act, that always prescribes the right thing under every possible circumstance. This is a brilliant insight from one of the most brilliant and famous authors in modern Western Christianity. It is really a shame that his faith won’t let him see the truth he has discovered.

In Chapter 1, C. S. Lewis introduced two ideas that (he claims) “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” These two ideas are (a) that there is a universal Moral Law defining right and wrong, which we somehow inherently know, and (b) that we do not obey this law. Unfortunately, these two ideas are not themselves the product of clear thinking, and indeed are a rather biased and superstitious failure to understand human morals realistically. There is no singular universal Moral Law by which we all make moral judgments; rather, we judge right and wrong based on how we feel about the outcome. This fundamental disconnect between theory and reality has already bubbled to the surface in a number of inconsistencies between what Lewis claims and what we find through even a trivial examination of the real-world facts.

In Chapter 2, Lewis acknowledges some of these difficulties and attempts to either refute or discredit them. As we shall see, though, his attempts to reduce his troubles only adds to them. As the good fairy told Pinocchio, once you tell a lie, it grows and grows until it’s as plain as the nose on your face—even when you sincerely believe the lie because you first deceived yourself.

Lewis begins his response by suggesting that “a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behavior is.” Notice, he doesn’t credit them with having reasonable objections, or with having raised valid points about possible weaknesses in his hypothesis. He declares that they “find it difficult to understand” the concept he calls Moral Law. In other words, we’re starting from the assumption that these objections are not problems with his theory, they’re some kind of failure on the part of his critics.

For example, some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct… It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way… But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset: there is no Moral Rule that says that whenever you hear a cry for help, the Right Thing To Do is to suppress your instinctive desire for self-preservation, and to put yourself into danger. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, and sometimes that exactly the wrong thing to do. Ask any fire fighter who has seen co-workers endangered by family members rushing into the flames to seek a missing child. Ask the child who safely escaped, only to lose the parent that ran into the flaming home not knowing where the child was. The rightness or wrongness of the behavior is determined by the consequences of that behavior, not by some arbitrary rule that declares “Thus always shalt thou do.” There is no one rule that applies to all circumstances, and each decision must be weighed in light of its probable outcomes.

I suspect that when Lewis first developed this argument, he had never had any personal experiences that involved hearing a cry for help and putting himself in danger in order to come to someone’s aid. There’s something of the armchair hero in his dispassionate description of a person hearing a cry, experiencing Impulse 1, followed by Impulse 2, followed by a consideration of which moral principles to apply to the conflicting impulses in order to decide a final course of action. Contrast this with any number of true-life stories in which real people responded instantly and instinctively, in the heat of the moment, without taking the slightest thought for their own safety and well-being (and sometimes with disastrous results, as in the parent rushing back into the burning home). Lewis’ version doesn’t sound terribly implausible in and of itself, but real life nevertheless frequently begs to differ.

Another flaw in this argument is that it falls short of actually proving his point. Even if we allow that some 3rd-party agency is helping to arbitrate between two conflicting instincts, this would not necessarily imply that the arbiter was some kind of universal Moral Law. A far better explanation would be to say that one instinct is simply stronger than the other, so no rational evaluation of moral principles is necessary. And should the erstwhile hero happen to be sufficiently self-possessed to consider the implications before acting, it makes more sense to say that he bases his decision on the expected outcomes, rather than on knowing that Moral Code Section 79 Article 132 A stroke 17 applies to this exact circumstance.

Lewis is telling a superficially plausible tale consistent with the point he’s trying to make, but it does not bear up under scrutiny. Even if we leave the hero himself out of the picture, and just ask ourselves how hindsight decides which decision ought to have been more morally correct, the Moral Law explanation falls short of the “expected outcomes” explanation. We don’t really have any way to know what such a Law ought to prescribe, other than to consider the consequences of the actions. Thus, by assuming the existence of a Moral Law, we have learned nothing that we can’t discover by considering the outcomes apart from any such Law. All we accomplish by appealing to a Moral Law is making a concession to superstition, and manufacturing an excuse for inserting God into a picture that doesn’t really contain Him.

But let’s take a step back. Lewis’ point is that instinct is not enough to explain human moral behavior. Despite his flawed example and superstitious “explanation,” that’s a partially correct observation. Instincts contribute to how we feel about certain types of outcome, and not uncommonly contribute quite strong feelings. The tiger that ate Golg yesterday is going to be hungry again tomorrow, and when he comes back to our tribe, Golg won’t be there to help us defend ourselves. The tribe that runs towards the tiger when Golg cries out for help, is the tribe that faces less danger in the long term. The tribe that laughs and says, “Sucks to be you, Golg!” is the tribe whose gene pool is going to run dry when the tiger picks them off one by one.

That’s why we see “defend the herd” instincts in non-human species—creatures not made in the image of God and not subject to any particular “Moral Law” written on their hearts and souls. Evolution is capable of producing some quite sophisticated and even altruistic behaviors, purely from the ongoing experience of a collection of genes distributed in a pool of social individuals, human or not. Thus, while social instincts are not sufficient to explain all human moral behavior, they’re more than adequate to produce a lot of the behaviors, priorities, and decisions that Lewis would like to ascribe to some sort of invisible, magical Moral Law.

The flaws in Lewis’ rebuttal are not fatal to his argument, but they do provide us with a good illustration of the ways in which his superstitions get in the way of clear thinking. Human instincts are not passive keys, to be played or not played according to some kind of celestial sheet music. They’re spontaneous and motivational, driving our decisions, not responding to them. Lewis realizes this, I’m sure, but his superstitions constrain him, and he ends up with a flawed and inaccurate analogy. Instead of defending his arguments, he ends up highlighting the discrepancies between the way things really are and the way he thinks things ought to be. It sticks out like Pinocchio’s nose, but unlike the wooden boy, Lewis seems completely unperturbed. It’s part of what makes him so popular, in certain circles anyway.

Chapter 1 of Mere Christianity sets out to establish what C. S. Lewis calls “two facts” that “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” We looked at the first of these “facts” last week: the notion that there is some kind of universal Moral Law, aka the Law of (Human) Nature, that dictates the definition of Right and Wrong. According to Lewis, we all know that this Moral Law exists, and we’ve even got some kind of inherent knowledge of what its commandments are. And yet (“fact” number two), we do not do what this Law tells us we should.

We’ll get to the rest of Chapter 1 in a moment, but first let’s note in passing just how far Lewis has already gone astray, due to the preconceived ideas he’s trying to impose on his interpretation of the evidence. Because he’s thinking in terms of divine commandments, he’s already introducing the notion that his so-called Moral Law is not just a description of common patterns of behavior, but is in fact some kind of obligation that each and every individual is somehow responsible to live up to. It’s a subtle little twist, but as he gets into the second part of Chapter 1, we’ll see that this extra little assumption is really a key factor intended to drive us to Lewis’ desired conclusion.

It’s kind of slick, in a way. He directs our attention to certain real-world facts (i.e. the way people judge actions in light of consequences), and then, while our attention is focused on the observations, he slips in a subtle, biased twist that colors our interpretation of these facts. Notice, the extra twist is not part of the observed facts: we don’t observe any Universal Moral Law with any objectively declared principle binding its precepts upon all mankind. This is purely Lewis’ ideology, injecting itself into the argument when it thinks no one is looking. Pretty sneaky, eh?

Before we get to Lewis’ second “fact,” let’s clean up a loose end from last week. Lewis is arguing that there is a universal, and universally-known, Moral Law.

Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

The problem with these two examples is that neither one is true. There have been and still are cultures and subcultures that admire those who put themselves first (and in fact some of our own celebrities are famous for it). They may not call it “selfishness,” since that’s the term used by people on the receiving end of this kind of behavior, assuming they don’t like it. But the cult of ego has always been a significant part of human society, and forms a large part of the “divine right of kings” mythology that has been popular for so much of human history.

Likewise, the people who “all agree” that you shouldn’t simply take any woman you like are the people who, despite the casual and callous sexism of Lewis’ era, were willing to admit that there is a certain merit to be had in respecting women’s rights. This has not always been a universal condition, and in fact in times of war the idea of “take any woman you like” has been rather popular, to the point that it even became part of the Law of Moses.

What Lewis is referring to is the common assumption that all “right-minded” men have agreed with the things he’s proposing, i.e. everybody whose moral perceptions must be correct because they match Lewis’ standards. He’s not reasoning based on things as they are, he’s simply exercising his own preconceived ideas about the way things ought to be. But like I said, that’s last week’s topic. Let’s move on to this week’s.

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact: the fact that this year, or this month, or more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Notice how Lewis’ preconceived ideas about morality inject themselves into his interpretation of the facts. Not only does he believe there is a real Right and Wrong, his argument implicitly assumes that this Moral Law is right about what’s Right and Wrong for everyone, all at the same time. He is assuming, in other words, that there’s always a Right thing we could have done, and that by failing to do it, we have done Wrong.

Sadly, we live in a world where this is not always the case. There are many situations where life gives us, not a choice between Right and Wrong, but a choice between Wrong and Wrong. Two shoppers each have handicapped granddaughters whose heart is set on getting a Groompy doll for Christmas, and there’s only one left. To be generous to the stranger is to add one more heartache to a small child’s life of misery. What’s the “right” thing to do? Or on a more serious note, take certain hot social issues, like abortion. To intentionally kill a healthy human fetus seems Wrong, but to violate a woman’s body via an unwanted pregnancy is also Wrong. What’s the Right answer? There isn’t one, which is why it’s so controversial.

In fact, if we go back to our original understanding of morality, we can see why this situation is more or less inevitable: we all judge Right and Wrong in terms of how we feel about the consequences of our choices. Some choices are easy: if you threaten enough people, they’ll gang up on you and eliminate you as a threat, which you probably won’t like. That’s easy, because there’s a clear difference between the good outcome and the unpleasant one.

But what about situations where all the outcomes are undesirable, albeit in different ways? There is no clear path to the right answer, because there is no right answer. This happens often enough in real life that we can say with reasonable certainty that Lewis’ mythical Moral Law is just that: mythical. We all wish there were always a way out, a right answer that resolves every situation, but there isn’t. Some of us, like Lewis, retreat from this harsh reality by imagining an invisible, universal, and eternal Law that knows all the right answers, even if we don’t. But this kind of fantasy is just wishful thinking, and it’s mere superstition to try and attribute our own moral behavior to this kind of imaginary Law of Nature.

This gives Lewis a significant handicap when it comes to trying to develop an impartial and reasonable system of morality and ethics. Had he begun with an accurate understanding of how we make moral judgments, he would have seen right away that there is no Moral Law that provides consistently Right answers to all human individuals at the same time. It can’t, because our moral judgments are based on consequences, and it’s frequently difficult, if not downright impossible, to find a course of action that produces outcomes that everyone regards as optimal. There’s just too much conflict and competition, and not enough material and social capital to go around.

Lewis has missed this point, which is a real shame because now he’s going to lay what he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” without taking this vital element into account. Instead, he’s going to assume that there is always a Right answer, a course of action that we know we ought to do, and yet some mysterious force within each of us magically drives us to choose Wrong instead. Superstition piles up on superstition, and “clear thinking” gets buried at the bottom, unmissed and unlamented.

One of the most widespread arguments against atheism today is the claim that we know God exists because we all possess some kind of inherent knowledge of a universal and unchanging moral law, implying the existence of a universal and eternal Law-Giver. C. S. Lewis may not have been the first to make this argument, but he gives it an almost prototypical presentation in the first chapter of Mere Christianity, and it’s a safe bet that most modern proponents of the “moral law” argument took it directly or indirectly from Lewis. In a very real sense, then, we have an opportunity to study the roots of a major pillar holding up modern apologetics. And not surprisingly, we’re going to be most interested in the very large cracks at its base.

Last week, we spent some time exploring the consequences that would result from selfish creatures being able to anticipate the consequences of different actions, including the social consequences, and we saw how this would produce a natural and even inevitable functional morality. In essence, it’s just a set of guidelines: certain types of actions, in certain contexts, produce certain types of consequences, and therefore we selfishly want to pursue the actions that are most likely to produce the consequences we feel we would enjoy. No single set of rules can cover all possible combinations of circumstances and actions, of course, so any moral code will suffer from a certain number of ambiguities. Also, different individuals and subcultures have to act in different environments, which naturally introduces a certain amount of variation in the moral codes that evolve. Overall, however, we all have a lot of needs and wants in common, and thus our moral systems will naturally evolve a fairly common core set of values.

Lewis, unfortunately, isn’t starting from this kind of forward thinking. He starts from the assumption that moral law comes from a Creator God, and then looks for evidence he can use to support that conclusion. In other words, he’s indulging in backwards thinking: given the conclusion you want to reach, find some plausible-sounding chain that ends up where you want to be.

Lewis, however, is far too gifted a writer to present his argument as such an obvious rationalization. Instead, he presents it as though he were “discovering” some kind of real-world truth. It’s quite engaging, really: starting with observation and proceeding step-by-step to his conclusion, taking care that each step is carefully linked to the one before. It’s this realistic-sounding, pseudo-scientific approach that gives Lewis’ writing its appeal, and makes it sound like he’s really onto something. If we look closely, however, we can see that he achieves this superficial appearance by a careful selection of evidence and a biased interpretation of that selection.

He begins with the observation that people quarrel:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ — ‘That’s my seat, I was there first’ — ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ — ‘Why should you shove in first?’ — ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’ — ‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

What Lewis finds significant about such exchanges is that neither party is expressing a merely personal objection, as in “Hulk no like, Hulk smash!” Rather, the accuser is appealing to a standard of behavior that they expect the other to know about. And likewise the defender appeals to some kind of common standard, or to some circumstance justifying an exception to the standard. This is perfectly normal and natural, of course: two selfish individuals, arguing over which particular context ought to be applied to their actions, so as to lead to the desired social consequences. But Lewis wants us to see this as something bigger, as some kind of transcendent Mystery.

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are: just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the laws of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature or to disobey it.

You see what I mean about backwards thinking. Lewis wants to reach the conclusion that God gave mankind a moral law, and that wicked men sinfully choose to disobey that law. So far, all that he has really looked at, in terms of real world evidence, is the fact that people quarrel. From this simple observation, and in blatant disregard of simpler and more natural explanations, he leaps to the conclusion that there must be a Natural Law of morality that, unlike other natural laws, men have the power to choose to disobey (thus making them sinners in need of a Savior). And he backs this up with an appeal to authority: “the older thinkers” called it a Law of Nature, and they ought to know, of course, because they’re older thinkers. Which older thinkers, he doesn’t say.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it… But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to everyone.

He goes on to justify this conclusion on the grounds that if there were no Law of Right and Wrong, then “all the things we said about the war were nonsense.” Apparently even C. S. Lewis was not above using patriotism as a club with which to thump anyone who disagreed with his conclusions. But I digress. The more important point to consider here is whether it is really true that people do not need to be taught this so-called Law of Nature. Does Lewis really mean that morality is unlearned? That nobody gives any moral upbringing to their children? Is the Bible wrong when it admonishes parents to teach their children good morals? Is the book of Proverbs a complete waste of time?

Lewis here is combining an observed truth (people understand the social consequences of their actions) with utter foolishness (“people do not learn morality”). Morality is very definitely a learned/acquired concept, as shown by the influence of culture and other environmental factors on the type of morality you develop. Take polygamy, for example: was it immoral in King Solomon’s time to have 300 wives and 600 concubines? Tip of the iceberg, that. People learn morality both from explicit teaching and from experience. I doubt that many of us got lessons in Sunday School about proper etiquette while on a raiding party in World of Warcraft, but be greedy and grab the best loot a few times and see how long it takes you to learn moral lessons about the social consequences of online behavior.

Lewis’ argument is beginning to show the discrepancy between the conditions proposed by his argument and the conditions that actually exist in real life. In his argument, there is one moral law, given by one Law Giver, that everyone knows inherently and without being taught. There are a few individual exceptions, according to Lewis, but the rule is One Law to Rule Them All. The real world, however, is different: people do learn morality from experience, and there are different moral codes for different groups of people, according to the different conditions that exist for each group. Already the cracks are showing in Lewis’ argument, and he’s just getting started.

Lewis does recognize this problem, and he attempts to deal with it:

I know that some people say that the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. there have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teachings of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are are to each other and to our own… I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.

Be careful what you wish for. I remember a chapel service in the Christian college I attended where we watched a movie based on a book called Peace Child. It was a missionary story about evangelizing a tribe of occasional cannibals who regarded treachery as a virtue; when they first heard the gospel, they thought Judas was the hero because he betrayed Jesus! Would that be a “totally different” morality, by Lewis’ definition?

The trick here is that Lewis is making a false dichotomy: either all moralities are the same morality, or else each morality must be totally different. That’s like saying that either all languages are the same language, or else each different language must be totally different. But look, there are nouns and verbs and adjectives in Greek and Norwegian and Spanish; grammatically, it’s striking how much they have in common. Does that mean they’re all the same language, which everyone knows because it was written in their hearts by their Creator? Isn’t it really more likely that common needs give rise to similar solutions?

Lewis’ big failure here (and elsewhere) is that he fails to consider simpler and more plausible alternatives. This is one way we can tell that he’s driving towards a pre-determined goal, guided by backwards thinking, instead of using forward thinking to expose the ordinary consequences of sentient behavior. He wants to reach the conclusion that there is one Moral Law, given by one Law Giver, and so he glosses over the fact that we have a number of very different moralities, even if we look just at the Old Testament vs. the New vs. modern Christian culture. Not totally different, of course, but different enough that they’re more consistent with a natural, consequences-based morality than they are with a supernatural, One Law morality.

We’re ready to start the main body of Mere Christianity, but before we delve into what Lewis calls the “law of human nature,” let’s take a moment to do some forward thinking. Let’s start with a species that is intelligent enough to have some understanding of cause and effect, so that they can anticipate the probable consequences of their actions, and choose the ones which will have the most favorable outcomes. Let’s further suppose that these beings possess enough empathy to communicate with each other, to recognize each other’s feelings, and to anticipate what sort of feelings others are likely to feel in any particular set of circumstances.

Given this as a premise, plus the assumption that each individual wants to achieve the most favorable possible outcomes, what consequences would we expect as the members of this species interact with each other and with an environment that contains both dangers and opportunities? If we look at a few specific scenarios, I think a clear general trend will emerge.

Let’s start with Ogg, Glog, and Berk, three members of a clan of these beings. In the first scenario, each one is fending for himself, looking for food. Ogg manages to catch a squirrel—not really a satisfying meal, but better than nothing. Glog, however, decides it would be easier to steal Ogg’s squirrel (or demand a part of it) than to catch one of his own, and the two begin to fight, allowing Berk to sneak in and steal the whole thing while the first two are distracted. Berk gets a meal, but now Ogg and Glog are both mad at him.

Second scenario: a moose wanders into the clan’s hunting grounds. It’s too big for any two or three hunters, so the clan gathers all of its hunters into a full scale hunting party. Ogg and Glog join in the hunt, but they deliberately don’t let Berk in on it because they’re still mad about the squirrel. The hunt is successful, and all the hunters, including Ogg and Glog, get a good, satisfying meal. Berk gets some too, as part of the clan, but by the time the hunters have finished, all the choice bits are gone and he has to make do with leftovers.

We could spend quite a lot of time exploring this particular set of scenarios, but these two give us a good starting point. Notice first of all the consequences of competition versus cooperation. The competing hunters had to settle for smaller prey since each was operating on his own, and the results were poor. Also, as Berk found out, certain behaviors had social consequences: by putting his own selfish interests ahead of those of the rest of the clan, Berk lost social esteem, and found that he received less benefit from intra-clan cooperation than the other hunters did.

The cooperative consequences were much better: the group could work together to bring down much bigger prey, thus providing much more food for each individual in the tribe. It wasn’t a matter of “I’ll give you some of my squirrel and then we’ll both have an inadequate meal,” it was “wow, that was some moose, I couldn’t eat another bite.” Competition is inevitable, and not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but the potential rewards of cooperation are frequently far better.

What we have here, then, is the evolution of a rudimentary moral system, i.e. a set of guidelines that help us categorize behaviors into those which promote conflict and competition versus those which promote cooperation and mutual benefit. We can call these guidelines “evil” versus “good,” but that’s just a label. The main significance is that we recognize and encourage the behaviors that we anticipate will bring the most desirable outcomes.

And speaking of labels, notice we’re not necessarily talking double-entry bookkeeping here. Ogg and Glog didn’t write down “Debit: one stolen squirrel; Credit: one missed moose hunt.” They got mad at Berk, and regarded him as a “Them” in the age-old categories of Us versus Them. It’s much simpler and more commonplace to categorize people according to how you feel about them. Can you imagine if we had to make all our decisions about how to treat people on the basis of adding up every interaction we’ve ever had with them, assigning a positive or negative score to each, and then adding up the total to see if it ended up on the plus side or the minus side?

It’s much easier, and more instinctive, to simply put labels on people, and then base your judgments on how you feel about the label: liberal vs. conservative, believer vs unbeliever, freshman vs. senior, dude vs. babe, black vs. white, homo vs. hetero, etc. And here’s the trick: if we’re talking about people that know about feelings like this, and who can anticipate that certain behaviors will put them in certain social categories, then that in itself becomes a “moral” guideline. We want to do things that will benefit us; we don’t want to do things that will cause us to end up in an unfavorable category (like Berk did).

We can make several predictions based on the above evolutionary scenario. First of all, we can predict that different groups will evolve different moral standards, though with a lot of common ground based on our common experience (i.e. we tend to have fairly predictable feelings about being robbed, assaulted, threatened, and so on). This is a perfectly natural outcome resulting from the immediate material consequences of certain types of competitive actions, regardless of the culture in which they occur.

Next, we can also predict that there will be certain individuals who will find competition more personally advantageous than cooperation is: the schoolyard bullies, or the bloody tyrants. Their moral system won’t restrain them from harming others, because they’re big enough and bad enough to get away with it. By the same token, however, very few people will adopt such narrowly selfish moral codes because such codes benefit the bully/tyrant at the expense of others, leaving others with little reason to admire the code. The others will stick to seeing that sort of conduct as wrong.

We can also predict that evolved moral codes will tend to have different guidelines for those outside our own social group than they do for those inside our group. For example, the code may say that it is wrong to tell a lie, meaning that it’s wrong to tell a lie to another member of the same group. At the same time, it can be perfectly ok to tell a lie to someone outside the “Us” group (“Do you know where the Jews are hiding?” demanded the Gestapo leader…), and sometimes it might even be wrong not to tell a lie.

Finally, we can predict that moral codes will continue to evolve, as we continue to acquire experience and (hopefully) wisdom regarding which behaviors do or do not contribute to the most desirable outcomes. There may be a period when the bully/tyrant can build a society by imposing his own strength and will on a troubled and chaotic world, and his servants might very well see his tyranny in terms of “the divine right of kings,” assuming they’re better off with a strong bully on the throne than they are with dog-eat-dog anarchy and disorder. But such periods can end, as stability opens up new experiences in the benefits of cooperation, equality, and liberty. Despotism’s Golden Age can fade and tarnish, morally speaking. And likewise with slavery, sexism, and homophobia.

Thus, what we have in the real world are a number of moral codes, with common core principles that evolve naturally out of our common, human reactions to behaviors that are materially harmful to us or beneficial to us. These natural, real-world codes are further augmented by the anticipatory social awareness that helps us recognize which behaviors are going to promote cooperation (and consequent benefits) within our society, versus those which are going to put us into undesirable social categories and to provoke undesirable conflicts with those around us. And these codes evolve and adapt to the particular social and environmental circumstances of the groups that hold them, leading to regional and temporal variations from one another.

This is an extremely important concept for us to grasp, because not only does it spare us the superstitious mistake of ascribing “right” and “wrong” to some invisible legislator in the sky, but it also explains what “right” and “wrong” really mean, and how they are grounded in objective reality itself. When we say that murder is wrong, this is not an arbitrary and whimsical designation. It’s not that some celestial tablet-scratcher flipped a coin that came up tails. Murder is wrong because it produces undesirable outcomes in the real world: undesirable for the victim’s friends and family because they are grieved and hurt by their loss, and undesirable for the murderer because he has just put himself in the category of Dangerous Threats, and society will, if it can, work to eliminate him somehow.

C. S. Lewis, I daresay, isn’t going to see this. That’s going to seriously handicap his argument, because the alternative is actually a pretty sad little system. The alternative is to say that there is no real-world basis for right and wrong, that it’s just an arbitrary system made up by some celestial bully/tyrant, and the only reason we need to care about it is that He is strong enough and brutal enough to hurt us if we fail to play along. That’s not an ethical system, it’s autocratic mind games. It’s like saying blue is good and green is evil—neither color has any intrinsic moral qualities, good or bad, they’ve just arbitrarily been designated as one or the other. Is murder really no more intrinsically immoral that some randomly chosen color?

No. Real-world morality is not arbitrary. It arises naturally and inevitably from the consequences (including the social consequences) of our behavior. And God Himself cannot change that.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the preface, but there are one or two points here worthy of comment, so I thought I’d put one more post into it. As we saw last week, Lewis hasn’t even gotten into the main part of his book yet, and already he’s running into problems with his basic premise. His goal is to “defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times,” a kind of “mere Christianity” that transcends personal bias and denominational bickering. And yet, as both ancient and modern church history show, this common core of beliefs is sufficiently elusive that its defenders have a hard time expressing what it is without falling into the No True Scotsman fallacy. Lewis, alas, is no different.

Lewis, to his credit, realizes that it would be an error to claim to defend Christianity while at the same time offering only a defense of his own personal or denominational faith.

The danger clearly was that I should put forward as common Christianity anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to myself. I tried to guard against this by sending the original script of what is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) and asking them for their criticism.

No Baptists, no Pentecostals, no Eastern Orthodox, and certainly no Mormons (God forbid!). Just a careful selection of faiths close enough to his own beliefs to be “real true Christians” but different enough that he can convince himself that he is indeed presenting “the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” Indeed, he even convinces himself that he has been “of some help in silencing the view that, if we omit the disputed points, we shall have left only a vague and bloodless H. C. F.” (by which I presume he means “Historic Christian Faith”). The careful reader will notice, however, that he has “silenced” this view by omitting a substantial number of the disputes, leaving only minor disagreements to trouble him.

Curiously, even though Lewis sets out to prove a common, non-denominational body of “mere Christian” faith, he seems to judge true Christian spirituality in terms of one’s commitment to a mainline denomination.

Hostility has come more from borderline people whether within the Church of England or without it: men not exactly obedient to any communion. This I find curiously consoling. It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the centre of each there is a something, or a Someone, who against all divergencies of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.

One of the hazards of being a truly intelligent believer, as Lewis is, is that your intellectual gifts allow you to imagine some pretty amazing things and to arrive at rationalizations that make them sound plausible. Here is C. S. Lewis, Oxford don, talking himself into believing that the major divisions within Christianity are inspired, at their center, by a common spirit speaking the same things to all. Amazing. And notice, the “truest” children of each of these faiths are those who allow other men to tell them what to believe; the independent believers, who make their own judgments about questions of faith, are “borderline” and disobedient.

One would think that, if all these denominational divisions were an imposed burden on Christianity, then the goal of a true believer ought to be to pursue the “mere Christianity” instead of the denominational divisions. But, as Lewis himself admits, there are significant differences that cannot be swept under the rug, and indeed that he would not want to sweep under the rug.

[Y]ou cannot … conclude, from my silence on disputed points, either that I think them important or that I think them unimportant. For this is itself one of the disputed points. One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their disagreements. When two Christians of different denominations start arguing, it is usually not long before one asks whether such-and-such a point ‘really matters’ and the other replies: ‘Matter? Why it’s absolutely essential.’

So Christians have divided themselves into conflicting denominations over issues that really matter, and indeed are absolutely essential—and yet Lewis would have us (and himself) believe that at the center of each of these denominations is the same Spirit speaking with the same voice, whether the denomination is right or wrong about the essentials. What’s more, true believers need to be obedient to some denomination (whether or not it is right about essential issues), because failure to obey these teachings (even the wrong ones!) makes you a “borderline” Christian whose doctrinal objections can safely be ignored when compiling a list of beliefs “common to nearly all Christians at all times.”

I’m expecting some Lewis to build some pretty interesting arguments on top of this foundation, aren’t you?

Let’s move on. Lewis next announces his reluctance to address topics where he himself is not “in the front lines” as it were. Thus, for example, he intends to skip over any discussion of the morality of birth control, as he is neither married, nor female, nor a priest. Nor a priest? Hang on, it’s not because he thinks priests have some special knowledge about birth control. He just says it means he has no pastoral responsibility towards women, and therefore he’s going to take advantage of the opportunity to dodge that issue as well. Whew.

He next complains that the word “Christian” should be used only in the very specialized sense of someone who follows the teachings of the apostles, as the disciples in Antioch did. That one struck me as a little odd, given that I would have thought a Christian would be someone who followed the teachings of Christ, not the teachings of his apostles. That, however, opens up a whole lot of disputed points about what Jesus really taught and intended by his teachings, and Lewis would just as soon leave those out, in order to maintain the myth that there is a common set of core beliefs that have been held by nearly all Christians at all times. So “apostles’ teaching” it is.

He closes his preface by assuring us that he does not intend for “mere Christianity”, the common beliefs of all Christians, to become an alternative to denominations. Rather, he compares it to a hall—not an auditorium style “great hall” or anything, just an ordinary unadorned hallway, with doors leading off to the actual rooms.

I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.

I think I know exactly what he means. “Mere” Christianity, the set of core beliefs that nearly all Christians have held since the beginning, is not satisfying. When you’re out in the hall, it’s just you and God. What makes the rooms interesting and attractive is that there are people there, people like you, people who are real. Maybe not in all the rooms, but just keep trying the doors until you find a group of people who are enough like you that you can call them true children of the faith. And if you still don’t succeed, find a door to an empty room (there’s lots!) and make your own denomination. Others will be along presently to join you.

The one thing you don’t want to do is to ask which door God Himself is hiding behind. Keep looking for that door long enough, and you’ll find the one that leads outside, where the sun is shining and the air is clean. There are people there, too, the “disobedient” and independent thinkers, or in other words, the free. Some are good and some are bad (just like inside), but they can come and go as they please.

But enough metaphor. Lewis has set the tone for his book, and it’s a rather peculiar tone: Christian unity is something to be praised rather than something to be pursued. Denominational divisions are a hindrance to the spread of the gospel, and at least some of the divisions are about genuinely essential matters, yet the goal is to pretend there is unity in order to get people into the hall, and from there into one of the denominations (right or wrong). And that’s ok, because even the wrong denominations are inspired by the same Spirit speaking to all in the same voice. Not that you should necessarily listen to what those other denominations are teaching, of course.

Where I come from, enticing people under false pretenses is considered immoral. If being honest about your faith means it’s harder to make converts, maybe there’s something wrong with your faith. Professor Lewis ought to have been bold and forthright about the conflicts and contradictions within Christianity rather than trying to produce an elegant and articulate cover-up. But that, it seems, is what we have to deal with here.

I’ve got a few books in my queue now, but I think the book I’d like to tackle next is Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. It’s a logical next step, because Lewis is one of the people who helped define the modern, evangelical Christianity that Geisler and Turek were mere apologists for. It also doesn’t hurt that Lewis is a higher calibre of thinker, which may spare us some of the groaners G&T laid on us with distressing regularity.

Of course, Lewis is going to have his own set of quirks. The first page of the preface, for instance, consists of Lewis explaining how the contents of the book were originally given on the radio, and how the first printed edition used contractions and italics to capture the informal feel of the original talks. It says a lot about his personality that he feels the need to explain to us why contractions and italics were a mistake, and how the new edition expands all the contractions and rephrases the sentences to emphasize the ideas without the use of italics.

Never fear, though: this book isn’t going to be a tedious lecture on the fine points of grammar and typography. After this initial fussiness, he jumps right in to what I think may be a core problem in the whole book. And, sad to say, he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s a problem.

The goal of Mere Christianity is surprisingly similar to that of Colson’s The Faith: to unite Christians around a common core set of beliefs. Where Colson’s approach was inspired largely by his conservative political agenda, though, Lewis’ goal is more strictly evangelical. He believes, or wants to believe, in a fundamental unity of the Body of Christ (i.e. the Church), that both underpins and transcends the doctrinal and denominational diversity that have been part of the religion since the apostles’ first squabbles.

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’. You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic. This omission is intentional… Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.

And this is where things begin, very subtly, to go wrong. In setting out to “explain and defend” a consistent belief (singular) that has been “common to nearly all Christians at all times,” Lewis must first assume that such a thing exists. It’s understandable that he would make this assumption. Truth is consistent with itself, and therefore Christianity cannot be based on the truth unless it is based on some core, self-consistent body of doctrine that defines it. Underneath all the controversy, there must surely be something we could call “mere Christianity” that’s just the plain truth about God without all the inconsistency and mutual contradictions of denominationalism.

The problem is that, in fact, the self-consistent core is what’s missing from Christianity. As Lewis himself observes:

There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think we have been told the answer. There are some to which I may never know the answer: if I asked them, even in a better world, I might (for all I know) be answered as a far greater questioner was answered: ‘What is that to thee? Follow thou Me.’

The reason Lewis cannot find answers, and thinks it possible that he may never know the answers, is that the questions have to do with why some very clear and authoritative Christian teachings say one thing, while equally clear and authoritative Christian teachings say something irreconcilably contrary. Of course, such observations are unsurprising if you are willing to consider that Christianity is merely an imperfect myth arising from the confused superstitions and misperceptions of men. For Lewis, though, these are mysteries that “ought never to be treated except by real experts.”

Lewis sees very clearly that these internal inconsistencies and mutual contradictions make a poor argument for Christianity as The Truth About God.

I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk about them we are more likely to deter him from entering any Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.

The inconsistencies of Christian teaching are solid evidence that Christianity arises from fallible human sources rather than from infallible and divine inspiration. The solution Lewis proposes, however, is not that we should reconsider Christian claims about the Gospel, but that Christians should seek to hide the problem until after the potential convert has bought into the faith. And he sees nothing at all dishonest in this advice: he’s merely being pragmatic. People need to be converted to Christ; open discussion of Christian issues prevents people from converting; therefore we need to suppress open discussion, QED.

To be fair, Lewis’ position is not entirely unjustified. Consider, for example, the way creationists exploit disagreements between scientists as a means of discrediting evolutionary science in toto. Is it unfair to suggest that discussion of complex, subtle, theological issues ought to be restricted to those who have the background to properly understand subtle and complex theology? Not necessarily.

On the other hand, not all of it is about fine points of esoteric and theoretical issues. For example, where is a believer supposed to turn for answers to questions about the faith? Is the Bible the sole authority for Christian faith and practice, or did God appoint a local presbyter (aka “presbyter” aka “prester” aka “priest”) to serve as His designated representative via a hierarchical chain of command culminating in an infallible Pope? That’s a rather practical, down-to-earth everyday example, and you’ll get different answers from Catholics and Protestants. (Ask an Eastern Orthodox while you’re at it!)

Do you have to be baptized to be saved? Seems like a question whose answer ought to be reliable, but again, you get different answers depending on who you ask. Catholic? Orthodox? Protestant? Which Protestant? Different denominations have a different answer yet again. Does the Holy Spirit indwell believers, and manifest His charismatic gifts, in modern times as He (allegedly) did in the past? Should we listen to messages that come from via utterances and interpretations? Again, depends on which Protestant (or even which Catholic!) you ask.

If Jesus was God, and he prayed “not my will, but Thine be done,” which of those two wills was God’s will? How can Jesus be God, and yet his will is not God’s will? Or how can God’s will be contrary to God’s will, such that you can pray “not [God's] will, but [God's] will be done”? Or if Jesus has two wills, a human will and a divine will, which one is “Jesus’ will”? Here you’ll have a harder time getting a consistent answer from any Christian, and it starts to verge on the esoteric. But these are some of the fundamental inconsistencies in the very nature of what Christians believe about who God is, as well as about the relationship between Jesus and God. If Jesus is not divine (and thus not possessed of infinite virtue etc), then can you make the doctrine of Redemption work? Can one mere mortal human life atone for all of the sins of all mankind?

The reason so many divisions, denominations, and doctrinal disputes exist within the Christian framework is because Christianity is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent at its core. Wise and rational men, like C. S. Lewis, realize that Christianity needs a self-consistent core if it is to be a genuine Truth, and so they make it self-consistent by a process of rationalization: sifting through the contradictions, and finding redefinitions and collateral assumptions that can be added to produce something more plausible. It’s almost a quantum phenomenon: by observing “mere Christianity,” you collapse the multiple conflicting possibilities into something that (in your own perception at least) is more solid.

The problem, of course, is that where genuine quantum phenomena collapse into a common, objective reality, the theological equivalent only exists within the minds of the men who conceive them—and these “realities” frequently conflict. There may be some shared perceptions among small groups of people with similar personalities, backgrounds, cultures, biases, politics, and so on. But the fundamental differences still arise, and still produce denominational (and non-denominational) divisions within the Church.

Lewis’ goal is commendable: he wants to take an objective view of Christian faith, and to present the core beliefs of Christianity without bias or partisanship.

I am not writing to expound something I could call ‘my religion’, but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.

Despite this noble goal, and indeed because of it, he is going to fail. “Mere” Christianity is a myth, a “truth” that isn’t there. In the process of trying to collapse the superimposed assumptions, interpretations and superstitions of historic believers into a solid, self-consistent belief common to all, he is inevitably going to reduce it along the lines that seem most reasonable to his own preconceptions and preferences. In the process, he’s going to create a subtly new Christianity for millions of Western believers—his religion, whether he calls it that or not. And, like countless believers before him, he won’t even know he’s done it.

I have a couple more substantial books coming in, but in the meantime I thought I’d take a quick look at Chuck Colson’s book The Faith. As some of you may recall, I bought this book in response to a request from a publicist at Zondervans, who invited me to submit questions to Colson, which the latter promised to respond to publicly in his blog. I sent him two rather simple ones (I thought), and never heard from him again. Go figure. So now I’ve got the book, and I’ve got a gap in the XFiles series, so it seems like it must be God’s will for me to review it now.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest ultra-condensed summary: What do Christian’s believe? A curious mixture of evangelical pop theology and contemporary conservative politics (what Colson calls “social holiness”). Why do Christians believe? Because great Christians demonstrate the power of God by the way they fearlessly face persecution and death for their beliefs. Why does it matter? Because if Christians don’t jump up and vote Republican every time Karl Rove says “family values,” they might end up following the example of the great Christians, and frankly that scares the shit out of them. The Church may love martyrs, but they love them best when they’re someone else.

This curious dissonance pervades much of The Faith, with Colson admiring and even gloating over the sufferings of Christians as though this were a noble and enviable witness, while at the same time superstitiously attributing these sufferings to a lack of faith, and suggesting that we could and should avoid suffering a similar fate by doing more to make our nation a Christian nation.

For example, the book opens with the story of the homicidal maniac who broke into an Amish schoolhouse and shot ten girls, five of whom died from their wounds. The last chapter features the story of the murder of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. Both stories are told in vivid, emotional detail, though slanted to make the victims’ desperation sound like noble piety in the girls’ case, and sheer futility in van Gogh’s case. Both stories are told to try and bring home the point that only “orthodox” Christianity can save us from having future generations praise us for the same reasons as Colson praises the Amish girls. God forbid.

In the introduction, Colson says that his goal is to lay out, in about 240 pages, the key points of Christian orthodoxy that Christians need to know. Obviously, if you’re going to summarize the key points of Christian doctrine in a mere 240 pages, there’s a substantial number important points you need to discuss. You need to be extremely focused and selective. Sensational stories, told in lavish and even lurid detail, would only waste space that could be spent discussing things like how Christians address the problems with the Trinity, or theodicy, or other vital doctrinal issues.

Colson, however, is not a theologian, he’s a politician. And make no mistake, The Faith is a political book rather than a theological one. Though the subject matter of the book is ostensibly religious and doctrinal, the primary goal of the book is to unite the largest possible body of voters believers around a core set of conservative doctrinal and political principles. Don’t expect this book to explore, in any depth, any of the issues that have divided Christians in the past and continue to divide them today.

Take the Protestant doctrine of sola fide (“[salvation] by faith alone”). If this idea is part of “the Faith once for all delivered to the saints,” then the Roman Catholics have clearly strayed from orthodoxy, but if not, then the Protestants are the heretics. What does The Faith have to say about these issues? Nothing much. He does affirm that sola fide—properly understood—is part of Christian orthodoxy. But look at how he says it.

The New Testament makes it clear that this gift of salvation, becoming righteous, or exchanging identities comes by faith—not works—or any merit of our own (Ephesians 2:8). I helped to organize a group called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), which underlined the agreement of both communions on this central question in a remarkable 1997 document, affirming what the Reformers meant by sola fide—or faith alone!*

*[footnote:] “The Gift of Salvation,” First Things (January 1998), 20—23, also at www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3453&var_recherche=gift+of+salvation. “We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God’s gift, conferred though the Father’s sheer graciousness out of the love he bears us in his Son, who suffered on our behalf and rose from the dead for our justification…Faith is not merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life. We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide).”

Sounds like a great victory for ecumenism, doesn’t it? Particularly for the Protestant side of ecumenism? Colson certainly seems to think that he’s managed to convince the Catholics (or at least some Catholics) that the Reformers were right about sola fide, and that salvation is by faith alone. In actual fact, though, all he’s done is to get them to agree to redefine sola fide in Catholic terms, such that faith itself becomes a work (“an act of the whole person…issuing in a changed life). Notice that the core disagreement—whether works like baptism are required for salvation—is neither mentioned not discussed. All that has happened is that he’s gotten both sides to agree that works alone are not sufficient to earn justification. Since neither Catholics nor Protestants teach that good works can save you apart from the grace of God and the atonement of Christ, this was not a difficult compromise to reach.

Compromise, consensus, lowest common denominator—these are the tools of the politician’s craft, and Colson is using them with a rather cavalier disregard for the deeper doctrinal issues that he’s glossing over. The doctrine is actually less important, you see. What matters is getting more and more Christians to lower their standards, ignore their theological differences, and unite around a conservative social and political platform so that conservative Republicans can have a solid, monolithic, and multitudinous power base to draw on.

That’s why such a short book on doctrine has so many lengthy and tabloidesque digressions: they not only evoke manipulatable emotions, they also help fill in the gaps left by the important issues that he’s not going to touch, in the interests of political expediency.

This book is a (no pun intended) textbook example of why a failure to separate church and state inevitably does the church more harm than help. The important issues, the issues that define why your church is not some other church instead, are left behind, sacrificed on the altar of political necessity. Unity comes at the expense of doctrinal compromise, and the state religion is reduced to what little bit of vague nothing happens to be shared in common by all believers.

As you know, I like to dig into a book and see what makes it tick. That’s probably not going to happen this time, because Colson isn’t so much defending Christian doctrine as he is attempting to exploit it for conservative political ends. Besides, it’s not a terribly substantial book, and there’s just not a whole lot of depth to dig into. So as soon as the other books get here from Amazon, I’ll probably abandon The Faith.

After all, it won’t be the first time.

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, Appendix 1.)

We’re just about done with Geisler and Turek’s attempt to deal with the existence of evil and the problems this poses for their allegedly all-good, all-wise and all-powerful god. And, in a bit of a surprise twist at the end, it turns out that the unbeliever actually wins this one. The Christian runs out of answers, admits that his “explanations” don’t really do the job, and ends up encouraging the atheist to just have faith. Great way to end a book called I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, eh?

Remember last week, when Dr. Geistur (the Christian) argued at some length that there were five possibilities regarding the creation of the world, and that there was some reason why God had no choice but to create a world that would end up full of sin and evil? Yeah. Turns out that was all a sham. This world is not the world that an all-wise, all-powerful and all-good God would make, and Geistur knows it.

GEISTUR: God can’t force free creatures not to sin. Forced freedom is a contradiction.

STRAW: But this world could be better if there were one less murder or one less rape. So God failed because he didn’t create the best possible world.

GEISTUR: Hold on. While I will admit that this world is not the best possible world, it may be the best way to get to the best possible world.

Geistur has been caught out, so he tries to quickly change the subject, which we’ll get to in a moment. But let’s notice first that Straw’s point is exactly right. Not all attempts to sin are successful. Sometimes you try to blow up a plane, and only set your undies on fire (ouch!). This world we live in already contains the possibility that sin can be thwarted, despite the free choice of the would-be perpetrator. Even if you insist that God is too pro-choice to deprive us of our free will, He still has plenty of opportunity to intervene to prevent actual harm from being done between the time sin occurs in the heart and the time the villain’s evil intention is carried out.

What’s more, when Person A plans to murder Person B, A’s free will has implications for B’s free will, since murder interferes with B’s ability to freely choose what they will do with their life. Even if God is constrained to minimize infringements on free will, it’s a wash. Somebody‘s free will is going to be harmed, so why does the evil person get his way and the good person doesn’t? Straw’s point doesn’t go far enough (naturally, since he’s only a straw man atheist). It’s not just that God failed to create the best possible world, it’s that He fails every day to do what He can to make it better.

Oops, the atheist is right, time to wave hands and try and distract the audience. You gotta love the choice of words here. Geistur can’t come right out and claim that this world is the best way to bring about the best possible world, because then he’d have to show how it’s the best possible way. He says it “may be” the best possible way. Faced with a solid, substantial, real-world problem raised by the atheist, the Christian backpedals and offers only empty speculation.

The problem is that Geistur doesn’t really have an answer for this one, or for the problem of evil in general. The best he can offer is some hand-waving and the hope that somehow, some way some mysterious and inscrutable answer might be out there somewhere. He assumes that it probably builds character or something.

GEISTUR: God may have permitted evil in order to defeat it. As I’ve already said, if evil is not allowed, then the higher virtues cannot be attained. People who are redeemed have stronger character than people who have not been tested. Soul-building requires some pain.

Kinky.

So if men, being made in God’s image, are devoid of the higher virtues and cannot obtain them without allowing and participating in evil, then it stands to reason that God must also be devoid of the higher virtues, and unable to obtain them, since there’s nobody available to redeem Him from His sins. Geistur’s argument also implies that God must have a weaker character, for the same reason. Otherwise it would be possible to have a strong character without sinning, and then we could have a world in which evil did not play such a vital role.

Let’s remember, too, that we’re only talking about the speculation that the present world may be ONE means of arriving at a better world. It’s not the only way to do so, and it’s certainly not the best. As we’ve mentioned before, Geistur’s own Super Bowl illustration gives us one model that a wise and good God could have used to build a world that builds character through competition. If God were smarter than His worshippers, He ought to be able to think of lots more. (Hey, as long as we’re indulging in empty speculations anyway, right?)

Unfortunately for Geistur’s rosy and shapeless daydream, Straw spoils the mood by asking why God would create people knowing they were going to choose hell. Geistur’s answer, rather astonishingly, is to suggest that it’s like parents choosing to have children, knowing that some day they would disobey! No, seriously, he tries to make it sound like an omniscient God, knowing full well the endless agonies to be suffered by the damned in Hell, would be no more put off by it than a parent would be at the thought of a child choosing to go his own way. Geistur even brings in his Super Bowl illustration again to try and sell the point.

GEISTUR: I was willing to take the risk of loss in order to experience the joy of love. The same is true  of every Super Bowl. Both teams know that one will lose, yet both are willing to play the game despite that risk.

Can’t you just see God sitting up in heaven, in His comfy armchair, TV remote in one hand, cold beer in the other, saying, “Yeah, I knew that billions would end up screaming and sobbing in ceaseless torture just so I could have a few worshipers, but that’s a risk that I was willing to take. You have to take risks to get the most out of life, you know.”

Nice guy. And this is Geistur, the Christian, painting us this cozy picture of his God deliberately creating sinners to go to Hell because the rewards to Him outweighed the risks to us—at least as far as He was concerned. Not a sparrow falls to earth without God’s knowledge, Jesus tells us. It’s just that God doesn’t care. Sweet.

Let’s just give each player a chance for one final quote:

STRAW: I must admit that your intellectual answers make some sense, but evil still bothers me.

GEISTUR: It bothers me too, and it should.

That’s a good closing line. It should bother him, because his straw man’s praise notwithstanding, his intellectual answers only show the tremendous inconsistencies in his Gospel. The rest of Geistur’s lines are all about having faith in some invisible Comforter Who, in some indefinable, subjective, imaginary way, will “help” us to endure the evil that his bastard God has benevolently prescribed for us, as “good” medicine to help us build some kind of “higher character.” Oh yes, and Jesus died on the cross, so He knows all about what it means to have to endure the consequences of sin. Well, except for the part about eternal suffering in Hell, of course. But that’s a risk He was willing to take, so He could get a few worshippers.

I think we can see now why Geistur’s very first priority in this discussion was to demand that we assume that God exists. Under no circumstances is any of this evidence allowed to be applied to the central question of the book, i.e. whether or not real-world evidence reflects the existence of a Gospel-style deity. It might seem like the most fundamental obvious question an apologist ought to have to deal with, but it’s off-limits. And now we know why: the real-world evidence is not consistent with the existence of a God that matches Geistur’s description.

God does not show up in real life. The only source of information we have about God is what we can obtain from the thoughts, words, and feelings of men. Not only is evidence of God absent from the real world, but the evidence which does exist is deeply and fundamentally inconsistent with the evidence that would result from such a God existing and creating us.

Geisler and Turek are right about one thing, though: they don’t have enough faith. When you believe what men tell you, just because men tell you, despite seeing how inconsistent it is with the real world, that’s not faith. It’s gullibility.

And we’re done! There are two more appendices, but they’re primarily aimed at refuting liberal Christianity, and I’m not terribly interested in pursuing that. Maybe some day. But I think we’ve pretty much finished our consideration of what Geisler and Turek think of as the primary evidence for God’s existence. It’s a weird combination of superstition, denial, double standards, and (of course) plain old gullibility, but it’s not what I’d call really good evidence.

So much for that then.

We’re watching a kind of textual cartoon in which Geisler and Turek have a straw-man atheist (Mr. Straw) grilling a Christian (Dr. Geistur) on the question of evil. So far, the atheist seems to be giving the Christian a pretty hard time, and the Christian, despite his smug and triumphant tone, is floundering.

It goes no better for the Christian when Mr. Straw asks why God created people knowing that so many of them would end up eternally damned in Hell.

GEISTUR: Good question. There are only five options God had. He could have: 1) not created at all; 2) created a non-free world of robots; 3) created a free world where we would not sin; 4) created a free world where we would sin, but everyone would accept God’s salvation; or 5) created the world we have now—a world where we would sin, and some would be saved but the rest would be lost.

Or at least, those are the only 5 options Geisler and Turek could think of, so naturally an all-wise and all-knowing God would be incapable of finding or creating a sixth alternative. Right?

That’s the problem with creating God in your own image: you may want to claim that He has the power to make things be whatever He wants them to be, but in actual practice, He can’t exceed the limits of your imagination. He’s restricted to being and doing only what you believe He should, because you’re the one that’s creating Him. So the five options that Dr. Geistur imagines for God are indeed the only five options He has available.

Even given those five options, however, Geistur has a hard time making the last option look like the best (or only) possible alternative. Let’s look at his excuses one by one.

GEISTUR: …The first option can’t even be compared to the other four because something and nothing have nothing in common. Comparing a real world and a non-world is not even like comparing apples and oranges, since they both are fruit. It is like comparing apples and non-apples, insisting that non-apples taste better. In logic, this is called a category mistake. It’s like asking “What color is math?” Math is not a color, so the question is meaningless.

Hmm, grass is not a color either, but the question “What color is grass?” is hardly a meaningless question. Plus, a chocolate bar is a non-apple, and some people do think chocolate tastes better than apples. But quibbles aside, it’s clear that Geistur is attempting to brush off this question without really addressing it. Sure, if you’re really determined, you might think of some instances where it would be meaningless to compare a thing with the absence of a thing, but that’s not a universal principle.

For example, if you have sex with someone other than your spouse, that’s adultery. If you don’t have sex outside of marriage, that’s not adultery. Is Geistur saying that it would be a category error to claim that non-adultery is better than adultery? Good health is not disease; disease is not good health. Can we not determine whether the presence of one is better or worse than its absence? Can we not compare the presence of poisons in our food to the absence of poison, and say which is better?

If we’re talking about God’s choice of actions, we can certainly say that it’s better not to do anything than to do something that results in endless suffering for untold billions of people. Morally, that should be a no-brainer. Plus, even if it were true that you couldn’t compare non-creation with the creation of evil and endless suffering, that’s still no reason for God to create endless suffering. If you can’t compare the two, then neither is better, and God has no reason to prefer to create suffering. Geistur ignores this factor as well, and moves on to the next alternative.

STRAW: Ok, so why didn’t God make his second option—a robot world?

GEISTUR: He could have, but that wouldn’t have been a moral world. It would have been a world with no evil, but with no moral good either.

And why would you need morality, if there were no evil? Once again, Geistur’s God is constrained by the limits of His creator: the fallible mortal man, Dr. Geistur.

Personally, I think it’s rather fascinating that Geistur is convinced a world where God exists and evil doesn’t, a world in which men are the unblemished image of God and obey His will perfectly, would necessarily be a world in which no moral good would exist. What does that tell us about God’s nature and God’s will? Even more ironic, Geistur is trying to make it sound like Robot World would be a bad thing. But how could it be “bad” if morality does not exist, and there is neither good nor evil?

Geistur just moves on to the next two options (with some carefully scripted help from Mr. Straw).

STRAW: So why didn’t he make worlds three or four? Those worlds would allow love, and they certainly would be better worlds than this one.

GEISTUR: Yes, but  not everything conceivable is actually achievable with free creatures… God can’t force free creatures not to sin. Forced freedom is a contradiction.

Interestingly, Geistur concedes that at least two of the five options would be better than the one God supposedly chose. His excuse for why God didn’t choose one of them? Same as Rabbi Kushner’s: God lacks the power to pull either of them off. Despite His allegedly unlimited power and allegedly unlimited wisdom and alleged sovereignty over the affairs of men, God can’t create a world in which free men would fail to sin.

Straw’s next line should have been “Will we have free will in heaven?” but I rather suspect Geistur’s head would have exploded.

Geistur’s God may be constrained by the conceptual limits of His creator, but we’re not, so let’s look at some of the ways a moderately clever God could have created world three. (World four is uninteresting because it involves God creating a sinful world full of suffering and injustice, and why go through all that when there are better alternatives available?)

Despite their morbid preoccupation with sin (especially other people’s), Christians don’t necessarily have a good understanding of why people sin. Instead of understanding the real reasons, they superstitiously give credit to a magical “sin nature” (or “law of sin” as Paul called it) that works mysteriously and inexplicably to cause us to want to do evil just for the sake of being bad. It’s like cartoon bad guys: they don’t have a reason to want to destroy freedom and justice and truth and such, they’re just, well, bad guys.

Real people aren’t cartoon bad guys. They do things for reasons, and those reasons seem good at the time. Address the underlying reasons why people “sin,” and they’ll no longer have any motivation to do wrong. Poof, there’s world three, a world in which people freely choose not to sin because they have no reason to sin.

How? Well, let’s look at a few of the reasons why people do bad things: ignorance, misunderstanding, unsatisfied appetites and biological drives, competition for scarce resources, and so on. Those are all factors that can be addressed, at Creation time, by a wise, good and loving Creator, without compromising the free will of the creatures. Don’t design creatures that need to eat each other for food. Equip them to survive and thrive on sunlight or some other limitless energy source. Don’t give them biological territorial instincts or irresistable and indiscriminate sex drives. Wire their brains to enable perfect empathy and understanding of others, and let them perceive instantly why the good choices are more desirable than the evil choices.

And of course don’t give them a sin nature that will enslave them and force them to do evil against their will. That was what Paul was complaining about, but it’s hardly mandatory that we have such a thing. For that matter, it’s silly to protest that “free will” prevents God from being involved when our free will is already being violated by some kind of magical sin nature. If free will is what we don’t have, then God runs no risk of causing us to lose it.

Geistur’s final score: three swings, three misses. The real world is simply not consistent with what Geistur wants us to believe about the existence and nature of his imaginary God, and when he tries to make excuses for why this is so, his answers are not consistent with reality or with each other. He ducks and dodges and dances away, but he never does provide us with answers that have the easy and automatic self-consistency of real-world truth.

Hang in there folks, we’re almost to the end (of Appendix 1). Geistur is going to try one last time to convince us that evil isn’t all bad, the end justifies the means, and it’s all for our own good. Stay tuned.

I remember watching a cartoon, long ago, where the rabbit was visiting Holland, and happened to spot a hole in the dike. Naturally, he stuck his finger in it to plug it. Well, you can guess the rest. No sooner does he plug one hole than the dike springs another leak. Soon he’s plastered himself to the wall, using fingers, toes, and even his long rabbit ears to plug all the leaks, and then even more leaks break out. He can’t plug the new ones without taking his fingers out of the old ones. You just know this isn’t going to end well for the poor rabbit!

I don’t know what sort of expression was on the faces of Geisler and Turek as they wrote their appendix on the problem of evil, but the more I read it, the more I think they must have had the same intense look of inventive desperation as that cartoon rabbit had. Every time they turn around, their rationalizations have new holes, and they’re running out of fingers to try and plug them all with. The best solution—replace the shoddy structure with a sound and solid one—isn’t available to them. Instead of taking a consistent, cohesive approach, they must resort to an erratic and hyperactive succession of sound-bite rationalizations, hoping to save the day by jumping from leak to leak fast enough to stop the flow of disaster. It doesn’t actually work, but at least they can feel good about how busy they are.

Today’s installment starts with Mr. Straw (the atheist) reminding Dr. Geistur (the Christian) that his excuses thus far have failed to explain why God does not intervene to warn us about preventable disasters like 9/11.

STRAW: If you knew [9/11] was going to happen and had the power to stop it, wouldn’t you have stopped it?

GEISTUR: Yes.

STRAW: So you are better than God!

GEISTUR: No, by stopping 9/11, I would be preventing evil. But God, who has an unlimited, eternal perspective, allows evil choices knowing that he can redeem them in the end. We can’t redeem such choices, so we try to stop every one.

What Geistur fails to consider here is that God, in this scenario, is not merely permitting evil choices, He is making an evil choice of His own, by deliberately withholding information that could have been used to thwart the attacks. That, you may remember, is the exact crime that Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison for: knowing about the attacks in time to warn people, and not informing the authorities. And God is guilty of the same crime, at least according to Geistur’s theology.

Nor does it excuse the evil of God’s own choices to promise that in some unexplained way we might hope for the possibility that God’s unlimited power might find a way to “redeem” this evil choice later on. A perfectly good God would not need to make up for His evil choices later on, since He would not make evil choices in the first place. Geistur thinks he has plugged the new hole, but all he’s really done is take his finger out of the old one, by putting God in the role of a sinner Who needs forgiveness Himself. And this isn’t the only hole Geistur opens up, as Mr. Straw also notices.

STRAW: Yes, but by your own Christian doctrine, God doesn’t redeem all evil choices in the end. After all, some people go to hell!

GEISTUR: Yes, but that’s because God can bring eternal good only to those who will accept it. Some people ignore the facts or simply choose to play the game in a way that brings them defeat. Since God cannot force them to freely choose to play the game the right way, ultimate good only comes to those who choose it.

Notice how each answer not only fails to solve the original problem, it creates additional problems as well? The problem with 9/11 is that God made the evil choice to withhold the vital, lifesaving information. Geistur attempts to plug this leak by saying God should be excused because He will redeem this evil choice later. When pressed, however, he admits that this isn’t really true, and that God will not redeem them, and in fact cannot redeem them, except for what Jesus called a “few” people. So this answer fails more often than it succeeds.

Geistur doesn’t notice this, though, because in true ADHD fashion he’s already shifted to a completely different compartment in his thinking: the notion that people only go to Hell because they obstinately refuse to go anywhere else. From Geistur’s point of view, God obviously cannot have any flaws, and therefore all these unanswerable problems must be man’s fault, somehow. The problem of God’s evil choice simply pops behind one of Geistur’s magic blinkers, where he can’t see it, and his attention is focused solely on how evil people are.

The problem with this excuse is that people are supposed to be made in God’s image. Geistur is assuming that, left to their own free will, most people will become progressively more evil until they are so opposed to good that they will cause their own harm rather than allow themselves to experience God’s eternal good. They’re made in the image of God, and therefore they naturally become progressively more evil as time goes on. This isn’t just misanthropic, it’s blasphemous!

Nor does it help to say that some kind of “sin nature” is preventing us from valuing and pursuing godliness. If a sin nature is some kind of external influence—that is, if it’s something that’s not an inherent part of human nature as created by God in His own image—then God could solve that problem by purging us of that sin nature (as the Cross is supposed to enable Him to do). Then our free will would be truly free, and we could pursue the good that, being made in God’s image, we ought to innately desire. If He can’t do that because our free will (created in His image) actually prefers the sin nature, then what does that tell us about the image we’re supposedly made in?

And remember, this situation is all supposed to be part of God’s plan, which He foreordained before the foundation of the world. If God today finds Himself in a situation where He has no choice but to make evil choices, which He will usually fail to redeem later on, because He has allowed us to acquire the kind of sin nature that prevents us from pursuing the innate desire for good which ought to come from being made in His image—well, if that’s the way things are, it’s only because that’s the way He always intended for things to be. Even when you try to excuse God due to “circumstances beyond His control,” Christian doctrine teaches us that He and He alone is ultimately responsible for creating and directing those circumstances, according to His own will. His behavior, thus, is inexcusable. He is, and must be, responsible for His own actions, or He is not truly God (at least as the Bible describes Him).

Interestingly, after floundering around for a while trying to make it sound like people should be glad that God allows them to go to Hell, Geistur seems to get an inkling of this same problem. If the situation today is such a mess, why would God create it this way in the first place? That should be interesting, though I’m not too hopeful of any truly profound insights from the good Dr. Geistur. I don’t think we’ll have room for it all in this post, though, so let’s break here and pick this up again next week. Cheers.

We’ve been listening to a fictional Christian, whom we’ve dubbed “Dr. Geistur,” as he tries all sorts of excuses for why God does not oppose evil in the kind of tangible and productive ways that would be consistent with the existence of a good and all-powerful deity. We’ve heard him excuse God on the grounds that God really has no choice, that somehow He lacks the power to prevent evil from happening one way or another. We’ve heard him criticize a Jewish apologist for making basically the same argument, on the grounds that all things are possible for God. We’ve heard him propose analogies like the Super Bowl, as illustrating how struggle can make victory sweeter (though he apparently fails to realize that it also illustrates the existence of alternatives that do not require resorting to sin and evil). And we’ve heard him try to sell the idea that evil isn’t really all that bad, and that it’s actually good for us, in the long run.

As if that hasn’t sufficiently made a general hash of his own religious beliefs, he next turns to this tidy morsel of misanthropy:

STRAW [the Atheist]: If God is infinitely powerful as you say, then why does he allow bad things to happen to good people?

GEISTUR: We’ve already pointed out that there are good outcomes for pain and suffering. But we also need to point out that the question makes an assumption that isn’t true.

STRAW: What’s that?

GEISTUR: There are no good people!

Charming, isn’t it?

Now in all fairness to Dr. Geistur, he’s not indulging in any personal antipathy towards his fellow mortals. He’s merely upholding an anti-human bias that’s inherent within his religion itself. As I mentioned before, one of the techniques that con men use to deceive their victims is the “Blame the Pigeon” strategy. People are more gullible when they’re afraid that they’re guilty of something, so to keep your pigeons from seeing through your scam, you just need to make them feel guilty.

Christianity takes this a step further by asserting that we are all guilty, by definition. There are no good people, according to the Gospel—just like there’s no naturally luxuriant and vibrant hair according to the marketing department of your favorite shampoo and conditioner. Even before you start, you’re inherently inferior and inadequate, and you need our product to make you socially acceptable. Even if we don’t have any actual product to deliver.

Dr. Geistur then gets the strawman atheist character to confess to having told lies and having stolen things. Mr. Straw protests that he’s not all bad, but Geistur retorts that he’s not all good either, and then broadens that to include all people, including babies who, in his view, are sinfully guilty of being selfish. Mr. Straw is judging himself to be more or less good relative to other people, but (Geistur argues) he’s failing to consider where he stands on an absolute standard of goodness.

The point of this whole little diversion is just to get to a point where Geistur can go back to Rabbi Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and claim that Kushner is making incorrect assumptions about both God and man. As far as Geistur is concerned, evil in the world is not a problem for an omnipotent God because the victims all deserve to suffer. The only real question, according to Geistur, is “Why do good things happen to bad people?” In other words, he’s invoking the Rapist’s Defense (“She was asking for it!”) as yet another excuse for God’s failure to oppose evil in any tangible, real-world way.

Like I said: charming.

Let’s take a moment here to indulge in some of the thinking that’s sadly failing to happen in this little dialog between the Christian and the straw man. Is it really true that there are no good people? And is there an absolute standard of goodness for us to measure people against?

Obviously, the answer to the first question is no, it’s not true at all. But to explain why, we need to understand the answer to the second question, which is also “no.”

When Dr. Geistur accuses Mr. Straw of judging people by comparing them with other people, he’s making an astute observation. We do judge how good people are by comparing them with others. What Dr. Geistur fails to realize is that this is the correct way to judge goodness in a person’s life, because “goodness” is a social relationship whose existence is defined by the person’s interactions with others. If you don’t consider the person’s behavior in light of the other people they are interacting with, then you’re taking things out of context, and are not making a fair judgment.

When a person is part of a group, there’s a certain tension between the best interests of the individual and the best interests of the group. “Goodness,” in a social context, consists of finding a workable balance between behaviors that benefit the individual and behaviors that benefit the group. Ideally, we want to maximize the behaviors that are beneficial to both, and minimize the behaviors that are detrimental to one or the other. It’s “good” to be a positive example and a reliable contributor to the well-being of the group, but it’s “bad” to be too much of a taker/exploiter, or too much of a doormat. “Goodness” is that which maximizes the benefit to all involved.

Now, that’s a fairly abstract description because different groups actually have different characters, objectives, and priorities. “Good” as defined by a fellowship of stay-home, full-time, home-schooling evangelical moms, and “good” as defined by an association of activists working to promote First Amendment liberties, might not be entirely the same list of behaviors. Is it “good” to depend on a wealthier relative to meet your own financial needs? Again, in a third world culture, it might very well be good (and even inescapable), whereas in an affluent society like America it might be seen as a sign of moral weakness, or worse.

How about mandatory celibacy? Good or bad? Even within Christianity, you’ll get a different answer depending on which group is considering the question (and who’s being proposed as being subject to the restriction). Is gay marriage better or worse than promiscuous gay sex? Hmm, might be hard to get a consistent answer to that one too, and might lead the Christian to reconsider his or her answer to the question about mandatory celibacy.

I think you see my point. There is no absolute standard of goodness, because goodness exists relative to a particular person, in a particular set of circumstances, in the context of a particular group with a particular set of standards, expectations, constraints, and so on. If you were to write a book containing an enumerated listing of which actions were “good” for a particular person in a particular social/cultural/economic context, the table of contents alone would probably consume all of the world’s paper and ink!

But by and large, no such reference guide is even necessary. We know that there are good people, and bad people, and we judge them according to our own contexts, as we should and must. But more to the point—and to get back to the topic Geistur is failing to address—none of that has anything at all to do with deserving to be born with crippling birth defects, or deserving lifelong poverty and starvation, or deserving premature death due to natural or man-made catastrophe.

Rabbi Kushner originally asked (and tried to answer) a perfectly good question about why a supposedly good God fails to intervene in cases where the victims suffer evils that they have not provoked by any correspondingly evil deeds. Geistur’s diversion into abstract hamartiology is just that: a diversion, a hand-waving attempt to distract us from the fact that he has no good answers. Go ahead: argue about whether or not it’s inhumanly barbaric to seriously claim that babies deserve to be born with horrendous, life-shattering birth defects. At least if you’re debating hamartiology, you’re not asking why God allowed an innocent child to suffer, and the real question of evil has been successfully dodged.

I wish I could say that this was just a momentary lapse on Geistur’s part, but skimming ahead… no, sorry, there’s lots more where that came from. Stay tuned (if you can stand it).

Last week, in the debate over evil, Dr. Geistur (the Christian) told Mr. Straw (the atheist) that evil wasn’t really all that bad, and that the end justifies the means. This week continues along the same lines, with some gratuitous mockery of atheists and some blissfully oblivious hypocrisy thrown in for color.

MR. STRAW: So you’re saying that evil has a purpose that has implications in eternity.

DR. GEISTUR: Yes.

From man’s point of view, evil is evil, but from God’s point of view, evil is ultimately not just good, but better than having no evil at all.

This is why the first curveball Geistur threw was an insistence on having this debate under the assumption that God must exist. That’s a very important assumption, because without it, if we remember that God does not show up in real life, and that the real question is whether or not men are feeding us a coherent and reasonable theology, the fact that you end up arguing “evil is good” might seem like a pretty serious self-contradiction.

At this point, there’s a bit of a breakdown in the script. Geisler and Turek, the authors, break the fourth wall in order to take a gratuitous swipe at atheists in general.

STRAW: Suppose there’s no eternity. Suppose we live, we die, and that’s it.

GEISTUR: It’s possible, but I don’t have enough faith to believe it.

STRAW: Why not?

GEISTUR: Haven’t you read this book?

STRAW: No, I jumped right to this appendix.

GEISTUR: That’s just like you, isn’t it? You don’t want to play the game; you just want to see the final score.

Take that you atheists! You can practically see Geisler and Turek sitting in front of their keyboards, worrying about what happens if anyone just skims their book. Suppose they go straight to the appendix, and judge the whole book by the quality of their arguments about theodicy? We don’t want them to conclude that the rest of the book is this bad, do we? Hey, I know, let’s make them think that’s what the evil lazy atheists all do—then they’ll have to read the whole book, just to “play the game.” Problem solved!

Word.

Of course, if you do read the whole book, like we have, you might notice that Geisler and Turek’s whole argument for eternal life and eternal judgment boils down to just taking man’s word for it that these unseen and self-contradictory ideas are really true. Because they “don’t have enough faith” to question what men tell them, even when the teachings are perverse and absurd. And they’re making fun of the atheists?

But it’s not just atheists who earn Geistur’s smarmy contempt. America in general—yes, this great Christian nation we always hear so much about—is equally to be dispised:

STRAW: I suppose I suffer from the American disease of instant gratification.

GEISTUR: That’s probably why you’re having trouble realizing the value of suffering and “no pain, no gain!”

STRAW: You’re right, reading this book is too painful. It’s too long.

I’ll grant you that it is indeed painful to watch a pair of otherwise educated scholars undertake a long, slow process of intellectual self-castration, especially when using instruments as blunt as those favored by Geisler and Turek. But somehow I don’t think that’s what Geistur is trying to say. Having gotten hold of a pleasurable fantasy, Geisler and Turek are indulging in a bit of self-gratification, imagining atheists everywhere moaning and gasping in the pain from the hard-hitting points they raise. Let’s give them a few minutes of privacy, shall we?

Ok, all done guys? Good, let’s get back to the actual discussion then, shall we?

STRAW: …let’s get back to the question of evil. If there is an eternity, then some evils in this world may have an eternal purpose. But there are certainly some evil acts in this world that have absolutely no purpose.

GEISTUR: How do you know?

STRAW: It’s obvious! What good purpose could there be in, say, the terrorist attacks on 9/11?

GEISTUR: While I wish it had never happened, there were some good things that came out of those terrible events. For example, we came together as a country; we helped those in need; and we resolved to fight the evil of terrorism. We were also shocked into pondering the ultimate questions about life, and some people came to Christ as a result of it. As C. S. Lewis said, pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 9/11 certainly woke us up!

Wow, Geistur came really close to admitting that 9/11 did more harm that good. And he really has to grope a bit to find some way to make evil sound like good. The terrorist attacks were good because they brought us together as a country? Really? I can’t help but wonder if Geisler and Turek would make the same argument today. Is this really the Great Revival they were hoping for? Are they glad that 9/11 led to a Republican rush to war in Iraq that proved disastrous and unjustified, resulting in a Democratic backlash that put Obama in the White House?

It’s no wonder why Geistur wishes 9/11 had never happened, despite his vague and empty reassurances that some good must surely come out of it. And, just to increase his discomfort, Straw presses the issue by pointing out that even if a few good things happened, the bad outweighs them. Geistur falls back on that favorite Christian stand-by: agnosticism.

STRAW: Yes, you can find a silver lining in just about anything, but there’s no way your “silver lining” outweighs the pain and suffering.

GEISTUR: How do you know? Unless you are all-knowing and have an eternal perspective, how do you know the events of 9/11 will not work together for good in the end? Perhaps there are many good things that will come out of that tragedy in the individual lives we will never hear about. In fact, good results may even come generations from now unbeknownst to those who will experience them.

STRAW: Maybe, but I don’t have enough faith to assume that.

Oops, I lied. That last line is not what Straw originally said. It’s only what he would have said if he were a real atheist instead of Geisler and Turek’s sock puppet straw man. In the book, Mr. Straw just whimpers something weak about Geistur copping out. That gives Geistur a chance to repeat his argument about how limited human knowledge is and how little we know about the future. And therefore evil is good, because we can’t ultimately know beyond all possible doubt that it is indeed evil.

Straw does redeem himself a bit with this next line, though.

STRAW: If God would tell me his reasons, then maybe I could believe you.

GEISTUR: Job already tried that tactic. After he questioned God about why he suffered, God baffled Job with questions about the wonders of creation (Job 38-41). It’s as if God were saying to him, “Job, you can’t even understand how I run the physical world that you can see, so how are you going to understand the vastly more complex moral world that you cannot see—a world where the results of billions of free choices made by human beings every day interact with one another?” Indeed it would be impossible for us to comprehend such complexity.

And just to prove the deep intellectual profundity of this point, Geistur backs it up with an allusion to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart. Cause what I’m sayin’, you just can’t argue with a fictional character that was portrayed by Jimmy Steward, know what I mean?

Ok, sarcasm aside, this is actually very close to bringing up an important and truly profound point. The issue is not whether an omnipotent and omniscient deity might know something humans don’t know. The issue is whether Straw, the man, could and should believe Geistur, the man. We’re not talking about observing God behaving in mysterious ways, we’re talking about the claims that men like Dr. Geistur make in God’s absence, and whether these claims have self-consistency of real-world truth.

If God were to show up in real life and tell me that He has reasons, then I would believe. That’s the difference between Job and Geistur. Job knew that God had reasons, because God showed up in person to tell him He had reasons, whether or not those reasons made any sense to Job (or to anyone, for that matter). Geistur has nothing like that. He does not know that God has any good reasons for allowing 9/11, he’s just clinging to faith in the doctrine that God must have had a reason.

Meanwhile, Straw is weighing the evidence to see whether or not Geistur is saying things that make enough sense to be believable. And Geistur can’t offer Straw the evidence that Job had, because Job had a God Who cared enough to show up in real life and to, well, to tell him to STFU. We don’t have that. God doesn’t show up even as a bully to suppress honest inquiry with thinly veiled threats. So it’s up to Jimmy Stewart to try and make up for God’s absence.

Geistur is, ultimately, making an appeal to agnosticism (or an appeal to ignorance, if you prefer). That’s a pretty poor argument, though, so he tries to deny that he’s doing it.

STRAW: But it seems like that’s an argument from ignorance.

GEISTUR: No. It’s not like we have no information about why bad things happen. We know that we live in a fallen world, and we know that good things can come from bad. So we know it’s possible that God can have a good reason for bad things even if we don’t know what those reasons are. And we know that he can bring good from bad. So it’s not an argument from ignorance, but a reasonable conclusion from what we do know. And while we don’t know the reason for every specific bad thing that happens, we know why we don’t know: we don’t know because of our human limitations.

And that’s Geistur’s final summation for his argument from agnosticism; after this, he changes subjects, so that’s probably Geisler and Turek’s final conclusion as well (at least for this particular rationalization). Unfortunately, none of the things Geistur says “we know” are things we actually know.

We don’t “know” that the world has “fallen” from an initial state of perfection. That’s merely a story that Geistur accepts by faith. Nor do good things come from bad things, strictly speaking. Life is a struggle, and when bad things happen, people work to make them better. The good things are the result of the work, not of the bad things. It’s true that you can’t have emancipation without having slavery first, but the goodness of the emancipation is not caused by the institution of slavery. The evil (slavery) creates a lack of goodness (liberty), but restoring that deficiency doesn’t mean that good came out of the bad. Good comes out of people working to improve the situation. And besides, though emancipation is good, it’s far better never to have lost your liberty in the first place.

Likewise, we don’t “know” that it’s possible for God to have a good reason for the bad things. In fact, there’s no way Geistur could possibly know that an omnipotent and omniscient God could not have found some way to achieve the good without requiring the bad. Even if we grant that it might be good to “wake up” America by blessing the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we still have to consider whether or not it would be better to issue the wake-up call by some means that did not involve horrific death for thousands of men, women and children. And by his own arguments, Geistur cannot know that a truly wise God could not think of a better way.

And finally, we don’t know that God can bring good from bad, because we never see Him do it. We see men superstitiously giving God credit for good things (and paradoxically failing to assign Him responsibility for the bad), but God Himself does not show up in real life to do anything at all, good or bad. Like I said before, the good that happens, happens because people make it happen. Once again, it’s Geistur’s faith, not his knowledge, that causes him to make the assumptions he cites as evidence that he’s not arguing from ignorance.

There’s one last exchange I want to address this week: the Jewish answer.

STRAW: What do you think of Rabbi Kushner’s answer to the question? You know, he wrote the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

GEISTUR: I think his answer is wrong.

STRAW: Wrong? Why?

GEISTUR: Because his answer is that God isn’t powerful enough to defeat evil on earth. So we need to forgive God for allowing evil.

STRAW: What’s wrong with that?

GEISTUR: Because there’s strong evidence that God is infinitely powerful. Fifty-six times in the Bible God is referred to as “almighty,” and in several other ways he is described as all-powerful. We also know from scientific evidence that he created this universe out of nothing (take a look at chapter 3 of this book). So Rabbi Kushner’s finite god doesn’t square with the facts.

Isn’t it funny how bad your own arguments can sound when you hear someone else make them? Geistur’s main point in this appendix has been that God allows evil because He really doesn’t have any choice: either He allows evil (even though it’s evil), or He destroys some vital principle of free will that makes us real people (thus committing an even greater evil). We fallible mortals might wish evil weren’t here to make us suffer, but sadly even “almighty” God can’t come up with a better alternative.

Hearing a Jew make the same sort of argument puts it in a whole different perspective. Of course, Rabbi Kushner does commit one faux pas that Geistur would never allow: the good Rabbi is frank and open about the fact that he blames evil on certain divine limitations, without tangling up his thought processes by as many convoluted rationalizations and contradictory dogmas. But you can’t swallow such direct and unadulterated honesty without a serious risk of evangelical headsplosions, so Geistur looks suspiciously at the plain, unvarnished version of his own argument, and flatly rejects it.

And that brings us to as good a break as any. Tune in again next week, when we’ll hear Dr. Geistur say:

GEISTUR: There are no good people!

Should be fun.

At the beginning of their book, Geisler and Turek compared life to a jigsaw puzzle.

Just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are difficult to put together without the picture on the box top, the many diverse pieces of life make no sense without some kind of unifying big picture. The question is, does anyone have the box top to this puzzle we call life?

In their last chapter, they claimed to have found the box top, the big picture that makes life make sense. By a curious coincidence, it happened to be the same as the religion they’re trying to sell us. And yet, when we compare their box top to the pieces on the table in front of us, the two clearly fail to line up.

The box top shows a wise and powerful shepherd who truly cares for his sheep and is able both to lead them to verdant pastures and to drive away any predators before they even approach the sheep. What do we see in the puzzle pieces? Mutton. Scrapie. Rocky, overgrazed pastures. Whole packs of wolves. But no shepherd. None of the pieces we can actually see really match the image of the loving, powerful, and all-wise guardian and caregiver, so lovingly depicted on the box top Geisler and Turek have painted for us.

So hidden away in an appendix (where believers are less likely to read it), in a comic-strip dialog format (which allows the Christian character to make broad claims without having to document them), Geisler and Turek are attempting to be the ones to find the answer believers have been looking for since before Jesus was even born. And, in keeping with long-standing traditions, they’re failing.

Last week, we saw how Geisler and Turek tried to make Mr. Straw (the atheist strawman in this dialog) sound unreasonable and whiny for asking why God is not currently opposing evil the way any good person would reasonably be expected to do. The Christian character, Dr. Geistur (as we’re calling him), even went so far as to imply that we, the victims, are guilty and responsible for causing all the evil that exists in the world—including things we have no control over.

Now it’s Dr. Geistur’s turn to get a little unreasonable, as he twists and turns, trying to think of some justification for God’s decision to serve as an accessory/co-conspirator to evil, continuing to provide it with the means and the opportunity to manifest itself in the world.

GEISTUR: If God wanted to end evil now, he could. But have you thought that maybe God has other goals that he would like to accomplish while evil exists?

STRAW: Like what?

GEISTUR: For starters, he would like to have more people choose heaven before he closes the curtain on this world. Paul seems to indicate that Jesus will come back after “the full number” of people become believers (Rom. 11:25).

Dr. Geistur seems to be a bit unsure as to whether evil is really all that bad. Remember, we’re not just talking about suffering here, we’re talking about sin. Geistur’s argument is that God could oppose evil, but then He wouldn’t be able to do as much. God with evil has more power to do good than God without evil. It’s like a performance-enhancing drug: it gives God super powers that He wouldn’t have otherwise. Sure, it may be wrong, but let’s face it, God is hooked on evil. Without it, He’s useless.

Is this really the argument Christians want to make? If God is truly the creator of everything, did He deliberately create a situation in which He would necessarily be dependent on evil in order to be able to do good? Dr. Geistur seems to have failed to think this through. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge him too harshly, though: the problem of evil is really a tough one because it’s fundamentally inconsistent with Christian beliefs. And that’s giving Dr. Geistur some serious cognitive dissonance.

Notice, for example, how he consistently invokes a kind of tunnel vision by assuming that the only thing God can do to oppose evil is to destroy the entire planet. Why doesn’t God oppose evil? Because He doesn’t want to destroy this world until the “full number” of predestined believers has been saved. It’s either/or: either God can do nothing to oppose evil (thus giving people time to repent), or He can end evil by destroying the entire world, along with all earthly opportunities for salvation. No other options, even for God.

Utter nonsense, of course: there are any number of lesser ways God could oppose evil, even while allowing it to continue to exist in some form. Geistur himself even proposes some of them—as chores we need to undertake. He can see that alternatives exist, but somehow he can’t make the connection between them and God. It’s the psychology of denial: if he could see them, he would be unable to explain why God doesn’t do them. Therefore, he cannot see them, except as things we ought to be doing.

We see another example of this psychological blindness when Mr. Straw (as the atheist cartoon) raises the possibility of God merely helping us when we suffer.

STRAW: That’s nice, but if I were suffering, I’d rather have God help me than you.

GEISTUR: If God prevented pain every time we got into trouble, then we would become the most reckless, self-centered creatures in the universe. And we would never learn from suffering.

STRAW: Learn from suffering! What are you talking about?

GEISTUR: Ah, you’ve just hit on another reason why God doesn’t end evil right now. Can you name me one enduring lesson that you ever learned from pleasure?

Notice how Geistur twisted the original suggestion from the idea that God could help comfort us after we experience pain into some kind of demand that God prevent us from ever experiencing negative consequences from our evil deeds. The reasonable expectation, which Geistur can’t explain or refute, is magically transformed into an unreasonable demand that he can dismiss.

Or can he? Think about it: the lessons we learn from pain are lessons about how to avoid the evil consequences of our evil deeds. But what if evil never existed in the first place? Without evil, there are neither evil deeds to do nor evil consequences to suffer, and thus no value in learning lessons about avoiding evil. No evil = nothing to avoid, and no motive to even want to do anything wrong in the first place!

Or let’s consider the proposition that, without pain (and evil), we would necessarily become the most reckless and self-centered creatures in the universe. Really? Even though we were made in the image of God? Did God become the most reckless and self-centered creature in eternity before the creation of pain and evil? I’ll give you a minute to think about that.

Or how about the idea that we could not learn enduring lessons without evil? Once again, Dr. Geistur twists this into a demand for enduring lessons we learn from pleasure (i.e. not just in the absence of evil). The strawman atheist, of course, can’t think of any, though it’s not hard to do (has Geistur never learned the satisfaction of a job well done, or the rewards of proper hygiene and exercise and nutrition, or the joy of helping others?). There’s lots of things that both make you feel good and teach you valuable lessons, but the psychology of denial prevents Geistur from seeing any of them just now.

Geistur’s dilemma becomes even worse when you try and put the word “enduring” into a Christian context. According to the Gospel, believers are going to spend eternity in heaven, which means that our earthly experiences are going to be a vanishingly small percentage of what our “enduring” experience will be. In order to be a properly enduring lesson, in a Christian context, it needs to be a lesson that will be applicable to the conditions that will allegedly exist eternally in heaven.

So, for example, Geistur argues that “You can’t develop courage unless there is danger.” Is this an enduring lesson, though? In an atheistic, secular sense of “enduring,” sure. But courage is only a virtue when there is a danger to face and an evil to oppose. Is that what conditions are going to be like in heaven for all eternity? What kind of relationship will there be between Jesus Christ and his Bride (i.e. the Church), if being raped and tortured is a valuable and enduring lesson in the Christian sense? What is there about watching your children slowly starve that makes you better prepared for what God has in store for believers in heaven?

Amazingly, Mr. Straw almost points out this problem. Dr. Geistur’s response has to be seen to be believed.

STRAW: But I wouldn’t need all those virtues if God would just quarantine evil right now!

GEISTUR: But since God has reasons for not quarantining evil right now, you need to develop virtues for this life and for the life hereafter. This earth is an uncomfortable home, but it’s a great gymnasium for the hereafter.

STRAW: You Christians always punt to the hereafter…

Yes, God does not quarantine evil, so that we can develop virtues. And we need to develop those virtues because God does not quarantine evil. And anyway, 9-11… er, I mean, the afterlife.

Geistur never does quite explain how exactly we’re better prepared for heaven if we suffer here on earth. Maybe heaven really sucks and so God has to make us suffer in this life so that His “rewards” will seem to be an improvement? Once again, good needs evil in order to have the power to be truly good. Heaven, somehow, is not the kind of place that could be good enough all by itself, without the evil.

Geistur makes one last, feeble attempt to make earthly sufferings sound relevant to heaven, but it takes a bit of careful scripting. Geisler and Turek have to sneak the word “punt” into Mr. Straw’s line so that Geistur can make a neat segue into talking about football as a metaphor of how rewards are sweeter when you really have to work for them. Just imagine what it would feel like to win the Super Bowl!

In fact, Geistur is simply changing the subject: Mr. Straw brought up a good point about how suffering would be irrelevant to a believer’s experience in heaven, and the Christian basically says “Ooo, look a monkey!” Wave your hands, blow some smoke, and how about them Raiders eh? Anything to get off the point. He never quite explains how winning the Super Bowl is like the victory believers experience in heaven, he just claims that they’re alike.

But what’s particularly ironic is that Geistur’s metaphor blows up in his face. Yeah, I bet it feels great to win a Super Bowl, and yeah it’s probably a lot of hard work and grunt time. But here’s the deal: the winning team didn’t need to be raped as little boys in order to prepare them for that tremendous victory. They didn’t have to try and exterminate the Jews to make touchdowns. They still got to experience the strength- and character-building process of striving for glory without the need to resort to evil in order to empower themselves.

God could take a pointer or two from a buncha dumb jocks. Despite Geistur’s frantic hand-waving attempts to make it sound like evil really isn’t so bad, and is in fact a valuable tool for helping us win our own personal spiritual victories, there are non-evil ways to accomplish everything good that Geistur is trying to give evil credit for. And it’s Geistur himself who points out this alternative.

All of Geistur’s excuses for God fail for that simple reason. Not only does God have countless lesser ways that He could be opposing evil, but there’s not even any need for evil to exist to be opposed. Ordinary, uninspired sports fans can come up with alternatives that build character, self-discipline, and moral fiber, without depending on sin to accomplish their goals. And if the God that Geistur preaches were a God that really existed, then He could do that too.

But He doesn’t, so He can’t, and that’s why Geisler and Turek have to hide their discussion of evil in an appendix.

We’re looking at Geisler and Turek’s attempt to rationalize away the problem of evil, as presented in a dialog between two characters we’ve named Mr. Straw (the Atheist), and Dr. Geistur (the Christian). The dialog started with one honest and reasonable question from Mr. Straw, which immediately provoked Dr. Geistur to change the subject, to deny that he had changed the subject, to insist that the rest of the discussion must be based on the assumption that God exists, and then to smugly insinuate that, because Mr. Straw granted this assumption for the sake of argument, he was “making progress.”

You’d think, after such an inauspicious beginning, that the quality and character of Dr. Geistur’s argument could only improve, but…

STRAW: So why doesn’t your so-called “all-powerful” God stop evil?

GEISTUR: Do you really want him to?

STRAW: Of course!

GEISTUR: Suppose he starts with you?

STRAW: Be serious.

GEISTUR: No, really. We always talk about God stopping evil, but we forget that if he did, he would have to stop us also. We all do evil.

And of course none of us—including Christians—would want God interfering in our ability to do evil, right? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say-n’more, knowwhutimean, eh?

Mr. Straw’s retort is that he’s talking about Hitler-calibre evil, not common everyday faults. But Geistur is ready for  him.

GEISTUR: My point is not the degree of evil, but the source of evil. The source of evil is our free choice. If God were to do away with evil, then he would have to do away with free choice. And if he did away with our free choice, we would no longer have the ability to love or do good. This would no longer be a moral world.

Any time a Christian tries to feed you this particular brimming bowl of bull, your very next question ought to be, “And has God always had free will?” Unless He has been at least partially evil from all eternity, God cannot have free will, and thus cannot love or do good. Alternately, we could admit that it is possible for free will to exist in the absence of evil, but that means that we, being made in the image of God, could also possess free will without the need for evil. Because if we couldn’t, then there would need to be evil in heaven, so that the Redeemed would retain their free will and remain capable of loving and doing good in their eternal reward.

Sadly, Mr. Straw is unable to come up with this particular line of discussion, since he’s an empty sock puppet on the fist of his apologetic masters. The best he can do is to point out that not all evil is the result of free choices. Natural disasters, birth defects, infant mortality, and so on, are all evils that happen quite apart from human choice. But Dr. Geistur has an equally muddled answer for that one as well (otherwise Straw wouldn’t have thought of it).

GEISTUR: The Bible traces it all back to the fall of man. No one is really innocent because we all sinned in Adam (Rom. 5:12) and as a consequence deserve death (Rom. 6:23). Natural disasters and premature deaths are a direct result of the curse on creation because of the fall of humankind (Genesis 3: Romans 8).

This is the old con game of “Blame the Pigeon.” Sometimes, when you’re trying to con someone, the victim (aka “the pigeon”) will notice that the stuff you’re selling doesn’t actually work. When that happens, the clever con man will immediately blame the failure of his merchandise on the pigeon himself. This does two things: it rationalizes away the failure, and it makes the pigeon feel responsible for the problem, and thus less likely to complain about it. In the worst case, where victim rejects the blame, the con man can still use this excuse to discredit the pigeon, so that he can at least continue selling his snake oil to other gullible saps.

Notice, too, how Geistur’s blame game neatly avoids answering Mr. Straw’s actual question. The question is not, “Why does evil exist?” but “Why doesn’t an allegedly all-good and all-powerful deity intervene against evil?” Accusing us of causing evil still doesn’t explain why God would not intervene to limit or negate the evil consequences. If your child is being electrocuted, you don’t say “Well, that’s the consequences of his decision to stick his fingers into the electrical socket,” you grab something non-conducting and knock his hand away from the socket. That’s the good and loving way to respond when someone you love makes unwise and harmful choices.

Obviously, God does not do that. What’s more, Geistur tiptoes around the question of whether God is, in fact, directly responsible for starting the natural disasters, diseases, deaths, and so on. Though he tries to pin the blame on man for provoking “the curse on creation,” curses don’t cast themselves. If creation has been cursed, then someone (or Someone) had to do the cursing.

As we all learned in kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right. Supposing that Adam and Eve actually did exist, and actually did sin against God. That might arguably be called evil, but so is putting curses on people, particularly when the people you’re cursing are not the people that actually sinned against you. Geistur tries to pin the blame on all of us by accusing us all of having sinned, but again, this is merely a blame game, since the offenses that allegedly justify the curse do not occur until after we’ve been cursed. And even if that were a valid justification for cursing us, why curse the entire creation as well?

In recent years, Christians (with the exception of Fred Phelps types) have cooled off a bit on the kind of might-makes-right theology that says God is right no matter what He does. There are those who would defend God by arguing that God was merely revealing the curse, not imposing it. According to this “kinder, gentler” theology, the curse on creation was imposed by someone else, rather than by God. Since God gave man dominion over the earth, man had the power to turn that dominion over to, say, Satan, should he choose to rebel against God and abdicate his divinely-ordained rulership through an act of direct disobedience.

The problem with this non-damning God is that it makes it even less reasonable to suggest that He would fail to intervene to mediate and/or remove the curse. Even supposing that the suffering and death were Satan’s will for creation rather than God’s will, God is not off the hook, morally speaking. As the Bible itself says, if you know the right thing to do, and do not do it, it is a sin. By giving Satan free reign to impose his will on Creation, God is effectively doing Satan’s will rather than vice versa. It’s no use trying to blame Man for God’s behavior. By providing Satan with the means and the opportunity to do evil, God necessarily makes Himself an accessory to sin, if not a co-conspirator.

The dialog avoids confronting this difficulty by having Mr. Straw begin to whine and complain about the idea that Jesus will make everything all right at the Second Coming.

STRAW: I’m not interested in the future. I want pain and suffering to end now! Why won’t God end it?

GEISTUR: He will end it, but just not on your timetable. Just because God hasn’t ended all evil yet doesn’t mean that he never will end it.

At which point we’ll all lose our free will and become completely unable to love and do good, right? Oh wait, that was two arguments ago, and thus completely unrelated to what Geistur is saying in this sentence. Silly me, I was looking for coherence.

The point of this argument is to show how totally unreasonable and selfish atheists are. I mean, stomping his little foot and demanding, “I want pain and suffering to end right now!” Isn’t that childish? Isn’t that selfish? I mean, can you imagine a loving (heavenly) father looking down on his children writhing in agony, and saying, “I want that to stop immediately”?

It’s easy to see the priorities here. Mr. Straw’s priority is the well-being of others, specifically those in need and in suffering. Dr. Geistur’s priority is making sure we all understand that suffering continues because God is not ready to end it yet, and that’s ok! It’s all a matter of perspective. To the altar boy bending over, helpless, terrified, humiliated and gasping in pain, Geistur offers the justification that someday, in some unseen, distant future, probably after you are dead, this kindly old priest will no longer be fucking you up the ass. So it’s ok.

Like I said, perspective.

Needless to say, this particular “answer” doesn’t even come close to justifying the lack of response on God’s part now. Future promises of improved behavior do not justify present sins. If it did, we would need no Savior, because we could just stand before the Judgment Seat of God and say, “Yes, Lord, I have done wrong, but none of that should count against me any more than it does against You, because ultimately there will come a time when I’m no longer behaving that way, just as You too will someday cease giving evil the means and opportunity to manifest itself.”

As I mentioned last week, this is Geisler and Turek’s own script. They can make the discussion go however they like. They even get to pick what the atheist says. And it’s still going very badly for them. They’re making excuses, they’re trying to shift the blame, they’re dancing all around the point, and their attempts to justify God only end up making Him look even worse. Not only is God callous and uncaring regarding the sufferings of His children, but (if we’re going to buy the “free will” argument) He necessarily becomes the source of an eternal Evil Himself.

As feeble and corrupt as Geistur’s “answer” is, though, it at least moves us a bit closer to the main rationalization he uses to try and excuse God for His failure to openly oppose the “works of Satan.” As I mentioned at the end of my last post, it’s a combination of arguing that the end justifies the means and denying that evil is really all that bad. Didn’t quite get there this week, but we’re almost there, so stay tuned.

The first question anyone should ask themselves, if they want to know whether the Gospel is true, is “Does the real-world evidence look the way it ought to look given an Almighty Heavenly Father Who loves us?” Even a trivial glance at the real world shows us an overwhelmingly large number of conditions and events that would not be there if there were a genuinely good and omnipotent deity around, at least if He had any concern at all about human affairs. Yet somehow, in fifteen chapters of arguing that it takes more faith to be an atheist, Geisler and Turek have not quite gotten around to considering this most fundamental and obvious mountain of evidence.

It’s not hard to see why. At the back of the book, tucked away in an Appendix, is their attempt to rationalize away the problem of Evil. Even Geisler and Turek could not deny, with a straight face, that real-world conditions are more consistent with atheistic conclusions. Nowhere in their 12-point outline for proving God’s existence was there any place where they could say, “Let’s take a moment and look at the largest and most obvious body of evidence relating to God’s existence, and show how Christianity’s explanation makes more sense.” It just doesn’t fit.

Even hidden away in an appendix, Geisler and Turek aren’t quite comfortable tackling the problem with the same scholarly(-ish) and intellectual(-ish) examination they used in the main body of the book. Instead, we get an almost cartoony script outlining a dialog between “Atheist” and “Christian”—the kind of late-night, bull session format you’d find in a casual frat house, just to kill the time. It’s not going to be deep. It’s not going to be insightful. It’s going to be two tired apologists indulging in a bit of self-gratifying fantasy so they can feel better about the problems their faith has when it confronts the real world.

Before we get started, let’s see if we can’t improve the script just a bit. Right now, it’s a bit cold and impersonal, as though Geisler and Turek didn’t care enough to give their participants names. So let’s name them. The “Atheist” character is an obvious straw man, so let’s call him Mr. Straw. “Christian” is presumably arguing the case Geisler and Turek would argue, so let’s name him Dr. Geistur. That warms things up just a bit, don’t you think? I’ll make that substitution throughout all the quotes that follow. We begin with a pretty decent question by Mr. Straw, to which Dr. Geistur replies with some frantic hand-waving intended to make the rest of the discussion assume that God must really exist.

[Straw]  If there really is an all-good, all-powerful, theistic God, then why does he allow evil?

[Geistur] How do you know what evil is unless you know what good is? And how do you know what good is unless there is an objective standard of good beyond yourself?

[Straw] Don’t try to avoid the question.

[Geistur] I’m  not trying to avoid the question. I’m simply showing you that your complaint presupposes that God exists. In fact the existence of evil doesn’t disprove God. It may prove that there is a devil, but it doesn’t prove that there’s no God.

You can see why this material would have been out of place in the part of the book that claimed it takes more faith to be an atheist. Mr. Straw’s very first line throws Geistur for such a loop that he immediately changes the subject and then lies about whether or not he’s changing the subject. And the point of this diversion is a rather blatant attempt to insist that the rest of the discussion must be based on the assumption that God must exist, no matter what the evidence says. Not even Geisler and Turek can follow that up with a smug “therefore I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist!”

And remember, this is their script. They could make the conversation go any direction they want, and they still can’t even begin to address the question unless everyone involved first agrees to believe that God must exist. They can’t admit the possibility that the existence of evil might have some implications regarding the existence of God. It has to be assumed, on faith alone, that God exists, before we start to consider the evidence. From their very first line, they have declined to acknowledge the most basic and obvious question here, let alone attempting to answer it.

Even their straw-man accuser sees through this ploy (which should give any amateur psychologists an interesting topic of discussion), but their faith simply will not be shaken, and they insist that Straw’s question presupposes the existence of God. Straw calls this an “interesting move,” and then agrees to make Geistur’s assumption “for the sake of argument” in order to try and get Geistur back on topic. In other words, Straw’s lines are written to suggest that he sees the validity of their point and refuses to admit it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, what about Geistur’s claim that Straw’s question presupposes the existence of God? Does it really force us to concede, however begrudgingly, that God must exist? Let’s look at the points that make up Geistur’s claim:

• You cannot know what evil is unless you know what good is.
• You cannot know what good is unless there is an objective standard of good beyond yourself.
• CONCLUSION: Therefore God exists.

Wait, what?

Geistur’s conclusion has no connection to the premises he claims to derive them from. Even if the premises were valid (which they’re not), they do not lead to the conclusion. You might arguably conclude, given the above premises, that some objective standard of good must exist, but it’s pure superstition to ascribe that “objective standard” to any particular god or gods. It’s like saying, “You presuppose the existence of elves that make shoes, because I see you are wearing shoes.” Attributing something real to something imaginary does not prove that the imaginary exists. You’re just being superstitious.

As a matter of fact, Straw’s question need not require us to define what “good” and “evil” even are. To ask Straw’s question, all we need is enough knowledge to understand that “good” is supposed to be opposed to “evil,” and vice versa. If it is, then a God who is both “all-good” and “all-powerful” by definition is a God whose power ought to be visibly engaged in eliminating and/or preventing evil (no matter what “evil” might be). The question itself does not presuppose that the asker necessarily knows what good and evil are, let alone presupposing that the asker must have obtained his or her knowledge from any particular god. The Christian claim that God is good (whatever they mean by “good”) is inconsistent with the Christian claim that the world is full of evil (whatever they mean by “evil”).

Remember, the core issue we’re investigating is whether or not men are telling the truth about God. We’re testing the words of men to see if they’re consistent with themselves and with what we observe in objective reality. We’re not trying to understand what we observe about God in real life, because God does not show up in real life to provide us with any objective observations, perplexing or otherwise. We have nothing to observe besides the things men say about God, and the only means we have of determining whether those words are true is the principle that truth is consistent with itself. If the real world is inconsistent with what men say about God, then the words of men are false, according to the definition of what real-world truth is.

There are many other things wrong with Geistur’s opening ploy, like the fact that different people have different ideas about what “good” and “evil” are (gays? priests? circumcision?), or the fact that knowing what “chocolate” is does not mean we must presuppose the existence of a deity whose fundamental essence is “vanilla”. Not only does this argument fail to prove that God must exist, it makes a total hash out of any kind of rational attempt to understand the real difference between good and evil.

That’s not really the point, though. Geisler and Turek aren’t trying to directly address the question of whether evil makes God’s existence unlikely, nor are they even trying to teach us how we know good from evil. Their intent is simply to divert the discussion away from any kind of reasonable consideration of whether or not the evidence is consistent with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful deity, and to move it into a “safe” rationalization about how we might best try and gloss over the discrepancies between what Christians believe and what we actually find in the real world. As we’ll see next time, there are at least two basic approaches we can take: “the end justifies the means,” and “well, I dunno, is evil reeeeeeeeally all that bad, in the end?”

Stay tuned.

Last week, Geisler and Turek told us a fairy tale without a happy ending, about a king who disguised himself as a commoner so that he could discover the true feelings of the young maid he’d fallen in love with. This week, they take the supposedly real-life equivalent of that fairy tale, and give the ending not just one, but several grim twists. First, though, they have to make their little rhetorical point about how the Bible is the “box top” to the jigsaw puzzle of life.

We said that if we could find the box top, we’d be able to answer the five greatest questions that confront every human being. Since we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that the box top is the Bible, the answers to those five questions are:

Eh, I’ll summarize: our origin is “God did it,” our identity is “we’re made in God’s image,” the meaning of life is “we were put here so we could make choices that would send us to heaven or hell,” morality is “keeping God’s commandments and spreading the Gospel,” and our destiny is… Well, that’s the rest of this post.

To understand Geisler and Turek’s take on the “eternal destiny” of unbelievers, we need just a bit of a digression. One of the internal inconsistencies in the Christian gospel is the conflict between the humble, loving, self-effacing deity/king of last week’s fairy tale, and the barbaric, unjust, and downright evil concept of Hell, as originally taught in the early church. Various theologians have been trying, since almost the dawn of the church, to find some way reconcile Jesus’ teachings on the subject with the kind of God Jesus also taught. The results have been mixed at best, and it’s not uncommon for later generations to produce a theologian who sees the need to give it another go.

C. S. Lewis is one of the more recent apologists to try and come up with a way to make Hell work in the context of a loving heavenly Father. As he explains at great length in his book, The Great Divorce, Hell is not a place “where the fire never goes out,” nor is it a “lake of fire” that God has “prepared for the devil and his angels,” or at least not literally. Lewis’ Hell is a state of mind, in which sinners are tormented by their own thoughts and feelings, which they refuse to abandon. Heaven could be theirs at any time, but they stubbornly cling to their own evil ways, and thus are personally and exclusively the sole cause of their own agony.

Interestingly, even though this is not at all what was said by Jesus or by any of the apostles, the Lewis Hell seems to be gaining the status of Scripture in conservative Christian thinking. It’s a fascinating study in the evolution of Christian mythology because we can see new “eternal truth” forming in real time, 2000 years after Christ, by conservative Christians seeking some rationalization that will make them more comfortable with the contradictory things their religion teaches. Geisler and Turek give us an inside look at a doctrine in flux, as they present both Lewis’ “damned-because-I-want-to-be” Hell and the original, damned-because-God-damned-you Hell that Jesus taught.

C. S. Lewis said it best when he wrote, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there would be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it…”

You say, “God doesn’t send anyone to hell!” You’re right. If you reject Christ, you’ll send yourself there.

You say, “God will just annihilate those who don’t believe.” No, he won’t. Hell is real. In fact, Jesus spoke more of hell than he did of heaven… God is too loving to destroy those who don’t want to be in his presence. His only choice is to quarantine those who reject him…

You say, “God will save everybody!” How? Against their will? Some people would rather be ruined than changed. They’d rather continue their rebellion that be reformed. So God says, “Have it your way. You may continue your rebellion, but you’ll be quarantined so that you can’t pollute the rest of my creation.”

You see how the Christian doctrine of Hell is being molded and re-shaped to fit the sensibilities of modern, pampered, well-fed Christians like Geisler and Turek? In Jesus’ day, Hell was a place of torment, where the worm does not die and the fires are not quenched, and the sinner cries out for just a drop of water to cool his tongue and relieve some of the agony of the fires around him. Nobody goes there unless God (or His angels) throw them in. Lewis, however, wants to turn that into a self-inflicted mental state whose very substance is drawn from “self-choice.” God is not only off the hook, He’s completely out of the picture, deliberately excluded by the sinner himself.

Geisler and Turek like the sound of that, so they declare that it’s exactly right to say that God does not send anyone to Hell. But then, contrary to both Lewis and themselves, they declare that God does send people to Hell, as a method of quarantining them away from His other children. In fact, according to G&T, God doesn’t even have any choice in the matter: He has to send people to Hell. Evil, you see, is more contagious than goodness and righteousness. Evil has the power to make good people turn bad, but goodness does not have the power to infect evil people and them good.

Kinda makes you think about the relative strength of good and evil, eh?

You say, “You Christians just want to scare people with hell!” No, we just want people to know the truth. If that scares them, maybe it should.  We certainly don’t like what the Bible says about hell. We wish it weren’t true. But Jesus, who is God, taught it, and for good reason. It seems to be necessary. Without a hell, injustices in this world would never be righted, the free choices of people would not be respected, and the greater good of a redemption could never be accomplished. If there is no heaven to seek and no hell to shun, then nothing in this universe has any ultimate meaning… We struggle through this life for no ultimate reason and Christ died for nothing. WIthout heaven and hell, this incredibly designed universe is a stairway to nowhere.

You might want to read that twice. G&T are claiming that without Hell, life would have no meaning, injustice would never be righted, and there would be no respect for free choice. And they also say that they don’t like what the Bible says about Hell. That may be partially true, since they clearly like what Lewis said better than what Jesus said. But while they certainly don’t want to be seen as being the kind of people who condone the eternal torture of the wicked, they’re clearly Hell’s fanboys, given the extremes they go to in order to try and make Hell sound like a good thing.

As for Hell being the only possible means by which injustices are righted, let’s think about that. What does Hell do to right injustices? What does quarantining the diseased do to right injustices? If you’re going to say that Hell rights injustices by torturing the evildoer, then let’s just go ahead and admit that we’re teaching a God who throws people in Hell for the purpose of torturing them. And then let’s admit that when God allows people to avoid Hell by believing in Jesus, the injustices they’ve committed go unrighted.

As for life having meaning without Hell, maybe Geisler and Turek should talk to some of their fellow Christians who do not believe in a literal, real Hell, and ask them if they do, in fact, find any meaning in life. Never mind asking atheists, who have no problem finding all kinds of meaning in life, without an evil sock-puppet god to threaten them. Just ask other Christians if their lives have meaning, without Hell.

They’re getting a bit warmer when they say that “redemption” is pretty pointless without Hell. After all, who needs a Savior if there’s nothing to be saved from, right? And this, I think, gets to the heart of the Christian ambivalence towards Hell. The doctrine is as horrid and barbaric today as it was when Zoroaster first invented it, but it’s an essential part of the Atonement myth. Jesus’ death was brutal and inhuman, so in order for it all to “make sense,” there must be some even more brutal and even more inhuman consequence that he averted by allowing himself to be crucified. Christians need Hell to help them continue to deny that Jesus’ death was as pointless as it was savage.

Chapter 15 ends with Geisler and Turek using a straw-man “atheist” to argue that life has no meaning, allowing them to retort that they have evidence that life does have meaning. It’s the same old game plan of pretending that Christianity is the only source of real meaning in life. Pure marketing bullshit, of course: not only are there other philosophies that find meaning in the universe, but Christianity isn’t very good at the meaning it does claim to provide.

Think about it: how intellectually and morally destitute does a religion need to be before it has to resort to Hell as an essential source of meaning? We’ve got a loving heavenly Father Who loves us so much that He wants us to be with Him forever in a two-way, intimate, personal relationship so close that marriage is only an approximation of the believer’s relationship with God. And oh, by the way, He has created a special place of fire and endless agony that is the ultimate eternal destination of most of His beloved children. And that’s the meaning of life.

Seriously?

Christianity finds meaning in mythic accounts of Ultimate Blessing and Ultimate Punishment in some far-future “next world,” and that’s because it sucks so bad at recognizing the meaning and purpose that are already present in this one. Ask a Christian to explain what meaning or purpose they find in this life, and they’ll fail. They may try to answer, but their answers will all be stories about things they believe happened in the invisibly-distant past, or the invisibly-distant future, in some world outside of our own. Ask for the present, material, here-and-now meaning and purpose of life, and they can’t do it. Not only does Christianity fail to teach them how to recognize materialistic meaning and purpose, it encourages believers to actively ignore even the possibility such things could exist.

And that’s basically where Geisler and Turek end the main body of their book: clinging to Christianity because they cannot acknowledge or even perceive the meaning of life outside their own narrow and superstitious world view. Their hypocritical boasts echo hollowly in a vast intellectual and moral wasteland, proclaiming that their confused and self-contradictory “evidence” has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Bible is Truth and that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian. Any honest reader will walk away unconvinced, unless of course he would prefer to be as deluded as Geisler and Turek. For those who truly yearn to believe, Geisler and Turek’s rationalizations will work as well as any other, I guess.

But wait, there’s more: the book has three Appendices: “If God, Why Evil?”, “Isn’t That Just Your Interpretation?” and “Why the Jesus Seminar Doesn’t Speak for Jesus.” Stay tuned.

Few things in life are as handy as a good rationalization. No matter where you start from, and no matter what the actual facts are, a good rationalization will always take  you to wherever you want to be. That’s deeply satisfying, if not strictly honest or wise.

The problem is that when you’re faced with a big problem, you sometimes feel the urge to draw on two or more rationalizations, to try and reinforce your position. That’s generally a bad idea. Rationalizations are not the truth, and do not benefit from the perfect self-consistency that is the hallmark of real-world facts. As soon as you start piling on different rationalizations, you begin to expose the inherent inconsistencies between them. Geisler and Turek provide us with yet another good example in this week’s installment of IDHEFBA.

We begin with a fairy tale romance, inspired by Kierkegaard (as interpreted by Philip Yancey).

The king was like no other king. Statesmen trembled before his power. No one dared breathe a word against him, for he had the strength to crush all opponents. And yet this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maid.

How could he declare his love for her? In an odd sort of way, his very kingliness tied his hands. If he brought her to the palace, and crowned her head with jewels and clothed her body in royal robes, she would surely not resist… But would she love him?

It’s a classic dilemma, at least for those in positions of extreme power: you want to know someone’s true feelings, yet you can never know whether the other person’s responses are due to genuine affection or whether they merely feign affection out of respect and/or fear of your great power. Not to give away the plot or anything, but the king here is supposed to stand for God.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. God is supposed to be able to see so deep into the human heart that he knows thoughts we ourselves don’t even know we’re thinking. But work with me here. It’s a rationalization. It doesn’t have to be consistent with the facts as long as it takes us to a desired conclusion via some sort of narrative plausibility.

So where were we? Oh yes, the king’s dilemma. Fortunately, the king is a genius. He thinks real hard and decides to disguise himself as someone else, and then see if the maid will fall in love with him for himself, without knowing about his royalty or power. Unfortunately for the folks at Disney Animation, the story ends there. There is no “happy ending,” because the point of the story is to make us believe that Jesus is really God, in disguise, coming down to us commoners, as a commoner, to see how we really feel.

Let’s pause here for a moment and give Kierkegaard his proper credit. This is a brilliant idea. Ok, perhaps it’s a bit obvious, but sometimes it takes genius to be the first to notice the obvious, and that’s really what we have here. If you’re an omnipotent God, and you want to know what people really think about you when you are, so to speak, not around, all you have to do is take on a more humble form, and then go spend some time with them, in person, in two-way face-to-face interaction.

So props to Kierkegaard. This is exactly what a real, loving God would do—and exactly what the Christian God does not do. If your goal is to find out how the commoner really feels, and especially if you want to give her a fair chance to decide whether she loves you or not, the best and only way to accomplish your goal is to do what any suitor would do: come courtin’ and spend time together. Thus, we can confidently conclude that the God-king of Kierkegaard’s story does not exist, because He does not show up to spend time with us. Thanks Søren!

Ok, back to Geisler and Turek. Our two intrepid apologists, naturally, intend that we should assume that Jesus was God in disguise, showing up in person (once!) because He’s looking for unbiased opinions about Himself. That might work for the small circle of people who actually met Jesus (assuming Jesus actually were God incarnate), but outside of that immediate circle, you lose the whole point of the exercise.

The point of the exercise, in Kierkegaard’s fairy tale, is that the God-king wants to obtain the commoner’s true opinion uninfluenced by His awesome reputation. Outside of the small circle of people who actually met Jesus, though, our opinions about Jesus have no alternative but to be based exclusively on—guess what?—his reputation. That’s all he left behind. He’s not here any more, and God does not show up in real life. Everything we know or think or feel today regarding Jesus is what we know, think, and feel based on what other men say about Jesus. Plus, if He had to come down among us in order to assess our reaction to Him, what will He do now that He’s gone? Either He didn’t really need to come down in the first place, or else His departure has left Him unable to fulfill His mission with regards to the rest of us.

What really comes through when you think about Kierkegaard’s fairy tale romance is how radically different reality is from the fantasies Christians have about their allegedly loving and humble deity. That fantasy is not enough for Geisler and Turek, though, who launch from this unfinished fairy tale right into a gruesome account of Jesus’ suffering, with a morbid fascination that goes into enough bloody detail to border on the pornographic (in the snuff porn sense of the word).

The connection, in Geisler and Turek’s mind, is the idea of Jesus as “The Suffering Servant.” Jesus, being a mighty King in heaven, is supposed to have humbled himself so that he could walk among us, not as our king, but as our servant. That’s the fairy tale connection, the link to a romantic young man willing to go to any lengths to approach his lady love. But there’s no happy ending here. Christians also have to rationalize Jesus’ brutal and violent death, and that’s where things get just a little creepy.

Remember, the original premise is that the whole point of becoming human was so that God could get an unbiased expression of how we feel about Him. He sets aside all the awesomeness and power and glory and so on so that we make up our minds about Him without being unduly pressured or swayed by His reputation. But that rationalization collides head on with the one that tries to explain why Jesus died such a violent death.

Geisler and Turek’s rationalization for the cross is that Jesus didn’t just take on the form of a servant, he became the Suffering Servant. That’s “Suffering,” with a capital Pain. Even though they open with a parable about how God wants our honest and unprejudiced response, they then proceed with a literal blow-by-blow description of every bruise, every wound, every tiny hot sliver of agony experienced by Jesus, in order to impress on us how cruel and unfair it would be for us to fail to offer our love to him in return.

Yeah, no pressure.

I’ll spare you the two-and-a-half pages of sadistic glory that Geisler and Turek use to (pardon the expression) drive home their point. But you get my drift. Christians are in denial, and have been for 2,000 years. Their religious leader ticked off the wrong guys, and they came down on him with predictable vengeance, and he lost. His disciples have never accepted that, and have come up with all kinds of rationalizations for why things turned out the way they did. The rationalizations are confused, contradictory, and downright creepy, and they blindly overlook what a real God would really do if He were truly willing and able to participate in a tangible, personal relationship with us.

Up next: Geisler and Turek promise to share with us the “box top” to the jigsaw puzzle of life. Stay tuned.

We’ve made it at last to Chapter 15, the traditional “altar call” with which many preachers end their Sunday sermon. Without any hint of intentional irony, Geisler and Turek are going to end I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an Atheist by urging us to have faith in Jesus. And they base this appeal, not on verifiable evidence or rational logic, but on emotion. And a rather selfish emotion at that.

A young man is brought before a judge for drunk driving. When his name is announced by the bailiff, there’s a gasp in the courtroom—the defendant is the judge’s son! The judge hopes his son is innocent, but the evidence is irrefutable. He’s guilty.

What can the judge do? He’s caught in a dilemma between justice and love. Since his son is guilty, he deserves punishment. But the judge doesn’t want to punish his son because of his great love for him.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this story already, parable or not. For example, the honest thing for this judge to do would be to recuse himself from the case. There’s a clear conflict of interest here, and whatever decision the judge makes, it’s not going to be impartial. For the judge to proceed is unethical and unfair, both to society and to his son.

Secondly, notice what a terrible parenting philosophy is expressed in that last line. The judge loves his son, therefore he does not want his son to receive a fair punishment for his genuine offenses? Whatever happened to “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him”? Not that I would recommend corporal punishment, of course, (there are much better alternatives available), but still, if a parent has to object to the idea of punishing his kid, then there’s something wrong with either the punishment or the parent.

The story doesn’t stop here, of course. The judge is about to do something “wonderful.”

He reluctantly announces the sentence. “Son, you can either pay a $5,000 fine or go to jail.”

The son looks up at the judge and says, “But Dad, I promise to be good from now on. I’ll volunteer at the soup kitchens. I’ll visit the elderly. I’ll even open a home to care for abused children. And I’ll never do anything wrong again! Please let me go!”

At this point, the judge asks, “Are you still drunk? You can’t do all of that. But even if you could, your future good deeds can’t change the fact that you’re already guilty of drunk driving.” Indeed, the judge realizes that good works cannot cancel bad works! Perfect justice demands that his son be punished for what he has done.

So the judge repeats, “I’m sorry, Son. As much as I’d like to allow you to go, I’m bound by the law. The punishment for this crime is $5,000 or you go to jail.”

The son pleads with his father, “But, Dad, you know I don’t have $5,000. There has to be another way.”

I’ll spare you the full force of G&T’s fiction-writing skills, but in summary, the judge very dramatically gets down from the bench, takes off his robe, and hands his son $5,000 so that he can get out of jail free. In a presumably tearful and moving moment, the son accepts the money and realizes the point the authors of his story are trying to make:

There’s nothing else he can do. Good works or promises of good works cannot set him free. Only the acceptance of his father’s free gift can save the son from certain punishment.

At this point, we the readers are expected to identify with the son. We’re supposed to feel like we’re undeniably guilty and that we’re facing a just and fearsome punishment, and that God, our Heavenly Father is offering us a chance to escape the just consequences of our own deeds.

Let’s just think about that for a minute. This is the altar call. This is the fisherman casting his nets and seeing who he can reel in. This is 2,000 years’ worth of Christian experience in attracting the sort of believer who is most likely to respond and convert. And it’s targeted at people who identify with the drunk driver who, despite his undeniable guilt, wants to walk out of court a free man.

Who is likely to respond to this appeal? Is this going to attract the sort of person whose standards of morality and ethics are offended by a judge deliberately “gaming the system” in order to obtain benefits for some defendants that he would not bestow on others? No. This particular appeal is aimed at people who take selfish pleasure in the idea of escaping the just consequences of their own evil deeds. Makes you wonder about prison ministries, doesn’t it?

There’s lots we could say about the ethical, moral and judicial implications of the judge’s actions in this story. For example, are the judge’s actions good? If they are, why don’t we try it on all drunk drivers? Bring them in, and tell them that if they plead guilty, they will be assessed an unaffordably large fine, which some employee of the state will then freely give them the money to pay so that they can go home free. Wouldn’t that be great?

Or there’s the question of the judge’s degree of guilt for the consequences if his own actions. Suppose that, early the next morning, while returning from the bar where he was celebrating his narrow escape from justice, the son drunkenly swerves across the center line and head-on into a minivan, killing seven young schoolchildren coming home late from a multi-day field trip. Does the judge bear any moral accountability for enabling his son’s behavior and sparing him a jail term in which he might have had time to think about his situation and enroll in some kind of self-help program?

None of those ethical, moral, or intellectual issues are of any concern to Geisler and Turek. This is an emotional appeal. You’re not supposed to think about it. You’re supposed to dwell on your own feelings of guiltiness, and your own desire to escape justice. You’re supposed to be feeling the elation of believing that God has found some way to let you escape accountability for your own actions and choices, by appealing to the principle of “negotiable guilt.”

What’s the only way God can remain just but not punish us for our sins? He must punish a sinless substitute who voluntarily takes our punishment for us (sinless because the substitute must pay for our sins, not for his own; and voluntary because it would be unjust to punish the substitute against his will).

It’s a good thing we’re not thinking, and are merely wallowing in our own guilt and despair, because if we were thinking we might realize that this kind of “negotiable guilt” is about as corrupt a system as you could come up with. What on earth is the point of justice if it’s not going to punish those who are, in fact, the true perpetrators of the offense that’s being punished? What is the purpose of punishment if it is merely bad things happening to people who have done nothing to deserve them?

What we have here is neither a system of justice nor a system of morals. All we have are guilty people who are not being punished, and innocent people who are. Geisler and Turek make the stipulation that the victims have to volunteer (as though suicide were some sort of virtue), but does that really matter? If the whole system so corrupt that it harms the innocent to benefit the guilty, then is it really an act of virtue to volunteer to help?

Geisler and Turek drive on, oblivious to the moral implications of what they are saying.

Where can God find a sinless substitute? Not from sinful humanity, but only from himself. Indeed, God himself is the substitute. Just as the judge came down from his bench to save his child, God came down from heaven to save you and me from punishment. And we all deserve punishment. I do. You do.

Let’s try and look past the outright creepiness of those last three sentences and think back to the parable Geisler and Turek are telling. In the parable, the child is guilty, and the father/judge pronounces a sentence, and then personally pays the fine that he himself just imposed. But why the elaborate sham? Why not just say, “Son, tell you what, I know you can’t pay this fine, so you don’t have to. I’ll just let you go free.”

In real life we’d say, “The judge has no power or authority to do that; he has to obey the law.” The judge, you see, is not the source of the law, but is merely an officer of a higher authority. But Geisler and Turek are using this judge to represent God, who supposedly is the source of all laws and is himself the highest possible authority. What higher authority is there Who is telling God that He can and must harm somebody, whether or not they’re guilty? Who is the greater God Who is telling God that once some innocent person has suffered, it’s ok for Him to let the guilty off the hook?

In the story, the judge gives the son the money to pay the fine, thus subverting the law while maintaining the outward appearance of upholding it. In real life, this money would be paid to the higher authority, i.e. the state. If the judge is really God, though, then what higher authority does He pay the fine to? If He must pay it to Himself, then has the fine really been paid? If I write a check from myself to myself, has any actual money changed hands? Again, it’s a sham, a fake transaction designed to give the appearance of upholding the law while actually subverting it.

Amazingly, Geisler and Turek take it even further.

[A] perfectly just God must punish bad deeds regardless of how many good ones someone has performed. Once we’ve sinned against an eternal Being—and we all have—we deserve eternal punishment, and no good deed can change that fact.

As if their legal and moral system wasn’t already corrupt enough, Geisler and Turek now propose that punishments be based, not on the seriousness of the crime, or on the harm it causes to others, but on the duration of the person taking offense at what you’ve done. You and I, according to Geisler and Turek, deserve eternal punishment, not because we’re guilty of offenses we kept committing for all of eternity, but merely because the Person we’ve offended is an eternal Being. A truly amazing legal principle, and so self-evident. That’s why crimes against the elderly deserve to be punished so much more than crimes against infants, doncha know. (Sheesh!)

This is what superstition leads to. When you base your concept of justice and morality on the confused conclusions that primitive people jumped to whenever they didn’t understand how the world works, you end up with a confused and superstitious system of morality and justice. You end up recruiting people by offering them a chance to scam the system, using a ploy that benefits the guilty by punishing the innocent, who suicidally volunteer to help you pull it off by arranging their own deaths. And then you see what kind of people respond to this sort of appeal, and what kind of people you end up with in the church, and you wonder why they have such serious problems with morality and justice. Go figure, eh?

Not that Christians are any worse people than anyone else, of course. It’s not that the people themselves are bad (despite Geisler and Turek’s insistence to the contrary). But the church is promoting a corrupt moral system that is the foundational basis for everything else they preach, and they’re appealing to people based on that corrupt moral system. By responding and converting based on the appeal of that system, people are committing themselves to a path that cannot escape the corruption of its own foundation. Especially when it is continually preached, via pulpits, books, broadcasts, and Internet, as the core of what Christians believe.

Christians, like most people, are basically good, but even good people can be led astray by corrupt and superstitious systems. The first step in recovery is to acknowledge the problem. And this story of the subversive judge, and his unjust treatment of his own son, is a fairly typical example of the Christian problem.

Last week, Geisler and Turek were explaining how they avoid finding errors in the Bible: “[W]hen we run across something inexplicable, we assume that we, not the infinite God, are making an error.” Cool, eh? They realize that things aren’t adding up the way they should. But instead of acknowledging that the Bible is broken, they simply assume that the fault is the reader’s and therefore not the Scripture’s, QED.

Not surprisingly, this inspires them to try and lead us to the following conclusion:

Unlike most other religious worldviews, Christianity is built on historical events and can therefore be either proven or falsified by historical investigation… If after 2,000 years of looking, no one can find the remains of Jesus or real errors in the Bible, isn’t it quite possible that neither exist?

Most people who died 2,000 years ago have indeed ceased to exist, without necessarily being resurrected gods incarnate. Neither are real errors absent from the Bible—all that’s missing is an honest acknowledgment of their existence (on the part of certain believers, anyway). Yes, 2,000 years of denial is arguably impressive, in a morbid sort of way, but it’s hardly a historical proof of Christianity.

So the historical argument falls a little flat, but Geisler and Turek have two more arguments that they’re going to use to try and prove their point: an appeal to science, and an appeal to slander.

[A]fter many years of continual and careful study of the Bible, we can only conclude that those who have “discovered a mistake” in the Bible do not know too much about the Bible—they know too little. This doesn’t mean that we understand how to resolve all the difficulties in the Scriptures, but it means we keep doing research. We really are no different than scientists who can’t resolve all the difficulties or mysteries of the natural world. They don’t deny the integrity of the natural world just because they can’t explain something. Like a scientist of the natural world, a scientist of theology keeps looking for answers.

Ooo, give those men a white lab coat. Theologians are scientists.

Notice what they’re saying, though. After proudly declaring that 2,000 years of searching have failed to discover any “real errors” in the Bible, they’re back-handedly admitting that there are indeed difficulties that even the most earnest and pious Christian rationalizations cannot resolve. Who is to say that some of these known problems are not, after all, “real errors”?

Geisler and Turek can’t hand-wave them away, so they try and distract us with a different rationalization, by saying that “mysteries” in the Bible are like scientific mysteries in the real world. We don’t know all there is to know about the real world, so we shouldn’t expect to know all there is to know about the Bible either. When theologians keep on believing despite known problems in the Bible, they’re just acting the same way a scientist would. Right?

There are many obvious flaws with this argument, starting with the fact that competent scientists know better than to simply assume that all contrary observations are in error. If you find that the actual data does not match the conditions that would result from your hypothesis being true, you don’t merely discard the observation, you modify your hypothesis, or abandon it entirely. To arbitrarily dismiss contrary evidence is to betray a serious lack of scientific objectivity and integrity.

Likewise, competent scientists would not declare that there was a complete absence of contrary data when they knew there were observations that could not currently be explained in terms of the original hypothesis, and which could falsify it. Geisler and Turek deny the existence of “real errors” despite knowing about the currently irresolvable “difficulties.” The most an honest scientist could claim is “we do not know that the Bible is inerrant, since there are still unresolved obstacles preventing us from reaching that conclusion.”

Unlike other scientists, theologians don’t deal with real-world observations that can be repeated, re-measured and re-validated by objective third-party observers. The difficulties faced by real-world scientists stem from the fact that reality is a complicated place.  Theology, by contrast, is difficult because the data consists of the things written by men who died millennia ago, and whose culture, language, and thoughts are anywhere from relatively inaccessible to completely impenetrable.

In other words, theology is a “science” that studies what goes on (or went on) in the minds of men who are no longer available. God does not show up in real life, so theological “scientists” can’t do their work the way other scientists do. The process of theology is more akin to that of the fiction writer than the biologist: you take the story as it has been told thus far, and try to think up a plausible scenario that takes it where you want it to go, and thus the “discovery” is made.

This leads to a pattern of development that I discussed in my post about Mt. Sinai and the burning bush. Studying something that exists in reality results in a converging understanding of the topic, as all scientists converge on the same real-world target they’re searching for. Studying something imaginary results in a divergent understanding of the topic, as each pioneer contributes some new and different perspective not necessarily compatible with other branches on the same bush. If we look at the history of scientific thought, and the history of theological thought, it’s quite clear which pattern shows up in which science (or “science”).

We could go on, but I want to save time for the last argument in Chapter 14: the slander.

Finally, it’s the critics who actually maintain an unfalsifiable position. What would convince them that their view is wrong?… Maybe they ought to consider the evidence we’ve presented in this book. Unfortunately, many critics will not do this. They will not allow facts to interfere with their desire to maintain control over their own lives. After all, if a critic were to admit that the Bible is true, he’d have to admit that he no longer calls all the shots. There would be an Authority in the universe greater than himself, and that Authority might not approve of the life the critic wants to lead.

In other words, if you notice that Ezekiel prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre utterly so that it would never be rebuilt, and that centuries later, Tyre was still a thriving seaport visited by Paul, it only seems like a contradiction because you enjoy raping small furry animals. That’s the critics’ dirty little secret, you see. They’re all just a bunch of cartoon bad guys who want to do bad things just because, well, they’re cartoon bad guys and that’s the way bad guys behave. No, seriously, they do. It’s in all the cartoons.

It’s kind of fitting, in a way, that Geisler and Turek chose to end Chapter 14 with the theologian’s equivalent of a sniveling “I know you are but what am I?” Or as Jesus put it, “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like other men…”

It’s especially ironic that they would end Chapter 14 on such a low note, because this is really the last argument in the main body of their book. Chapter 15 is basically the “altar call” portion of the sermon, an emotional appeal rather than an intellectual one. And this last half-hearted attempt at intellectual argument is not only morally bankrupt, it’s intellectually moribund as well.

Take the accusation that the critics are maintaining an unfalsifiable position. “Unfalsifiable” means you’ve phrased your position in such a way as to preclude the possibility, under any reasonably conceivable set of circumstances, that your conclusion could be admitted to be wrong. For example, if you say “any ‘difficulty’ in the Bible is, by definition, an error on the part of the reader rather than an error on the part of the Bible,” then you’ve created an unfalsifiable defense of the proposition that the Bible contains no errors. No matter what errors we find in the Bible, the apologist automatically classifies it as an error that is not in the Bible, so his claim of inerrancy can never be falsified, by definition.

That’s something very different from the problem we face when we can’t prove that something is false because the fact is that it is actually true, or vice versa. It’s not that there is no reasonably conceivable set of circumstances that would convince the critic that the Resurrection was true, and in fact it’s pretty easy to determine what evidence would constitute reasonable grounds for believing.

Just to cite one obvious example, let’s suppose that Jesus died, and rose from the dead, and appeared in Jerusalem, in a living, physical, glorified resurrection body, teaching both believer and unbeliever alike and was still there. Is there anyone out there who enjoys puppy-raping so much that they would still deny the Resurrection with a 2,000-year-old Jesus still living and teaching and revealing God’s will to us in the same city where he originally rose? Would denial of the facts even be a rational strategy for preserving one’s individual liberty?

The problem isn’t that we can’t describe the sort of evidence we ought to be seeing if the Bible were true. The problem is that the question “What would it take to convince you that the Bible is true?” turns out to be a lot like the question “What would it take to convince you that there’s a fully-grown, hungry, carnivorous T-rex standing 50 centimeters behind you?” In each case, if the claim were true, the most fundamental and obvious consequences would be rather unmistakable. That you even need to ask the question is sufficient to show that the claim itself is false.

And by the way, Geisler and Turek’s baseless slander notwithstanding, Bible critics don’t really have a problem submitting to genuine, legitimate authority. We submit to higher authorities all the time. We obey our governments, our police, our teachers, our coaches, and others. We pay our taxes just like everyone else, and have a moral history that’s typically as good as that of our Bible-believing fellows, or better. And of course, the laws of Nature are a kind of higher authority, and we submit to those as gladly as any believer. And again, sometimes more so.

Our only problem is with men who claim an authority based on uncritically taking their word for it that some invisible and all-powerful Person wants us to do what they say. It’s not that we don’t have faith, it’s just that we make a distinction between faith and gullibility. Pardon us if we examine your evidence, and then decline to start writing you checks. If you want real belief, provide real evidence.

So, then, from a real-world perspective, Geisler and Turek have absolutely no grounds for their self-righteous innuendo. It comes, sad to say, from a long history of Christians smearing their critics and spreading unsavory rumors about unbelievers. Nor is this merely an unfortunate manifestation of perverse human nature—Christians are required to believe in the fundamental evil of all non-believers. If unbelievers could be moral and upright without a supernatural Savior and a Holy Spirit, what would be the advantage of being a Christian?

And there you have it. After 14 chapters and 374 pages, Geisler and Turek’s intellectual argument comes to an end not with a bang, but a whimper. We’ll still go through the “altar call” in chapter 15, and maybe even an appendix or two (Appendix I is “The Problem of Evil”!). But from here, we can safely conclude that Geisler and Turek have failed, and failed miserably, to establish their claim that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian. They gave it a good shot and tried their best, but in the absence of a God Who actually shows up in the real world, it was just too hard. If you have to try and argue God into existence, it’s already a lost cause.

WARNING: Before reading the following statement by Geisler and Turek, you should turn off your irony meter, remove the battery, unplug the recharger, and store all components in separate rooms of your house.

Critics may also charge, “But your position on inerrancy is not falsifiable. You will not accept an error in the Bible because you’ve decided in advance that there can’t be any!” Actually, our position is falsifiable, but the critics’ position is not. Let us explain.

First, because Jesus’ authority is well established by the evidence, we reasonably give benefit of the doubt to the Bible when we come across a difficulty or question in the text. In other words, when we run across something inexplicable, we assume that we, not the infinite God, are making an error.

Yes, when disproving the claim that you’re merely assuming Biblical inerrancy, what better way to start than by boldly and proudly declaring that you do assume any error is not the Bible’s?

Geisler and Turek, of course, are just trying to follow the standard rhetorical practice of beginning your argument by conceding that there is a legitimate question or problem that your position needs to address. It’s a common enough practice (and the source of a great many creationist quote mines, when followed by scientists). First you declare the problem, and then you proceed to explain how your position addresses that problem.

What Geisler and Turek don’t seem to realize, though, is that by admitting that they simply assume the Bible cannot be wrong, they’re conceding a lot more here than is good for their position.

They try to make their position look legitimate because they say they are only making this assumption in the context of Jesus’ authority, which is “well established by the evidence.” The “evidence” that allegedly establishes Jesus’ authority, however, is the Bible itself, when read under the assumption that it contains no errors. In essence, they’re admitting that the critics are right: they do reach their position on inerrancy by deciding in advance that the Bible cannot contain any errors, and is thus able to establish Jesus’ authority so that his authority can be used to justify the assumption that the Bible contains no errors.

Nor does their argument improve when they try to make it sound like their position is nevertheless falsifiable. The term “falsifiable,” when used correctly, refers to a statement that has been phrased in such a way that we can determine what consequences would result from the statement being true, as opposed to the consequences that would result from it being untrue, so that when we look at the real world, we can determine which set of consequences have actually occurred.

Geisler and Turek aren’t using “falsifiable” in that sense. Instead, they merely hand-wave, setting up an impossible standard of falsification, and then saying, “There, if you can just do that, then you will have disproven our position.” They don’t want to really know if their position is false or not, they just want to set up a pretext for claiming that critics have failed to falsify it. But here, let’s let Geisler and Turek explain it themselves.

[T]hat doesn’t mean that we believe there’s absolutely no possibility for Bible errors. After all, there’s always a chance that our conclusions about inerrancy are wrong—for we are certainly not inerrant. In fact, our conclusion on inerrancy would be falsified if someone could trace a real error back to an original scroll.

You see the catch-22 here. To falsify their position on inerrancy, you must first provide a real error that can be traced back to an original manuscript. Their assumption, however, is that the Bible cannot have any real errors, because God cannot make mistakes. Any error found by any critic is thus, by definition, not a real error, or at least not an error in the manuscript itself.

In other words, all we need to do to meet Geisler and Turek’s standard of falsification is to provide them with something that, by definition, cannot exist. That’s “falsification,” apologetics-style. And even Geisler and Turek seem to have some suspicion that Biblical inerrancy isn’t really a viable position, because their next argument is to try and claim that Christianity don’t need no steenkin inerrancy anyway.

[E]ven if inerrancy is falsified someday, that wouldn’t falsify the central truths of Christianity. As we have seen, the historical evidence that Jesus taught profound truths, performed miracles, and died and rose from the dead for sinful humanity is very strong indeed. Even if the Scriptures are found to contain a false detail or two, the historical truth of Christianity will not be diminished.

The problem, of course, is that the “historical truth” of Christianity is rather dependent on the assumption that the Bible cannot be wrong about anything. If there’s the possibility that some parts of the Bible might not be quite accurate, then it behooves us to subject all of the Bible’s claims to some real-world verification, to discover which parts are true, and which are embellishments, misinterpretations, or even outright deceptions.

Traditional Christian beliefs tend to do rather poorly when subjected to that kind of critical examination, though, and Geisler and Turek hasten to reassure their readers that they do not, in fact, believe that the Bible will ever be falsified. But just in case it ever is, you know, you can still go on believing what the Bible teaches anyway. Just keep on trusting what men say about God even after you discover that they don’t always tell the truth. That’s what they call faith (and what I call gullibility).

We’ll close today’s post with a look at one last pose of fake open-mindedness and falsifiability.

Is there any discovery that would cause us to disbelieve Christianity? Yes. If someone could find the body of Jesus, Christianity would be proven false and we’d give up.

Of course, since they assume Jesus did rise from the dead, they’ll naturally assume that any remains you show them must have belonged to someone else. It’s not like we have Jesus’ DNA in storage somewhere for reference. Anyone who can claim, with a straight face, that all the errors in the Bible are due to mistakes on the part of the reader, is going to have no problem at all denying that some ancient corpse ever belonged to Jesus. It’s a no-brainer (in more ways than one).

Notice what Geisler and Turek did not say: they did not say that they would disbelieve Christianity if you could examine the consequences that would result from the Gospel being true, and the consequences that would result from the Gospel being a myth, and could observe that real-world conditions are far more consistent with the myth hypothesis than with the Gospel hypothesis.

That would be a reasonable, rational way to approach the question, but it wouldn’t be guaranteed to lead to the desired conclusion. So instead they set up a goal that will be impossible for any critic to meet, a standard of falsification that could be thwarted by simply denying that the evidence is “convincing” (in the highly unlikely event of the evidence being discovered at all).

Geisler and Turek know that there is some value in being open to the evidence, and they want to make a show of being open to having their ideas falsified. But in the end it’s just empty posing. They’re not interested in reasonable and rational standards of evidence, and it shows in the arbitrary and unrealistic demands they make of those who would seek to convince them.

We’ve reached the part of the chapter where Geisler and Turek pretend to answer the objections of critics, or at least something resembling critics.

Critics may say, “Humans err, so the Bible must err.” But again it’s the critic who is in error. True, humans err, but humans don’t always err. Fallible people write books all the time that have no errors. So fallible people who are guided by the Holy Spirit can write a book without errors.

Geisler and Turek don’t know it, but this brief paragraph—almost a throwaway—brings up a very significant point that will tell against them in their subsequent argument. Maybe it was just an uneasy, guilty feeling: we just got done looking at all 17 “errors” that Dr. Geisler accuses Bible critics of making, but that list came from a different book. In this book, they only looked at four of those “errors,” and the previous section ended with Geisler and Turek accusing critics (yes, critics) of forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics.

That’s perilously close to admitting that the Bible isn’t really the divinely amazing authority that they think it should be. It’s understandable, then, that they would immediately follow that near-confession with a hurried protest that “of course that doesn’t mean a human book can’t be perfect.” They can’t quite deny that their Scripture has an unmistakably human quality, with all the weaknesses that implies, but they want to assert, regardless, that it is still infallible. So to reassure themselves, they imagine a straw “critic” making the silly argument that the Bible must be wrong because people can be wrong. Easily refuted, but it brings up that one tiny critical point…

Genuine critics, of course, wouldn’t bother arguing that the Bible must be wrong just because people are fallible. They don’t need to: there’s plenty of instances of contradictions and factual errors in the Bible, and those are so much more fun to point out anyway. Geisler and Turek are merely confronting their own uneasy suspicion that the Bible does indeed look like the product of human effort rather than the divine revelation they want it to be. So to buttress their faith, they argue that, even though people can be wrong some times, they can also be right.

That’s a misstep, because what that means is that it’s possible for people to be right about some things and wrong about others at the same time. Humans are fallible: they’re capable of making mistakes even though they don’t always make mistakes. And that means that we can’t assume that a person must be wrong about everything in order to be wrong about anything.

Yet that’s precisely the assumption Geisler and Turek made repeatedly in their discussion of the New Testament manuscripts. Zeroing in on Luke the Evangelist, they pointed out 80-some instances where Luke’s record is consistent with what we know about inconsequential background details like contemporary trade routes, major political figures, and other trivial cultural details. If Luke were going to be wrong about the supernatural stuff, we’re supposed to assume that he would necessarily be wrong about the trivial details as well. We’re supposed to forget that humans can be wrong about some things even when they’re right about others.

Remember, the only truly infallible standard is reality itself, which is why Geisler and Turek appeal to that standard when trying to argue that no detail of Luke’s account can possibly be false or mistaken. Yet even though they use it to judge the reliability of Luke’s mundane account, they mysteriously fail to judge his supernatural claims by the same standard. Even though we know that men are fallible and that all their claims need to be compared to a standard of verifiable objective reality, they treat Luke’s account as though men must either be right about everything, or be wrong about everything. They assume that if Luke got mundane trivialities right, he must have been absolutely infallible about everything he wrote.

They then compound their error by trying to deny that they are reasoning in a circle when it comes to Scriptural infallibility.

“But arent you just arguing in a circle,” the critic might ask, “by using the Bible to prove the Bible?” No, we’re not arguing in a circle, because we’re not starting with the assumption that the Bible is an inspired book.

(Just a quick aside: it’s nice to see Geisler and Turek suddenly remembering, for a change, what their book is supposed to be about. Obviously, they started writing I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST under the assumption that “God’s inspired Word” needed some human help, but still, after so many chapters of heedlessly dogmatic apologetic, it’s nice that they occasionally remember the pretense they’re supposed to be putting on.)

We’re starting with several separate documents that have proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be historically reliable. Since those documents reveal that Jesus is God, then we know his teaching on the Old Testament must be true…

And so on and so  on, yada yada yada. Charles Darwin’s observations have been repeatedly verified and validated by thousands of scientists working in fields as diverse as biology, zoology, paleontology, genetics, organic chemistry and even (indirectly) by astronomy, cosmology and nuclear physics, yet that wasn’t enough to establish evolution beyond a reasonable doubt back in Chapter 6. Meanwhile, Luke reports that Paul crossed the Mediterranean Sea by getting into something called a “boat,” and that’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt that all of the claims of the New Testament writers are historically reliable.

And Geisler and Turek want us to believe this, even though they know that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics, written by fallible people who can be wrong about some things even when they’re right about others. And even though the claimed deity of Jesus is based on the things that can’t be shown to be consistent with verifiable reality, details they simply assume are infallible, they deny that they’re assuming the infallibility of the Bible in order to prove the infallibility of the Bible.

They lie.

But maybe that’s not intentional. Maybe, being fallible men themselves, they’re merely mistaken about their own assumptions, and about the fundamental honesty and integrity that ought to be the basis for their book—and isn’t. Maybe they’re simply unaware that their thinking and perceptions are being warped into a fallible and outright deceptive system called a Christian worldview. Maybe they just haven’t realized that if you have to play games with the facts in order to justify your beliefs, it’s a sign that your beliefs aren’t true.

I’m not going to try and second-guess their motives here. The fact remains, though, that by marketing this book they are marketing a seriously malfunctioning and mind-crippling system of thought, as demonstrated by their own inability to recognize and acknowledge the fallacies at the core of their apologetic. Whether or not Geisler and Turek ought to be accused of intentional deception, their product remains a lie, and is worthy of exposure and opposition. And I’m only too happy to oblige.

Time to wrap up our side-trip into Dr. Norm Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We’ll pick up today with number 13 on his list of “errors” allegedly made by critics. And 13 seems to be Dr. Geisler’s lucky number because this one is an arguably genuine error:

13. Assuming that round numbers are false.

A good example of this would be the passage about the basin in Solomon’s Temple that, according to the Bible, was ten cubits in diameter and thirty cubits in circumference. As any good geometry student knows, a circle with a 10 cubit diameter would have a circumference of 10 x pi, or roughly 31.416 cubits. Technically speaking, the Bible is “wrong” by about one and a half cubits. But frankly, that’s just being picky. Rounding off awkward numbers is a perfectly normal, acceptable, and understandable practice in ordinary speech (like I did just now with the “one and a half” reference). Besides, there are much more significant errors that disprove Biblical inerrancy much more definitively, so it’s really not worth pressing this particular issue.

The next point isn’t quite so lucky for Dr. Geisler.

14. Neglecting to note that the bible uses different literary devices.

Yeah, the guy who sincerely and with great conviction argues that the creation myths in Genesis 1-10 must be literally true, is accusing Bible critics of failing to recognize the fact that the Bible uses different literary devices to make its points. This is another argument that would be fun to look at in Dr. Geisler’s book itself, because it’s dollars to donuts that he’s using this argument only when the Bible says something he disagrees with. I’ve had similar conversations with creationists, when I pointed out that the Bible uniformly and consistently refers to heaven as a physical location in the sky over Palestine. We know that there’s no throne of God above some “firmament” floating in the sky, and therefore Biblical references to heaven are all metaphor, doncha know. Even when real people allegedly travel, physically, to and from there. Awesome.

15. Forgetting that only the original text, not every copy of scripture, is without error.

Another fun one. Despite the claim that God wants the Bible to be our sole infallible source of moral and spiritual authority, the fact remains that there is nothing magical or supernatural preventing Bibles from containing errors. Even apart from the issue of different translations, not all Bible manuscripts agree, even in the original Greek and Hebrew. There are pieces of the text that have variant readings, and other parts where scholars aren’t sure what the original words and/or meaning were.

Now granted, this amounts to really a very small percentage of the text. Just enough, in fact, to belie the claim that the Bibles we have today are literally infallible. But the discrepancies are there, and consequently Bible scholars have to come up with an excuse to cover the problem. And they have: they assure us that it’s only the original manuscripts that are infallible and without error, and therefore the mistakes we see right in front of us are merely copyists’ errors.

And how do we know that the mistake was not present in the original also? Well, we don’t have the originals, so you can’t prove that the mistake was there, right? Sadly, for some people, that’s all the “proof” they need. But I expect Dr. Geisler would appeal to another argument: textual criticism.

Textual criticism is the art and science of reconstructing the original text by tracing the ancestry of each variant reading. This is exactly the same sort of technique that Drs. Geisler and Turek rejected when discussing the techniques used by evolutionists to trace the ancestry of variant species. Somehow, though, Dr. Geisler has absolutely no qualms about using these same methods to reconstruct the evolution of variant texts in the transmission of the Scriptures.

Nor should he. It’s a perfectly valid technique, and it works just as well and just as reliably whether you’re applying it to uncials or palimpsests or endogenous retroviruses. The problem is that it doesn’t always let you reconstruct the original text exactly and entirely, leaving you with a “preferred reading” that still does not eliminate all the problems and ambiguities. And it doesn’t work for the Old Testament at all, because a group of rabbis called the Masoretes went through and came up with their own OT canon by the simple expedient of destroying all the other variants. Only the Dead Sea scrolls are known to have escaped (and not all of those texts have been released by the Israeli government, which makes you wonder what’s in them that needs to be kept so secret, eh?).

16. Confusing general statements with universal ones.

Aka the “all does not mean all” defense. Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible,” but what he actually meant by that was that with God, all things that are possible are possible. Um, yeah, it would be hard for a statement like that to be false, don’t you think? You could use that slogan to sell a lot of things. “With Smirnoff, all things that are possible, are possible.” Hey, I’ll buy that!

What Dr. Geisler claims is an error made by critics is really a quibble raised by apologists, and it’s based on a fundamental and inescapable weakness of all Scripture-based authority systems: interpretations are debatable. You have to interpret a document, because a text can’t explain itself. It’s not like a living prophet or apostle, whom you could dialog with and who could clarify what he meant by this or that term. If the Bible says that “all Israel will be saved” and some critic points out that not all Israel will be saved, you can quibble over what “all” means, or what “saved” means, or who “Israel” refers to. There’s no objective, external, and unambiguous standard for determining which interpretation is correct. Every believer is free to believe whatever interpretation seems right in his own eyes.

Thus, whenever a critic points out problems with what the Bible says, whether it’s about general/universal statements or anything else a critic might see as a problem, Dr. Geisler can claim that the critic is merely committing an error of interpretation. He does not need to prove, or even define, what the “correct” interpretation should be, and he can even change his own interpretation in midstream as needed to dodge the issue of the moment. There’s no fixed standard for what the correct interpretation must be, and therefore it’s always safe for the apologist to accuse the critic of having a wrong interpretation.

17. Forgetting that latter revelation supersedes previous revelation.

That’s what’s so great about Eternal, Universal and Unchanging Truth—when your side wins the theological debate, you get to pick a new Eternal, Universal and Unchanging Truth. It “supersedes” the old Truth, like magic. And if you call now, we’ll even let you keep your old Truth, absolutely free!

In science, new discoveries supersede old ones because the old ones were fallible and inaccurate, and subject to improvement as we learn more about the real world. Christian apologists, however, have to maintain the myth that the Bible does not contradict itself, and has never been fallible or inaccurate. How do they do it? Easy: when you find a problem with the teachings of the Old Testament, they just say, “Oh, that doesn’t matter, because we have the New Testament now.” The problem has been “superseded,” allowing the apologist to simply gloss over it and ignore it.

But you can’t get rid of a problem just by declaring that the old Infallible Truth has now been superseded. If you’re going to have an Eternal and Unchanging God, with an Eternal and Unchanging Moral Law that dictates what it does and does not take to please Him, then sweeping and significant changes in His alleged True Faith should not happen. There shouldn’t be a need for reforms. God shouldn’t have released a version that He knew was going to need radical changes for the 2.0 release. Poor quality control is a sign of shoddy workmanship.

Ok, that’s a bit facetious. What it’s really a sign of is men taking an old religion and simply adapting it to new purposes (predictably, with themselves as the ones in charge of the new religion).

This goes back to the whole Myth Hypothesis vs Gospel Hypothesis issue. If you begin by knowing that Christianity must be the One True Faith, and you work your way backwards to some plausible-sounding scenario directed at achieving your apologetic goals, then you can sketch out a plot in which some already-established religion lends its “brand recognition” to your new faith just before being “superseded” by it. But that’s rationalization, thinking backwards to achieve a predetermined conclusion.

If we start with the premise that there exists a loving Heavenly Father Who knows how to save His children from Hell, why not just do that first? It’s just as educational, and beneficial, and it rescues untold numbers of innocent animals from being made to suffer so that wicked humans can escape the consequences of their sins. There’s no need to start off with some imperfect Old Religion that would need to be superseded. Just do it the right way first.

So if we think about the logical consequences of each hypothesis, it’s easy to see that the facts are much more consistent with the theory that Christianity is just men essentially vampirizing Judaism. Christianity, being a mere human invention, needs to attach itself to Judaism in order to absorb its established legitimacy—having no life of its own (to start with) it needs a living host to feed from. A genuine religion, ordained by God before the foundation of the world, would not need to take such a parasitic and detrimental approach: it could just as easily bestow the best and most effective religion from the very start.

And we’re done with our little side trip. Seventeen alleged “errors” that Dr. Geisler uses to try and evade the problems in his fallible, erroneous and superstitious Bible, and of these, only a couple of the minor objections are even reasonable. And none of this would be an issue in the first place if it weren’t for his God’s consistent, universal, and undeniable absence from real life.

If Dr. Geisler had a God that was willing and able to behave as though He believed what the Bible says about Him, we wouldn’t need an infallible Word of God because we’d have the actual God Himself. He supposedly loves us enough to die for us so that He could be with us, and supposedly has the power to pull it off, and to eliminate the last obstacle separating us from Him, so He’d be both willing and able to show up to participate, in person, in that relationship He worked so hard to make possible.

In which case, apologists like Dr. Geisler would be out of a job. Makes you think, don’t it?

We’re going a little bit beyond the Geisler and Turek book right now to have a look at the 18 “errors” that Bible critics allegedly make, at least according to Dr. Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We only made it through the first five last week, so let’s jump right in and get started, shall we?

6. Basing a teaching on an obscure passage

This one seems like Dr. Geisler is padding his list just a bit, since it’s really just a special case of #5, Failing To Let Easy Passages Explain Difficult Ones. Christians, for example, have no problem basing teachings on obscure passages (or even non-existent ones) without any qualms about the legitimacy of this approach. It’s only when they disagree with someone else’s interpretation that “based on an obscure passage” becomes an issue.

From an apologist’s perspective, though, it’s good to plant the suggestion that it’s wrong to base teachings on obscure passages, because then whenever you get in trouble with your Bible text you can just declare the passage to be “obscure” (rather than wrong or self-contradictory), and that allows you to simply dismiss your critics on the grounds that they’re committing Error #6. It’s a good technique for getting rid of hard problems without actually addressing them.

7. Forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics

Yes, you read that right. While arguing that the Bible is the supernaturally inspired, infallible and authoritative Word of God, Dr. Geisler accuses the Bible’s critics of forgetting that it’s a human book with human characteristics. Word.

8. Assuming that a partial report is a false report

This is actually a fairly clever, if sneaky, rhetorical maneuver. One of the problems with stories that improve with the telling is that, when you have written records of both the original version and the “improved” version, you can see the details that were added. Likewise, when one writer records one “improved” version and another records a slightly different “improved” version, you can see where the two variants have had different details added.

Usually, the embellishment of an urban legend takes place through the adding of details that were not previously in the story, as the re-teller unconsciously tries to fill in the gaps in the original. It’s less common for someone to deliberately contradict a detail that’s already in the story, though it does sometimes happen.

This situation allows Dr. Geisler to claim that, since the later details are, in many cases, not outright contradictions of the earlier versions of the story, Bible critics are committing Error #8 when they notice that later versions of the stories have added embellishments. That way he avoids needing to explain why there’s visible myth-building going on in the Bible accounts, and can dismiss the “difficulty” as being an error on the part of the critics, even if they’re not claiming an explicit contradiction.

The problem (for Dr. Geisler anyway) is that not all of these variations are so easily reconcilable. For example, in Matt. 28:1-10, we are told a version of the Resurrection story in which the women, arriving at the tomb, see an angel who descends from heaven, rolls away the stone, and tells them outright that Jesus has risen from the dead. They immediately run to go tell the disciples, and on the way they meet the risen Jesus himself, who confirms the angel’s message.

Mark’s version of this same story repeats the idea that an angel told them Jesus had risen from the dead, but adds that the women ran away and told no one. Luke, on the other hand, says no, the women did go and tell the disciples, and Peter ran to the tomb and found it empty, but did not believe the women’s stories, and oh by the way there were two angels telling the women about the resurrection.

John’s version agrees that there were two angels, but insists that when Mary Magdalene (and the other women?) came to the disciples, she/they reported nothing about a risen Jesus, but only that the tomb was empty and that she/they did not know where the body had been taken. Also, according to John, Mary Magdalene was the only one who saw the two angels, and she didn’t see them until after Peter and John ran to the tomb and found it empty (John seems to have added himself to the story at this point). And these angels were sitting inside the tomb instead of standing outside it. And so on.

Lots of conflicts and inconsistencies here as far as the participants involved, the order of the events, whether or not Jesus appeared, to whom, and when, and what the women (or woman) told the disciples to get one (or two) of them to check out the tomb. Dr. Geisler’s attempt to deal with all these variations is to point out that if one story says there were two angels and the other mentions only one, then that’s not a contradiction. Here’s the summary Geisler and Turek offer:

As we have seen, it’s not a contradiction if one Gospel writer says he saw one angel at the tomb and another says he saw two. Matthew doesn’t say there was only one. And if there were two, there certainly was (at least) one! So divergence doesn’t always mean contradiction. Instead it often suggest genuine eyewitness testimony.

Isn’t it cool the way you can make all the other inconsistencies just disappear by focusing exclusively on whether seeing two angels is roughly the same as seeing one angel? Matthew wasn’t even there, and yet somehow, by the magic of apologetics, he’s an eyewitness testifying about how many angels he saw. The Bible critics must be committing Error #8, you see, and therefore we don’t have to pay any attention to critics when they point out contradictions in the Bible. Ah well, moving on…

9. Demanding that NT citations of the OT always be exact quotations

Another popular apologetics ploy: blame the critic for being so darn critical. After all, how dare you demand that God’s inspired prophets be familiar enough with His word to quote it accurately? Hmm, well now that you mention it, that doesn’t sound all that unreasonable, so Dr. Geisler changes it to suggest that critics are demanding exact quotations. That sounds a little more nit-picky, doesn’t it?

The problem is that OT passages cited in the NT are sometimes misquoted in ways that change the meaning of the original text. For example, Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14—part of a prediction of the destruction of the kingdoms of Aram and Samaria—as though it were a prediction of Messianic virgin birth. Thus, Matthew is guilty of Dr. Geisler’s Error #4 (Failure To Consider Context), but more than that, he changes a key pronoun.

Isaiah’s original prophecy was that a virgin (or maiden) would conceive and have a son, and would name him Immanuel. Mary, however, did not name her son Immanuel, she named him Jesus. The Facebook generation would call that a “Prophecy Fail,” so Matthew just changes the pronoun and makes it “they shall call his name ‘Immanuel’ which means ‘God with us’.” One tiny, well-placed change that makes it sound like Isaiah was anticipating a child who would have the reputation of being God Incarnate, even though this is not at all the actual topic in Isaiah 7.

If we want to know whether Jesus is really fulfilling prophecy or if the Gospels merely twist the Scriptures to suit their own purposes, this is an important factor. It’s not that we insist on unreasonably precise quotations, we just want accurate quotes. If we find that OT passages have been distorted in ways that obscure the original meaning and introduce entirely new and foreign ideas, then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Simply accusing people of Error #9 doesn’t resolve the issue.

10. Assuming that divergent accounts are false ones

Déjà vu, eh? We covered this one under Error #8. Let’s move on.

11. Presuming that the Bible approves of all its records

This is the “out” that apologists use whenever anyone notices Biblical heroes behaving wickedly and/or immorally. “We’re not saying that it was right for David to have Uriah murdered so he could take Uriah’s wife, the Bible is merely recording the fact that he did.” There is some validity to this argument, and there have been some critics who have used the sins of the patriarchs as evidence that the Bible is not inspired. Such cases can indeed be addressed by pointing out that the Bible does not endorse everything it records.

What’s less amenable to this sort of exoneration, however, are the numerous instances where God is the Biblical hero Who is threatening to punish children for the sins of their parents, or Who is impregnating someone else’s fiancee, or Who is commanding His followers to commit genocide, or Who is condoning and directing slavery and instructing slave-owners in how to get around the rules that ostensibly liberate all slaves every 7 years. It’s one thing to say the Bible merely records man’s sins without approving of them, but God’s? That’s a tough one.

12. Forgetting that the Bible uses non-technical, everyday language

This one is kind of funny. I wish we had time to do the whole book of When Critics Ask, but I’m just guessing that he’s not going to use this one to explain things like the talking snake in Genesis 3!

Error #12 tries to account for the fact that the people who wrote the Bible didn’t know as much as we do now about the real world and how it works. Such ignorance can be embarrassingly obvious at times (like when God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until the 4th day). Dr. Geisler’s excuse is that the Bible is using non-technical, everyday language, so we sho