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Thank you.

Atheists have a new tactic to avoid confronting the voluminous evidence for God: When your debate opponent catches you dismissing valid scholarship, cry “Courtier’ Reply!”

Predictably, he does not link to Myers’ original article, but rather presents his own hand-crafted version.

Continue reading at the new home of the Evangelical Realism blog.

In this week’s installment, Dr. William Lane Craig addresses the topic, “Why Is Apologetics Important?” As I mentioned last time, apologetics is important because God’s failure to show up in real life leaves Christians without an objective basis for their faith, and therefore they have no alternative but to rely on the works of men like Dr. Craig. But that might be a bit blunt for a book intended to encourage Christians to keep believing, so he offers three other reasons instead…

Continue reading at the new blog site

Morality is like the river, in that there are some circumstances where it is fairly easy to make it become what we want it to be, as well as other circumstances where, do what we will, the “water” is going to follow its natural downhill flow. But if morality is like the river, then what is the landscape that shapes its natural course, and what force of “gravity” pulls it downhill? That one is a little more complicated to explain.

As you may recall from last week’s post, I differ from Thomist philosophy (or at least, from as much as I’ve seen of it so far) in that I believe there is precisely one ontological perfection, no more, and this perfection is reality/truth itself as a whole. All lesser “perfections” are, in fact, errors in perception: our minds are inadequate to contain and process more than a very small fraction of the whole truth about reality as a whole, so we are forced to isolate certain perceptible aspects of reality and treat them as distinct concepts, even though real truth is not isolated nor distinct from itself. Anything we have a concept for is necessarily imperfect, and is less than the whole truth.

In discussing things like “goodness,” therefore, the philosopher needs to be careful to remember that he is actually studying the characteristics of his own imperfect perception of goodness, and not something that is perfect and complete in and of itself. If he forgets the inherent imperfection of all philosophical entities, and believes that such things have an independent existence of their own (or worse yet, are the ontological sources for observable reality), then he makes the same mistake that led Aristotle to conclude that the celestial bodies are all perfect spheres moving in perfect circles. Such “perfections” are merely oversimplifications designed to make the philosopher’s life easier; they break down if you try to apply them to the more complicated reality they are drawn from.

In considering the actual basis for “good” and “evil,” then, the first thing we need to remember is the real-world context in which such patterns can be seen to emerge. That context is a context of materialism. We exist as material organisms; our lives, our actions, our very consciousness is built upon a physical foundation of energy exchanges, organized in patterns that have evolved over millions and even billions of years. “Good” and “evil” can thus be reduced to a question of energy exchanges, in much the same way as a symphony can be reduced to a series of rapidly varying air pressures—and with about the same loss of comprehensibility.  That’s zooming in too close, so that we can’t see the big picture. Too much detail overwhelms our limited minds.

There is useful information there, however. Knowing that a symphony exists, materially, as a series of variations in air pressure, we can understand why you can’t listen to symphonies in a vacuum. And likewise, knowing that good and evil are constructed out of a pattern of material energy exchanges, we can understand why good and evil do not exist in some abstract, ethereal dimension, but rather are rooted in, and bound to, our material life.

Let’s elaborate slightly (but not too much, since this is still just a blog post). As living organisms, we are what we are as a result of natural selection. Organisms that did not have the physical properties leading to extending their own existence are organisms that proved more likely to perish without reproducing; the organisms which were equipped to maintain and continue their existence were more likely to prolong the patterns that led to this kind of survival-seeking, in their own lives and in the lives of their offspring.

At the most fundamental level, then, we have a differentiating factor: natural selection has given rise to a behavioral pattern of pursuing actions that promote continuation of existence, and of avoiding actions that interrupt the energy exchanges (thus causing death). The actions that promote survival are thus “good” (on a primitive level), and the ones that promote premature death are “bad.”

Note, by the way, that there is no point in asking whether it matters whether the organism lives or dies. That’s a subjective question. We are not speaking of whether some third party observer has preferences one way or another about the organism’s life, because that’s irrelevant to understanding what “good” and “bad” really are, especially at such a foundational level. All we have, and all we need, is the evolved pattern of behavior that prefers survival over extinction.

This is a category of good and evil that exists all the way down to the microbial and even sub-cellular level. At this point, however, it’s still too basic, in a symphony=list-of-frequencies sort of way. To properly understand good and evil in our own context, we need to follow the organism as it evolves mechanisms that promote the “good” behaviors and avoid the “bad” ones. Again, though, we’re tracing the evolution of a material phenomenon, specifically the development of neural systems capable of registering sensations, emotions, and instincts.

The apex of this process (so far) is the evolution of intelligent, self-aware consciousness. We evolved into a material organism whose physical structure allows the types of energy exchanges we call “thinking.” And along the way, we learned a thing or two. For instance, we learned that there is strength in numbers, and we learned that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. We learned, in other words, that banding together into societies is “good,” but that it has a price which can be “bad.” Societies can prolong your existence, but it can also cut it short, sometimes unexpectedly so.

This is the “landscape” across which the “rivers” of morality flow. In some places, there’s a clear, sloped channel down which the river flows: murdering someone, for example, makes you at least a potential threat to others, so that’s bad in two ways: not only is your victim dead, but you’ve put yourself in a situation where the “good” thing for everyone else to do is to prolong their existence by cutting yours short, so as to eliminate the threat. People benefit from being united in a society, PROVIDED that no one member ruins it for everyone else.

Morality thus arises spontaneously as set of conventions for balancing the potential rewards of social cooperation against the potential costs of social interaction. Because morality arises out of the nature of the material substances and energies that make up our lives, there is a certain degree of objective reality to large areas of morality. Dead is dead, and there’s no remedy for that, so the laws of morality in any society are almost certain to follow the same pattern of prohibition against murder.

On the other hand, there is also a strong subjective aspect to morality, in that the only reason we care about morality is because we are material organisms with a deeply ingrained behavior pattern that favors survival over extinction. If you give someone a definition of good and evil, and they ask you what difference your morality makes, you can tell them that they’re asking the wrong question. The question you have to ask first is, “To whom does it make a difference?” It makes a difference to us, because we are material organisms, whose patterns of makeup and behavior were formed by natural selection. And that’s the only difference it makes. That’s why we even discuss moral issues. Our interest in morality is the “gravity” that keeps the river flowing.

Of course, being organisms that are both intelligent and social, we have a lot more than just life and death to worry about. We understand that things can be bad even if they don’t threaten us with immediate annihilation. Loss of power, loss of goods, loss of shelter/clothing, loss of health and strength, loss of skills—any or all of these things cast doubts on how well we can survive in a hostile environment. This is another consequence of the material basis of good and evil: we have real, objective, material needs and there are sometimes hard physical constraints on who gets to keep the “good” stuff and who has to go without. It does not need to go all the way to literal physical death: any exchange that leaves you with fewer resources than you started with is a “bad” exchange (for you at least).

Ultimately, then, morality is both subjective and objective. It’s subjective in that it matters to somebody (and if it didn’t, then what difference would morality make?). People care about good and evil, subjectively, and this is what both defines morality and makes it important. But there’s an objective aspect of morality as well, and that is that our moral judgments take place in the context of a material “landscape” in which some directions are downhill and others aren’t. Societies have a way of imposing arbitrary moral standards (like the “right” of the rich to exploit the poor), but material actions have material consequences, and ill-advised moral standards are likely to be overthrown sooner or later (e.g. the French Revolution).

In answer to Nick’s question, then, my definition of goodness is that truth is good first and foremost. Your best shot at success depends on having what’s inside your head match what’s outside your head. Chasing illusory prey or fleeing illusory predators may give you strong feelings, but it’s not a survival benefit. This is the standard by which I judge C. S. Lewis’ arguments to be “not good.”

Beyond that, good and evil have to be defined in terms of finding the best balance between the interests of society and the interests of the individual. There’s no one correct moral balance, just like there’s no one correct river: we need to follow the path that best suits the circumstances and that achieves the best balance between making society strong at the expense of the individual, and making the individual strong at the expense of society.

Ultimately, you could reduce morality to a calculation of energy exchanges, albeit one that would be humanly impossible to compute. Each action has a certain cost to the individual, and a certain benefit to the individual, and a certain cost to society and a certain benefit to society. If we could add up all the costs, and all the benefits, and break it down so that neither party had disproportionately more nor less than the other, then we would achieve the mathematically optimal moral decision. Failing such a precise measure, though, we’ll have to do with our best estimate and with the imperfect process of consensus.

And that, barring a sudden burst of participation from Nick, is probably going to be as far as I go on this topic. I’ve answered his challenge, and his interest in engaging me has been conspicuous in its failure to manifest itself over the course of my past three posts, so there I think the matter will rest. It’s been fun, and moderately interesting (for me at least), and I, at least, am satisfied with the outcome.

Nick is quite right: your definition of “existence” will have a significant influence over whether goodness exists independently of our perception of it. So let’s ask the questions Nick alludes to. What do we mean when we say something exists, and what does this tell us about the reality and nature of things?

One quick caveat: this is a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation, so I’m going to give a rather cursory presentation in the interests of brevity. (Caveat two: that doesn’t mean this will be short, merely that it will be shorter.)

My approach to the question is going to be reality-based, as opposed to pure speculation, which may affect the answer in interesting ways. As usual, I’m going to base my reasoning on the principle that truth is consistent with itself. This is an observation, by the way, not just an assumption. Falsehood, by definition, is that which is inconsistent with the truth, so if we were to assume that truth is also inconsistent with itself, then there would no longer be any meaningful difference between truth and falsehood. Or, to look at it slightly differently, if you wish to refute my argument, you must show that my argument is inconsistent with the truth; once you’ve done that, though, so what? Your refutation rests on the assumption that failure to be consistent with the truth is a failure to be truth, and that’s a false assumption unless the truth is consistent with itself. Without that premise for your reasoning, you may find inconsistencies in my reasoning, but you have no way to tell whether it’s inconsistent because falsehood is inconsistent with truth, or because truth is inconsistent with truth. Reason and logic assume, by their existence, that truth is consistent with itself. My own reasoning, therefore, will be based on that premise.

Given that truth is consistent with itself, we can derive the following operational definition of existence.

A thing exists if it possesses characteristics and attributes that are consistent with the truth, and does not possess any characteristics or attributes that are inconsistent with the truth.

This is not an entirely flawless definition of existence, but it does have the advantage of putting real things in the category of “true things” and mistakes/delusions/deceptions/etc. in the category of “false things.” So it’s a fair foundation upon which to build a less naive definition.

Next, let’s consider what it means for truth to be consistent with itself. Obviously, the immediate meaning of “consistent” is that it does not contradict itself. But secondly, truth is also comprehensive—it includes all true things. If you took two distinct domains, each of which contained true things, neither domain would be the whole truth. Some things in “A” would be missing from “B,” and vice versa; the whole truth is the union of A and B. Neither A nor B is “the truth,” each is only a part of the truth, which is something greater than either by itself. And lastly, truth is coherent: no truth exists in isolation, but is interrelated with the rest of the truth in some way. (This is the property that makes reason and science possible, by the way—without it there would be no way to follow the connection from cause to effect, or from premise to conclusion, etc., because the connection wouldn’t be there.)

Some might dispute that last point about the coherence of truth. It might be possible, or at least conceivable, to propose some domain of truth that did exist in complete isolation from the truth domain that defines “reality.” If such a thing did exist, however, there would be two possibilities: either it must always and forever be entirely irrelevant to the truth of real existence, or it must be consistent with real-world truth at whatever points where the two do interact. As we’ve already discussed, however, truth is comprehensive, and if there were two separate domains that each contained mutually consistent truths, they would form parts of a larger, all-encompassing domain of  truth, in which case the larger domain would be the real truth, and the “external” truth would not truly be isolated from the rest of the domain. That leaves only irrelevant truth as a possible exception to our definition of truth; and if any such truth existed, we could safely ignore it, since by definition it is irrelevant.

Thus, we can modify our definition slightly to say that truth is consistent (does not contradict itself), comprehensive (includes all true things relevant to the real world) and coherent (no truth, relevant to the real world, exists in isolation from the rest of real-world truth). For convenience, I will be assuming all three attributes of the truth whenever I refer to truth being consistent with itself.

Given this understanding of the characteristics of truth, what can we learn about reality? Earlier we defined a thing as being real (i.e. as “existing”) if it possessed characteristics that were consistent with the truth, and possessed no characteristics that were not consistent with the truth. Reality itself, then, means all things whose characteristics are consistent with the truth. Everything that is real is also true. But what about the converse? Can we also say that everything that is true is also real? The alternative would be for us to say that there exist some things that are true but that are not real, i.e. things that are true, but do not exist. We can eliminate that possibility, though, because in order for such things to be true, they must possess properties or characteristics or attributes that are consistent with the truth, and none that are inconsistent with the truth. That means they must also be real, according to our operational definition of existence. In order to meet the criteria for being true, they must also meet the criteria for being real, i.e. for existing. Reality, as a whole, coincides with truth, as a whole.

This is what I take as the ontological perfection. Reality itself, as it exists independently of our perceptions of it, is the ultimate standard of perfection, because it is the ultimate, infallible, and perfect manifestation of the truth. Whatever error or deception or myth exists, exists because our perceptions are imperfect, and our perceptions are imperfect because the real truth is consistent, comprehensive and coherent, far beyond the ability of our finite minds to entirely comprehend. The best we can hope for is to identify certain patterns and regularities within reality, and to be approximately correct about part of the infinite perfection of reality.

That’s actually not as inconceivable as it might sound, because we ourselves are a part of the reality we are trying to observe and understand—the same patterns and regularities that make reality/truth consistent with itself are woven throughout the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of which our minds are constructed. There is a certain inherent resonance between what we are perceiving and the machinery we use to perceive it, due to the fact that both subject and object are aspects of the same self-consistent truth/reality. We have an affinity for perceiving certain aspects of the nature of reality simply because we share aspects of that nature with the reality we’re trying to perceive.

Obviously, this does not make us infallible. Our perceptions are approximations, a limited representation of an unlimited data pool. We do not and cannot perceive true ontological perfection; we can only extract, from our experiences, the regular, consistent patterns that are part of the one true ontological perfection. These limited perceptions, however, are not the whole truth. Truth is comprehensive and cohesive, but our understanding works by abstracting, by separating specific aspects of the truth from their interrelated parts.

This is a key point, and one that I think underlies the failure of some philosophers to correctly understand the nature of ontology. When we take some part of the truth, and isolate it so we can study it independently of its real-world context, we are doing two things: we are arbitrarily excluding relevant information in order to produce a single concept simple enough for our neurons to process with a reasonable expenditure of energy, and we are also creating a falsehood—an idea that is missing the coherence and comprehensiveness of genuine truth.

This is not entirely a bad thing. It’s a necessary trade-off. Strict fidelity to ontological accuracy would overwhelm our finite powers of computation and analysis; some sacrifice of truth is necessary in order to reduce the problem to something humanly solvable. It does highlight, however, the importance of remembering the difference between observing the characteristics of a thing, and observing the characteristics of human concepts about the thing.

Take “triangularity,” for example. Why do we have a concept of triangularity? The concept exists because one of the patterns we observe in reality is a regular ordering of points and lines we call “triangles.” But nothing in the real world is as simple as what we call “triangles”—whether it’s ink on paper or girders in a bridge, or slices of a pie, the shapes we call “triangular” are in reality much more complex than the simple definition mathematicians give to a three-sided geometric shape.

The thing we do, to make it easier to think about reality, is to eliminate many of the true interrelationships between things, so that we can focus more easily on one particular aspect of reality in isolation. The truth, however, is that real world triangles don’t exist in isolation; “triangularity” is characteristic of a human concept about the patterns we see in real-world truth. Perfect truth is consistent, comprehensive, and coherent; by isolating “triangularity” from its real-world context, we have created a degenerate “perfection” that resides in our perceptions rather than in the reality we are trying to perceive.

Consider, for example, that slice of pie I mentioned earlier. Is it really triangular? One of the sides is curved, yet the definition of a triangle, as specified by mathematicians, is that all three sides are straight lines. In real life, however, there is virtually nothing we would identify as “triangular” that meets the mathematical definition. There’s a disconnect there: real-world truth is coherent, but the mathematical concept explicitly isolates the “triangular” property from its context. The process of reducing it to computable form has changed it from being part of real-world truth to being something that, while simpler, is no longer entirely consistent with reality.

This is why it’s such a subtle yet devastating error to try and understand the world in terms of “essences” and ideals and so on: the process of mentally reducing something to a computably-simple principle necessarily isolates it from its real-world context and thus renders it no longer completely consistent with reality. It is a human concept about reality, inherently and inescapably over-simplified in order to allow finite thought about the topic; it is not itself real.

If we fail to carefully maintain that distinction, we run the risk of believing in a truth that’s distinct and different from what we see in the real world, a “higher and better truth” that coincidentally happens to be unconstrained by any need to conform to the real-world evidence. The process of isolating the “essence” of a thing from its real-world context is a process that necessarily isolates it from the sort of consistency-checking we need in order to falsify untrue statements. We can and must work with imperfect representations of the patterns we see in real-world truth, and we can even do so reasonably and reliably PROVIDED we remember that we are working with imperfect perceptions about the real world, and not with the consistent, comprehensive, and coherent perfection of ontological being. To confuse the two, and especially to buy into a world view that proposes a “higher truth” unconstrained by real-world evidence, is to leave ourselves vulnerable to a particularly pernicious and sophisticated form of gullibility.

Well, I’ve scarcely scratched the surface, but in keeping with my “non-a-dissertation” caveat, I’ll go ahead and stop here. There’s tons more I could say, and a significant amount that I should say, which is why I was waiting to see if Nick would perhaps narrow down the scope of his questioning somewhat rather than asking for my views on ontology in general. There’s just so much stuff there. On the other hand, perhaps that’s why Nick himself seems equally reluctant to offer us a quick summary of his views on the ontology that lies behind his views on morality. I will thank him for bringing up such an interesting topic, though. Perhaps this time he’ll respond, and we can discover even more together.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion… By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

This is a very serious logical fallacy which, if unaddressed, undermines the validity of all subsequent Thomistic argumentation regarding natural law. I then posed a fairly simple question for Nick:

My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy…?

I was frankly looking forward to Nick’s reply, given his extensive readings (especially as compared to my own). How would he address this problem? Would he agree that Lewis was presenting an unsound argument, and try to excuse him on the grounds that he was summarizing something much more complex? Would he try and make a case for the existence of a disobeyable law independent of any Observer with opinions and preferences about our behavior? Would he admit that “disobeyable law” already assumes the existence of a Divine Law Giver, and plead that in this special case it’s ok to assume one’s conclusion?

I was very interested in seeing how he would reply, but I didn’t expect him to reply like this:

I believe the question, if I’m understanding it rightly, concerns if Lewis is contradicting himself about a law of nature that cannot be broken supposedly and a law of morality that can.

Also, it concerns why we should believe if it cannot be measured or is not tangible in some way.

As they say in lolspeak, I am disappoint.

First of all, with regards to the second point, I did not ask why we should believe in the intangible/unquantifiable, I asked how a layman can verify the validity of complex philosophical constructs, in the absence of tangible by-products. Most of us have no hope of understanding the math behind Einstein’s equations, but when we see the mushroom cloud we at least have some idea that e does equal mc^2. Is there any way, then, that we can verify the validity (or lack of validity) of Thomistic conclusions regarding goodness?

I would suggest that there are some standards even a layman can apply, such as the test of whether or not the whole structure is built on a simple logical fallacy. When we read Chapter One of Mere Christianity, we find Lewis committing the fallacy of incorporating the assumption of his conclusion into the specification for the terms he uses to define his premises. For the simple layman, that would seem to rule out any possibility that his argument is sound. That’s why it’s so important for us, as presumptively unread laymen, to get a straight answer to the question of whether or not Lewis’ first step is a logical misstep, and if so, is this implicit fallacy a fair depiction of the actual foundation of Thomist thought.

If the answer to both questions is yes, that would be extremely damaging to the argument for natural law, so hopefully Nick will address this issue in his next reply.

Meanwhile, I’ll take a stab at answering another one of his questions, since he has repeated it more than once. Nick is wondering whether any of us know know the three criteria for moral goodness: object, intention, and circumstance. It’s an interesting topic in and of itself, so let’s have a quick tour.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the primary criterion for assessing the moral goodness of a particular action is the object of the action. Note that’s “object,” not “objective.” When discussing the object of a moral act, we’re talking about describing what the act is, not what it is intended to accomplish. For example, murder, witch-burning, capital punishment and suicide all have human death as their object, even though many different intentions are involved (sometimes multiple intentions for the same act!). Thus, “object” has to do with “what,” not “why” or “how much” or so on.

Before an action can be morally good, it must first be good in its object. Thus, to judge the goodness of any action whose object is human death, we must first assess whether human death is good in and of itself. That’s a point that has interesting implications, as discussed below.

Next, we must look at intention. Is the action intended to accomplish a good result? The caveat here is that if the object is immoral then no amount of good intentions can make the act morally good. The end does not justify the means, at least according to the 3 criteria for moral goodness.

And lastly we must look at circumstance. This is kind of the loophole in Thomistic morality. In theory there can be no such thing as “extenuating circumstances” capable of making an action good when its object is not good (otherwise we don’t really have 3 criteria for moral goodness, because the real determining factor is circumstance). Thus, in theory the circumstance can tell you, e.g. that stealing someone’s parachute is a worse offense than stealing someone’s handkerchief, but both actions are still immoral because the object of the action is taking someone else’s property against their will, which is an immoral action.

The gotcha with the 3 criteria is that the actions of God Himself are, in many cases, immoral by this standard, and thus in practice theologians end up having to invoke the idea of extenuating circumstances, which means claiming that the last criterion overrules the first two. Without extenuating circumstances, no act of genocide can be good unless its object (wiping out an entire ethnic group of people, including children and babies) is also good; thus in commanding genocide, God is requiring His people to behave immorally. The only way to avoid this conclusion is either to decide moral goodness based on circumstance despite one or both of the other two criteria. Either that or decide that wiping out entire populations is morally “good,” or course.

And yet, even though you will find Catholics, for instance, who argue that the extermination of the Amalekites was not immoral, due to extenuating circumstances, they will still use the 3 criteria standard as an argument for why abortion can never be moral under any circumstances. As so often happens, the “absolute standard” isn’t always absolute. It’s what you might call a “flexible” standard—it allows us to determine what is and is not moral, except when it doesn’t, in which case we fall back on the argument from circumstance (which sometimes sounds suspiciously like my basis for morality ).

You could almost make the 3 Criteria standard work, if you said that you have to consider all three criteria as a whole. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really solve the problem: either all three criteria are in agreement, in which case the question is trivial, or else there is some conflict between the three criteria, in which case you need some kind of higher principle of morality to which you can refer in deciding how much of a “vote” to give to each of the 3 criteria in determining the outcome. But if you have to appeal to a higher standard of morality to referee between 3 conflicting criteria, then it is the higher standard that is the real criterion for moral goodness, and you’re just fooling yourself by claiming to base moral goodness on the 3 criteria.

So like I said, it’s an interesting topic, and one I’m sure Nick will have more to say about (and with my blessing). I wouldn’t call it a solid philosophical approach, though, unless Nick can convince me otherwise.

In the interests of focusing on the heart of the issue rather than on tangents, let me begin by conceding that Nick has read more books on the subject of the ontology of good, Thomist philosophy, and so on, than I have. He has recommended Budziszewski, so I will give him a go. (Nick, would Written on the Heart be a reasonable starting place? When you have kids in college, the $10 book has certain attractions over the $70 hard cover, which is what Amazon is charging for The Line Through the Heart.)

Meanwhile, I do have an on-topic question for Nick, which might open up some common ground for fruitful discussion.

My question concerns the validation of academic inquiry, with a special emphasis on the needs of the layman. Academia, the land of intellectuals and scholars, is a rather diverse landscape. It gives us cosmology and particle physics, and it also gives us postmodernism. It has its triumphs and its failures, its breakthroughs and its fads, its wisdom and its foolishness. For many people, it’s almost a cabal—we don’t know what they’re doing, and if we try to get involved, we find the discussion wrapped in an almost impenetrable layer of technical jargon, inside references, and non-obvious assumptions. Are they giving us the next big Answer, or is this just another postmodernism in the making?

That’s not my question for Nick, but I’m leading up to it. The point is that having a lot of publications and citations and academic popularity is no guarantee that your conclusions have meaning and value outside the ivory tower. If there were a major academic discipline dealing with, say, the philosophy of aerodynamics, then we could get some idea if the leading figures in the movement were correct by having them design a flying machine. If it just sits on the runway waggling “perfect” appendages until it finally tips over and bursts into flame, then it’s probably safe to conclude that the philosophers behind it had fallen into the uniquely academic trap of being brilliantly persuasive rather than brilliantly accurate.

That only works for disciplines that have a tangible output, however. Where a discipline is concerned entirely with intangibles and metaphysics, there’s a substantially increased risk of proceeding on the basis of conclusions that have been verified only by consensus rather than by objective measurement against a real-world standard of truth. The popularity of a given philosophy, and the eloquence with which it is defended and explained, are not in themselves any guarantee of real-world accuracy. Indeed, in the absence of an “experimental metaphysics” branch of philosophy, there is a substantially increased risk that one’s conclusions will owe more to rhetorical strengths than to actual fact—that the silver tongue will outweigh the gold standard.

Nevertheless, there are criteria that can be used to at least weed out those conclusions which are flawed by logical fallacies, self-contradictions, or substantial inconsistencies relative to real-world facts. And this, finally, is where I arrive at my point.

My question is this. If Thomistic philosophy is successfully representing real-world truth, I would expect it’s “tangible,” flying-machine-on-the-runway product to be a description of real-world morality that was coherent, consistent, and logically valid. In Mere Christianity, however, C. S. Lewis did not present a logically valid description. For example, in Chapter 1, he writes,

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.

Wherever there is talk of disobedience, you are necessarily assuming the existence of two Observer/Participants, each of whom has intentions about how the principal Participant “ought” to behave. The disobedience consists of a difference between the behavior as practiced by the principal Participant, and the behavior as intended by the second Participant. This is in Chapter 1, mind you—the starting point of his argument for Moral Law.

In the absence of intention, there can be no “disobeyable” laws, because there is no intent that you should behave in any particular way. The only laws that exist apart from intention are laws that describe real constraints on what can and cannot occur. Such laws cannot be disobeyed, because they describe what can and cannot happen, and if anything happens contrary to such a law, it merely proves that the law is not an accurate description of what can and cannot happen, and thus is not a genuine law.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion. In fact, we might even accuse him of naive animism—accounting for observed real-world phenomena by arbitrarily attributing them to invisible intelligent agents. By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

Granted, I don’t think that’s entirely Lewis’ fault. It’s easy to accidentally incorporate an assumed Observer into your basic terminology. Take the concept of “imperfection” for instance. Everything is a “perfect” instance of itself; things are “imperfect” only to the extent that they differ from what some Observer thinks they ought to be. To define “perfection” is to assume the existence of a Person with intentions regarding which characteristics and behaviors are “right” for some particular thing.

But I digress. My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy, and given this problem why should we, as laymen, conclude that Lewis’ Thomistic philosophies are anything more than just another fad, like postmodernism?

Thanks.

DD: What I have is not so much a definition of goodness as an objective approach to discerning goodness. One of the major flaws I see in Lewis’ reasoning is a tendency to assume that “goodness” is defined by a list somewhere, and that’s not really realistic or workable, as I’ve discussed extensively in my discussion of the “Book 1″ portion of Mere Christianity.

Reply: So let me get this straight. You don’t have a definition of goodness, but yet you’re basing your argument on what goodness is. C.S. Lewis was a Thomist. Do you know how Thomism describes goodness? Do you know how Aristotle did? Do you know how that relates to the central doctrine of Thomistic thought, the doctrine of being?

If you do not believe goodness can be described (A more accurate word than defined) then there’s no point in you going on about it and the privation of it, evil.

Hello, Nick, and welcome once again. I’m afraid that you do not quite have things straight yet, but perhaps I can explain myself a bit better. What I’m saying is that Good (as in Good vs. Evil or Right vs Wrong) is not a singular standard with a singular definition. Moral standards are a cultural convention arrived at through a combination of factors including (a) accumulated experience of the consequences of certain things, (b) natural human empathy and (c) sentient self-interest, as they relate to the group in question. There may be other factors as well, but these are the big three.

The reason I did not give you the definition of goodness that you asked for is because your question was too vague. You did not specify any particular social/historical/cultural context, and that’s an important prerequisite for any such definition. Trying to define “Good” without reference to any particular social group is like trying to define marriage without any reference to either of the spouses: it’s not strictly impossible, but it leaves undefined a number of significant variables without which your definition is going to have problems. (More on that below.)

As for Thomistic thought and Aristotle and such, my critique of Lewis is based specifically on the job he does explaining his concept of Moral Law to the average layman, which is why I’m speaking in layman’s terms instead of invoking technical philosophical jargon. If you are suggesting that Lewis’ explanation is misleading, or that it fails to properly explain the topics he is discussing, such that the layman must first master Aquinas and Aristotle before he can properly understand Lewis (!), then perhaps we ought to warn people not to read Mere Christianity, as it will only confuse them.

And lastly, if all you want is a description of goodness, that’s a bit easier. I apologize for the brevity of my first reply, but I’ve got a bit more free time today, so perhaps I can go into more detail. In particular, I’d like to discuss how my understanding of the source of morality is different from (and better than) Lewis’.

The flaw I see in Lewis’ explanation, and in the concepts of natural law and eternal law which underlie it, is that it attempts to reduce the difficult question of Right vs. Wrong down to a relatively simple rule of fiat: somewhere “out there” is a list of things that are always Right/Good, and a list of things that are always Wrong/Evil, and thus morality is merely a matter of finding which list contains the thing you are trying to judge. (For purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter as much whether this list springs from God’s mind or His will or His nature; the main problem is that it is there at all, by whatever means.)

There is a strong, naive appeal to such a notion. People are always hoping to find an easy, sure-fire way to lose weight, to get rich, to enhance their (*ahem*) “personal characteristics,” and they feel pretty much the same way about any system that offers an easy, sure-fire way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Screw up morality, and you screw up your life, and people know it, so they’re eager to “buy.” The problem with the “rule of fiat” approach to morality, as it is with other such nostrums, is that it doesn’t actually work in real life.

For example, if there were, somewhere, an eternal law that enumerated all the things that are Good and all the things that are Sin, then that would be an absolute, eternal, and universal constraint. A thing is either right for all people, at all times, in all circumstances, or it is wrong for all people, at all times, in all circumstances. Its moral quality is defined, not by the circumstances attendant on it, but by an independent and extrinsic standard or ideal to which it must relate, and that standard must be arbitrary (i.e. not dependent on circumstances or consequences) or else it is reduced to merely relaying some other, more fundamental source of morality based on circumstances and consequences.

Thus, if genocide is a sin, then it’s a sin even when the Israelites do it; conversely, if it was ok then, it must also be ok now. If suicide is a sin, then it’s a sin for everyone, including those who commit suicide by provoking the Pharisees until they arrange a crucifixion. The rule of fiat is a fixed and absolute morality, not a kind of moral relativism, so it cannot and indeed must not modify its demands to suit some contemporary circumstance or other. But that causes theological problems, because sooner or later God Himself ends up doing something immoral like, say, getting another man’s fiancee pregnant.

The only way to “fix” this hypothetical law is by modifying it so that it becomes contingent upon circumstance: genocide is wrong IF you’re wiping out this group of people rather than that one; suicide is wrong UNLESS you are doing it to benefit someone else, it’s ok to impregnate an unmarried woman IF you are Almighty, etc. In other words, the “eternal law” approach fails unless it is reduced to merely relaying some higher moral standard based on real-world considerations—what we might call the “rule of consequences” as opposed to the rule of fiat. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but like I said, layman’s terms.

In other words, “absolute” goodness sounds good and is easy to sell, but it’s not the ultimate answer. There’s an even deeper and more fundamental source of morality, by which we can judge whether or not the Moral Law needs to be fixed to make it come out right. It’s the difference between theory and practice. In theory, Moral Law is natural law (in the Thomistic sense), but in practice, it is relativism, and we judge the rightness or wrongness of God’s actions by a more flexible standard so that things that would be sin for anyone else are fine for Him. Circumstances and contingencies, and not the inherent rightness or wrongness of the act itself, are the final measure believers use to get God’s conduct to come out “right.”

Lewis’ Moral Law argument suffers from many other, similar flaws, as I’ve discussed over the course of the past several weeks. And it’s not just that Lewis’ argument (and the philosophy behind it) fails to fit the facts, it’s that there exists an alternative that does describe human morality as we observe it in the real world, even among Thomists and other believers, without the caveats and twists and rationalizations that Lewis’ approach requires.

That description, of course, is the one I’ve already alluded to above. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil are social conventions that arise within a certain group based on their perception/consensus regarding which set of consequences they want to encourage and which they want to avoid. It’s complex, changeable, and often results in conflicts between different groups with different moral standards (with one or both sides trying to promote their standard as Eternal and Immutable Law), as we see in action in real life every day.

That’s not a popular description (people like their diet pills and their Ten Commandments) but it’s the objectively accurate one. Like it or not, that’s the way the real world is. Moral standards evolve within particular groups at particular times, and are tied to those groups but not necessarily to others. That’s why, for example, slavery is evil today, and eating pork is not, whereas in Old Testament Israel it was the other way around. Circumstances change, social conventions change, and morality changes right along with them. So you see, I can describe how morality works, but I cannot give you a specific definition of what “good” is, because that definition can be different for different groups at different times. All I (or anyone else) can do is to describe how it works—and my description, unlike Lewis’, accurately matches the way we see real morality function in real life.

DD: As to your second question, I have a feeling you’re leading up to something by the reference to “goodness in relation to being,” but I’m not sure what exactly you have in mind.

Reply: Correct. If you are not sure what I have in mind, then it’s time to learn. If you do not know this concept, then it’s really difficult to take the account seriously. Of course, if you want to learn an accurate description, I’m ready to give it.

I’m sure I and my readers would be glad to hear it. Share, by all means, what you know.

DD: I do have a few decades of experience as an evangelical, Bible-believing conservative Christian, so I am fairly comfortable with my understanding of how Christians see “goodness.”

Reply: No you’re not. I’m not talking about how Christians see goodness. It’s irrelevant to me. Goodness is what it is regardless of if Christians see it and goodness had an ontology before Christianity came along. I’m talking about what it is and I don’t need the Bible for that or the revelation of God at all.

Good for you! I don’t need the Bible either, with the caveat that we are entitled to examine any book that claims to be inspired by the Author of that ontology, to see if its claims are consistent with itself and with the real world evidence. As I’m sure you would agree.

By the way, I apologize for misunderstanding which group you were thinking of when you said “Lewis and others,” but you’ll have to admit you were a bit vague there. I’m glad to see that you’ve been more specific in your response.

DD: No doubt you could find a point or two to quibble over, but I daresay you could do the same with any number of believers as well, so I’m not worried about falling outside the mainstream.

Reply: You bet I could because sadly, most Christians don’t even know this due to the dumbing down of the church that leads to the apostasy you’ve just described yourself as fulfilling. You didn’t know about goodness then and you still don’t now.

I’m afraid you have jumped to a false conclusion there; I hope that was unintentional. If you can address the points I’ve raised, then I would encourage you to do so. Anyone who merely wishes to indulge in innuendo and premature boasting, without demonstrating an awareness and understanding of opposing arguments, would risk coming across as ignorant and obstinate. That applies to me as much as to you, naturally.

I think the most productive approach would be for each of us to attempt to address the points under discussion as they are raised, and if there is any relevant argument or information that has not yet been raised, we should raise it, and actually see if the other party is familiar with it before drawing any conclusions about their level of knowledge. Fair enough? I have addressed the points raised by Lewis in his book, just as you are free and welcome to address the points I raise in my posts. And if you feel like there’s anything Lewis said in the first several chapters that I’ve overlooked, and/or that I’ve incorrectly omitted in order to make spurious claims of ignorance on Lewis’ part, feel free to point those out as well, and I will gladly correct any errors that warrant correction.

DD: If you think I’ve missed anything important, feel free to share.

Reply: Just the big picture and an education on what you’re talking about. You don’t have a working idea of what goodness is and you aren’t interacting with the metaphysics that C.S. Lewis held to, which would be a good Thomistic metaphysics.

You seem to have rather strong feelings on the subject. Are you by any chance letting these feelings bias your conclusions? That would explain why you seem to think you’ve plumbed the full extent of my knowledge even before we’ve started, as it were. And that would indeed be a shame. Still, I’m glad you showed up and gave me the opportunity to explore the topic a little further. The Lewis book was very disappointing, and you’ve made the discussion a lot more lively. Thanks much.

I’ll give you a little of the background below the fold, but if you’re impatient, you can just skip to my new blog over at Changing Religions.

It was early in the year 2000 that I admitted to myself that I no longer believed the Gospel, a confession that was followed by a good few years of “angry atheist” mode. I’d wasted the first 40 years of my life on a swindle and a con job, and I was seriously pissed off about it. I turned up on Usenet in talk.atheism, and made almost a career out of mocking and haranguing those few smug, self-righteous, and self-appointed evangelists who showed up to share with us the good news that we were all going to hell.

Eventually I mellowed out somewhat, and ceased raging and lashing out, at least publicly. I still harbored a deep resentment that would occasionally spill out, but by and large I moved on. I retained one lesson I learned, however; a seed from a chance remark by a Christian I was arguing with. He informed me, with predictable smugness, that I was a worshiper too: I worshiped the truth. He thought he was accusing me of idolatry, but it struck me that worshiping the truth was not really a bad idea, and that Truth made a far better God than anything he could come up with.

Thus was born my vision of Alethea as the One True God. I originally used it against him as a purely trollish maneuver, mocking him by showing how my “god” was better than his despite not even being a real god. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to see how Alethea might actually fill the role a genuine God would really play, if such a thing existed. Not of course the kind of Divine Person you might see walking down the street, but then again would a genuine deity be either? If you’re omnipresent, you can’t walk down the street, because anywhere you might go, you’re already there!

Anyway, the idea grew on my. I played around with it some, but wasn’t all that active. Then my home state passed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage—a purely spiteful act of Christian persecution against gays that got me riled. I started Evangelical Realism partly to exercise my faith in Alethea, but mostly to speak out against the vile and hateful religion that was abusing the law to oppress an innocent minority. The angry atheist rose up again, and I was out to strike some blows against tyranny, ignorance, and superstition.

This is 2011, the first year after my first decade as an ex-Christian, and I think it’s time the angry atheist went away. I needed him for a time, and I think he may even have done a teensy bit of good while he was here. But now there are better things I could be doing, and I’m anxious to get started doing them. I’ve become comfortable and even predictable in the things I’ve been doing, and it’s time to shake that up.

So I’ve started a new blog, Changing Religions, that builds on the understanding I developed on my post about “Getting Religion.” Some of the comments on that post were along the lines of “Yeah, but what can we do?” and I even ended the post with a question about who will bell the cat. But the more I think about it, the more I think we can do something, and I think it’s time we, or at least I, gave it a try.

So thanks for all your support here at ER. It’s been good to have you all as readers and commenters. Some of you may want to join me at CR, some of you may not find its new direction entirely palatable. Either way I wish you all the best of luck.

ER probably won’t go away entirely; I may have a new post here now and then, and someday I may even finish the series on Mere Christianity. I’m going to focus the bulk of my attention on the new blog, though, so for those of you who will be joining me there, see you later, and for the rest, farewell.

You’re absolutely wrong. Terrible example and you have apparently not read TIA nor understood that Duncan doesn’t even begin to rebut its arguments. He does not show that religion was involved as a pretext in more than 7 percent of the wars in recorded human history. Nor does he explain why no military tactician or strategist has EVER incorporated religion into their military tactics or strategy. His critique is totally invalid.

Now stop making groundless assertions and be specific. Precisely what about that his argument that religion causes war do you find persuasive?

Notice, the primary crime he accuses his critic of is a failure to read and understand the opposing point of view. He then insists that I failed to rebut his argument, and he demands to know what is so persuasive about my argument that religion causes war. Does he have a point? Does my argument—meaning the argument I actually made, not the one Vox attributes to me—fall apart when examined in the light of the evidence Vox cites?

Turning back to the post in question, what I originally wrote is this:

His main point is that religion is not the primary cause of most wars, which is perfectly reasonable and accurate. [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, he pretends that Harris and Dawkins and company are claiming that eliminating religion would eliminate war, which is a pretty blatant straw man. (He even admits at one point that Harris and Dawkins “[never] state that they believe religion is the direct and primary cause of war.”)

Yep, as usual, Vox has not a clue what he is talking about. He claims that none of my posts rebutted anything he said, but has he even read what I wrote? Or is he the one who is failing to read and understand what the opposing side is saying? He’s so desperate to dismiss me as “unintelligent, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest” that he completely fails to notice the fact that I agree with him about religion as a false cause of war. In fact, I think Vox is overstating the influence of religion by about 7%.

Let’s ignore, for the time being, the issue of battlefield generals using or not using religion as a tactic or strategy. By the time the generals are on the field attacking the enemy, the war has already been caused. There’s clearly no point in seeking the cause of a war amongst the choices generals make after the war is already underway.

But aside from that, Vox and I are pretty much in agreement as regards the role of religion in the events leading up to the wars of history. My chief critique of Vox’s argument was that he failed to spend any time at all discussing the role(s) that religion did, could, or should play in times of national crisis leading up to possible war. I’m not saying that religion does have such a role or roles, I’m merely pointing out that Vox’s analysis failed to document some very important considerations, not to say the MOST important consideration, in determining what connection, if any, exists between religion and war.

If we do take this into account, though, we can begin to document how really impotent and useless religion is in matters of genuine significance. War is a pretty big deal, as far as the real world is concerned. It changes boundaries, destroys people and lands, changes customs and sometimes even languages. We would expect, if any world religions incorporated a deity Who genuinely cared about mankind (or about good and evil), that at least some religions ought to have an unmistakable or even supernatural influence on the course of events leading up to (or away from) a war.

Naturally, there are may roles that religion could play. For example, if there were a genuine deity to pray to, then national leaders would be able to pray for guidance. If divine wisdom were bestowed on them from above, advising them on whether or not their cause was just and their chance of victory secure, then this would indeed put religion in a highly influential role with respect to the circumstances leading up to (or away from) the war. Likewise if there were practical advice/wisdom to be gleaned from a study of the religion’s holy scriptures, either by the leaders or (in a democracy) by the voters.

Another role religion could play would be the very important role of uniting people into a common body, i.e. a united front with which to face the enemy. Religious faith could play a vital role in supplying manpower for the war effort, as people were led by their god to make personal sacrifices and commitments for the greater good of all. With a real god behind it, religion might influence wars by miraculous means, such as, oh, making the invading soldiers all go blind so that they couldn’t fight.

If religion did indeed have any substantial, real-world influence over the course of events, then (a) Vox would be wrong, but more importantly (b) it would matter which religion were the true religion. After all, if we’re going to fight wars over religion, we don’t want to fight for the wrong one, eh?

What Vox has discovered, though, is that in every real-world case, the true power lies, not in religion, but in purely secular, materialistic factors. Religion is a passive, empty symbol, which men invest with whatever meaning or interpretation suits the need of the moment. And, as Vox has shown, the need of the moment is dictated by secular factors, like politics, or economics, or sheer human cussedness. Casual observers might be fooled by the apparent role of religion in war, but to jump to that conclusion is to stop too soon and to fail to apprehend the purely secular factors that are driving and controlling the religious aspect. Religion is the passive puppet of greater, real-world forces.

Ironically, Vox concludes that Islam is the only religion with any significant influence over whether or not nations will go to war. I think it’s safe to say, however, that that’s more an emotional reaction against 9/11 than a serious historical analysis. In the 93% of wars he says were not caused by religion, he cites geopolitical, ethnic, economic and other secular factors as the real causes, yet if we look at the 7% of wars that are allegedly religious, we’ll find the same factors at work, with religion serving merely the same empty, symbolic role as the colors on the national flag.

It’s as foolish to insist that someone must be wrong all of the time as it is to insist that someone must be right all of the time. (I realize that in saying that, I’m rebutting the theme, if not the whole thesis, of TIA, but I digress.) Not everything Vox says is wrong, and in this case I think he’s a lot more correct than even he gives himself credit for.

The circumstances leading up to (away from?) international war are very momentous and vitally important circumstances. Vox is doing a great service both to believers and to unbelievers by documenting the fact that religion plays no role at all—”does not play a secondary contributory role in war. It does not play a tertiary contributory role in war,” as he says. Religion is utterly passive and irrelevant, a sock puppet that merely “speaks” whatever words it pleases men to put into its mouth.

And that goes for more than just war too. Thanks for the help, Vox.

Eh, Vox?

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.

Letters to the Editor, December 15, 2010So let me see if I understand this: The Defense Department is proposing to let people who choose to live a homosexual lifestyle serve “openly” in the armed forces (per the Dec. 2 article “DADT study group: Full integration is best”), but won’t allow Christians such as myself the freedom to “openly” share the good news of Christ with our co-workers — as the faith we’ve chosen requires?

DOD officials plan to tell servicemembers who have a problem with those living a homosexual lifestyle to “learn to deal with it,” but they are prepared to counsel and/or slap Christians with paperwork if someone feels “offended” by our witness? Wearing sexual lifestyle choices on your sleeve is OK, but not your faith?

Military chaplains who teach that homosexuality is antithetical to and incompatible with Christianity (which it is) can either muzzle their objections or “leave,” but gays will be permitted to parade their lifestyle choices in front of all?

Bottom line: So I’m free to express myself if I’m a homosexual, but not if I’m a Christian? What disgraceful hypocrisy.

Here’s the truth: I will continue to witness to who I want, when I want and where I want. My commitment to my God supersedes my commitment to the DOD and, if officials are upset about that, then I guess they can “learn to deal with it.”

Department of Defense? More like the Department of Double Standards.

Lt. Col. Stacy L. Maxey
Afghanistan

I feel like writing back to the good colonel and clarifying one or two matters about which there seems to be some confusion.

Dear Col. Maxey;

Regarding your letter of Dec. 15 to the Stars and Stripes, it seems you are offended by the double standard involved in repealing DADT. I’m sure you will be delighted to find out that a fair compromise is easily available that removes all of the issues of double standards between Christians and gays in the military. All we need to do is apply the same standard to both. With the repeal of DADT, the following will be possible:

• If someone asks whether you are a Christian, you will not have to lie and say that you are not, just as gays will no longer have to lie when asked if they are gay.
• If the military discovers that you are Christian, you will not automatically be discharged, just as gays will no longer face immediate discharge upon discovery that they are gay.
• If you are seen openly participating in casual Christian activities, such as going to church or carrying a bible, you will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge, just as gays who are seen associating with others of the same sex will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge.
• Any prayers, Bible studies, or other Christian activities which you engage in on your own time, in private, will not be any of the military’s business, just as it is none of the military’s business what homosexual soldiers do in private, on their own time.
• If you have a fellow soldier or superior officer who is pressuring you to engage in homosexual activities against your will, you will have the same freedom to file a complaint as a gay soldier has to complain about a fellow soldier who is pressuring them to engage in Christian activities against their will.
• If a superior officer unfairly penalizes you for failure to engage in homosexual activities, by giving you unfavorable performance reviews, withholding promotion, or giving you punitive work assignments, you will have the opportunity to apply for a redress of your grievances, just as gays will in the case of superior officers who penalize them similarly for failure to engage in Christian activities.
• Military chaplains who advocate Christian conduct, as well as those who advocate homosexual conduct, will be free to speak as their conscience demands when conducting designated services where attendance is voluntary, but may face pressure, reprimands, or even discharge if they abuse their position to advocate Christianity or homosexuality among those who do not wish to participate in such exchanges.

Granted, you may be required by regulations (if not by ordinary courtesy and professionalism) to make certain concessions. For example, to promote team cohesion and unit effectiveness, you may not be allowed to single out certain members of your team for public humiliation and harassment just because they are gay. But even here, the same standard works the other way: your team members will be required not to single you out for public humiliation and harassment just because you are a bigot and/or have chosen a bigoted religion.

You are right: there have been some serious and injurious double standards in the military. I’m sure that with your interest in justice, fairness, and service, you will be delighted now that these double standards are being ended, and the samel rules applied equally to all service members.

Sincerely,

Deacon Duncan.

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.

My comments in the past have been along the lines of “they’re both partly right and partly wrong,” but I’ve been frustrated by my inability to express something that felt deeper and more important than that. It took me a while to put it together, but now I think I’m ready to go into more detail, and spell it out.

The basic problem is that neither the New Atheists nor the “framers” really get religion. Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative in hopes of stirring discussion—religion is a subject both groups are intensely interested in and familiar with, so neither side is exactly ignorant about it. But there’s a very important aspect to religion that they still don’t “get,” and without this understanding, neither side will never have anything more than rare and coincidental successes, at least in the public arena.

Religion functions on two levels. On the personal level, religion functions as a mental framework (aka a “worldview”) within which believers organize their perceptions of life and the world around them. For many people, superstitious myths function remarkably well as an approximation of what’s going on in real life. “Discovering God’s will,” turns out to mean learning by experience what works and what doesn’t, and that’s a process that benefits the participant even when there is no God. What scientists do by study and analysis, believers do (on a much rougher scale) by superstition and social instinct. Science is more accurate, but for most people, religion is much, much easier, and therefore preferable.

That’s the personal level. The personal level plays a small role in helping to determine what religious beliefs will seem plausible to the individual believer, but in practice this actually has very little to do with what the believer will end up believing, or with how they will act on the basis of their belief. Of far greater importance is how religion functions on a social level. On a personal level, believers use religion to make sense of the world, but on a social level, believers use religion to establish a dominant community within society, and to secure a good place for themselves within that community.

It works like this: religion is a subjective truth. No real God or gods ever show up in real life, to validate or falsify anybody’s theology. Religious dominance is therefore solely a function of—and a measure of—social dominance. Anything that weakens a religion in society necessarily weakens the community that preaches it, and conversely the more any particular religion has influence over society, the more influence the religious community has over society. Hence the emphasis on “America is a Christian nation,” for example.

Notice (as an aside) that this is possible only because religion is a subjective truth. If two people disagree over, say, whether it’s safe to mix ammonia and chlorine bleach while cleaning, that’s a disagreement with objectively real consequences. If you mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, toxic gases will be released, and you could possibly die. The question is a question of objective truth. Likewise if two people disagree about whether pi is more or less than the square root of two, it’s a question of objective truth. Do the math and find out who is right. Peer pressure is irrelevant.

If two people disagree about the Trinity, by contrast, there is no corresponding objectively-real consequence. Neither trinitarian nor non-trinitarian deities show up in real life, and therefore the real-world consequences are the same no matter which side wins. Objective reality does not favor one position over the other, and therefore the debate is entirely a contest of social influence (i.e. peer pressure). It’s a popularity contest of ideologies: whichever side can win the most votes (converts) becomes the dominant (subjective) truth.

Believers understand this on at least an instinctual level. The mistake atheists tend to fall into is to approach religion as though it were a question of objective truth. It is not. It is a question of which subjective truth has the political and social dominance to assert itself as The Truth. People do not embrace or reject religious doctrines on the basis of whether they are objectively true, they decide almost exclusively on the basis of the social implications. People will embrace and promote the beliefs that enhance the social dominance of their religious community, and will reject arguments, factual or not, that diminish their community’s influence and/or that would threaten their own individual standing within the community.

That’s a crucial point. What confuses the issue is the fact that people try to make their religion more dominant by asserting their beliefs as objective truth. This is where the average atheist steps into a trap, because it would seem like the way to address such beliefs is by showing that they are not objectively true. Reasonable, logical, and maddeningly ineffective. The arguments just seem to bounce off, no matter how logical, or well-documented, or noble they might be. Subjective truths, even when asserted as objective fact, are immune to real-world falsification.

What we need to understand is that people aren’t looking for genuine objective truths. Genuine objective truths can be complicated and uncomfortable, but what’s worse, they confer no particular social advantage on people who are not in the top 10% of intelligent and logical thinkers. And that’s not what people want. What people want are subjective “truths” that they can use to build dominant communities, unfettered by the arbitrary requirements of factual accuracy. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of who’s winning.

So to go back to the “framing” debate, we can see that both sides are right and both are wrong. The New Atheists are right about the value of speaking plainly and honestly, but the framers are right that the New Atheists are offending people without necessarily advancing the cause of atheism in society. Naturally so: atheism threatens to weaken the Christian community, and Christians don’t want to lose their social dominance. Yet the framers are also wrong: speaking respectfully of Christian beliefs only reinforces the social dominance of the Christian community, and might be making the cause of atheism even more hopeless.

And yet, they’ve also got a valid point: people tune you out if they think you’re just disparaging them. Atheists need to gain the attention and interest of the majority audience in order to establish a viable, if not dominant, community within society. But the New Atheists are correct as well: you don’t win a popularity contest by being mealy-mouthed and wishy-washy about what you stand for (ask John McCain, or Obama for that matter).

To advance the cause of atheism/skepticism/liberalism/etc, here’s what we need to understand. Most people are not swayed by the objective facts, especially in domains, like religion, that are all about subjective truths. What people are looking for are worthwhile communities that have at least a viable and respectable position in society. More importantly, people are looking for worthwhile communities in which they themselves can comfortably fit in and be respected participants.

And yes, I know, there are people who care more about factual truth than about peer pressure, and these people will listen if you offer them rational, fact-based arguments. But most of those people are skeptics already—it’s not that hard to discover the truth about God! The rest of the population won’t change religion because of evidence; they’ll change when and if they find a community they like better.

This leaves us with two missions: (a) to create communities where ordinary people, not necessarily science-minded, can feel comfortable, welcome, and important, and (b) to put social pressure on believers to give them enough of a nudge that they can overcome their existing social ties and uproot themselves and become members of the new, non-superstitious communities. The framers have an advantage when it comes to mission (a), because they’re naturally more social and community-oriented, but they won’t succeed unless the New Atheists are successful at mission (b), which is where their strength lies. We need to make people uncomfortable where they are (as the New Atheists do), but we also need to offer them an inviting alternative (which the framers ought to be good at).

I’m leaving tons unsaid (sigh). Such is the plight of the blogger. Comments are open though, so there’s hope.

So, who’s going to put the bell on the cat?

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.

Since gay people sin against us by falling in love differently than we do, we should punish them by falling in love differently than they do. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! Let’s see how they like a taste of their own medicine, eh? They want to walk down the street with a same-sex lover? We’ll show them: we’ll walk down the street with opposite sex lovers. Hah! They want to marry same-sex partners? Let ‘em. But we’ll make ‘em pay. We’ll marry opposite sex partners. Legally! Take that, gays! You want to be different from us? Fine, then we’re gonna be different from you. And it serves you right.

Yeah, none of this merciful, New Testament, God-loves-sinners crap. Paul knew how to deal with sinners. Give ‘em old-fashioned Moses-brand justice, and do to them exactly what they’re doing to us, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. 100% Biblical justice, old school. Then everyone will be able to see just how much harm you can do to someone else by falling in love differently than they do.

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.

Jason’s account makes it sound as if King was an uncompromising and iconoclastic leader. But that misreads King and the history of civil rights. Remember that it was Malcolm X, not Dr. King, who insisted on change “by any means necessary.” Indeed, Malcolm X criticized King using logic analogous to that Jason deploys against accommodationism.

Sounds like strong talk, though Josh immediately tempers it with one of the many disclaimers and caveats in his post:

(I repeat that this is an analogy. New Atheists aren’t Malcolm X, there aren’t atheist nationalists that would parallel Malcolm X’s black nationalism, neither I nor any other accommodationist would claim to be Martin Luther King reborn, etc. It’s an analogy, please don’t overinterpret it.)

He’s got a point to make and he’s going to make it, but he bends over backwards to be, well, accommodating to those who might disagree with him. He wants us to hear what he has to say, and I think we need to hear it. I wouldn’t call myself an accommodationist (and I don’t think many regular readers would accuse me of being overly accommodating to religion, at least in this blog), but right now, at this time and place in the history of church and state, I think we need to listen to both sides, and do some serious, open-minded thinking. And I think the MLK vs Malcolm X analogy gives us something really meaty to think about.

If you haven’t been following the discussion, the links are here, here, here and here. It’s worth taking the time to read the whole thing, even though the posts tend to be on the longish side. But what really sparked my interest is the analogy Josh draws between how Martin Luther King approached civil rights, and how Malcolm X did.

Malcolm X, of course, was famous for being fierce, uncompromising, and unapologetic. He had a style that might forgivably remind some readers of certain popular bearded bloggers on the New Atheist side. But, as Jason points out in the comments, Richard Dawkins, at least, is no Malcolm X, and his books (even The God Delusion) conspicuously fail to demand the end of religion “by any means necessary.”

That weakens the analogy, but doesn’t destroy it, which suggests that the parallels that Josh draws are close enough to be intriguing, but perhaps not as close as they could be. There may be a better fit, and one of the commenters raises an idea that might give us a clue.

The clue lies in realizing that Malcolm X’s approach was less successful because he not only refused to accommodate racism, he refused to accommodate white people. MLK was more successful because he attacked the racism rather than the racists. Josh calls this “framing,” which is a term that tends to excite knee-jerk responses in some people (myself included), but there’s really nothing terribly controversial in the observation. We could have called it “common courtesy” (or politics) just as easily—the tacit if sometimes unwarranted assumption that those present were excluded from the group being criticized.

Here’s what I see as being a point of interest relevant to this discussion. MLK did not do what so many of us do routinely: he did not single out and identify specific individuals, to ridicule and condemn their personal racism. He did not identify specific groups (e.g. Catholics) as bastions of racism, to be condemned and rejected. (Did he openly denounce the Klan? That I don’t know.)

Consequently, it’s not surprising that MLK was more successful than Malcolm X in effectively winning over the opposition. For white people, there would be no point in reconciling with Malcolm X, because Malcolm X won’t accept them unless they stop being white, which isn’t really an option. MLK gave white people a way to support equality for blacks without requiring that they stop being what they can’t help being.

The crucial question, then, is to ask how this strategy might apply to the ongoing debate between atheism and religion. The trivial answer would be to say that atheists ought to attack religion in the broad, general sense without singling out any particular groups or individuals. But would that work? And is it even possible to confront religion without referring, at least indirectly, to specifics that will obviously and immediately let everyone know exactly who you’re talking about? And, not to forget another important question, is accommodation sufficient to accomplish its goals without confrontation? Did Malcolm X contribute at least partially to MLK’s success by saying things that needed to be said, that were too harsh for MLK to say?

I tend to lean towards the view that both approaches—and the inevitable conflicts between the two approaches—are necessary. There are harsh things that need to be said that I don’t expect Josh to say, and there are (for want of a better word) “accommodating” things that I don’t expect Jason or PZ Myers to say, that also need to be said. And there are things that each side needs to say to the other, urging either temperance or zeal, as appropriate to the specific circumstances.

But here’s my last point, and I think it’s something both sides need to remember: religion is not racism. Racism is a relatively simple thing, no matter how devious it may be in how it expresses itself. Racism is the idea that one race is superior or inferior to another, and ought to be treated differently. Religion is not so simple. Religion encompasses both good things, like preaching the value of honesty and virtue, and bad things, like the failure to practice what you preach. It encompasses both good people and bad people. It promotes both community and divisiveness. It reflects both what’s good and what’s bad about the people who make it work, and leaves open the chicken-or-egg question of whether religion does more to define people’s attitudes and actions than people’s attitudes and actions do to define the religion.

You can’t just “outgrow” religion the way you can outgrow racism. Or at least, a lot of people can’t. People use religion as a conceptual framework within which they understand what is going on in the world around them. They don’t have the analytical skills to describe the complexities of real life in scientific terms. Beyond a certain point, none of us do—there’s too much data, coming in too fast, for a detailed and rigorous analysis to keep up. Conceptual symbologies like “God’s will” and “intelligent design” serve as rough approximations for the apparent “moods” of things too complicated to reduce to simple causes and effects. Religion works, as a rough, back-of-the-napkin approximation of what happening, and that’s enough for a lot of people. It has to be, because that’s all they have!

So here’s the dilemma: MLK had it easy, because all he had to overcome was racism, which is a prejudice that people can easily live without. Religion isn’t. Oh, for some of us it is, because some of us are able to see the world in objective, scientific, rational terms. Unfortunately, that ability tends to make it that much harder to understand why other people don’t find it as easy as we do. What we’ve got works better than what they’ve got, so why do they so stubbornly refuse to see things the way we do? The answer is that they don’t have our ability to see everything in such cold, analytical, rational terms. They think socially and see socially, and it just makes more sense to them to understand the world in social terms, as reflecting the motives and moods of intelligent supernatural beings.

Our job, then, is to try and wean them off of the more harmful aspects of religion, like superstition and intolerance, while intelligently recognizing that we can’t ask a fish to ride a bicycle. People won’t give up their last hope of making sense of life, so they won’t give up their religion unless and until something better comes along. And science, while better, is out of the reach of a lot of people. That’s the “intelligently recognizing” bit I just mentioned. It is neither possible nor necessarily even desirable to force everyone to think the same way scientifically-minded people do. Such a goal would indeed be a Malcolm X style strategy, doomed to failure.

So on the one hand we do need to confront the bad aspects of religion, like superstition and intolerance, but we need to do so without destroying the one tool most people rely on to get by in life as sentient beings. And I’m not sure how to accomplish that. I’ve toyed with the idea of offering people a reality-based religion (see my Patron Goddess link above), but I’m no messiah, let’s face it. I think that’s what we need, but I have no real clue how to get there.

Meanwhile, let’s encourage Josh and Jacob and PZ and Jerry Coyne and Chris Mooney and all the rest to continue their discussion, with as much civility as the market will bear (knock wood). We need both sides because I don’t think either side has found THE answer yet, nor do I expect either side to make much progress without the other. I’m going to continue making such critiques as I always have, because I think that’s important and necessary, but I strongly encourage people to disagree with me and try and change my mind. The time is ripe, let’s make the most of it.

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.

Neither side should be lightly dismissed; each has something important to say, and a valid point to make. And of course, I have my own two cents to toss in.

My first penny is that I tend to agree with those who think this statistic is a telling point in favor of unbelief. Truth is consistent with itself, and the more you know about something that’s really true, the more you can see how well it fits with all the other facts. Conversely, of course, the more you know about something that isn’t true, the easier it is to find inconsistencies and contradictions. Since at most one of these religions can be The Truth, it makes sense that most religions would benefit from a higher degree of ignorance among their believers.

The second cent is this: faith is a belief, but you can’t just have a belief. You have to believe some thing. If most believers know little about what it is they’re believing, then what exactly does their faith consist of? They obviously don’t miss their beliefs if they don’t even know what they are, which implies that their faith is of little practical importance to them in their everyday lives. Oh, it’s important symbolically, as a kind of banner to rally around. But again, if it were really important enough to rally around, wouldn’t it be important enough for people to know what it is?

This is one of the things that greatly disturbed me when I was a believer, because I did believe that Christian beliefs were important, and I couldn’t understand why almost nobody, in any church, seemed to hold the faith in high enough regard to want to learn it. At least not in the pews. You could preach it, people expected you to preach it, but, well, tomorrow’s Monday, back to the real world, eh? That’s part of the reason I ultimately left my Christian faith behind. God doesn’t show up in real life, miracles are only rumors, exaggerations and superstitions, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to be doing much in people’s hearts. If the faith is hollow too, if the beliefs have no practical, meaningful content, then what’s really left to hang around for?

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.

The milder type spreads fear by saying “Someone else is going to hurt you.”

You know, like “liberals.” Or better yet, “socialists.” Or gays. Or whoever it’s convenient to demonize at the moment.

Our biggest problem isn’t that we’re being terrorized by the violent guys. It’s all the “milder” types jumping on the terrorist bandwagon, working to maintain a continuous state of fear and paranoia in the general public. If we really want to help America by fighting terrorism, we ought to start by recognizing where it’s really coming from. It’s not being smuggled in from some Middle Eastern territory. It’s 100% home grown.

Just two cents worth, in observance of 9/11.

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 very simple and straight-forward example of an instance where the claim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” can easily be shown false.

The problem with extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence is that believers have no extraordinary evidence to back up their extraordinary claims (otherwise why would they be so vexed by this requirement?). It’s not at all that skeptics are making any kind of unreasonable demand. All that this oft-repeated claim means is that if you’re going to say something is true, then we ought to be able to see things in the real world that are consistent with what you claim: if you claim extraordinary things are part of the real world, then we ought to be able to see extraordinary things, in the real world, that are consistent with those claims.

But that’s too much to ask of the credulous, so they’re anxious to rationalize away this perfectly reasonably requirement. Let’s see how cl tries to get out of this one.

Take the claim that some person climbed a tree, for instance. I doubt there is anybody out there who would deny this claim’s ordinariness, as people have been known to climb trees since antiquity. If I were to make the claim that some person climbed a tree, what sort of evidence would a reasonable individual require?I’m willing to bet your answer to that question would be comprised of one or more of the following:

1) some kind of hard evidence, e.g. an authentic photograph or video footage;

2) reliable testimony from a trusted source.

If your answer is comprised of one or more of the aforementioned, then I’m going to argue that it’s fair to call those examples of “ordinary evidence.”

Notice that he’s distinguishing between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” on the basis of commonality vs. rarity. Tree-climbing is “ordinary” because people have frequently been observed to climb trees, and it’s common knowledge that humans have a long history of doing so. Likewise, photographs of people climbing trees, and trusted sources who report seeing people climb trees, are proportionately common. Since this evidence occurs frequently, and not rarely, it is “ordinary” and not “extraordinary.”

He continues with this same standard in his “extraordinary” example—only not quite.

Next, take the claim that some person climbed one of the 88-story Petronas twin towers in Malasia. I doubt there is anybody out there who would deny this claim’s extra-ordinariness, as such feats are, well… simply not ordinary. If I were to make the claim that some person climbed one of the 88-story Petronas twin towers in Malasia, what sort of evidence would a reasonable individual require?

I’m willing to bet your answer to that question is going to be the same as your answer to the previous question: either some sort of hard evidence, reliable testimony from a trusted source, or both.

As such, I’m going to argue that the person who makes the argument, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” either misuses the term extraordinary, or attempts to increase the claimant’s burden of proof without justification.

Did you catch that? Climbing the Petronas towers is “extraordinary” because it doesn’t happen very often. How often do you see hard evidence, then, of someone climbing them? Equally rare. Reliable witnesses saying they saw someone climbing them? Equally rare. By cl’s usage of “extraordinary,” the evidence is just as “extraordinary” (i.e. “rarely encountered in real life”) as the claim. Yet he denies that the evidence is extraordinary because the type of evidence (e.g. photographic, or eyewitness testimony) is the same as for the “ordinary” case. In other words, he’s using a different definition of “extraordinary,” a definition based on type rather than on frequency of occurrence.

We can use that standard too, but if that’s the case, climbing a tree and climbing a building are both “ordinary” in that they’re both examples of humans climbing things. In other words, if we define “extraordinary” as meaning that the category itself must be rare, then neither example is extraordinary, since both fit in same the category of “people climbing.” What makes the Petronas climb extraordinary is the particular set of details in which it is different from other instances of people climbing things. But then, the same is true of the evidence: what makes it extraordinary are the particular details that make this particular photograph, or this particular eyewitness testimony, different from other photographs and testimonies.

Thus, it’s not the skeptic who is misusing the term “extraordinary,” it’s cl himself who equivocates on the meaning of the term, defining the claim as extraordinary based on the rarity of the details, and defining the evidence as ordinary based on the broad category of types of evidence. If you maintain a consistent standard of what “extraordinary” means, then the evidence can and must be just as extraordinary (or just as ordinary) as the claim it supports, just as cl’s example shows. This leaves cl with a double fail on his hands, because not only does his argument fail to prove his point, but we’re also left wondering just why he feels the need to try and make this argument in the first place. People who actually have reliable evidence don’t go around trying to downplay its importance.

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.

How can we help such people understand why America is not (and does not want to be) a Christian nation? The other day I though of a parallel that might be helpful: calling America a “Christian Nation” is like calling America a “White Nation.” Yes, there were quite a lot of Founding Fathers who espoused at least vaguely Christian rhetoric, just as there were quite a few who owned slaves. And yes, you can find a lot of early American policies and precedents that favored Christianity, just as you can find a lot that favored white men. And you can even argue that, by “freedom of religion,” the Fathers meant being free to choose whatever flavor of Christianity you like best, just as you can argue that when a slave owner like Thomas Jefferson writes “all men are created equal,” he really means only that all white males are equal, and not that women and/or other races are also equal.

If you’re a white supremacist, you may not see anything wrong with doing any of the above. If you’re a Christian supremacist, then you may see a problem only with the “White Nation” arguments (even though they’re the same as your own, slightly re-framed). And that’s the point. The Christian Nation arguments are Christian Supremacist arguments. They’re a bigoted demand that your religion be publicly and officially acknowledged as supreme above all other religions, just as white supremacists demand that whites be held superior to all other races. And that’s why sensible and fair-minded men and women should oppose all efforts to turn America into the kind of Christian nation that our Founding Fathers came here to get away from.

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.