mood: contemplative
music: George Winston – The Great Pumpkin Waltz
Clive Staples Lewis was and is certainly one of the most influential Christian writers of our time. His immense popularity has soared with the film versions of his stories being released to critical acclaim. He also wrote a number of theological non-fiction books, among them, Mere Christianity.
In this book, Lewis makes the case for “mere Christianity” by arguing that the ideas of goodness and justice, which we find are common to all cultures, and that this standard, which he calls “The Law of Nature”, must come from outside ourselves, and further must be instilled by a supernatural being.
This is what is known as an argument from morality – the basic premise being that if there are objective moral values, then those must be informed by something outside of ourselves. Christians, quite naturally, say that this something else is God. But is it? For the argument from morality to be valid, we must demonstrate that human beings cannot have gotten their morality from somewhere else – either by evolutionary processes or by reason or societal benefit, or a combination of these. So where do we get our sense of morals and ethical mores from?
The Foundation of Ethics
There are a few primary, but not necessarily mutually exclusive views about the evolution of human morality – one is that societal conventions ultimately decide our ethical feelings and behaviors, and the other is that our behaviors are informed by deep-seated feelings that evolved with us as a species.1 Briefly, the anthropological view would say that we feel killing is wrong because society has decided as a matter of policy that we’d prefer you didn’t, and there are very powerful in-group / out-group forces and feelings at work to make us feel a very strong revulsion against the taking of another life. The other (sociobiological) view is that we evolved feelings against behavior such as murder because it’s damaging to the survival of the species if we go around engaging in wanton violence. Sociobiologists and anthropologists have and will continue to refine and develop these theories as we continue to study the human brain. My (non-anthropologist, non-sociobiologist) view is that both theories are an extension of the nature-vs-nurture discussion, and as such, it is very likely that both actions of mechanism are involved in the development of human morality.
My point is that since before the time of Socrates, we have had, and continue to refine, a perfectly naturalistic view of human ethical standards that stands completely independent of any theological basis for morality. In fact, we do not need any theological basis for morality – in particular, I think it is obvious that we do not get our morals from the Bible.
The Bible as a Basis for Ethical Behavior
The Old Testament is a place where it’s easy to find places where our current moral views might be offended. The various genocides, injustices, human rights violations and pestilences that God sent around the world in the Old Testament make even Christians squirm listening to them. Christians tend to escape from this by saying that the Old Testament was meant specifically for that time and place and for the Israelites only, ignoring the fact that this sets a double-standard for the rest of the world. Further, it was explicitly denied by Jesus in the New Testament, in Matthew 5:17, when Jesus says “…until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” And in Hebrews 13:8, the author exclaims “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” (Or they trap themselves by getting stuck in a version of the Divine Command Theory of Ethics – where “because God ordered it, it was just”, but anybody who really thinks about this for a while will realize just how morally corrupt that theory is.)
However, if, even for the sake of argument, we consider only the New Testament, we still run across examples of ethical behavior that we would today find unacceptable. In Matthew 15, he refuses to heal a Canaanite woman’s daughter, calling the Canaanites “dogs” – and only agrees to heal her after she annoys the disciples into convincing Jesus to help. In Mark 4, he explains that the reason he speaks in parables is so that “seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted and their sins should be forgiven them.” In Romans 1:26-32, Peter explains that homosexuals are worthy of death. 1 Timothy 2:11 explains that women should “learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”.
Critics of the examples that I have cited here will probably (rightfully) point out that I’m guilty of cherry-picking examples of injustice, or that the rules cited were a product of the time and place when they were issued – and I have no problems with that. In a society where women had about as much rights as slaves, telling women to be in subjection would be perfectly logical and normal. But therein lies my point – we, as a society, have evolved. We (most of us) no longer say it is ethical to kill homosexuals, or that women should sit in silence, never to be granted positions of authority over men. Christians accept these evolved morals, too, whether they admit it or not. They gloss over the myriad injustices of the Old Testament and pick and choose which morals in the New Testament they like. Even the words of Jesus are cherry-picked – who has heard a sermon preached on Jesus refusing to heal a sick child until begged to by annoyed disciples, or thought about the farmers who lost 2,000 pigs when Jesus sent demons into them, instead of just casting them out? (Jesus then leaves the scene without so much as a nod to the farmers.)
Lewis and the Law of Nature
But perhaps God has changed his ethical standards of behavior throughout the eons, and now gives humans moral advice through a conscience, the kind of conscience Lewis posited that all humans had directing what they ought to do – and which he attempts to prove is evidence of the Christian God.
This is problematic on a number of fronts. For one, the very real possibility of a naturalistic basis for morality is completely ignored, and Lewis makes no attempt to address this. For him, it is self-evident that the power to subjugate our selfish desires cannot come from within ourselves, because “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.” He also adds that the moral sense is usually in the position of encouraging the weaker, not the stronger, instinct. “The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note”. But he neglects to consider some different possibilities: that the reason the moral “instinct” can be louder than all the others is that it contributes to our survival and advancement as a species, or that as a society we gain greater happiness by creating a taboo against theft or adultery.
However, it is with his second argument that some even bigger problems come to the surface: Lewis claims that a common thread of virtue runs throughout all cultures and throughout all times, and that this is unlikely if human morality was a human invention. To quote: “I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour 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 teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.”
This is one of the most ridiculous statements Lewis ever penned. How can anybody claim with a straight face that all societies throughout history have had essentially the same moral code? What about Mormon and Arab polygamy, ancient Greek pedophilia and infanticide, Chinese foot-binding, Japanese ritual suicide, Aztec human sacrifice, African female genital mutilation, Islamic ritual murder (“honor killings”), terrorism and suicide bombings, medieval European totalitarian monarchy and inquisitions, Nazi eugenics, racism, and attempted genocide, even Christian-inspired slavery and colonialism, oppression of women, and anti-Semitism? The Bible itself sanctions slavery, discrimination against women and genocide. As mentioned previously, these things may very have been the cultural norm in the societies that practiced them (and in some places, still are.) Indeed, even today, we still heatedly debate euthanasia, sex education, capital punishment, drug use, contraception, and abortion. The very few commonalities that can be found – prohibitions on outright murder and theft chief among them – are there precisely because a powerful combination of evolutionary psychology and societal well-being put them there – any society or people without them wouldn’t be around for long.
Lewis also charges that most of our advancement in morality have come about due to advances in knowledge, e.g., the reason we know longer burn women at the stake for being witches is because we no longer believe such things exist. This argument is simply wrong, however. There is no difference in factual knowledge between societies that forces women to wear a burqa while others reject this practice – the only difference is that some societies believe this is ethical and “God’s will” and others reject this reasoning. There is therefore no “Law of Nature” – it does not exist. There is no moral code common to all human societies – excepting the most basic of societal foundations discussed earlier – and under the crumbling remains of this ridiculous argument we find Lewis’ argument for God amidst the rubble. Lewis’ argument for God hinges upon the assertion that there is an absolute moral code in the universe, and that every person is consciously aware of it and chooses to follow (or not) of his or her own free will – but this is obviously not true. As an atheist, I believe in objective morality, but one that has (unfortunately) not been recognized by every human society.
Lewis’ Conclusion
In the second part of the book, Lewis attempts to use his previous arguments as evidence pointing to the existence of his god, namely, the God of the Bible, the Christian God. Although he says early on that we are not “within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology”, he makes only some trifling attempts to seriously consider other alternatives. He insists that the “something” that is giving us our moral imperatives through our consciences is, in fact, a “Someone”, though he admits that this “Someone”, while obviously a great artist (as the universe is a very beautiful place) he is also “quite merciless and no friend of man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place)” – seemingly making the case against the Christian God.2
He does attempt to consider atheism, but dismisses it with surprising casualness. “My argument against God [when I was an atheist] 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 didn’t think this argument through too well, because it’s a laughably bad analogy. All human beings desire pleasure over pain, and this is one of the fundamental forces that drives everything we do. If we are experiencing pain, or even unpleasantness, we can imagine how our circumstances could be better, compare it to reality, and take steps to move reality in the direction of our thoughts. I have never personally been a slave, but I can imagine what it would be like, and I intuitively know that I would dislike it. I don’t need firsthand experience to be able to run a mini-simulation of slavery in my head and conclude that freedom is better.
He also considers dualism – the idea of two gods, one good, one evil, and quickly rejects it by way of the Euthyphro dilemma:
“Now what do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power?…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”. However, by taking this reasoning to its logical conclusion, we realize that we must apply this rule to God Himself, and ask ourselves whether a command is good because God orders it, or whether He orders it because it is good – the Divine Command Theory I spoke of earlier. To put it simply, what makes God good? If He’s “good” because He does what pleases us, this provides an unsatisfactory basis for ethics, and if God commands it because He’s good, we’re obviously applying an external standard of “good” onto God, one which must be higher than He.
He goes on to place the blame for the universe’s abundance of suffering squarely on the shoulders of that old Christian standby, free will:
“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.”
But once again, Lewis is guilty of not applying standards consistently. Does God have free will? Could God possibly order something that was evil? If not, why? Lewis also takes the time to ponder, briefly, the ancient Problem of Evil, and comes to the conclusion that since (he believes) God is all-good and all-powerful, God intervening directly to put a stop to evil would spell the end of the world, wondering “whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over”. Lewis has apparently forgotten that since God is all-powerful, His direct intervention in human affairs need not spell doom for the human race, and has overlooked the fact that God (according to the Bible) intervened on many occasions in the past (even going so far as to stop the motion of the sun on one occasion) without dire consequences.
Finally, we come to the final argument that Lewis has regarding Christ: the classic trilemma of “Liar, Lord, or Lunatic”:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
This is, however, a false dilemma (technically, a trilemma, but that’s sort of an unusual word), as Lewis ignores several other very distinct possibilities: that other people lied about Jesus, or that the Gospel Accounts, in the thousands of years they have taken to reach us after being copied and re-copied and re-re-copied, then lost, written down from memory, and copied again, sometimes with drastic and irreconcilable differences, are inaccurate.
A Non-Believer’s Perspective
I will point out that Lewis makes a very good statement later on in the book about the rejection of Christianity: “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in.” Lewis comes tantalizingly close to realizing and articulating one of my biggest objections to Christian apologists: the tired imperative that one should “simply believe”. One cannot choose to believe anything as a matter of instant policy – I cannot choose to believe in Christ any more than I can choose to believe in the Tooth Fairy – people cannot consciously control their beliefs.
All this said, Mere Christianity is simultaneously an enjoyable, conversationally-toned read, but it is sadly lacking in logic and is filled with premises that the author assumes are self-evident, but gives no logical reason why they would be. Lewis was clearly a gifted writer and an intelligent human being, very much informed by the opinions and practices of the day. However, I am afraid that I must find the arguments in this book, for now, to be feel-good, but ultimately empty rhetoric.3
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
1: I am not going to go into a thorough explanation of both theories here – suffice it to say that that would take a great deal of time, and it is ultimately irrelevant to my argument that you, the reader, have an intimate understanding of both theories. A list of websites that I used in my studying of both theories can be found here.
2: Or perhaps making a very good case for the Christian God, my cynical side says.
3: I swear that keep trying to keep these entries smaller, but it never works out.