Insufficient Christianity: 7:1

On to more of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.  In Chapter 6, he attempts to show how pantheism and atheism are unsound philosophies, and from the looks of Chapter 7, he seems to be proceeding from one such worldview to the next, breaking down them all, until only Christianity remains.

I am highly entertained that, in the same way as with Chapter 6, his arguments in this next chapter also do as much or more violence to Christianity as they do to the alternate worldviews that he is attempting to argue against.

Lewis’ next opponents are what he calls Christianity-and-water and Dualism, with another jab or two at atheism.  First he “refutes” atheism (again) and his “Christianity-and-water”:

Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It 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. Both these are boys ‘ philosophies.

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not 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 you want to go on and ask what is really happening–then you must be prepared for something difficult.

. . . and the twisting semantic games never end.  Lewis goes on to state that the exact reason that he believes Christianity to be real is that “It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”  He goes on for several paragraphs about this, and for the life of me, I cannot decipher this point of his to be anything other than a many-layered statement that basically says, “The more bizarre nonsense that a worldview claims, the more likely it is to be true.”

It takes a certain considerable volume of philosophical cojones to actually claim this. I find myself slightly disappointed that humanity had not discovered the truth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster until after Lewis’ death; it seems he would have converted instantly, and I would have loved to have seen such a thing.

Of course, he’s missing a rather important point here; while it is true that the planets are all different sizes and shapes, and the earth, in fact, revolves around the Sun (contrary to what we might otherwise naturally assume), etc., we only accept these seemingly strange assertions as true after we have evidence for them.  Their strangeness is not - and that’s not in big-assed capital letters – itself a reason to believe these assertions.  I would have thought this would be obvious.

That’s the most obvious and . . . wait for it . . . simple rebuttal to Lewis’ argument, but there are others.  For example, he noticeably doesn’t bother defining what way in which he considers some worldviews to be simpler than others.  A volume containing all the knowledge that we presently have about the completely naturalistic, material universe would be somewhat larger than, for example, the Bible.  Likewise, there is nothing inherently “simpler” about his Christianity-and-water God than his hard-nosed, “manly” Christianity (yes, Lewis hilariously claims that Christianity is the “manliest” worldview!).  Both assert “truths” so simple that they can be conveyed with a few lines of scripture from a very old holy text, or alternatively, “truths” so complex that human minds are completely incapable of understanding them.  The point here, obviously, is that it’s easy to claim that a religion is either simple or complex, as your situation and philosophical needs dictate; religions simply don’t discuss reality- you can keep them simple or make up any amount of nonsense, because religion doesn’t actually need to have an externally verifiable gauge.

Now, concerning Lewis’ “rebuttal” of Dualism . . .  You might recall Chapter 6, where tries to refute Pantheism?  He claims that if there is any such thing as real moral good and real moral evil, then God cannot be everywhere and in everything and still be morally good, and this is why Pantheism is false.  Besides several other obvious issues with this argument, Christianity claims that God is all-powerful and perfectly good, so by Lewis’ own reasoning, the God of Christianity cannot co-exist with a world containing evil.

Entertainingly, Lewis digs himself another hole in Chapter 7, here, with his supposed rebuttal of Dualism:

The two powers, or spirits, or gods–the good one and the bad one–are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. . . .  One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. . . .  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.

Did you catch that?  Lewis claims that if we are to call one power good, we must judge him by a standard higher than himself.  My question for Lewis (my rather obvious question, I would have thought) is:  How then do we know whether your own Christian God is good?  This is the classic question; Is X morally good because God says so, or does God say so because X is morally good (according to an objective standard of morality independent of God)?

I think this might be the single biggest issue with secular morality versus theistic morality:  How does one define the word “moral” itself?  If your answer to the above question is the first response (X is morally good because God says so, and for no other reason), then you are specifically defining morality as “the will of the most powerful/oldest/most intelligent/most Y quality/whatever being that exists,” and that is what morality is.  (Of course, I disagree, defining morality for myself as, “morally good actions increase, or at least maintain as much as is possible, the degree of personal freedom and justice enjoyed by all sentient, self-aware lifeforms that themselves possess a moral conscience; morally evil actions having the opposite effect.”)  Whatever your personal standard of morality might be, if you take the second response to the above question, you have done what Lewis describes here in his rebuttal to Dualism.  You are requiring another force greater than the “god” in question, and judging the “god” in question by that objective standard.

My point here is that Lewis has been arguing all along that morality, by definition, cannot be arbitrary.  That, however, is exactly what one is claiming if they claim that morality is literally nothing more or less than the will of “god.”  If we agree that institutionalized slavery, for example, is morally wrong, then why is it wrong?  Is it wrong because God says so, and for no other reason?  If it is, then the obvious response is to point out that if God were to say that slavery was morally good he must still, by this logic, be morally correct.  To say that morality is nothing more than the will of “god” (to borrow a phrase from Lewis) is to state that morality is nothing more than God’s personal preference.  This is exactly what Lewis has been arguing against for the entirety of the book thus far – that morality absolutely cannot be the arbitrary “personal preference” of a person, and that there must exist a real objective reality.

Briefly, then, Lewis’ exact argument against Dualism also does violence to the Christian concept of God.  Lewis claims that (assuming that morality is something more than someone’s arbitrary preference) we could only determine if either of Dualism’s two godlike beings were “morally good” by comparing them to an external, objective standard.  I totally agree with him; the problem is that he somehow fails to see that this exact same issue applies to the Christian god.  Obviously, Lewis then claims that this external, objective standard must itself be a sentient, godlike being, yet he has spectacularly failed to prove this.  Entertainingly, if Lewis is correct about the existence of morality requiring the existence of a supreme moral being, and that this godlike being must be judged by an external objective standard (not someone’s mere “personal preference”), he will have created, in his own mind, an infinite regress of gods, each being judged by a system of morality created by the god directly above him.

What facinating method of disproving the existence of the Christian god will Lewis come up with next?  Same godless time, same godless station, folks.

We’ll end today’s review with a scary quote from this chapter:

Enemy-occupied territory–that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

Yes, that’s right, Lewis claims that there is an “enemy” that Christians are called to wage war upon.  I understand that this is the case in a Christian worldview (and that the Bible says as much), but it still disturbs me to remember this all-to-common rhetoric from when I called myself a Christian. Really, is it any wonder that Christians have burned people to death because they thought that they were possessed by demons?

Mere Christianity Online