Insufficient Christianity: 8:1

For those of you just joining us, here’s a recap: we’re thoroughly dissecting C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity in excruciating detail. This is chapter 8. The previous chapters can be found by going to the bottom of this post and clicking the “C. S. Lewis” label. You can also find an online copy of Mere Christianity using the link at the bottom of this post.

Chapter 8 is amusingly titled, “The Shocking Alternative”. Of course, what Lewis is referring to here is an alternative to atheism and deism. The shock, you’ll surmise, is that the alternative is Christianity.

Lewis begins this chapter by stating that Christians ‘believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.” He says that a skeptic will then ask if the existence of evil is in accordance with the Christian god’s will. His answer is: free will allows for evil. He says this is akin to a mother’s will being for her children to clean up after themselves, but sometimes they don’t. 

That’s all well and good, except that a mother would not punish a kid who didn’t clean up after himself with eternal hell and separation from mommy because the kid didn’t do or think the correct thing while calling this act “perfect justice”. But, Lewis has not made this claim yet, so I am merely speculating that as a Christian he believes in Hell and in his god’s perfect justice.

As an aside, I don’t think Lewis’ definition of free will is not a counter-causal definition, so I’ll tentatively accept that (somewhat simplified) definition.

“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. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Doesn’t Lewis’ concept of god throw a wrench into the idea that he can’t imagine a creature which is free but cannot be bad? Does Lewis’ god have free will? If so, then wouldn’t it also be free to be bad? If having free will means you have the capacity to be bad, then Lewis’ god either does not have free will, or it has the capacity to be bad.

“Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Lewis has this backward. Love/joy/goodness seems to be a consequence of our capacity to be good or bad, not the purpose of being able to be good or bad. Lewis goes on with an unsupported assertion that his god wants us to be freely united to him and each other and that this union is really super awesome. He gives no rationale.

Lewis’ next point is that we can’t argue with the things god says because he is the source of our reasoning power so we can’t be right and his god wrong. Of course, this conclusion only works if we agree with all of Lewis’ other prior premises and conclusions, namely that morality proves there is a god, and that said god is the Christian god, only god, and that the Christian god created everything and is all good (despite the fact that we don’t know if this god has free will or not). Lewis has failed to support that there is a god. He has failed to support that his god is the source of our reasoning powers, and he has failed to support that his god is all good. If we are incapable of judging his god’s actions, how do we know he is good?

This argument can also be applied to any god and is thus completely useless in proving anything. I could say, for example, that we can’t question the actions of Allah because Allah created us and is all good. When you have magic and supernaturalism on your side, you can prove anything.

Lewis goes on to talk about Satan’s sin of wanting to put himself first, be the center, and be god.  He asserts that Satan taught this sin to all of humanity. Because humans think they can “invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God,” they have created all of the bad things in the world – “money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery”. All of this is due to trying to find something outside of god to make us happy.

I have to wonder why Lewis even needs Satan (who he supposes exists without any proof whatsoever) to explain all of this. If god gave us the capacity to either be good or be bad, aren’t we just doing what god gave us the capacity to do? We don’t need a superpowerful bad guy to explain that we screw things up.

Lewis goes on to say that his god’s solution to this was 1. consciousness. 2. Jesus!

If you think I am skipping huge chunks of his book in which he provides a decent rationalization for this, you’re dead wrong. He doesn’t.

The “shock” of this chapter is that this Jewish dude showed up and told people he was god. Lewis describes this as “quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” Apparently some Jewish guy showing up claiming to be god and capable of forgiving any sins is so asinine that it must be true. Otherwise, this is pure silliness.

My vote is for pure silliness. Lewis is actually arguing (for the second time in his book) that if someone says something incredibly absurd, the absurdity makes it more likely to be true.
You know, atheism seems patently absurd to lots of people…

Mere Christianity online