Lesson Three: "Some Objections"

from Book One, Chapter Two: "Some Objections"

Lewis continues his discussion of the concept of a Moral Law that he introduced in the previous chapter by dealing with the two most common objections to this concept. These are:

1) The claim that morality is a function of human instinct (internal sense)
2) The claim that morality is learned behavior derived from a society/cultures conventions of behavior (external sense)

Remember that Lewis's thesis is that morality is based on a real and definite moral law that exists outside the realm of human thought and cultural construct. It is, in other words, transcendent or supernatural. Let’s examine each of these discussions individually.

INSTINCT
Lewis differentiates the moral law from the human instinct by means of a most effective example. He imagines a man who hears other man in distress cry for help. Out of the man’s human instinct come two urges: first, the urge to go and help the man in distress; second, the urge to flee the danger himself as a means of self-preservation.

Lewis makes the convincing point that in many cases, the stronger urge is that of self-preservation. If we adhered solely to instinct, then it follows that we should obey the stronger of the two urges. But what is clear is that in all of us, there is a third notion: the voice of conscience that tells us to suppress the survival instinct and obey the urge to help the man in danger. This third urge is not a manifestation of the instinct within ourselves, but rather the function of the supernatural moral law that tells us what we ought to do, often in spite of what our instincts are urging us to do.

Furthermore, Lewis writes that if morality were an internal sense, we should be able to identify at least one of our natural instincts as “good” and follow that instinct in any and all moral situations. This is not, however, the case in reality, and it is easy for us to recognize that any human instinct, no matter how noble, cannot and should not be followed blindly in every situation. Lewis’s analogy is particularly apt: our instincts are like the keys on a piano—none of them can be called “right” or “wrong” in and of themselves; the moral law is like the sheet of music that tells us which notes are to be played to make the right sounds.

Therefore, agreeing with these premises, we must confess that the moral law does not originate in our own instincts and must come from outside ourselves. Now the question becomes, “From what source outside of myself do these ideas of morality come?”

CONVENTION
People who argue that morality is simply a matter of a society’s conventions point out that our notions of right and wrong are learned from a variety of sources—home, church, school, peers, etc. Lewis does not deny this, but he makes the important distinction between the way in which we obtain this knowledge and the nature of the knowledge itself.

The analogy is this: we learn our multiplication tables in grade school. Were we to never attend school, we would have no idea what “nine times seven” equals, but our ignorance of this equation would not change the essential truth that 9 x 7 = 63. In the same way, our ignorance or knowledge of the moral law has no effect on its existence or its truth. When we learn about the moral law, we are learning about the nature of truth in the same way that we learn about the nature of multiplication. In philosophical terms, this is known as a priori knowledge—knowledge that we obtain based on logic and reason, independent of experience.

Lewis gives us two reasons why we can view the moral law in this way. The first reason he gave in the previous chapter: We find that basic morality has never varied significantly throughout the history of human civilization. Every culture in every age has adhered to the same basic moral standards (a few that spring to mind…honor God/the gods; don’t murder; don’t steal; don’t lie; don’t have sex with another person’s spouse; don’t betray loyalties…can you think of any culture that did not adhere to one of these standards in any way?)

The second reason is a bit more complex. He says that whenever we judge the moral standards of two different cultures—in his case, the comparison is between his native England and Nazi Germany—we always say that the morality of one culture is “better” than the morality of the other. But in order for this to be a logically meaningful statement, do we not have to have a third notion of morality that stands as the measure by which we judge the other two? If this is not so, then all we are doing is expressing a preference, but we cannot condemn the lesser morality as “wrong” or “evil” unless there is a real moral law that exists independent of society and culture.

This third standard is the moral law, and because it exists independent of any single nation, culture or society, it may be rightly categorized as transcendent or supernatural. Therefore, Lewis has effectively shown that a moral law exists, and that it exists independent of any individual human instinct or particular society’s conventions. What follows next is trying to identify the true source of this moral law.

Discussion Question:
Are you convinced that the moral law is real and exists outside the realm of human instinct and social convention? Why or why not?

To respond, please click on the word “comments” below. (If you have a pop-up blocker active on your web browser, you may need to deactivate it for this site to enable comments.)

Lesson Two: The Law of Human Nature

One of the most interesting things that C.S. Lewis does in making the argument for Christianity is the way in which he builds his case from the beginning using simple experience and common sense without mentioning anything about God or Jesus for some time. Many nonbelievers are often skeptical about any type of claims about God and usually resistant to information about Jesus.

Lewis begins his argument in the simplest way, by pointing out that when two people quarrel, there is usually some sort of understood appeal to fairness, honesty, justice, etc., that both parties are appealing to. No one tries to win an argument by rejecting the value at stake; instead, they try to prove that their side has the stronger claim to the right.

In recognizing this tendency, Lewis names this idea the “Law of Human Nature.” It is this standard that is the foundation of both civilization and civil law. We cannot condemn the actions of an individual or the collective actions of a nation or government as “wrong” or “evil” unless there is some standard of behavior upon which all people and nations agree. Lewis wrote this during World War II, and it was in the aftermath of that war that many Nazi officers were tried, imprisoned and executed for “war crimes.” They were condemned for violating the Law of Human Nature, not just because we didn’t “like their behavior.”

Lewis strongly rejects our modern idea of “cultural relativism” as far as morality is concerned. This concept states that different cultures in different eras have differing standards of morality. On the contrary, Lewis affirms that human morality has meant the same basic thing throughout the history of civilization. If there is no Law of Human Nature, and morality is simply a function of culture, what is the use of words such as “fair” or “unfair”?

Once we have accepted Lewis’ premise of the Law of Human Nature, we must grapple with his accusation that none of us, himself included, are keeping this Law very well at all. If we do not believe this, consider what Lewis tells us: Whenever someone points out the way in which we are violating the Law of Human Nature, we may offer many excuses why our violation is justified considering the circumstances, but never do we deny the validity of the moral standard brought to bear against us.

So, that leaves us at the end of the first chapter with two conclusions:
1) Human beings have an idea about a standard of human behavior;
2) We do not, in fact, behave according to this standard.

Discussion:
Do you agree with these two basic points? Do you feel as if you have an instinctive awareness of “right” and “wrong”? Do you agree that you do not always live up to your own standards?

To respond, please click on the word “comments” below. (If you have a pop-up blocker active on your web browser, you may need to deactivate it for this site to enable comments.)

New Links Available

We have three new site links courtesy of David S., who also has the distinction of being my first comment poster (hooray! Thank you, David!). I'll let him describe the sites and invite you all to check them out:

www.tektonics.org—Tekton Apologetics Ministries
Very good website dealing with Bible “contradictions,” the Jesus myth, and a wealth of information on authors and speakers within & without Christianity.

www.christian-thinktank.com—The Christian Thinktank
Excellent website ran by Glenn Miller (no, not the jazz musician). Deals mostly with the painful questions often asked of Christians.

www.apologeticsindex.org—Apologetics Index
A very good reference site for finding just about any religious group, teaching, or individual. It has about 7,000+ entries in its database and it's still growing.

Thanks again to David for his input.

Lesson One: Preface

Yes, we’re going to start with the Preface—I know it’s easy to skip these little introductions, but in fairness to Dr. Lewis, it is as long as many of the other chapters, and it also contains a good bit of exactly what he means by the title “Mere Christianity.”

We tend to think of the word mere as meaning “insignificant.” Lewis uses it in this case in its more traditional definition as “pure” or “absolute.” This is significant for the fact that one of his first qualifications in the Preface is to point out to the reader that he is not distinguishing between different Christian denominations, but rather explaining and defending the basic beliefs that are common to most Christians.

This is an important point to remember, mainly because Lewis points out that any discussion of the doctrinal or theological differences between various denominations does nothing whatsoever to convince the nonbeliever of the truth of Christ. We, as Christians, often get wrapped up in defending what it means to be Baptist, or Methodist, or Pentecostal, or Catholic, that we forget that we should do as Paul did, and preach the truth of Christ crucified and resurrected. It is that truth that Lewis seeks in the book.

Part of what makes C.S. Lewis so appealing to me is his honesty about what he knows and what he doesn’t know. He freely admits that there are many questions about God that he cannot answer, but he also speculates that even if he could address God directly about these questions, the answer might be, “What is that to you? You follow me.” I think about how many times in my own life that I have wanted answers from God, completely oblivious to the fact that what I needed to do was follow him, and from that, the answers would come.

Lewis also points out that the second part of the book, “What Christians Believe,” was vetted by clergy from four different denominations, once again reinforcing his desire to discuss what we have in common as Christians rather than what separates us. I often wonder what we as Christians could accomplish if we could get past our differences and focus instead on the one who should unite us.

It is this sense of unity in diversity that he closes his preface with in terms of an analogy of a hall that contains many doors that open into different rooms. His book of “mere Christianity” is meant to be the hall; each various denomination is a room off the hall. What is important about the analogy is his warning not to choose a “room” based on the attractiveness of the décor or the quality of the service, but rather upon how much of the truth and holiness of God can be found there. Sound advice, indeed.

His final reminder, and our starting point that will launch us into the first chapter, is this: We are to pray for those who we think have chosen the wrong rooms, and we are specifically ordered to pray for those who are our enemies. “That is one of the rules common to the whole house.” Strict homework, is it not? To pray for our enemies and for those who we think believe wrongly? But it is not Professor Lewis who has given us that assignment, but the Lord Jesus himself.

Thank you for joining me for this first lesson. I am interested in any comments you have about this first lesson, the site so far, or what you would like to see take place here. If you don’t have anything specific to say, at least sign in and say hello so I know you’ve made the first visit. Simply click on the word “Comments” directly below this lesson and follow the instructions on the screen.

Also, if this is your first time here, be sure and review the previous entries, which give a biography of C.S. Lewis and a short background of the book. You may comment on these entries as well under each posting.

For next week: Book One, Chapter One: “The Law of Human Nature.” The next lesson will be posted Sunday, June 12.

Mere Christianity: The Background of the Book

In 1943 Great Britain, when hope and the moral fabric of society were threatened by the relentless inhumanity of global war, an Oxford University professor was invited to give a series of radio lectures addressing the central issues of Christianity. Over half a century after the original lectures, the topic retains it urgency. Expanded into book form, Mere Christianity never flinches as it sets out a rational basis for Christianity and builds an edifice of compassionate morality atop this foundation. As Mr. Lewis clearly demonstrates, Christianity is not a religion of flitting angels and blind faith, but of free will, an innate sense of justice and the grace of God.

Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief. First heard as informal radio broadcasts and then published as three separate books—The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality—Mere Christianity brings together what Lewis sees as the fundamental truths of the religion. Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity's many denominations, C. S. Lewis finds a common ground on which all those who have Christian faith can stand together, proving that "at the centre of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice."

source: www.amazon.com

C.S. Lewis: A Short Biography

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, the son of A.J. Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta (Hamilton). His mother, a promising mathematician, died when he was nine years old. Lewis had been very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. Lewis and his brother were brought up by their father.

During his childhood, Lewis created the imaginary country of Bloxen. He started writing early—in the attic of their house he had a "study" where he composed his stories. After attending schools in Hertfordshire, Northern Ireland and Malvern, he was educated at home from 1914-17.

"I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also of endless books," Lewis wrote in his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy (1955).

Lewis's early favorites were Edith Nesbit's books, among them The Story of the Amulet (1906), which mixed fantasy with reality, and the uncut edition of Gulliver's Travels. Later he read the Norse myths and sagas, and such historical books as Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur. Later he also found The Odyssey, Voltaire, Milton and Spenser. Lewis's private tutor taught him to read Greek for pleasure.

Lewis graduated from University College, Oxford, in 1923. He was fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years (1925-54). From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His lectures were crowded—he had a phenomenal memory, and he could speak spontaneously about Greek and Latin texts without notes.

With J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis formed a literary group called “The Inklings,” which took shape in the 1930s. Their Tuesday lunchtime sessions at the Bird and Baby pub became a well known part of Oxford social life. Williams died in 1945, and the meetings faded away in 1949. Lewis preferred the company of men. He considered that women's minds were intrinsically inferior to men's. A visitor at the Socratic Society of Oxford portrayed Lewis as "ruddy of complexion, radiating health, of substantial girth all over, and his eyes sparkled with mirth."

As Surprised by Joy demonstrates, the watershed in Lewis's life was his conversion from atheism to Christianity. He had began to lose his faith at the age of 13, partly due to his deep-rooted pessimism, and partly due to pantheistic experiences and interest in Wagner's music.

After reading such writers as Chesterfield, Bergson, George MacDonald, and George Herbert, and abandoning his youthful snobbery, he became a deist in 1929, and later he was associated with such neo-Christians as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a Catholic.

In the 1930s Lewis started to publish popular religious books, among them A Pilgrim's Regress (1933), a thinly disguised allegory of his own conversion. The Screwtape Letters (1942) was a correspondence from a senior devil to his nephew concerning the latter's task of winning a young man to damnation. The Problem of Pain (1940) asked, "If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?" Lewis suggested that much of the suffering in God's world can be traced to the evil choices people make. In his own life, Lewis followed Christian principles. He gave away two-thirds of his income, sat at the bedside of the sick, and personally served the poor.

In Out of Silent Planet (1938) Lewis put his Christian beliefs in the setting of a science fiction story. The book started Lewis's Ransom trilogy, where the achievements of science are in alliance with those of demonic evil. In the first part Ransom is kidnapped by an amoral Wellsian scientist, Weston, and taken to Mars. The series continued in Perelandra (1943), in which an angel carries Ransom to Venus. In That Hideous Strength (1945) Ransom is back on Earth, and calls Merlin to fight against an unpleasant scientific organization, the NICE.

The Chronicles of Narnia has turned out to be the most lasting of Lewis's novels. "I wrote the books I should have liked to read," Lewis said. "That's always been my reason for writing." The Chronicles tell the story of a group of children, who come into contact with the mysterious other world of Narnia, where the lion Aslan is the prototype of Christ. "I don't know where the Lion came from or why He came," Lewis explained later. "But once He was there He pulled the whole story together."

The portal to Narnia, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, is a wardrobe through which the four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter a secondary world. In the first story the bad Witch is destroyed in a battle. In the sequels the children travel in Narnia and meet sea monsters, dragons, mermaids, wizards and other creatures. Turbaned, dark-skinned people called Calormenes, who worship a demon named Tash, also cause trouble—Lewis's view of Muslims couldn't be more explicit.

The final books deal with Narnia's beginning and end. In the last Armageddon story, with its death-and-resurrection theme, the struggle is between young King Tirian and the forces of evil, as represented by Shift the Ape and Puzzle the donkey. The harmony of Narnia is destroyed and Father Time puts out the sun. Jill and Eustache appear from a railway train to help young Tirian, "last of the Kings of Narnia." Aslan reveals the truth: the children were killed in a railway accident. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning." Lewis ends the book telling that they lived happily ever after—it was for them only the beginning of the real story.

Lewis was briefly married to Joy Davidman, a Jewish American divorcee. They met in 1953, but their correspondence had started before it. Lewis's years at Cambridge were happy—Joy Davidman was always good-humoured and shared his delight in argument for argument's sake. She died of cancer in 1960. Lewis's notes from this period was published under the title A Grief Observed (1961) The relationship was the subject of the film Shadowlands (1994), directed by William Nicholson and starring Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins. Lewis died of osteoporosis on November 22, 1963.

source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cslewis.htm