In chapter 4, Lewis begins with what he has established in the first three chapters: the Moral Law exists in the heart of every man, that it is “real,” we “did not invent” it, and which we “know we ought to obey” (21). The reality behind the law is that there must be “something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour” which put that moral law there, and that is what is laid out in this chapter (21).
The chapter starts with a discourse on the various views on the nature of the universe. Lewis identifies two major views and a minor one that existed contemporaneously to him. The first of these views is the materialist. Materialists believe that “matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why” (21). This matter, “by a sort of fluke” just happened “to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think” (21–22).
Materialism is an unconscious view of large parts of our culture. Steven Hawking makes this exact argument almost word-for-word, saying in a Discovery channel documentary that “The life we have on earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.” He would later go on to expand on this view in his two hour epic on the origins of the universe, where he uses the largely unscientific theory of multiple universes to explain how all of reality is really just a fluke: the multiverse is like the proverbial monkeys with typewriters tasked with recreating Shakespeare, and we just happened to be in the Hamlet dimension. Now, it is possible that Hawking’s (and indeed the view of post of our pop-scientists’) theories are entirely true, however I don’t think they have really considered the implications of this view for human life. For one, it is actually important philosophically that we are created Imago Dei. Human life only has intrinsic value because all of our moral and political systems instinctively assume this. Take the liberal doctrine of human rights: when asked why the Canadian constitution guarantees “fundamental freedoms” including “conscience and religion” and “thought, belief, opinion and expression,” it replies that “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” and therefore these are basically self-evident. If you go one deeper, the only reason why murder is considered Malum in Se and not Malum Prohibitum in the common law is that it assumes that human beings were created on purpose and for a particular reason, and therefore their moral value is such that it is only ever lawful to kill one in situations of double effect. It is because of this that every society that has dispensed with the idea that human beings are created by God and embraced materialism wholeheartedly has gone into human rights abuse and genocide. Consider the Marxist nations: Albania was the first and so far only nation in the world declare itself officially atheist, declaring that “the religion of the Albanian is Albanianism” (Glenny, The Balkans). As a consequence of the state’s official atheism, humanity there was treated like cattle. The regime employed slavery, forcing political opponents to carry out “hard labour” with “no compensation, mainly in the mining industry,” (Fevziu, Evnver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania). People in Albania literally had to write their diaries in the corner of their room to protect themselves from the secret police. By the end of communism, per capita income was $15 a month, private property was illegal, and there were only 1265 cars in the whole country. That the state that most embraced materialism in the 20th century turned out the way it did ought to give many of our modern materialists pause.
There is another, deeper problem than the impacts of materialism on the state though. If taken seriously, it is corrosive to the soul. The Russian novelist Tolstoy believed very deeply that we had been created by accident and that life was basically meaningless, and as a consequence he was afraid to go out to his barn with a rope for fear that he would hang himself. He did not escape this depression until his conversion to Christianity around his 50th birthday. Many of his contemporaries were affected similarly by their materialist worldview, most famously Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered a severe mental breakdown in the last years of his life. This is not an attempt to strawman our modern materialists and call them suicidal or insane — far from it. For one, most modern materialists do not torture themselves with their thoughts to the same extent that these men did, nor do they go as far as Nietzsche does in declaring the meaninglessness of life. However, like with the example of Albania, you can tell the quality of a belief in part by its fruits, and at both the state and individual levels, this particular one has been bad. Lewis will go on to reincorporate the materialist worldview and provide some of his own critiques later in the chapter.
The next view of the nature of the universe discussed by Lewis is one I hadn’t heard of before reading this chapter, which is the “life-force philosophy” of Bernard Shaw and Bergson (26). This philosophy is described as positing that “the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Men were not due to chance but to the ‘striving’ or the ‘purposiveness’ of a life-force” (26). In order for this perspective to not be identical to the third view, the life-force must not have a mind. Lewis says that the life force philosophy “gives the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences,” calling it the “greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen” (26–27).
As I said, this philosophy is something that is unfamiliar to me. I was hoping to look into it a little bit and see if it’s an heir or an ancestor to any other philosophies I’m more familiar with, but not much luck. Cambridge calls it a combination of “the conservative scientific narrative of Darwinian evolution” and the “non-Darwinian meliorism of Lamarckian theory,” producing a “semi-scientific proto-narrative of an origin and evolving moral maturity of mankind through brutal struggle.” It seems he’s done a unique thing and invented an entirely new heresy, and so I don’t really have much comment on it specifically (yet).
However, I can comment on the idea of believing in God without the less pleasant consequences. Mainline protestantism is currently on a warpath to entirely declaw Christianity, alternately saying that Hell either doesn’t exist or that it is empty, that everyone goes to heaven regardless of their sins, and that the idea of sin itself is relative and grounded entirely in conscience. A great example of this view is on display in this conversation between Trent Horn and a pastor of the United church. The pastor says that “we’re all getting in” to heaven no matter what we do, and that calling sins “disordered” is harmful. There are a lot of problems with that, and I’ll address both a practical and a theological one. As a practical consideration, univeralism gives no reason for someone to convert to Christianity in the first place. It’s kind of a reverse Pascal’s Wager — if a believer and a non-believer go the same place at the end regardless of what you’re doing, then what is the point in believing and giving up your Sunday mornings (if the United Church even mandates that)? Theologically, this Christianity must mean that God is neither perfectly just nor perfectly merciful. He cannot be perfectly just because nobody is justly condemned in the end, and He cannot be perfectly merciful because salvation is extended to all whether they merit it or not. While Bernard Shaw’s particular view no longer exists, the universalist view does, and in both cases it is nothing more than “wishful thinking.”
The final view that Lewis describes is the Religious. The religious idea is that “what is behind the universe is more like a mind than anything else we know” (22). This mind is “conscious and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another” (22). The mind made “the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, to produce creatures like itself… to the extent of having minds” (22).
I’ve been revisiting Jordan Peterson’s biblical series recently, and I was reminded of it by this passage. The Biblical stories “present the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings as a cosmically cataclysmic event,” he says. “And you could say, well, what do we have to do with the cosmos? And the answer to that is, it depends on what you think consciousness has to do with the cosmos. Perhaps it’s nothing, and perhaps it’s everything. I’m going to go with everything, because that’s how it looks to me.” He concludes by saying that “that’s the initial event, in some sense, after the creation: the cataclysmic fall. The entire rest of the Bible is an attempt to figure out what the hell to do about that.” Now Dr. Peterson never claims to be speaking as a Christian, but it is remarkable what you can discern about the universe just by the development of consciousness in human beings. The fact that it is unique to us (as Jordan Peterson says: No other animal has that distinction. Now, you’ll read that if you put lipstick on a chimpanzee… [he] will wipe off the lipstick if you show it in the mirror. And dolphins seem to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors, so there is the glimmerings of self-conscious recognition in other animals. But to put that in the same conceptual category as human self-consciousness is…To my way of thinking, it’s…Well, it’s uninformed, to say the least, but I also think it’s motivated by a kind of anti-humanistic, underlying motivation.) shows that human beings are somehow unique and set apart among all the animals. That some other mind must have created the mind proceeds from this almost directly, as Lewis shows.
Lewis has to then clarify what he’s saying in the face of two unconscious cultural assumptions we make. The first is that “one of these views was held a long time ago and the other has gradually taken its place” (22). This is false: “wherever there are thinking men both views turn up” (22).
This assumption is something like the Whig interpretation of history, which is to say the view of history that places each moment as a step on the path to ever greater liberty and enlightenment. It’s one that bothers me a lot as a student of history and is definitely an idea I’ve had to fight within myself (as has the academy). The most typical manifestation of this is assuming that people from prior ages were simply more stupid than us, and inevitably new modes of thought will supersede theirs. In every philosophy course I’ve taken at university, we begin with Socrates and Plato, (always heavily criticized) and then skip ahead 2000 years to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Other ancient philosophers are often dismissed out of hand (Aristotle is “stupid” because he believed in four elements theory) or never mentioned (I’ve never heard any mention of Cicero, Aurelius, Seneca, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, or Burke at any point in my Political Science degree). You can see this even in how ideas are discussed in the culture. The period from the 5th to 15th century is often described as the Dark Ages, where people were presumably stupid and unenlightened and nothing of academic value was produced — never mind the great stories including Viking Sagas, the Chanson de Roland, and Beowulf; the creation of Magna Carta; the 500 years of philosophical and theological development; and the contributions to language from the likes of Dante and Chaucer, there is nothing of value we can learn from this period. Of course, this is obviously untrue, and any real student of the humanities knows this — History departments in particular have made great strides in correcting it. Nevertheless, Whiggism continues to influence our popular history almost everywhere, hence the necessity that Lewis pre-empt the Whig objection here.
The other objection Lewis addresses is perhaps even more prevalent than the Whig objection, and that is the scientistic one. Lewis writes that you “cannot find which view [between the materialist and the religious] is the right one by science in the ordinary sense” because “science works by experiments” and “watches how things behave” (22). All scientific experiments in the long run go something like: “I pointed the telescope to such-and-such a part of the sky at 2:20 AM on January 15th and saw so-and-so” (22). This is all science can do, and, Lewis writes, “ the more scientific a man is, the more… he would agree with me the this is the job of science — and a very useful and necessary job it is too” (23). Science cannot answer “why something comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things that science observes — something of a different kind” (23). The “statement that there is such a thing,” and “the statement that there is no such thing” are not statements that science is able to make, and “real scientists do not usually make them” (23). It is “usually the journalists and novelists who have picked up a few odds and eds of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them” (23).
That real scientists are not the ones out there pushing scientism is one of the enduring components of this passage. Today, it is not real scientists who say that science is the only way of knowing things, but rather pop-scientists like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson who know very little of science and even less of other ways of knowing things. As Lewis says, science is only capable of knowing things that can be observed scientifically. If you made this claim about any other discipline, it would be self-evident: political science is only capable of studying human societies and it cannot tell us anything about eusocial insects, for example. We would call political science naive if it said it could explain everything about the world, and that all other disciplines ought to be subordinate to it (even though it is the master science 😛) and yet there are many in the science world who hold that science can explain everything, including science itself. In reality, genuine science is founded on a set of axioms, many of which it shares with real belief. Science presumes that the universe is basically ordered, that men are made with the capacity for reason, that men can explore the ordered universe using that reason, that all results they find are predictable and reproducible, and that true results cannot contradict each other. Science itself cannot explain any of these things, because they are all outside of the scope of what can be proved experimentally.
I think the prevalence of scientism shows a lack in our scientific education. Genuine study of science ought to be an antidote to mere materialism. It is, for lack of a better term, almost blasphemous to look at the immense beauty, complexity, and order of the universe and come to the conclusion that there is nothing at all behind it and it emerged by accident. I say blasphemous because even to a secular person that is an incredibly profane and vulgar way of speaking about the world in which they live. If you don’t believe me, go outside, climb a large hill, and look at the sunset for 30 minutes, and then tell me that it just happened by accident. Even if you believe it did, your soul will have been stirred to the point where you wish you agreed with me.
Lewis then says that our position would be “hopeless” were it not for the one thing about the world we know the most about: ourselves (23). “There is one thing, and only one, int he whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation,” and that is men (23). This is because men are the only thing in the universe we do not merely observe: it is something that we are. We have “inside information” on men, and 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” (23). Anyone studying men from the outside “as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence we had this moral law” (23–24).
Forgetting that we are men is a common error among many modern thinkers. Rousseau, Marx, and the postmodernists all believe that certain parts of our nature that they find to be bad are entirely constructed by institutions, and that if we just changed the institutions we would perfect the human soul. Not only does this deny that human institutions were created by men and for men, but it denies the one thing that they themselves know the most about. All three can discern from their own lives that there is a moral law that tugs them one way, as well as temptations that tug them the other way. They are, in effect, studying human society in the same way as they study electricity or cabbages.
Finally, the fact that we know what we know about men is used to demonstrate that the religious, and not the materialist view must be true. “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” (24). Since that power “would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them,” no observation of the facts can find it (24). We can use our own case to discover that there is something more than the material, and in our case, we find it. We can extrapolate this to the rest of the world too: Lewis writes:
Suppose someone asked me, when I see a man in blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters? I should reply, ‘Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it does contain a letter.’ And if he then objected — ‘But you’ve never seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting,’ I should say, ‘Of course not, and I shouldn’t expect to, because they’re not addressed to me. I’m explaining the packets I’m not allowed to open by the ones I am allowed to open.’
This postman, which Lewis has been building up to over the past four lectures, is the subject of the next chapter. Like Lewis alluded to in the Bernard Shaw section, however, this postman is not exactly who you might think he is: we’re offered a word of warning that God is not exactly the fluffy bunny rabbit much of our culture assumes Him to be.
