Layman

Just out of curiousity, what kind of Christian where you? I only ask because I spent a month in Malaysia working with local churches, and Christians are a very small minority in Malaysia. The majority are Muslims, with strong Buddhist and Hindu minorities.

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: Layman ]</p>

RogerLeeCooke

Ah, one of my favorite writers! I used to read everything by him I could get my hands on. I still think the Narnia stories are great fiction and the space trilogy ("Out of the Silent Planet," "Perelandra," and "That Hideous Strength") go from good to great to outstanding.

As for his Christian apologetics, Diana has it right. He likes to make his points by analogy. He didn't do well in "The Problem of Pain," but then nobody could. The only answer a Christian can give is to take refuge in God's inscrutability or else become a Christian Scientist and claim that the pain isn't real. (As Mark Twain said, the only thing in the whole Universe that Mary Baker Eddy recognized as real was the dollar.) In "Mere Christianity" he gave what he thought was a knockout punch against atheism, along the following lines:

"If my mind wasn't designed by an intelligent being, then I can't trust my thought. But that means I can't trust the arguments that lead to atheism. Therefore, all reliance on reason presupposes that my mind was designed."

Lewis' major premise here is extremely bizarre, and he later said that he was convinced he had scored a bulls-eye, since every atheist he told it to failed to see any difficulty with trusting an undesigned mind. Since he was so far into reason, one might think he would explore why the designer made the brains of 90% of humanity so defective that they couldn't see the truth of Christianity.

Lewis also apparently believed in absolute space and time, despite having heard of relativity, and he had a peculiarly Aristotelian view of the physical universe. He said that scientific laws don't make anything happen, they merely prescribe how it must happen if it does. In other words, they are necessary conditions obeyed by matter and energy, but not sufficient. You still need God to get anything to happen. Weird!

Albion

Didn't he also get into a debate with Elizabeth Anscombe about naturalism and end up having to revise one of his books as a result?

diana

I read that first sentence of Lewis's ("If my mind wasn't designed by an intelligent being, then I can't trust my thought."), and I thought...WHAT?! "Bizarre" is right.

"All reliance on reason" simply presupposes that you have nothing more reliable to work with. What a silly git.

I thought he rather craftily presupposed proof of design, though (to prove design...of course ). I admit that he writes so beautiful and simply that it's often difficult to see that he's simply making the same tired arguments--because he does it so well.

In order to establish design, one must have a basis for comparison and have knowledge of some being who is capable of the work. I know a watch is designed because I compare it to the natural world (I can see it works differently from anything I find elsewhere in nature; instead of being built of chemicals and organic cells, which I find elsewhere that explains independent movement like I observe in the watch, it is made of minerals, which doesn't explain the independent movement) AND because I already have knowledge of man's ability to craft such a thing.

Neither of these conditions are met in order to establish the "design" of nature itself. I have knowledge of nothing outside of the known natural world to compare it to which would help me see a difference that must be labeled "design," nor do I have knowledge of a being who is capable of crafting such a thing.

I think it fairly simple-minded and egocentric to assume that one's ability to think is so very special a quality that it could not simply have evolved and moreover, the fact that he is self-aware must mean he has a "soul" as well. This is just man wanting to feel more special than he really is (as if intelligence isn't special enough).

Concerning C.S.Lewis in general, isn't all argument by analogy fallacious? Analogy isn't argument; it's illustration. It helps others see something from your point of view, but doesn't actually make an argument.

Or am I off-base on this?

d

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: diana ]</p>

Boro Nut

I didn't realise there was any christian messages in his books? I read The Lion, The Witch and The Lampost once. It was just getting exciting when they killed the Lion in chapter two. I couldn't see the point in finishing it after that, so I never bothered.

Boro Nut

Tercel

If I recall correctly, "Miracles" is the best CS Lewis book as far as quality of rational arguments go. (Though it's a while since I'm read it, but I think IRC)

The Christian tradition is pretty broad: I don't think you can characterise this as the "common" Christian explanation as if its something Christians in general believe. In fact, in my estimation the majority of Christians would disagree with that explanation.
If you replaced "Hell" with "sin" you might find more agreement.

A valid question, but I don't see how it means the quoted passages from Lewis have a contradition in them. Perhaps you meant a contradition between them and what you believed?
Lewis is arguing:
1. Free will is intrinsically a good.
2. Free will necessitates the possibility of evil.
C. God allowing the possibility of evil is a good.
I do not see anything particularly wrong with that argument.

Well I haven't claimed that recently. You seem to be limiting Christianity to a rather specific viewpoint again. Again, I suspect a very healthy proportion of Christians would beg to differ with that view.

Again, many Christians would disagree that God sends us to Hell. The Eastern Orthodox & Liberal Protestant idea that we send ourselves to Hell seems to becoming increasingly popular among even Fundamentalist Protestants.
To answer to your question that those who hold your proposed theology would probably give is that God is constrained by a logical necessity and it is not a matter of simply "being compassionate".

HRG

Item 2 is what is wrong with his argument.

1. Free will - i.e. that I am not an automaton - is already evidenced by my ability to freely choose between ham and jam for breakfast. It is not necessary for the existence of free will that I can choose between dismembering my family with an axe and not dismembering it.

2. No one will say that my inability to fly to the moon by flapping my arms invalidates free will. However, a universe is conceivable in which harming other sentient beings is as physically impossible as flying to the moon is impossible for me. Yet such a universe is quite compatible with us not being automata.

IOW, free will does not necessitate the possibility of evil.

Regards,
HRG.

P.S. You might want to read Mark Vuletic's "Tale of Twelve Officers" in the infidels library/modern documents.

RogerLeeCooke

The Lion (Aslan) is Christ, and the Witch is Satan. I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but the lion gets resurrected. The other five novels also contain Christian messages, especially "The Last Battle," whose subject matter you can imagine.

As far as "Pilgrim's Progress" type allegories go, however, Lewis' best book is "The Great Divorce." It's packed full of caricatures of the sort of people you meet every day.

luvluv

Actually, you might want to pick up C.S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress, which is a totally allegorical portrayal of his conversion from atheism to Christianity.

It is seriously, seriously good.

I'd like to again stand on my soapbox and encourage people to read the Problem of Pain if they want to see some of Lewis's more effective apologetics.

Also, pick up The World's Last Night and read an essay called "On Obstinancy in Belief"

This is C.S. at his apologetic best. You can pick all of these books up off the shelf at your local bookstore, and you can probably get all three of them for less than 40 bucks.

- luvluv, resident Lewisian.

luvluv

diana:

All I think C.S. meant by this was something similar to an argument often raised against determinism. If determinsim is correct, then no one's thoughts are true or false, they are simply CAUSED. What he was saying was that if logic is the result of a series of purposeless accidents in a purposeless world, then why should anyone trust that they lead to anything true?

I think the argument fails too, because the fact that our reason often leads to our being able to correctly interpret our interaction with the natural world, and allows us to predict how objects and organisms outside our reason will behave, is enough to trust our reason. But I do believe his objection works better in terms of philosophical issues: there is no reason to believe that evolutionarily acquired intellects should be able to apprehend abstract truth.