RJS

I thought I would post a paragraph from CS Lewis, and try to get a few of you to respond (i.e rip it to shreds). I am honestly looking for fair and candid reactions. He seems to postulate that the mere existence of an athiest is virtual proof that God exists. As you probably know he was an athiest and converted to Christianity. Thanks in advance.

From Mere Christianity

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of "just" and "unjust"? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feed wet. Of course I could have given up on my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. "Dark" would be a word without meaning."

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: RJS ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Lewis was extensively ripped in the Morals Forum earlier this year.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000067&p=" target="_blank">Mere Christianity</a>

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000078&p=" target="_blank">Problem of Pain</a>

Vorkosigan

RJS

Thanks for the link - very helpful. I did a search prior to my first post, but nothing came up - oh well.

Any chance I could get you to give an opinion on this specific statement - within the context of the original post?

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning"

Philosoft

If I may...

Re: the universe; we haven't "found out that it has no meaning." We do not ascribe meaning to it because we haven't found any meaning for it. Lewis implies we are looking for "no meaning" which is silly.

MOJO-JOJO

And as is pretty typical within christendom, Lewis has been ripped to shreds by "his own kind". This righteous couple point out that Lewis simply became a Christian because it was popular amongst his little clique of fellow writers to do so.

<a href="http://www.balaams-ass.com/journal/homemake/cslewis.htm" target="_blank">CS Lewis the Devil Boy</a>

Xians just love to bicker and feed on one another, further undermining their entire belief system.

Wyrdsmyth

C. S. Lewis is a very good writer, with an engaging conversational style. And he has that utterly reasonable cadence, which is the hallmark of gently persuasive rhetoric. As a child, I immensely enjoyed his Narnia books and his "Space" trilogy. As an adult, I still admire their inventiveness and imagination, and I generally regard them as re-imaginings of a Christian-like Cosmology. This is especially true of Narnia.

Like Dante, Lewis enjoyed incorporating pagan elements into what he may have perceived as a greater whole, what with all of the creatures from Greek and Roman mythology making appearances in what is allegedly a monotheistic multiverse. There is even a reference to Plato's Theory of Ideas, or what we might call the Really Real. It's pretty clear that Lewis had a great love of classicism and even some pagan art, which I think he often struggled to reconcile with his Christianity. There is nothing too odd about this, many people have been doing the same thing for centuries. Aquinas's SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES was about reconciling Christianity with Aristotelianism.

When you put C. S. Lewis in such a context, I believe he becomes much more understandable, in his goals and the way he argued and thought. He was a classicist and a historian, first and foremost, and then became something of a poet and fantasist in his own right. But alongside this was his Christianity and his apologetics, and the debates he engaged in on campus.

In my opinion, Professor Lewis was not very much devoted to philosophy and logic. His interest was more aesthetic and artistic. That was the way he thought. And it's a shame he didn't spend more time on logic, because I think he may have realized then that several of his arguments are horrible fallacies, and although they sound quite reasonable on the surface, there just isn't much substance to them.

Take your quote, for example. In it, Lewis says, "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust." What kind of reason is that to be an atheist? I, on the other hand, am an atheist because I don't think there are any deities. Justice, or the lack of it, has nothing to do with it. The world may at times seem very unjust, but that has nothing to do with whether any deities exist [it may have something to do a certain conception of God, and the qualities of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, omniscience and free will, but I digress]. It sounds to me like he may have never been an atheist at all, with this talk of arguments "against" God, as if he had to somehow convince himself that God wasn't there, or prove God doesn't exist. Was he an atheist, or a doubting Christian, or merely in a prolonged state of rebellion against a religion he never truly gave up? He says, "atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."

Well, of course atheism is simple -- it only means a lack of belief in gods or divine beings and unprovable supernatural entities. Like many others before him and since him, Lewis here casts atheism in the inappropriate role of 'worldview,' which it isn't. Have we found out that the universe has "no meaning" as Lewis says? Is this something we can "find out"? The universe is there, it exists... we can all sit here and argue about what it means, or whether it means anything, but how can we ever settle it? Does a tree have meaning? What about a cloud? Or a nebula? Or the hokey-pokey? The universe may not be a Grand Allegory, the great artifice of a God with sensitive aesthetic tastes (like Lewis). Maybe it just is.

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

daemon

Heh, I don't think I would put too much stock in this bizarre site, though it's a great source of idiot-humor. Claiming that Lewis' use of the phrase "what on earth" in the Narnia series wasclearly proves he thought the events in the books were real is one of the most bizarre non-sequiturs I've yet seen!

Clutch

Hmm... isn't that the hallmark of open scientific inquiry? That is: would you think it less worthy of comment if Christianity was altogether internally uncritical?

Jeez, I'm defending Christianity all over the place, suddenly. A very disorienting experience!

Christians do bicker among themselves, but I do not for moment think that *this* is what undermines their belief system. I think it has more to do with the superstition, immunity to revision in the face of facts, explanatory vacuity... There, that feels better!

RJS

So can an athiest believe that there is a meaning to life?

or in other words,

If an athiest believes that there is an "unknown" meaning to life, is he/she mislabeled as an athiest?

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: RJS ]</p>

Philosoft

Sure. She can even create that meaning herself.

<strong> No, gods or god-beliefs are not obviously necessary for life to have meaning. Further, I fail to see what it 'means' to be the creation of a deity.