Ben’s Reviews > Mere Christianity > Status Update

The free will response to theodicy is also bankrupt. Lewis says he can't imagine a world in which free beings don't go astray. And he's a fiction author! Therefore, I can only suppose that he didn't really try to imagine such a world but rather simply wrote it off. God could have made it much easier to believe in him. An omnipotent god would be aware, although Lewis wasn't, of behavioural nudging.

'Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong'. Every LLM I've asked says that my reversal of the mystery response to theodicy is novel. Imagine a world where free will exists but evil doesn't. Though unlikely, it's logically possible. Someone in that world asks, how can it be? Answer: God's a mystery. Same answer explains both good & evil & is therefore useless.

He makes the bizarre claim that it's impossible to do bad things for their own sake. Hello Ian Brady & every other born psychopath. He says that people do bad things only because they mistake them for good things. Josef Mengele was just confused. He says that sadists who find wrongdoing sensuous aren't actually bad but are instead pursuing a good thing, pleasure, in a bad way. Peter Scully wasn't evil, merely lost.

Lewis says that dualism (the existence of two gods, one good, one bad) is untenable because to call one good, one bad implies the existence of a higher moral standard by which to judge goodness & badness & to which the two gods are subservient, & that this standard is actually the one true god. But this invokes the Euthyphro dilemma, which he doesn't have the nerve to wrestle with.

He says that science is simply the act of making observations, nothing more & nothing less, & that therefore its knowledge is limited & that it can't shed light on deeper questions. But scientists frequently make predictions that experiments later prove true. Massed observations & inferences about them can penetrate to the very centre of things. In this sense, science is far more "prophetic" than any religion.

Lewis's philosophy falls prey to the same problem as Spinoza's: it rests on an edifice so dependent on foundational premises that if one is proved untrue all the rest are proved untrue also. Lewis spends the first chapter arguing that our moral sentiments are transcendent & universal simply because we didn't make them & feel compelled to follow them. But both phenomena have evolutionary explanations.

'After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the question, 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as it is?' 1. The goal of philosophy is to question common sense, not to assume it as true. 2. Universal knowledge could answer all questions by definition. 3. Denying 2. *assumes* non-naturalism.

On this page he writes that according to the materialistic view of the world, the universe came into existence 'by a sort of fluke'. This is a perfect example of the how Lewis's simple language is knowingly deceptive. He dismisses as 'a sort of fluke' all of the profound & complex explanations that comprise the field of cosmology. It's disingenuous. This smug dismissal is also destroyed by anthropic arguments.

Lewis argues that the moral law is transcendent because we did not invent it and know we ought to obey it. But these two facts have naturalistic explanations. We did not invent it: it evolved. The feeling of objectivity also evolved: if moral feelings were weak enough for there to be consensus about them being subjective, then they would be less often adhered to, less useful, and therefore less adaptive. Simple.

He says that the 'human law of nature' differs from the physical laws of nature because rocks, etc., don't think whereas humans do. He thinks this means that the moral law is not descriptive of what humans actually do but prescriptive of what they ought to. But he doesn't question the nature of consciousness at all. Moralising could be determined, an epiphenomenon, subjective consensus building etc. A false dilemma.