S1E4 – MC B1C2 – “Some Objections”

In today’s episode, we look at Chapter 2 of “Mere Christianity” which is entitled “Some Objections”. In this chapter, C.S. Lewis responds to some issues raised by listeners in response to his assertion that there is this Moral Law.

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe using iTunes or Google Play. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.

S1E4: “Some Objections” (Download)

Show Notes

Chit-Chat

–

Toast

• David and Matt were drinking a Heineken Lager.

Discussion

01. “The Bigger Picture”

• Is the moral law something beyond us, or is it a social fabrication?

02. “Herd Instinct”

• The fist objection is that of following the crowd.

“Some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like our other instincts?’

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

• Jack responds by saying that a herd instinct is not akin to the Moral Law.

We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct – by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires – one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

03. “No Third Thing”

• What if there is no third thing? In this case, the stronger instinct of the two must always win out. But often, we feel that we should side with the weaker one.

If the two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are the most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

The thing that says to you, ‘Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,’ cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be the note.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good,’ always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses – say mother love or patriotism – are good, and others, like se or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ ones and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness ro right conduct) by directing the instincts.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

04. “The Great Divorce”

• This last section that Lewis writes is a plug for “The Great Divorce”, the story of a soul journeying across the countryside of heaven; because nearly every chapter contains a soul who is doing something that might be considered good, but the goodness has been corrupted, and they are unwilling to let go.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

The story of the mother and son

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

• When speaking about love, Matt gave a quotation from the great Archbishop Fulton Sheen, one of the first great American television evangelists.
• David followed up with a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas…

To love is to will the good of the other as other.

St. Thomas Aquinas

05. “Social Convention”

Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you would call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

Though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great…and you can recognise the same law running through them all: Whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

06. “Superior Cultures”

• A popular idea in the modern age is to think that all cultures are equal in goodness.

When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense inpreferring citilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

• This idea connects to an analogy that Jack makes later, about the straightness of lines…

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?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

07. “Moral Relativism”

• What if you uphold conventionally good principles not because there is some “objective truth”, but because you personally uphold certain values as higher? Lewis observed that this means that morality becomes a mere opinion, as was discussed in the prior episode.

What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at the bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of hat we mean by right, the, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

C. S. Mere Christianity, The Law of Human Nature

08. “Exaggerating the Differences”

I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of beliefs about facts. For example, one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Waas that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did – if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather – surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

There is no difference of moral principle here” the difference is simply about matter of fact….there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Some Objections

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

• Extra outline and notes for the Chapter 2 are available here.
• No C. S. Lewis Doodle for this episode, but be on the lookout for more in the near future!

Support Us!

• Please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
• We would be grateful if new listeners would rate and review us on their preferred podcast platform.