S1E6 – MC B1C4 – “What Lies Behind the Law”

Our penultimate chapter of Book I of “Mere Christianity” is Chapter 4 and is entitled “What lies behind the Law”. In this episode, Jack digs into the consequences of the Moral Law and, in particular, what we can know about the universe in which we live.

Unfortunately, there were some small issues in this episode with my microphone, a bit of a crackle.

S1E6: “What Lies Behind the Law” (Download)

Show Notes

Chit-Chat

–

Toast

• David was working on a Heineken.
• Matt was drinking a Blue Moon.

Discussion

01. “Origin of the Universe”

• Jack begins by recapping his teachings on the differences between the Law of Nature and the Natural (or moral) Law; the difference being descriptive versus prescriptive.

The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else – a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• He then begins unpacking what these concepts tell us about the universe. He asks the questions “what is the universe,” and “how did it come to be”? Lewis presents two views: the materialist view, and the religious view.

First, there is what is called the materialist view. eople who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one change in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• Lewis emphasises that both of these views are ancient.

Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• In a sense, the materialists make a case for the existence of God. Think of all the things that had to perfectly align for life to exist. This is known as the “fine tuning” argument. David referenced the following video produced by the Unbelievable radio host, Justin Brierley.

Why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is not a scientific question … Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• Some people might argue against this, claiming that given enough chance and time, eventually well-ordered things will come to be. David used the example of monkeys banging away on typewriters. However, intuitively, we know that such works must be produced by something with a mind, not merely a brain.
• Lewis argues that in order for the materialist view to work, time and matter must always have existed. But most people today believe that the universe had a beginning, known today as the “Big Bang”, an event theorised by scientist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre.
• This feeds into the Kalam Cosmological Argument which, when expressed as a syllogism, is as follows:
  
  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
  2. The universe began to exist;
  3. Therefore: The universe has a cause.

• The conclusion of this argument is that if time, space and matter came into existence at the beginning, the cause of the universe must be timeless, spaceless and immaterial. Sound familiar?

02. “Proofs for God”

• St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about the Five Ways, which argued for the existence of God.
• Philosopher Edward Faser wrote a book called “Five Proofs of the existence of God”.

• Matt spoke about “Why We’re Catholic”, a book by Trent Horn, which he received from a generous podcast cohost!
• Matt talks about his interaction with famous Atheist, Richard Dawkins, who wrote “The God Delusion”. That discussion referenced Lawrence Krauss and his book “A Universe from Nothing”.

03. “The Role of Science”

• Jack now gets to the subject of science, and whether or not it can adjudicate between these two views. He does not think that it can.

You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense … why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is not a scientific question.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• David said that we live in an age of “scientism”, the popular idea that all knowledge must be reduced to scientific knowledge and that other sources of truth, such as philosophy, must be discarded. One of the main problems with this view is that this is not scientific! It’s a philosophical claim! Additionally, science is based on an number of axioms which cannot be proved by science and must simply be assumed:
  
  1. A world outside our minds must exist
  2. We must be able to attain true knowledge of this world
  3. Logic must be operable
  4. Our sense must give us trustworthy data
  5. Nature must be orderly and constant

• In response to scientism, Jack tells us what science really is…

Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such an such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,’ or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heat it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.’ DO not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• From this, Lewis states that there is one other area we can go to for more information: ourselves.

There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, 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. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man 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 that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• Jack gets to the question: is there a power behind the creation of the universe?

The position of the question, then, is like this. 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.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

04. “Transcendental Power”

• Lewis claims that the truth of a divine architect could only be found within ourselves, not in the observable facts of this world.

The position of the question, then, is like this. 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. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it … If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe – no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. … The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• David pushed back on this idea from Lewis, because Jesus did make himself incarnate. What Lewis likely meant was that God was not just a thing in the universe, but something that transcends it.
• Jack then states that he finds the moral law within himself, and that he infers its status in other people as well. He uses the analogy of postal packages.

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. It is the same about this question. The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way … I do not think all the other people in the street get the same letters as I do. I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity – that whereas the sender f the letters merely tells me to obey the laws of my human nature, he compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• Readers might infer that Lewis has proven Christianity. But he has only shown the logic of basic theism.

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know – because after all hte only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

05. “A Third View”

• Because this book was a series of talks on the BBC, it had to be edited for time. Jack adds a note to the end of the chapter, detailing a third viewpoint, what he calls “Life-Force philosophy”.

In order to keep this sectino short enough when it was given on the air, I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to mention the In-between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest exposiitons of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson.

• The two proponents of “Life-Force Philosophy” mentioned were the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher Henri Bergson. George Bernard Shaw was a great supporter of Eugenics and here is a a brief video clip of him espousing his rather disturbing views.

People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Man were not due to change but to the ‘striving’ or ‘purposiveness’ of a Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then ‘a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection; is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind ‘strives’ or has ‘purposes’? This seems to me fatal to their view.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

• The reason that people propose this worldview is often so that they can claim to believe in something, but not have it interfere with their behaviour or choices. They often want to avoid responsibility.

One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences … The Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, What Lies Behind the Law

Wrap Up

More Information

• The outline for the Chapter 4 is available here.

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