The above picture was taken on a trip to Oxford I made a few years ago. I am standing inside “The Eagle and Child”, the preferred pub of “The Inklings”, the literary club to which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien belonged.
In the next week or so I will be launching a new podcast. If you’ve been enjoying my other podcast, The Restless Heart, don’t worry, that will continue as normal. This new podcast will be called “The Eagle and Child”, named after that Oxford pub. Together with my friend Matt, we will work through C.S. Lewis’ book, “Mere Christianity”, chapter-by-chapter.
So, if you’ve ever wanted to become more familiar with C.S. Lewis, I’d invite you to buy a copy of Mere Christianity and join us each week as we discuss one of Lewis’ most famous works. If you have an questions or comments, please tweet us at @PintsWithJack.
Matt and I had a test recording last week and, as I listen to what we recorded, I’m really excited for the road ahead…
You can look at my more detailed notes, but this is an overview of the content of Book II of “Mere Christianity”…
Chapter 1 – “Rival Conceptions of God”
Quotations
Truth in other religions
If you are Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth…[However,] as in arithmetic – there is only one right answer to a sum…but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others
Pantheism
…these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction [between good and evil] would have disappeared altogether…
Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God…
If you do not take the distinction between good an bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God
Non-Pantheists
…[these people believe in] a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another…
…God invented and made the universe – like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed
…if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will…a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on putting them right again
Evil and God
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…I could have given up 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
Questions
1. Why does Jack say that when he became a Christian he adopted the more “liberal” view?
2. Is it possible to affirm the truth of other religions while still holding to the absolute truth claims of Christianity?
3. Can you think of any religion completely devoid of ALL truth?
4. Into what two central conceptions of God does Jack say people hold? Do you think we could divide it up in a different way?
5. In what way do these conceptions of God and our attitudes towards the Moral Law and the Universe relate to each other?
6. Why does the very question of asking about evil in the world presuppose the existence of God?
Continuing my notes on Book II of “Mere Christianity”…
Notes & Quotes
1. Christians believe that evil exists in the world. So does that mean God wills it?
“If it is [in accordance with God’s will], He is a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?”
(a) Anyone who has held a position of authority can explain this dilemma
“You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible”
(b) Free will is the cause for much evil, but it is the only thing which makes love possible
“Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. …free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having”
(c) God seemed to think the trade-off between free will and evil was acceptable and we’re not especially in a position to argument with Him.
“He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source….you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on”
2. It is because of the greatness given to us by God that we are capable of such great evil and the same is true for Satan.
“A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best – or worst – of all”
(a) Satan’s sin was most likely selfishness and this is what he taught the humanity.
“The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race…[to] invent some sort of happiness for themselves…apart from God”
(b) This is the source of much of the evil in the world.
“…out of that hopeless attempt [for happiness apart from God] has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy”
3. We fail in our attempt to be happy without God because we were made for Him.
“A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else…God design the human machine to run on Himself… God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there…[we] are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.”
How did God respond to all this?
(a) Conscience
“…He left us conscience…and all through history there have been people trying (Some of them very hard) to obey it”
(b) He sent “good dreams”
“…those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again…”
(c) Formed Israel
“…He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was – that there was only one of Him and the He cared about right conduct”
(d) Jesus
(i) Claimed to be God
“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God… Among Pantheists…there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips…”
(ii) Forgave sins and yet claimed to be humble and meek
“[He] told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was… the person chiefly offended in all offenses”
“Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings”
(iii) This provides us with a trilemma. Jesus was either Lunatic, Liar or Lord.
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell… Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse”
(iv) Which means you can’t just call Him a great moral teacher
“You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us”
Discussion Questions
1.Why does the presence of evil in the world pose a threat to the belief in a omniscient, omnibenevolent God?
2. In what way does free will go a long way to explaining much of the evil in the world?
3. Jack says he can’t imagine a creature which has free will but no possibility of going wrong. Do you think this is a reasonable statement?
4. Do you find Jack’s argument concerning the illogic of arguing against God comforting at all?
5. How does Jack explain why the great evil of humanity doesn’t show that God made us “out of rotten stuff”?
6. Why do our attempts to find happiness without God fail?
7. What are the different ways in which God has started the process of rectification of the human race?
8. Don’t the “good dreams” of dying and rising gods just prove that Christianity is a fabrication?
9. What evidence is presented for Jesus making divine claims? Why is forgiving the sins incomprehensible if Jesus wasn’t God?
10. Why does Jack say we can’t just say that Christ was a great moral teacher?
Here are my notes for Chapter 2 (Book 1) of Mere Christianity. In this chapter, Jack outlines objections which might be raised in response to his assertion that there is a Moral Law of which we all fall short…
Objection #1: “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct?
There is a difference between instinct and the Moral Law.
“…feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not”
The Moral Law judges between instincts.
“…[there is] 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…cannot itself be either of them…it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses…[and] often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger”
No instinct dominates, every instinct has its place.
“The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys…[a piano] has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones… 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”
Objection #2: “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?”
Learning something doesn’t automatically make it a convention.
“…[this takes] for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. We all learned the multiplication table at school…but surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention…[which] might have made different if they had liked?”
Some things we learn are only convention, but others are not.
“…some of the things we learn are mere conventions…to keep to the left of the road…and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs”
The Law of Human Nature is real truths:
1. It is universal
“…the differences are…not nearly so great as most people imagine…mere conventions…may differ to any extent”
2. We compare moralities, thinking one better than another
“We do believe that some moralities are better than others… The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other…real Right, independent of what people think”
Objection #3: “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?”
There is a difference between belief about facts and morality.
“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”
In India they don’t eat cows. In America we do. The morality is the same (don’t eat your ancestors), but the understanding is different (cows are not your ancestors)
Discussion Questions
1. How does Jack make a distinction between the Law of Human Nature and heard instinct?
2. How does Jack distinguish between social convention and real truth, like Mathematics? Why might we think that the Law of Human Nature fall into the latter category?
Here are my notes for the first chapter of Mere Christianity. In this chapter, Jack argues two main points:
1. There is a Law of Human Nature
“…the man who makes [these objections] is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about”
“Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football”
(a) The Law of Human Nature is the only one which we can choose to disobey
“a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it… As a body [a man] is subjected to gravitation…if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has…but the law which is peculiar to human nature…is the one he can disobey if he chooses”
(b) You may still find a few people who don’t really know the Law of Human Nature
“…you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune”
(c) Differences in morality are not that great
“…some people say…different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference”
“…think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in a battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well imagine a country where two and two made five”
(d) Those who deny a real Right and Wrong will accidentally betray themselves
“He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson”
We see the presence of the Moral Law more clearly in our reactions, rather than our actions.
2. We do not keep this Law
(a) That doesn’t change the Law itself
“…people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table”
(b) Our excuses prove we do not keep the Law
“If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently?”
(c) We demonstrate the Law by only make excuses for the bad things, not the good.
“…you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves”
Discussion Questions
1. What does Lewis argue we can we learn from the way people quarrel?
2. Why should we believe that the Law of Human Nature is real?
3. Do you think it’s true that we don’t live according to the Law of Human Nature?
There are many topics I’ve wanted to write about but either through lack of time or, more recently, writer’s block, I’ve never quite managed to tackle them. However, today I will begin to scratch a writing itch which I’ve had for some time. Over the next month or so, I will be publishing articles which relate to the classical proofs for the existence of God.
A few days ago, I was talking with a friend on Facebook who is a former Catholic. During our discussion, I mentioned a philosphical proof for God, known as the “Argument From Desire”. He asked me to explain it, so I wrote a brief summary of the proof and we spent a little bit of time going back and forth. So, drawing upon this conversation, I thought that this would be good topic with which to begin this series of posts on the philosophical arguments for God…
You can look at my 
