C. S. Lewis: The Moral Argument for God's Existence.

C. S. Lewis: The Moral Argument for God's Existence

So far, we have encountered two broad sorts of arguments for God's existence: a purely a priori argument (the ontological argument) and a series of arguments that begin with natural facts about the world and reason from those to God's existence (the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas fit this latter description.) Lewis's case is more like the arguments of Aquinas than Anselm's ontological argument. It begins with a fact and tries to find the best explanation for the fact. But in one interesting respect it is unlike Aquinas's arguments. It starts from an observation about the world, but it is an observation of a seemingly non-natural fact. It goes on to argue (i) that there must be more than one kind of reality, and (ii) that the best way of understanding the not-merely-natural kind of reality is by positing the existence of God.

Lewis begins with a two-part observation about humankind. First, for a good part of our history we have had a sense that there is a way that we ought to behave: fairly, decently, morally, however you like to put it. But the second part of the observation is that very often we don't act the way we believe we ought to. The content of this sense of how we ought to behave Lewis calls, variously, the Law of Right and Wrong, the Law of Nature, and the Law of Decent Behavior.

This law doesn't apply to most things. If you say that a stone or a tree ought to be a certain way, this is at best a manner of speaking. It's really shorthand for something like: it would be convenient for me (or for people in general) if this tree were a certain size or this rock were a certain shape. But from the pont of view of the (lower-case) laws of nature, a "bad" tree and a "good" tree follow the laws equally.

Here we could quibble with Lewis. As the word "nature" (or its Greek or Latin equivalents) was used during much of the history of science and philosophy, the nature of a tree, for example, involved what was typical for a tree. Thus, certain freakish kinds of growth would count as unnatural. But while this is both true and broadly relevant to Lewis's remarks, there is no point in making a fuss about it because when it comes to science as we now think of it, Lewis is quite right. A tree that acts untypically for a tree is still, we assume, acting under broader laws of nature that would explain its departure from the norm.

Lewis makes this point by saying that what we usually call laws of nature are not "laws" at all. What he means is that a law of nature is simply a description of what does happen. It is not a prescription about what should happen. A departure from a "law of nature" would normally be taken as evidence for revising the law - for saying that we hadn't really given the right general description of the way the world works. But the Law of Decent Behavior (to pick one of Lewis's descriptions) isn't like that at all. Moral laws don't describe what actually happens. As Lewis puts it,

In the rest of the universe, there need not be anything but the facts.

Lewis points out that this is very strange, and the strangeness of it might lead us to try to explain it away. He considers two possible ways of eliminating the strangeness.

The first is to say that moral judgments about people are ultimately no different from judgments about the goodness or badness of stones: they are judgments about what is or is not convenient for the person making the judgment. But Lewis points out that this is just wrong. I might judge two equally inonvenient situations as very different morally. In fact, if you trip me by sheer accident, I make a very different judgment than if you try but fail to trip me deliberately. In the first case, I won't say that what happened was morally bad, however incovenient it might have been. In the second case, I will judge what you did to be morally wrong even though it didn't cause me any real inconvenience at all.

The alternative "natural" explanation that Lewis considers is that morality is not a matter of what is good for me as an individual. Rather, it is a matter of what is good for society. But Lewis points out that if you tell someone they ought to behave decently because it is good for society, the person could well ask:

and to answer "you ought to do what's good for society because you ought to behave decently" is to land us right back where we started.

Now it might be pointed out that Lewis himself has given a hint of a less blatantly circular suggestion on this very point. He writes, on behalf of his opponent:

Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where one plays fair. To argue this way would be to say that we can persuade the doubter to behave decently not because it is in his immediate interest, but because it is on his long-term interest. The reason would be equally selfish. It would simply be more sophisticated. But Lewis could surely reply that sometimes doing what is right is not even in my long-term selfish interest. After all, people sometimes literally give their lives in the service of goodness. And so Lewis's point about the circularity of appeals to society's good remains. Supose we have someone who cares only about his own interests, short and long-term. And suppose he sees that a certain case of "decent" behavior is neither in his short-term nor his long-term interest. Telling him he ought to behave well because it will benefit society is a bit like saying that one plays football in order to score goals, to use Lewis's example. Benefiting society is part of behaving decently, just as scoring goals is part of playing football. This sort of reason will work only for someone who is already in the game.

What is the upshot of all this? It is that

The Moral Law... is not simply a fact about human nature, in the way that the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. Nonetheless, we find ourselves -- most of us, anyway -- unable to deny that there are laws of decent behavior; the Law of Morality is "really there." And so, Lewis says,

It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality: ...there is... a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us. This is the crucial premise for all that follows: there is a sort of reality that is not exhausted by the ordinary facts. Before we go on, then, we might want to ask if the case for this alternate sort of reality is quite as strong as Lewis believes it to be. The hard-bitten naturalist might say "no." The observable facts are that we find ourselves with conflicting impulses. We feel an impulse to satisfy our own selfish needs and we also feel an impulse or motivation to what Lewis calls "decent behavior." Those are the facts. Do they really call for a non-natural explanation?

Now the mere fact of conflicting impulses is not in need of any special, explanation at all. After all, our desires are complex. Sometimes they clash. I might want to go out dancing. And I might also want to stay home and watch a movie. Both impluses are real, and they conflict. But what of it? Or to return to a sort of case already discussed, I might find a conflict betwen my immediate impulse to take a nap and my longer-term desire not to have to finish up all my work in a hurry at the last minute. Once again, conflicting desires. But once again, there is no mystery calling for anything that goes beyond the realm of the natural.

Lewis would point out that all these examples involve purely selfish desires. His sorts of cases point to something different: a felt or perceived to go beyond our merely selfish desires. But the naturalist will point out that we find forms of altruistic behvior in the animal kingdom. Indeed, evolutionary blologists have given them plenty of attention over the last few decades. And what they have pointed out is that in many cases an evolutionary explanation seems possible. Evolutionary fitness is a matter of having characteristics that tend to get your genes passed on to the next generation. Doing things that benefit your children or even your nieces and nephews or even members of your group can sometimes have this effect indirectly. And it wouldn't be too surprising if a mechanism that evolved in small, close-knit groups would tend to lead to more generally "decent" behavior as society grew larger and more complicated.

The trouble with this, Lewis might reply, is that even if it has a large element of truth to it, it doesn't fully explain morality. My sense that I have a moral obligation to people who will not be able to benefit me is not just an instinctive impulse. It is a considered judgment. Even though evolution might give me a tendency to think this way, it has clearly also given me a tendency to look out for my own purely selfish good. My judgement that decent behavior matters even when it won't do me any special good can't be accounted for by an evolutionary just-so story.

As armchair scientists, we are in no position to resolve this conflict by ourselves. Lewis's point that the moral law is not merely natural is plausible enough that we might as well grant it and see what he does with it. And what he does is to use it to argue in favor of one broad "world-view" and against another.

As Lewis sees it, there are two broad views that people have held about the universe. One is what he calls materialism. This is the view that ultimately, all there is is matter obeying the laws of nature. The fact that we are here at all is really just a sort of fluke outcome of matter blindly doing what matter does. The other view, which he calls the religious view, is that what lies behind nature is much more like a mind than like anything else.

How can the conflict between these two views be resolved? Lewis insists that it can't be a matter of doing science. Science deals with what is -- with what is actual. Scientific experiments are descriptions of actual events and particular places and times. Scientific laws are generalizatins about the actual behavior of things. It is no insult to science to say that it can't do what it wan's intended to do. And what it can't do is tell us if there is anything behind the actual appearances and behaviors of things.

Once again, the naturalist is likely to protest. And there are at least two lines of protest open here. One is that science very often does try to tell us about what is behind the ordinary appearances. No one has ever seen an electron. But science infers the existence of electrons from the the things we can see -- from the bits of behavior of matter that we can actually observe. The second point is that the "laws of nature" aren't simply descriptions of how things actually behave; Lewis is wrong about that. At best, laws of nature tell us how things behave "other things being equal" -- i.e., in the absence of interfering forces. In the laboratory we can sometimes come close to isolating just the factors that enter into the law itself, but we never fully succeed, and so for most any interesting laws of nature, we never simply see them displayed. Laws of nature are descriptions of idealized cases. But even though they go beyond the actual, we aren't thereby lead to abandon what Lewis calls materialism. (We may be for other reasons, but not for this reason.) And it might be argued that if science can tell us about the otherwise invisible and ideal in general, it isn't obvious why science can't resolve the question of whether there is a God.

In truth, science is unlikely ever to resolve the question. All the same, it is hard to see why, given the sorts of arguments often presented for belief in God, science should be irrelevant. Leaving aside the ontological argument, typical arguments for God's existence have a clear resemblance to scientific arguments: they begin with statements about what we find in the world and end with a proposed "best explanation" of these facts.

Still, Lewis has a couple of relies that he can make. One is this:

Supposing science ever became complete enough so thag it knew every single thing in teh whole universe. Is it not plain that the questiuons, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?" "Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were? In other words, there are questions about the universe "all told" that seem by their very nature beyond the scope of science. And Lewis even tells us, in effect, why this is so.

We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. Lewis's point is more far-reaching than it may appear to be. Consider electrons. We can't observe them. but they are, nonetheless, facts of the universe. They don't lie "behind" the universe; they are part of it. What Lewis is pointing out is that religion deals with "ultimate questions," to borrow a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich. No mere fact about the universe, no matter how exotic or exalted, would count as answering an ultimate question.

But then, what hope is there that we can get any purchase at all on such questions?

Lewis notes that

Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing ou language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge form us, would never get the slightest idea that we have this moral law. But we aren't restricted to this "objective" or "external" perspective. In the case of oursleves, and other humans, we have an insider's view. And this is the key, according to Lewis. If there is a "controlling power outside the universe,

it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe... 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. The argument, then, comes down to this: we find ourselves, as it were, being commanded or instructed to act in a certain way. The best explanation for this is a mind -- or something like a mind -- behind the universe,

becuase after all, the only other things we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions Now in fact, this isn't true at all. I'm a bit of matter, after all. And I've been known to give instructions from time to time. But then, I'm matter organized in the sort of way that gives rise to minds.

We could speculate about whether the matter of the universe entire is organized into some sort of cosmic mind. Some people find this idea attractive but in this context I think it would distract us from the more important point. The reason I feel bound by the moral law is not because I have the sense that some being is commanding me. And suppose there were. The whole point about morality is that it never simply reduces to the facts, even facts as extraordinary as the commands of a comic Mind. If a cosmic Mind commanded me to kill the first-born children in all of the families in my neighborhood, it would be my moral duty to disobey the command. The nature of morality is such that it always makes sense to ask whether a command is morally acceptable, no matter who issues the command. And this is directly relevant to the sort of argument that Lewis is offering. Lewis started out with the idea that there is more to morality that any mere fact. And he is right. But that includes facts about the commands of a cosmic Mind. So the sort of explanation Lewis offers for our moral sense is the wrong sort. If it were correct, then morality would, after all, have a factual explanation. The explanation would be extraordinay in one sense, but in another sense it would rob morality of its moral quality.

This is related to a point that we discussed in class. The moral law, assuming there is one, is independent even of the will of God. And so God can hardly be invoked as an explanation for morality and the moral sense.

So where does this leave Lewis's argument? Is it simply destroyed?

That's a bit hard to say. Lewis's starting point was that there is more to reality than, as it were, "factual" reality. And although the point is not beyond debate, the existence of the moral law does seem to provide a reason for believing that reality is larger than material reality. Indeed, Lewis hints at another reason for believing the same thing, though he doesn't really seem aware of the nature of the hint. It is in the passage in which he talks about someone who studies Man from the outside, with no grasp of our language. The point is that someone who didn't know our language would miss much, if not all of the meaning in our behavior. And insofar as they attributed any meaning to it at all, it would be because they were familiar with meaningfulness "from the inside" -- from their own standpoint. But the fact of meaning in the universe is a fact that is not easy to understand from a purely materialist point of view.

I say "not easy" because I don't think we are in a position to say "impossible." But somehow we manage to mean and somehow, thereby, things we do have meaning. This is at least as puzzling as the fact of morality. And notice that explaining it by referene to the meanings in a cosmic mind would only push the mystery back one step further, just as explaining morality by the dictates of a cosmic Mind would only push that mystery back one step further. But this puts us on the threshhold of something like a religious Mystery: anything that could straightforwardly explain such puzzling facts would automatially be disqualified from having real religious interest. Whatever God might be, it seems, God is not the Great Cosmic Explainer. Lewis seems to get halfway to grasping this point, but he nonetheless gets only halfway.

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