So, you object to
there even being a God. Why? Because
life is hard? Because life is horrifying? Because you believe God should never
have allowed free will to choose sin, that He should have NOT given anyone
angels or humans that choice? You imagine a God who should only have allowed
goodness and no pain? Whatever your reason, whether you think you're too smart
to believe, too evolved to believe, there are some pretty smart, evolved people
who have gone from complete unbelief to believing, why? What could bring a
person whose intelligence is beyond doubt, to go from a steadfast believe in
there being no God, to believing? If you are one of those people who do not
believe you have NOTHING to lose to read this, nothing at all. Your
intelligence will not lessen, you will not de-evolve, in fact if anything you
may find more fuel for your stance should need arise.
I wish all who
didn't believe in God could read this book (Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis)
but that is an empty wish. I just hope and pray at least ONE person, just at
least one, will find the following compelling and seek to know more and in
knowing more come to all the TRUTH.
(Please read yesterday's post before this one for continuity sake.
Thanks!)
'Mere Christianity-
C.S. Lewis
2 - Some Objections
If they are the
foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some
of the letters I have had show-that a good many people find it difficult to
understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent
Behaviour is.
For example, 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 all our other
instincts?" Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that
is not what I mean by 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. 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.
Another way of
seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If 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 most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be
telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. 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? I mean, we often feel it our
duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing
our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But
clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct
stronger than it is. 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
that note.
Here is a third way
of seeing it 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 sex 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. But there are situations in which it is
the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to
encourage the fighting instinct.
There are also
occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his
own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other
people's children or countries. 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" notes 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 any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of
tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
By the way, this
point is of great practical consequence. 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. You might think love of humanity in
general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find
yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake
of humanity," and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
Other people wrote
to me saying, "Isn't what you 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?
I fully agree that
we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends
and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are
mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left
of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the
right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to
which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.
There are two
reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is,
as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the
moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are
not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—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. The other reason is this.
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 in preferring civilised 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. We do believe that some of the people
who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call
Reformers or Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their
neighbours did. Very well then.
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. But the standard that measures two things
is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with
some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right,
independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to
that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be
truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real
Morality—for them to be true about.
The reason why your
idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real
place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us
said "New York" each meant merely "The town I am imagining in my
own head," how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There
would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the Rule
of Decent Behaviour meant simply "whatever each nation happens to
approve," there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever
been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the
world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.
I conclude then,
that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often
make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the
things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the
opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people
who exaggerate the
differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of
morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to
me, "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?"
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. There is no difference of moral principle here: the
difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in
knowledge not to believe in witches: 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.
3. The Reality Of
The Law
I now go back to
what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things
about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of
behaviour they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency, or
morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so. Now
some of you may wonder why I called this odd. It may seem to you the most
natural thing in the world. In particular, you may have thought I was rather
hard on the human race. After all, you may say, what I call breaking the Law of
Right and Wrong or of Nature, only means that people are not perfect. And why
on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer if what I was
trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not
behaving as we expect others to behave. But that is not my job at all. I am not
concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth. And from that
point of view the very idea of something being imperfect, of its not being what
it ought to be, has certain consequences.
If you take a thing
like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it
ought to have been otherwise. Of course you may say a stone is "the wrong
shape" if you want to use it for a rockery, or that a tree is a bad tree
because it does not give you as much shade as you expected. But all you mean is
that the stone or tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of
your own. You are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that. You really
know, that, given the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any
different. What we, from our point of view, call a "bad" tree is
obeying the laws of its nature just as much as a "good" one.
Now have you noticed
what follows? It follows that what we usually call the laws of nature—the way
weather works on a tree for example—may not really be laws in the strict sense,
but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey
the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only
means "what stones always do"? You do not really think that when a
stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the
ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall. In other words, you cannot
be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law
about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen.
The laws of nature,
as applied to stones or trees, may only mean "what Nature, in fact,
does." But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent
Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean
"what human beings, in fact, do"; for as I said before, many of them
do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of
gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature
tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.
In other words, when
you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the
actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have
something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there
need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain
way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story. (*) But men
behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you
know that they ought to behave differently.
---
[*] I do not think
it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean that, as far as the
argument has gone up to date, it may be.
---
Now this is really
so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it away. For instance, we
might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you
only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely,
that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply
untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there
first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my
bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame
the first.
I am not
angry—except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses—with a man who
trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if
he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not.
Sometimes the behaviour which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all, but
the very opposite.
In war, each side
may find a traitor on the other side very useful. But though they use him and
pay him they regard him as human vermin. So you cannot say that what we call
decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that happens to be useful to
us. And as for decent behaviour in ourselves, I suppose it is pretty obvious
that it does not mean the behaviour that pays. It means things like being
content with thirty shillings when you might have got three pounds, doing
school work honestly when it would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when
you would like to make love to her, staying in dangerous places when you could
go somewhere safer, keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the
truth even when it makes you look a fool.
Some people say that
though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a
particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole; and
that consequently there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have
some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a
society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that
they try to behave
decently.
Now, of course, it
is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals,
classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of
the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as
we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point If we ask: "Why ought
I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is good for
society," we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for society
except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have to
say, "Because you ought to be unselfish"—which simply brings us back
to where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any
further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not be
much good saying "in order to score goals," for trying to score goals
is the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be
saying that football was football—which is true, but not worth saying.
In the same way, if
a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying,
"in order to benefit society," for trying to benefit society, in
other words being unselfish (for "society" after all only means
"other people"), is one of the things decent behaviour consists in;
all you are really saying is that decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You
would have said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, "Men
ought to be unselfish."
And that is where I
do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are
unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The
Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour
in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about
how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we
cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about men
would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about
how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the behaviour we
call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour we find
inconvenient, and may even be the opposite.
Consequently, this
Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must
somehow or other be a real thing— a thing that is really there, not made up by
ourselves. And yet it is not a fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as
our actual behaviour is a fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit
that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case,
there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and
yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of as made, but which we find
pressing on us.
*******
Psa 53:1 ' … The
fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.'
Please, God, please,
we do not wish to be fools!
All through the name
of Your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior now and FOREVER!
AMEN!
