Reading the Classics: Mere Christianity

I’ve been reading along with Tim Challies in his Reading the Classics Together reading program. This week’s reading was Book 1 (Right and Wrong As a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe) from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. This section consists of five short chapters that together argue for the existence of some sort of god—not necessarily the Christian one—from the existence of a universal moral law. (He puts “moral law” in caps. That seems a little quaint, so I’m not going to do it.)

I remember reading this argument when I was still a teenager and being blown away by it. It was the first time I’d read an apologetic work and I loved logical arguments, so I was delighted to discover that my faith could be defended reasonably.

This time around it was the writing that impressed me. I’m experienced enough to understand that while the argument Lewis makes is a fine one, there are limits to the usefulness of arguments like this. But no one explains difficult concepts using illustrations better than C. S. Lewis and that makes his writing captivating.

I had a few thoughts about the argument itself as I read and here’s one of them. I wondered if in chapter 5 where Lewis discusses what we can know about God from the existence of the universe alone, and then what we can know of God from the additional evidence of the moral law that God has put into our minds, if he wasn’t shortchanging (just a little) what the universe itself can tell us about God. Romans 1 informs us, I think, that we know something more than that God is a great artist (Lewis’s conclusion) from the witness of the universe. We can also know that human beings are obligated to worship this great artist that made the universe. In other words, it is not absolutely necessary to argue for a universal moral law written in our minds to come to the place Lewis is trying to put us, the place where we realize that we have “put [ourselves] wrong with that Power” that made the universe.

Does the use of the existence of a universal moral law make the argument stronger? I’m sure it does. But it also it took four chapters to establish the existence of a universal moral law. (And as a side note, I think, sixty years later, when, for example, it seems less certain that everyone agrees that “you ought not to put yourself first,” it might take more than that to do a bang-up job of it.) It doesn’t take four chapters (or more) to establish the existence of the universe, so I’m wondering if the presence of the universe as an argument in itself might be useful if it were pushed further than Lewis takes it. What say ye?

Oh! One more thing. On the ever-exciting punctuation front, I found a comma splice on page 37.

Comments

[John]

C.S. Lewis is certainly a great writer, though at times not the best theologian.

I'm always delighted to find an error in punctuation in a book, but my wife calls me "snooty" when I point them out. (And of course I would make more on one page than I could find in an entire book.)

[rebecca]

I suspect the comma splice is intentional. I only found it because I was going to quote that section, so I had to type it.