Insufficient Christianity 28.1

Admittedly, I did not so much as analyze the last chapter of Mere Christianity as read it and go off on a random tangent about how our lives really are worth living even if the universe does not have a purpose. Lewis basically spent all of the last chapter (chapter 27) comparing humans to tin soldiers and saying that god created us as tin soldiers who would eventually become "real flesh" and that this was akin to humans becoming Christians.

In this chapter, Lewis answers two questions from his critics. One individual asks Lewis, "why, if God wanted sons instead of 'toy soldiers,' He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process."

Lewis says that there are two answers to this question: one is easy to understand, and the other is not. Let's look at the first, easy answer:

"The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness."

Now, I often wonder why a perfect god would punish his creation for behaving exactly as he planned to have them behave. One could say that if I gave birth to a child, I would certainly punish my child for misbehaving, and god is doing the same thing. However this is not an appropriate analogy because though I "made" my child in the sense that I copulated and then grew and birthed him, I did not "make" him in the same sense that god supposedly made the human race. God punishing the entire human race for using their free will to sin is kind of like me punishing my child for eating with a spoon after I have taught him to eat with a spoon and repeatedly told him that it is his choice to eat with a spoon or not.

Also, since when is it just to punish people for mistakes their great great great great great great … great grandparents did? Basically, the Christian god is punishing us for being human. It's like punishing Lewis' tin soldiers for being unable to be easily oxidized in air. The tin soldier can't help but me made of Sn*, yet without Sn, the tin soldier would not be tin at all.

And the difficult answer:

"All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one 'Son of God'. If we insist on asking 'But could there have been many?' we find ourselves in very deep water. Have the words 'Could have been' any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing 'could have been' different from what it is, because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. (The letters on this page would have been red if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on.) But when you are talking about God i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend-it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. "

Well that's fine, but when people say, "Could god have done things X way" they are asking for the individual on the other end of the conversation to imagine a hypothetical situation. It is not nonsensical to ask people to imagine a hypothetical situation that is contrary to fact and then take that hypothetical situation to some conclusion. Similarly, even though it is a "fact" that I have been living with Flimsy for about a year, I can easily imagine a hypothetical situation in which that did not occur. That and, Lewis has still failed to establish that his god is an irreducible brute fact.

He goes on to say that it does not make sense of god begetting more than one son, because if he did then we would have to invent some sort of space or distance in order to say that the two are separate things. I don't see how this is a particular problem given that Lewis and other creationists have already invented some sort of eternal time in which god resides in order for the universe to have not existed and then began to exist. There had to, then, be a time before the universe was made. So basically, he is coming up with an ac hoc justification for why there can't be more than one son of god. I think the whole paragraph is pretty silly:

"I find a difficulty about the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In order to be many they would have to be somehow different from one another. Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying different places and containing different atoms. In other words, to think of them as different, we have had to bring in space and matter; in fact we have had to bring in 'Nature' or the created universe. I can understand the distinction between the Father and the Son without bringing in space or matter, because the one begets and the other is begotten. The Father's relation to the Son is not the same as the Son's relation to the Father. But if there were several sons they would all be related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several 'sons'. But when I think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about something that exists before any universe was made, I was really smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something inside it. When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father begetting many sons `before all worlds' I find I am not really thinking of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. (Was Nature-space and time and matter - created precisely in order to make many-ness possible? Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then spiritualising them? But of course all this is guesswork.)

So what Lewis is saying is that imagining the idea of more than one son creates more questions than it answers and so the idea of multiple sons does not solve any problems or make much sense. But Lewis' god is the same way, as that god brings up tons of questions in order to solve a painful few.

The second criticism Lewis addresses is the idea of individuality. He says that we must remember that we are both part of the human race: "You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are 'no business of yours,' remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist."

He goes on to say that the devil will get us if we decide that we dislike one of these two errors in thinking worse than the other, because the devil will lead us to be drawn gradually away from the one we dislike and into the one we don't mind so much. I realize at this point that Lewis is running with Christianity and largely speaking to the converted, but if he wants to provide a more compelling argument as to why dislike of totalitarianism over individualism or vice-versa might lead one to become a totalitarianist or an individualist, a justification other than "the devil will lead you to do this" might make a wee bit more sense. There really isn't any evidence that dislike of individualism will lead you on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

*Okay, this joke may be a little too obscure for some people. Tin's symbol is Sn, and it is a metal that does not easily oxidize in air.