Mere Christianity

After reading through Mere Christianity I was amazed once again by C.S Lewis’s argument and style. The premise of the book is quite simple, Lewis plans to prove the existence of a God by using rational thought alone. First, he does something that isn’t very natural in philosophical debate  circles he comes before his readers with humility. Which is interesting because normally this would make him seem weak and discredit his logic. However, his humility is also a weapon that makes the hearts of his readers soft and openly makes them except his reason.  The next tactic used is he makes his argument applicable to everyone but stating that everyone who is above morality can disregard his essay. This entraps the reader because as Lewis knows none of us are above morality. Now that Lewis has everyone caught in the quicksand of his argument we have no choice but to listen. Next Lewis does yet another philosophical tactic, which is grounding your argument by first starting with a concept that your opponent already believes. Lewis says that in every single culture, from an early age, all humans have a concept of what is moral and what is amoral. He gives an example  of a child’s argument where  the response is “how would you like that if someone did that to you”. Lewis then says that this is more than the child claiming that he doesn’t like the action of the other child but something more. He then says that this is a concept of moral law, because both the villain and victim agree that a standard has been broken. This is the concept or a moral law. Now some of Lewis’s reader are feeling uneasy because they don’t believe in a greater moral law. They only believe in a non -authoritative law created by man in order to get along with the herd. However, Lewis expects this and parries with this example. IFa man is in trouble and another man hears him, the man who hears will have two natural responses. One, that he needs to help the man in trouble because he is one of the herd. The second response is to run away in order to live another day, this is the self-preservation nature that is within us all. Then unexpectedly Lewis pull out another response the third, this is the moral laws which overrides the self-preservation by telling the man that he should indeed help the man. I found this argument very interesting because in topic of secular morality the self-preservation and saving the herd are talked about, however with them it only comes down to a choice instead of, first the intervention of moral law which affirms that one choice is better than the other. I’m not sure how a secular rationalist would combat this argument, so if anyone reading this has ideas please comment below. In addition, another part of Lewis’s argument that confused me was the intercultural idea of moral law. In order to understand this more ended up going to the library after class and reading parts of the Abolition of Man,  Which is a really hard read but definitely worth the time spent on it. What I got away from Abolition of Man was that indeed there is a standard of law that is used by all men however certain thing are inconsistent in different cultures however this can be explained by sin distorting the moral law.