RTS Papers / The Theology of C. S. Lewis / Spring 2019
TWO INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES: SEEKING AND HOLDING
Revisiting the psychological arguments as genetic fallacies, Lewis concludes that people on the whole spectrum of “wish-lists” can “assess differently” much of the same evidence. “There is no need to suppose stark unreason on either side. We need only suppose error.” If we cannot agree with Lewis on this, then we cannot rise above what Alvin Plantinga calls the de jure objections to faith, the most notorious being those of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Such objections are not the kind that focus on Christianity’s objective failure with the facts, but rather the Christian’s illegitimate means of assessing them. Does the skeptic usually mean by this that the Christian apologist has misused the laws of logic or misrepresented the facts of the case? Not at all. What this rather means is that the Christian’s mind is the sort of mind that was bound to think up such fantasies! An interesting psychological profile, perhaps, but this hardly constitutes an examination of the truth of the matter at hand.
This same point is also embedded in Lewis’ “cardinal difficulty of Naturalism” in Miracles, since what the de jure objections really amount to is a kind of epistemological determinism. It is maintained that each of us was bound to come to the beliefs that we have by interlocking cause and effect of one sort or another. Lewis shows that such a deterministic theory of reason “would have destroyed its own credentials.”
If epistemic chains (If A then B) are reduced to cerebral events and nothing more, then there is no vision of things outside of the mind; and “if logic is discredited science must go down along with it.” Mind 1 (C. S. Lewis) and Mind 2 (Bertrand Russell) would have been equally bound to view the evidence for the resurrection in exactly the ways they have. Yet the conclusion of Mind 1 is “A” and that of Mind 2 is “~A.” What then? Shall we appeal to a standard outside of those two minds? Unfortunately standards are mind-bound things; and if naturalism is true, then this is only a way of appealing to Mind 3, and then 4, and so on.
Now our apologetic method should not match an unbelieving epistemological determinism with a believing one. In other words, it is no apologetic at all to maintain (or commend) belief in Christian truth by a constant pointing away from the outside world, inward toward subjective perspective.
We must take account of the subjective, but that cannot be an alternative to the objective. That is to say, we cannot halt the apologetic encounter by pointing to the futility of the unbeliever to accurately assess the data of revelation. The point is granted by Classicalist and Presuppositionalist alike (assuming they are both Reformed), but it seems to me that Lewis would have seen at least one commonality between the Naturalist and Presuppositionalist: deconstruction of one’s inevitable subjectivity rather than getting on with the argument about objective truth. In the meantime, our concern is to rise above the level of de jure objections to faith, to focus the skeptic and ourselves on the de facto. For if our concern is whether Christianity is true of all reality, then we must resist any kind of reductionism of the relevant objective truths.
Evidentialism slavishly follows the skeptic around in reducing that relationship to faith-and-evidence. The skeptic brings a difficulty, and the evidentialist reacts. But then the skeptic has another difficulty, and then another, ad infinitum. This is most clearly seen in alleged “errors in the Bible.” We abandon our solid rock and follow the skeptic out where there are as many potential difficulties as their are drops in that ocean.
Presuppositionalism resists that drift by holding to the shoreline and by pointing to the rock that forms even the bottom of that sea. It is true, of course, but our unbelieving sailor cannot see it below the surface. The question in seeking and holding is this: Have we sought a strong enough faith worth holding on to to being with? Lewis’ “two tracks” or “two phases” here in this essay are really two motions that are naturally connected in someone who is intellectually secure. We give all the more room to seeking and doubting the more we know that there is to hold on to.
But then why the struggle at all? Lewis seems to be suggesting, and we know from our own experience, that there are “defeaters” in the moment that, while we may look back at them and realize that they were bad arguments after all, at the time that we faced them it shook our faith to the core. At the very least it made us sick to our stomach that such devilry could be out there, as when Ransom bitterly lamented the “advantage” of Weston’s seductions upon the Green Lady. Here we must take into account the great spiritual battle, which is where Lewis seems to be more in accord with Presuppositionalism.
If the whole sea around our “continent of faith,” or the whole “forest” around our little outpost, is that “enemy occupied territory,” such as Thulcandra in the Space Trilogy, then here is an objective reason in reality that obstinate faith and seeking evidence are not two different paths but one. In fact, it are the defeaters to faith that are parochial in the grander scheme, though they may loom larger in our sight. Consequently, to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7) in this respect is to walk by the larger reality and not by the smaller. It is to recognize fallen reason as intellectual myopia.
The defeaters are a diversion. What Calvin called “monster minds” (a Sam Harris or a Bart Ehrman today) play the role of the UnMan so that our own minds are fields of a War of Rebellion as well, half the terrain of the devil and the other of God, our active intellect playing the roles both of the Lady and of Ransom. We must persuade ourselves against ourselves. And our natural tendency is to call the tree “real” and any talk of the forest “mysticism.”
CAN WE NEATLY DEFINE THE APOLOGETIC METHOD OF LEWIS?
This is a softball way to ask the question. Of course we cannot “neatly” categorize Lewis! But allow me to be brave enough to say that Lewis was essentially classical in his basic philosophical orientation. The way in which he takes for granted Augustinian and Thomistic notions, no matter what angle he is coming from, is sufficient to demonstrate this. I happen to agree with him on those commitments. What shall we say to the equally obvious point that his writings show an eclectic strategy? We cannot ask Lewis in person. But take note of Lewis’ statements that are “evidential” or his myths that attempt to “get under the skin” of the tender hearted seeker. What do we find?
I would argue that we find the classical assumptions running underground even here. Who are the wise characters in Lewis’ fiction and what drum are they constantly banging? George Macdonald in The Great Divorce, the professor hosting the children in the Chronicles of Narnia, and first the Oyarsu and then Ransom himself by the end, in the Space Trilogy—all with great ease, as if every one of them were reclining back in an Oxford chair and smoking on Lewis’ own pipe as they spoke, all extolling every square inch of general revelation and logic-chopping all worldviews to the root. The Christian was the last man standing, and that by a rational rout. This is the essence of classical apologetics, whatever other unique gifts Lewis brings in to make him wholly unlike any other apologist, of any school, before him or since.
The Presuppositionalist may sense his own “getting back behind” all of the surface of facts in Lewis. No doubt there is a commonality here or there. But for Lewis an “indirect approach,” as in Miracles, meant not a formal transcendental argument for God, as in Van Til. Rather it meant the Christian doing art, poetry, myth, law, history, and science, with such excellence that only genuine admiration and anxiety could force our incredulity to ask what lay under the surface. Clearly this is not always what Lewis is doing. In his major non-fiction works, his thesis and antithesis are clear.
At several points his interpretation of general revelation is not sufficiently informed by special revelation, and so his apologetic undermines several important doctrines. Total depravity is misunderstood by him; atonement is distorted and justification wholly ignored; biblical inerrancy is rendered improbable (if not impossible); and he paints a picture of the virtuous pagan that wears out its own usefulness at points. Nevertheless he shows the greatest number, or kinds, of Christians how to engage in their own arenas of apologetic encounter. And that is all we can really ask of a mere Christian: especially one who frankly admitted that he was no theologian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008
Clifford, William Kingdon. “The Ethics of Belief,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/
Lewis, C. S. Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967
__________. God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997
__________. Mere Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996
__________. Miracles. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996
__________. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965
__________. That Hideous Strength. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965
__________. The World’s Last Night. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1987
Plantinga, Alvin. Knowledge and Christian Belief. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015
Smith, James K. A. You Are What You Love. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016
(#CSLewis #Lewis #Narnia #SpaceTrilogy #Perelandra #Apologetics #worldview)
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