I'm expecting a response from Ariel, but the rest of you please chime in as well (especially Randal with his lawyer's logic). The reason, of course, that I want responses is that I want you all to point out the error in my thinking. Since the subject is C.S. Lewis - a man I admire and a Christian I trust - I am thinking that I must be wrong somewhere, but I'm not finding it.
To be fair to Lewis, I'm basing my blog post on a 12 part CD course on C.S. Lewis and his writings. To say that this course just scratches the surface is to say that someone telling you that 1 + 1 = 2 just scratches the surface of mathematics. So far, at least, the course has been mostly a review of his books and his apologetics.
That being said, here is my problem...
1) Lewis believes that our pursuit of joy and our knowledge of good presuppose that there is something more joyful that we can't grasp and more Good that we can't see (i.e. God) but that we still somehow know. I have no problem with this and the logic he uses to prove this seems compelling.
2) He then explains that Jesus must be who He says He is because otherwise He would be a liar or a lunatic. Again, I followed all of that, and I can't argue this point.
But here is where I find the problem - the leap from the first statement to the second.
Let me put it this way, the first statement relies on our own internal logic. We can grasp the fact that joy is something that we can never hold on to. We can understand the idea that our knowledge of Good must come from some place outside of the world because we know what right and wrong are and many of us have never ever read the Bible. Etc... So our own knowledge informs us about the idea of God. The second statement, however, relies on the words of Jesus Christ as written in the Bible. Without getting into the whole idea of the Bible and how it was written, we are still being asked to accept that the Bible is a definitive truth and that Jesus Christ is a definitive truth. If there was no Bible, wouldn't that negate Jesus Christ? You see, the first statement is something I can feel. The second statement relies on me knowing something of Jesus Christ. I can see mathematics at work because if you give me one apple and then hand me another one, I have two apples. Its something I intuitively grasp even if I don't know what it means (like the language we speak). Jesus isn't necessarily intuitive.
So, did Lewis make a Leap in Logic? Or did I miss something in his writings that points to the intuitiveness of Jesus Christ?
Now, that having been said and asked, and posited for ridicule, I am, of course, concerned with the whole reason my brain refuses to simply accept Lewis's argument. I know, intuitively, that I will never find "proof" of God, and yet I also know intuitively that God exists. Therefore, I sometimes wonder if logic and intelligence are the logs in my eye preventing me from seeing that which is clearly obvious if I were to just remove these darn things from my iris (which itches, by the way). Is intelligence a curse or a boon to human beings? I wonder what Lewis would say?
4 comments:
Well, Will, I think that both statements are steps to each other. The first being that goodness comes from a holy source - and, therefore, we know of the holy source even if we are never taught about it. The second being that Jesus must be the son of God because he says he is - and that is a lesson learned in the search for the source of goodness.
Think of it this way - before Jesus, was anyone going around saying they were the son of God? Did anyone even have that idea? Or did people intuitively recognize that a goodness existed and therefore something which created the goodness existed, too - - so that they were ready to accept Jesus when he came and to learn the source of the goodness -as he was the ultimate teacher?
I'm not even sure if this makes sense because, like you, I am grappling at explaining it - although it does make sense to me. Its sort of a chicken-egg argument. I think the intuition comes before one can embrace the knowledge.
I think Heather's right, for the most part. I think the logical flaw is assuming that 1) leads to 2). Both statements need to be taken independently of each other, and are not steps to the other. To me, each is a statement of fact.
But it's fun discussing...
I agree that the two points are not part of the same syllogism or same proof. Also, I'm not sure Lewis' position is the Christ is God because otherwise he would be a liar or lunatic. In fact, though, those are are only two option:
God
Not God.
If the second is true, then Christ was either a deliberate charlatan or a delusional lunatic.
I think what Lewis is saying is that our Knowledge of Good/Joy points to the existence of the Transcendent (God). If, then, we believe in God, the question then becomes, how is He manifest to us, if at all. To answer that question, we then look to the various ostensible revelations of God to Man: Bible, Koran, whatever. We then compare those ostensible revelations to what we intuitively know about God, i.e. "The Good" and compare. Which is a most accurate portrayal of the Human condition?
In that respect, we are led to Christ.
More later, perhaps.
Cheers.
Being the non-believing heathen that I am, I think the odds are that Jesus was probably liar or lunatic, rather than the son of God.
But I'm wondering if liar or lunatic are really the only alternatives to Jesus claiming to be the son of God. I'm hardly a scholar on these matters, but I keep hearing that we have very few direct quotes or writings directly from Jesus, and that we know him mostly from the descriptions of him by others. I'm wondering if Jesus really went around saying that he was the son of God, or whether that was just something attributed to him by others.
Also, I've never heard of a logical argument for the existence of God that I've found to be convincing. It seems like it all comes down to faith. I was reading a book called "Religious Literacy" a few months ago, and the author was describing the history of Christianity in America. The way it was described, for a long time, formal education and rationality were viewed as the enemy of religion, since they ultimately resulted in people questioning the basis of their beliefs.
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