We Have Cause to Be Uneasy—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place ... you want to be.... If you are on the wrong road ... the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, It is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake."

"We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches; we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.... We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody"—the Mind behind the Moral Law—"one is the universe He has made.... I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but ... the universe is [also] a very dangerous ... place." The Moral Law is better evidence than the created universe "because it is inside information.... The Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness," but not "indulgent or soft.... The Moral Law ... is as hard as nails. It tells you ... the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful ... dangerous, or difficult it is to do."

"It is no use ... saying that if there is a God of that sort ... then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him.... One part of you is on His side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation.... God is the only comfort; He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it. And we have all reacted the wrong way."

"Christianity simply does not make any sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing ... to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the Law, and that you have broken that Law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this Law—which you and I cannot meet—have been met on our behalf [and] how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God."

"The Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get neither comfort nor truth—only ... wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over ... wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Christianity Honestly Faces Why We Are Ill at Ease and Offers Hope

Highlights from chapter 5: We Have Cause to Be Uneasy, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

What Lies Behind the Law—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

There Have Always Been 2 Views: The Religious and The Materialist

"Ever since men were able to think," begins C. S. Lewis,  "they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be here.... Two views have been held. First the materialist view.... The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind ... than anything else we know.... It is conscious ... has purposes, and prefers one thing to another.... Please do not think one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men, both views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science....

Useful and Necessary

"Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part in the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is ... and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind', then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science ... who go in for them....

"Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing ... in the whole universe that we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We ... have ... inside information.... If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than an architect could actually be a wall or staircase.... We could expect it to show itself ... as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?   In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes ... [to] a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide. I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.

"Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something that is directing the universe, and that appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind ... because ... the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.... In the next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out."

Who or What Is Operating Inside?

Highlights from chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

The Reality of the Law—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Cheating may help but...

A traitor may be useful but...

"You may say ... what I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong ... only means that people are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix ... blame.... But ... I am trying to find out truth.... The very idea of something ... not being what it ought to be ... has ... consequences....

"A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first. I am not angry—except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses—with  a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not. Sometimes the behaviour I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all, but the very opposite. In war, each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful.  But though they use him and pay him they regard him as human vermin.  So you cannot say that what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that happens to be useful to us.

"And as for decent behaviour in ourselves, I suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behaviour that pays. It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have got three pounds, doing school work honestly when it would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her, staying in dangerous places when you would rather go somewhere safer, keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool.

"Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole.... Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that ... safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point.... If a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, 'in order to benefit society' ... (for 'society' ... only means other people).... You would have said as much if you stopped at the statement, 'Men ought to be unselfish'. And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish.... Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong ... must ... be a real thing—a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves ... above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour ... but which we find pressing on us."

Highlights from chapter 3: The Reality of the Law, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Is "Decent Behavior" Basically Instinct?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"The Moral Law tells us the tune...our instincts are merely the keys."

C.S. Lewis said these two facts are foundational to all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe:

1. Human beings all over the world have the unshakable notion that they ought to behave in a certain way.
2. None of us do, in fact, behave that way: we know the Rule of Decent Behavior; we break it.

"If they are the foundation," Lewis begins in Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity, "I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is. For example... 'Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law.... Feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling ... you ought to help whether you want to or not....

"The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play; our instincts are merely the keys.... There are no such thing as good and bad impulses... .A piano ... has not got ...'right' notes and 'wrong' ones.  Every single not is right at one time and wrong at another.... The most dangerous thing you can do is take any one impulse ... and set it up as the thing...to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man....

Worth Reading

"We learn the Rule of Decent Behavior from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions," such as what side of the road to drive on, "and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs. There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is ... that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are ... not nearly so great as most people imagine." Lewis mentions he devoted an appendix to citing the evidence for that fact in his book The Abolition of Man. In short, it is the reason you won't find people of any time or place exalting cowardice or treachery to friends.

The other reason for believing morality is like math is when you think about the differences between the morality of one people and another, "Do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another?.... Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were any truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.... If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about....

"One word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between moralities] because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and ... belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, 'Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of ... Right Conduct?' But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that ... if we really thought that there were people ... who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him...to kill their neighbors or drive them mad...surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy [traitors] did?... You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."

Highlights from chapter 2: Some Objections, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Right and Wrong As a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning to the Universe does the most important thing a title should do: convey vital information at a glance in an interesting, engaging way.  Mere Christianity consists of 4 slender books or sections:

• Book 1.  Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe 
• Book 2.  What Christians Believe 
• Book 3.  Christian Behavior 
• Book 4.  Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

The Context of World War

Since each book grew out of a series of wartime radio broadcasts (only 10 minutes long in the beginning), that first one  was all important for catching and holding attention.  It succeeded.  Actually, that is an understatement: "RAF [Royal Air Force] officer John Lawler was in the officers' mess when someone had ordered a drink.  The radio was on and Lewis came on the air as the barman was about to hand the drink back.  'Suddenly everyone just froze listening to this extraordinary voice.  And what he had to say.  And finally they end up and there was the barman with his arm still up there and the other man still waiting for his drink.  And they all forgot it, so riveting was that'" (C.S. Lewis in a Time of War by Justin Phillips, a BBC journalist here citing an interview).  The officer, the bartender, and everyone else in that room had their priorities right.

So what does Lewis say in Book 1, Chapter 1: The Law of Human Nature? "Every one has heard people quarreling.... They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?'—'That's my seat, I was there first'—'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm'—'Why should you shove in first?'—'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine'—'Come on, you promised.'  People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups."

"Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him.  He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about.... Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong.... No sense trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.... When the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature ... but a man could choose either to obey ... or disobey it," unlike other laws of nature, such as gravity.

"Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.  He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining, 'It's not fair!'... We are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong.  People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.... My next point: None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. ... [We] know the Law of Nature; [we] break it.  These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in."  

A clever Doodle version of this chapter

Highlights from chapter 1: The Law of Human Nature, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.