The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
- "I wonder at the hardihood with which such persons undertake to talk about God. In a treatise addressed to infidels they begin with a chapter providing the existence of God from the works of Nature . . . this only gives their readers grounds for thinking that the proofs of our religion are very weak. . . . It is a remarkable fact that no canonical writer has ever used Nature to prove god.
Pascal. Pensées, IV, 242, 243.
Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, "Why do you not believe in God?" my reply would have run something like this: "Look at the universe we live in. By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold. The bodies which move in this space are so few and so small in comparison with the space itself that even if every one of them were known to be crowded as full as it could hold with perfectly happy creatures, it would still be difficult to believe that life and happiness were more than a by-product to the power that made the universe. As it is, however, the scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space—perhaps none of them except our own—have any planets; and in our own system it is improbable that any planet except the Earth sustains life. And Earth herself existed without life for millions of years and may exist for millions more when life has left her. And what is it like while it lasts? It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another. In the lower forms this process entails only death, but in the higher there appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain. The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die. In the most complex of all creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. It also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures. This power they have exploited to the full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering. Every now and then they improve their condition a little and what we call a civilisation appears. But all civilisations pass away and, even while they remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilisation has done so, no one can dispute; that it will pass away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it should not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a uniform infinity of homogeneous matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit."
Posted Mar 13, 2011, 11:29 PM UTC · edited
Of course, CS Lewis was a atheist for only a short time, as a mopey teenager exposed to his first serious intellectual peers. He never really achieved a thoughtful degree of atheism that asked fundamental epistemological questions.
Oh now, lets not just dismiss him... out of most self proclaimed ex-atheists he's probably one of the most legitimate. I mean, it does happen... out of the millions in history there are bound to be some otherwise I'd think it quite miraculous ;) And you know such a transition makes for a popular book!
I'd probably be less inclined to dismiss him if he wasn't such a self-righteous dick about everything. I mean, he beat that "former atheist" horse until it was nothing but a greasy spot.
but he wrote some decent books and to be honest it was a time when making these claims didn't really get as much super analysis as nowadays. remember this was before the internet and people were still debating via snail mail.
nowadays the propoganda machine exploits this completely out of proportion.
Philosophers have been debating these sorts of issues at a deep level for a very long time. Lewis is fairly shallow as far as engagement with the tradition goes.
lol, yes... yes he did :p
No self-respecting "ex atheist" would rely so much on the Argument from Ignorance as the basis of his religious beliefs. For this reason, when I think of CS Lewis being an "atheist", it's more likely a default position that in his mind represents a time before his spiritual awakening and not a conscious acknowledgment of any tangible atheistic stance.
CS Lewis' claim of "ex atheist" illustrates two types of atheism: the default position that every human being is born with: absence of belief, which is likely the type he's referring, and a more informed position of rejection of belief based on knowledge and experience. CS Lewis was never the latter-type of atheist.
You seem to think all atheists are hyper-intelligent. Sadly, it just ain't so. So many decide god is bullshit and then start trying out healing crystals or homoeopathy. People are weird like that.
Ah yes, the old, "if he'd have just thought about it more, it'd have been obvious that God doesn't exist." Nothing like assuming your position is more intelligent, when it can't be proven.
Nothing in my statement implies what you said.
His two-year stint as a disaffected teen atheist no more qualifies him to be a "former atheist" than my high school physics class qualifies me to call myself a "former physicist", or a few weeks without eating meat qualifies me to be a "former vegetarian".
If you read Lewis' apologetics (where he invariably plays the "former atheist" card), it's clear that he spent little effort to understand the fundamental philosophical bases for atheism and scientific naturalism.
Do you understand the philosophical bases for atheism? If so, what do you think they are?
An understanding that all religions/superstitions are overwhelmingly similar and invalid
Skepticism and critical thinking based on the best evidence available
Just spit-balling here, feel free to debate
Edit: also, love the username
I'm in a hurry to get out the door so I'll keep this short. Short for me, anyway. These are the philosophical aspects that are important to me:
(1) In order to evaluate the truth(*) of particular claim about the universe, that claim has to be clearly articulated. "Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead" is a clearly articulated claim; "God is eternal" is not clearly articulated.
(2) Some mechanism must be proposed that explains how evidence that we can observe(**) either supports the validity of the claim, or fails to support it.
(3) That evidence must actually be found and shown to be a statistically significant indicator of the mechanism that supports the claim.
This is the standard we apply to all non-supernatural claims about the universe. When evaluating supernatural claims, we can see why they are called supernatural. They fail these tests on a number of counts.
Re: (1) They are rarely well-defined, in fact there is rarely even consensus among believers about the content of the actual claim, leading to questions of logical inconsistency.
Things get worse from there. Re: (2) The ideas proposed rarely lend themselves to any association with observable evidence, leading to unfalsifiability ("your tools cannot test my claim").
In the rare case that they propose some specific mechanism that would have observable implications (e.g. "the earth is 6000 years old"), the evidence invariably fails to support the claim, or (at best) there is no evidence to support the claim. The best that we can say in that situation is that the truth status is unknown. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? It's a clear enough claim, but we don't have a theory for how that would work, nor do we have any way to collect evidence.
When faced with failure to find evidentiary support, believers often fall back on (2), e.g. "Satan planted the evidence so you can't find the real truth", or fall back on testimony, asserting that the truth value of testimony is impeachable. For those cases, I go to Hume's criteria to make a basic analysis of the reliability of testimony.
(*) Note I mean "truth" with a lowercase t, the routine concept of a evidence supporting a claim, not an absolute and irrefutable claim about the universe. Scientists who use language like "proven" that implies irrefutability are choosing poor language. Hence the popularity of the phrase "evidence-based".
(**) I mean observe in all its forms, including measurements with instruments, not "to see with your eyes".
Yeah, guys, if you just think about it more, I'm sure you'll accept God into your hearts and realize invisibility is a part of omnipotence.
See, that's a load of crap. Your position is too.
I think you're wrong here. Fundamental epistemological questions make it really difficult to be convinced that reality is exclusively material and knowable only via science.
Really?
If you know something we don't, please share it!
Scientific knowledge is not absolute. Science is objective in the sense of being reproducible, but it is still relative to the point of view of humanity, defined as what is knowable through the use of our senses and reason, subjective by nature. And our scientific knowledge suggests that physicality is an emergent property.
'Pure' probability is immaterial, and evidently fundamental.
Experientiality is an immaterial property of our own existence. You can argue that experientiality is fundamentally material (caused by physical reality, made of physical reality), but not that it is itself material - the claim that people have experiential qualia is not falsifiable and never will be. (I personally think dualism takes an odd position saying that experientiality is somehow not relative to physical reality, but I equally think materialism is weird because it refuses to classify experience itself as truth.)
You can insist that experientialness is illusion, but the illusion is real.
Epistemology isn't about what's provable, it's about the nature of knowledge, all of which is potential by nature; we assume truths haven't changed in each moment, but by definition everything changes along the dimension of time. The vast majority of knowledge will remain untested.
The vast majority of meaningfulness is non-physical. Social realities are non-physical realities - you may argue they are fundamentally physical and that all knowledge in social context is fundamentally physical, but that is different than saying they are "exclusively material and knowable only via science."
OMG we don't know anything for sure! Life is mysterious and meaningless! What is reality anyway?
AKA "circular argument"
"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -Hume
Testify!
I would say that is better put as "A wise man proportions his certainty to the evidence."
"There are no facts, only interpretations." -Nietzsche
What I mean by this is that "evidence" is nebulous category. My (limited) understanding of Kuhn makes me skeptical that we're not cherry-picking the evidence to fit our presupposed framework, which in this case seems to be materialism.
What Nietzsche advocates is a perspectivism which shouldn't be understood as a free for all but rather as an advocacy to enlist as many perspectives as possible in the service of understanding. For a fuller articulation of this read chapters two and five of Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy or spend some time thinking about the implications of GM 3.12.
But from the perspective of Hume and things like the problem of induction, or some sort of radical skepticism, a lack of reason is no reason for anything at all.
I don't really like discussions of relativism or Kuhn but Errol Morris is trying his hand at epistemology in this 5 part series.
In any case the statement "[f]undamental epistemological questions make it really difficult to be convinced that reality is exclusively material and knowable only via science" in no way contradicts "[h]e never really achieved a thoughtful degree of atheism that asked fundamental epistemological questions". Science must rely on philosophy for its ground (hopefully a good philosophy) .. i.e. science is not a philosophy but a methodology. If Lewis was an atheist who never got beyond that then that would make him one who never asked fundamental epistemological questions.
But epistemology gives us great tools to evaluate specific claims about the supernatural. When claims are made that are unfalsifiable, that are internally inconsistent or illogical, then we can take a strong philosophical position that those claims are false. Or that, at a minimum, the phenomenon as described is very poorly defined.
Sure, but that only works to the extent that those claims are approchable via the tools provided. If we restrict the purview of this discussion to Christianity, Christians have never understood God as a material being inhabiting a manner of existence similar to the one that we do. Consequently, restricting one's methods of investigation to the same tools that show us how cells divide, or what's happening at the center of stars, is non sequitur.
But that's just it; Metaphysical claims, by their very nature, lie outside the realm of the knowable and provable (and disprovable). How then can one decide which of these metaphysical claims are true and which are false? It is therefore rational to dismiss all metaphysical claims.
That's the definition of unfalsifiable, and applies perfectly well to invisible unicorns as it applies to any particular conception of a supernatural God.
Such as?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
Is there a specific question you'd like to posit?
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