Ep. 395: C.S. Lewis Argues for Christianity (Part One)

0:00 Mark: It is your last chance to reserve your slot to see the Partially Examined Life live celebrating America's 250th birthday in Madison, Wisconsin. All four of us this coming Saturday, July 11th in the early afternoon. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.comlive for details. You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode three, 395 is something like does Christianity make sense as a philosophy? And we read portions of C.S. lewis's Mere Christianity, published in 1952, based on a series of radio broadcasts he delivered between 1941 and 1944.

For more information about the text and the podcast, please See partially examined life.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, a kazoo in humanities band. A scrap of inanimate clay in the sculptor's shop. An egg learning to fly in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:02 Seth: This is Seth Paskin feeling the presence of God in flowers and music in Austin, Texas, but without a map of the Atlantic Ocean.

1:11 Wes: This is Wes Alwan using material things like bread and wine to put a new life in me in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:19 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey making a snappy finger clicking tune out of my instincts.

1:26 Mark: I recall at some point somebody had emailed us saying you should do something on the philosophy of Christianity. And I was like, well, what the hell does that mean? I mean there's, we've read lots of Christian philosophers, they have lots of different theories, you know, what work are you talking about in particular? But CS Lewis was also specifically mentioned to us and that is what he is trying to give the mere Christianity is the generic Christianity. I'm not going to get caught up in the differences between the theological doctrines of the various sects.

I'm going to try to give you an argument from reason, right? So you don't have to just believe this stuff on faith. Your reason should point you in this direction, you know. And he sounds actually quite a lot like Bertrand Russell, just in his style, this, this British, you know, as I'm explaining it, anybody at ever, any level of intelligence could understand this. I'm going to walk you right through, step by step. But he's going to get to some bizarre places, of course, but he says

2:20 Dylan: it in such a way as it's like, how could you possibly disagree? Yeah, just, just his tone. I listened to some of the audiobook which is read by a guy with a British accent who like doubles down on the sense of it when you listen to it.

2:35 Mark: Wes, you had Said like Hobbit, good cheer or something you get from this reading this. Very easy to read. We needed a stylistic break from Hegel and other thorny things, and this would definitely qualify.

2:48 Wes: Yeah. As you might expect, it's very well written. It's also. I wouldn't call it dumbed down, but it's definitely much lighter than the things that we've been doing. And there's kind of a comforting thing about reading C.S. lewis. There's just something about his tone which is very comforting and benevolently paternal, even as he's telling us about the. That that Christianity is. Has got some very hard aspects to it. It can be terrifying. It can be tough as nails, all of that stuff. His bedside manner is really great. I was thinking when I was reading this, if anything convinces Mark to go. To go back to being a Christian.

3:29 Mark: Oh, no, no, not even close, but okay.

3:33 Wes: I think he's a very. Also very persuasive writer. I find much of the psychology persuasive, even though it didn't make a convert out of me. You know, I was reminded reading this of actually the feeling that I would get from reading the Chronicles of Narnia, which also has that. The feeling of comfort to me at least comes along with it. But I felt like I learned a lot and I came away thinking, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're Christian or if you're even interested in becoming a Christian. The kind of apologetics he's doing, the he's doing tries to do the difficult work of explaining something is very weird to me, which is, you know, the crucifixion. I often tell people, I just like. The whole aesthetic of it bothers me. I think Christ should put a shirt on. Actually, maybe we should cut that out.

4:22 Dylan: Nope.

4:23 Wes: Or he should be less ripped. But anyway, it's the first time I've heard. I mean, it's an explanation of the crucifixion and Resurrection, which I felt like. I felt like it deepened my comprehension of what that. Of how one might explain the significance of that and why it's important. And we'll get to that.

4:38 Seth: Well, I mean, I wish I was half as clever and half as good a writer as him.

4:45 Dylan: It's.

4:45 Seth: I think his mastery in this particular text is the use of analogy, because that's really how he manages to take something that seems that philosophically should be pretty contentious and debatable and just sort of masterfully like home spins, you know, this is. Bring some homespun wisdom. Well, that's just like a frog Jumping off of the bog, and next thing you know, you're a lion, you know, or a lion going through a wardrobe. But I mean, it's truly a masterwork in that respect because you flow from one paragraph to the next. And he's leapt across a massive chasm through the simplest of rhetorical devices. And he does it over and over and over again, and it's truly dazzling. And at the same time, I think it doesn't work on the unconverted. This is kind of a preaching to

5:44 Dylan: the choir type of text he explicitly aimed at. Not at that.

5:50 Seth: I know, but that's what it feels like to me. Because so many of the analogies and all that, you know, are also so culturally bound that they rub the wrong way sometimes too. But anyway, I mean, it's like I want desperately to. This is just so good that I want desperately to be on board ideologically and not just stylistically, but I'm not.

6:11 Dylan: The thing that appealed to me about it was the combination of. I'll call it an assured confidence about the direction that he had chosen and that how to make it clear about why it made sense to him. And so that comes through really well in the positiveness that someone in possession of their why and how they are pursuing their life and their assuredness about it comes through. And it comes through in a way that feels very accessible and benevolent. The way Wes mentioned, I didn't have too many times where it felt like it was the same benevolence of an executioner walking you to the gallows or something like that.

That was just really nice to you while. But that self assuredness comes with anybody who really is certain about everything, what they're doing. The one thing that did feel like is that the certainness that comes with it is that his combination of belief, the question of humility and forgiveness, I think runs true and through on it and makes it appealing. And so it's that there's an infusion of generosity. Overall, I would say not completely, but overall, well, frankly, is the positive part about interacting with people who are a certain kind of just everyday Christian believer that comes through.

I'll be interested to talk about a number of the philosophical points that he makes. My opening, I almost made my opening. Not sure that the fact that we make distinctions between better and worse means that God exists. Because that's basically. Basically what he says.

8:05 Wes: Yeah. We were talking on the nightcap and we were talking about road rage. And I said that every time Dylan gets in a road rage incident, he should be like, you Know f you and oh, there is a God. I have these reactive attitudes. That's the best information we have. It's the inside information suggesting that there is a God. Now I do think he actually has a point, actually.

8:28 Dylan: There is a really good one to struggle with. Right.

8:32 Wes: And it is the sort of the first principle of his whole argument. It's where he starts out with our moral sentiments and tries to build on top of that. So I thought, yeah, that's an interesting philosophical strategy.

8:42 Seth: So Dylan, the point you make, I probably, if I was making it more sophisticated and, and charitable opening would have said he's describing the best that Christianity can achieve, you know, like in some sense. But of course the problem is it rarely manages to achieve that as, you know, systematically and that you end up with all this theological baggage that causes all kinds of problems too. And it's like that's the.

9:12 Wes: Also known as Christianity.

9:13 Seth: Yeah, but that's, that's the big.

9:16 Wes: All the bells and whistles, all the,

9:17 Dylan: well, all the institutional things that come with it. Right. Because all the thoughts come with. And ends up transforming into a cultural and I want to say governmental, but at least a social prescriptiveness that involves rewards and punishments.

9:36 Seth: Yeah.

9:36 Mark: I wonder if he actually is as non denominational as he claims to be in that.

9:41 Dylan: No, he's not. He's a Church of England guy.

9:44 Mark: He says that a primary division seems to be right between the Protestant, it's you and Jesus and God having a conversation. And the Catholic, like you can't really understand this stuff so you have to use the authority. And he sort of elides over this distinction. But. Right. So the book is structured, there's four books and the first one is this moral argument for the existence of God. And then he moves into what Christians believe, Christian behavior and beyond personality or first steps in the doctrine of the Trinity, which is sort of the ultimate view of human nature as transformed by Christianity.

Yeah, so we'll get to that. But Right. The part that was easiest to follow was this first book which. Let's talk about that soon. But then once you sort of are in, it's very phenomenological, like, you know, observe your own the way that you judge things. And hey, look, it seems like you have these moral sentiments that, you know, as Kant pointed out are not. He never mentions Kant, he never mentions any philosophers other than to say a very wrong thing about Hegel at some point for the most part. But yeah, so once you are in the predicament where you recognize the moral facts, the facts about Your psychology that he's pointing out, then you are ready to take this journey, to take the leap.

And once you take the leap, then it's no longer about your own moral intuition, say. Because we've established actually that all of your moral intuitions, all of your everything about your human nature and your telos is all faulty and needs to be replaced wholesale by the mind of Christ. But he doesn't really get into, well, how do you know the mind? Like, well, we know most things through authority anyway, right. I don't know. I've never been to England. I just take your word that England exists. I take. So he gives this kind of thing about authority and that's supposed to give

11:39 Wes: us testimonial evidence, which is really important.

11:42 Mark: Yes. So that's supposed to give us, like, yeah, that this Jesus was a real person who really said these things and these things were captured in a book. And so there's no further question of, like, well, how do you know that things weren't lost in translation? Or isn't there hermeneutic issues about understanding the book itself, like, these are all glossed over? Or like, well, this is why there are multiple sects within Christianity and people of good will who have made this initial leap are in a position to argue about them. But you, as the beginner probably should not worry about them at all. You just need to get on board. And once you, like, are on board, then we're going to just load you down with all these rules that it is not in your purview to say, is this reasonable or is this not?

12:28 Wes: I mean, I think you're pointing to a real internal tension here, which is the mere. And mere Christianity points to something more universal. Right. And he's going to make this appeal to universal moral standards to get us going. He says things like, we don't have to think all other religions are wrong. They can be right in certain ways. But where they differ, right. Think Christianity is right. In the end, he has to buy into something historical, which I think is a stumbling block for a lot of us who are not Christians. Right. A Christian has to buy into the idea that God made himself human or instantiated himself or part of himself as a human being and then died on the cross for us.

So you can say, well, how do we know that? And he can talk about testimonial evidence and all that. I don't think that's really the essence of this. The best argument for it is psychological. Right. It's the idea that God, in a way, is modeling the way that we must make our willfulness die. Our wills died. In other words. In other words, give up our pride. And I think many people come to that kind of revelation outside of Christianity as well. It's very. If you've experienced it, if you've maybe been too prideful and ambitious for most of your life, and then you kind of figure out, whether through Christianity or psychoanalysis or something else, that that.

That is a misplaced priority. It is really quite. Life is quite qualitatively different before and after that revelation. So I will say that. So I think, for me, I think the book actually, I think if anyone is open to being converted, this is probably one of the best tools to do that. But for me, it has to be about the psychology. There has to be something psychologically compelling. And you have to take these weird, weird historical ideas, these ideas about just weird historical events and all the paraphernalia that go along with religion. The guy nailed to a cross and all that stuff, which again, to an outsider is kind of off putting.

You have to do really subtle psychological apologetics for that. And I think he does the. Probably the best job you can do for that. And all the theology that we. We read a lot of theology. Right. We've seen a lot of the apologetics. But the way he puts it here, to my mind, has been the most persuasive that I've read.

14:49 Mark: All right, I guess let's start in. So book one, Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe. Yeah, we read the whole of the first two books and we sort of skipped around. I ended up reading the whole book just because it was so freaking easy. But I think we have plenty to talk about in the assigned parts. So. Yeah, I think again, I want to compare this to Kant that he. When we just walk around with the notion that we can judge the quality of the moral value of various behaviors, that something is a priori. Lewis does not use the word a priori, but it is non empirical.

You know, even if you observe somebody that seems like a good moral exemplar. Well, you recognize it as a good moral exemplar. You are using a standard that did not come from that person. If that person suddenly did something nasty, you would recognize that that is nasty, that that person is. So the standard. Standard comes first. And we also recognize that we never live up really, nobody ever lives up to this standard even close. There's just always something that we recognize. Yeah. That actually would be a better thing to do than what is going on Right now.

And so what does this mean? This must mean that moral facts are not just observable things that science could detect. They are something he wants to say, actually supernatural, that this is the opening, just our very moral sense. These are not just commands we give ourselves. They're not non natural facts in the way that a philosopher might say, okay, well naturalism isn't all there is to ontology. No, it's literally supernatural. The only thing that could explain this moral sense is that we have God's stamp on us.

16:34 Wes: Yeah, the way I would put this is if we've, we've read enough, you know, if we've understood enough about science and philosophy, we really ought to think from, at a theoretical, from theoretical standpoint, that there is no such thing as morality because there is no such thing as a morality. From a theoretical standpoint. There are just atoms and void. There's only morality. From a practical standpoint, even, even Kant would agree with that. Right. Morality is not some part of, among the empirical things of the world. It's not part of our experiences.

In a way, it's not even noumenal. And yet we act as if there is such a thing as morality and we can't get beyond that. And philosophers who do ethics try and establish very fancy ways of grounding normativity. Even Hume is an atheist or Korsgaard, who I assume is probably an atheist. Right? Hume wants to ground normativity in some way and Korsgaard wants to ground it in identity. I think the thing that all of those attempts have in common is something like what C.S. lewis is claiming, which is that in order to ground normativity, we have to be able as human beings to identify with a general point of view that is not our own with the law.

And identify does not mean obey it because we are afraid, or obey it because there's a sting of conscience, or obey it because we have attachments and moral sentiments, or any of those other reasons. It's this weird internalization and acceptance of the moral norm as something true. So I find that like Lewis, I find that a very, very mysterious thing. And for Lewis, the upshot of that is there must be something, a mind like entity underwriting normativity. I think someone like Korsgaard would say that that doesn't actually ultimately work. A lot of philosophers would, would say that.

But, but I think even if you don't agree that there has to be a mind like entity like God underwriting morality, I think there might be a more generic. It points to a broader insight to my mind, which I would have trouble expressing.

18:47 Dylan: Seth earlier said that one of the powerful aspects of Lewis's book is his use of analogy. And I would also add in there what felt like sort of apt. But to me unusual observations. And his wind up to the conclusion that we were talking about. He points to a distinction of human beings. One of the things that makes us human beings is this recognition of fair play, of right and wrong and noting that it is manifest in our quarreling about it and that animals don't quarrel, they fight with one another, but they don't quarrel with one another. Trying to show that someone else is wrong about something, trying to say, well, you're wrong about that.

And that that observation about who we are. He then goes and does everything that we've just been discussing. That that becomes, you know, a mind like independent entity that is setting that stage, setting that law as opposed to it being part of who we are as social entities. That we have this come out of ourselves. Something like what Tomasello would. Would do or Coorsgaard or.

20:06 Wes: Can I give a quote here? Yeah, it's in chapter four, but yeah, right. The first few chapters kind of COVID ground that we've been over a lot, right. So for instance, the idea that morality is not reducible to social utility or something like that. But we can, we can come back to that. But I think the pivotal turn here is in chapter four. He's trying to say what lies behind the moral law and suggests, right, the theoretical point of view, the third person point of view, which can't really decide between materialism or the religious point of view, which is that there's a mind behind the universe.

That can't be the approach. We have to approach this from the inside. And we have special inside information from the practical point of view that the theoretical point of view can't provide us. So this is on the bottom of page 23. He says now the position would be quite hopeless but for this, quite hopeless. In choosing, I think, between materialism and alternatives. There is one thing, and only one in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is man. We do not merely observe men, we are men.

In this case. We have, so to speak, inside information. We are in the know. And because of that we know that men find themselves under a moral law which they did not make and cannot quite forget even when they try and which they know they ought to obey, cannot quite forget even when they try and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get inside knowledge from us. But merely observing what we did would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law.

And then he moves on to say,

21:50 Dylan: which is interesting, this is a comment. Because in a way that's in a significant amount of tension, unless you have to be in the know to recognize quarreling. Because on that analysis, and his first point on page four, about the observation that human beings quarrel about what's good and bad or what ought to be done, that you shouldn't have behaved in a certain way, or that this thing is better than that, that quarreling as an indicator of us having a moral law that we are using as a yardstick for our behavior that ought to be able to be observable by aliens, it seems to me.

22:34 Wes: Well, if. Yeah, I mean, I think there'd be an argument you don't have to be

22:37 Dylan: a human being, Especially if we. Because if what he says there. If you have to be a human being to do it, then that means that we would not be able to detect if animals have their own moral laws. Unless we're a dolphin or a chimpanzee or an ant, we wouldn't be able to tell if we have a moral law on the basis of what he's saying here.

22:55 Wes: I think there's a point here. So, for instance, if there. If aliens observed us and there were no effective state corresponding to something being funny for them, right? There's nothing. They would never be able to understand us smiling or laughing. It could never have any meaning for them, no matter how much we explained it. Just like if they couldn't see red, that they couldn't see color. We couldn't explain to them the qualitative experience of seeing color. So I think the idea is, if you haven't experienced moral sentiments or the psychological pressure of morality, it's impossible to explain it to an outsider.

Something like that. I mean, the ultimate point he wants to make. And I think this is, you know, probably we're going to find this a bridge too far. But on page 25, there must be something which is directing the universe and which 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 than anything else we know. Because, after all, the only other thing we know is matter. And you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. And then he says, that doesn't mean it's a personal God.

So he's still not at the point of a personal God, but he thinks them. If we want to explain if there is such a thing as objective morality, then the psychological pressure, it applies to us as a form of law or instruction, or you ought to do this can only be explained in terms of a mind like entity producing that ought.

24:32 Dylan: Yeah, but this is a very, very, very conventional version of. It's so amazing that. And so out of the realm of possibility that human beings were created or it's a very, very standard, it's impossible to conceive. So therefore it must be God that actually designed it, that the world is the way it is. It's so sophisticated and so beautiful, it's so beautif. Possibly be anything but God. It's exactly that same argument, which is really. I mean, to me, in the end it's a lack of imagination.

25:07 Seth: But I mean, it's interesting to hear you say that, Dylan, because to me it's the ontological argument. Okay, so basically he says animals have instincts that they have to obey. Physical objects are bound by laws. So when we say a moral law, we're not talking about like a physical law. What we're moral law is, is really morality or moral capability. Moral agency is the ability to selectively choose or ignore instincts which animals don't have. And he says, he uses again a really beautiful analogy. He says the moral law is like the specks of the house, right?

It's like instincts are like notes and the moral law is like the conductor. Right? I mean, it's an orchestrates the notes. So basically the argument is, well, the instincts come from the world, from the bodies, our physical thing. And because the law could not possibly be an instinct, you can't have an instinct controlling other instincts. It has to be something separate. It comes from someplace else, not us. It must. And therefore there has to be something that's capable of creating the moral law in us, blah, blah, blah. So it's essentially the ontological argument from.

26:27 Wes: Well, he says it's. It must be mind like. Right. And Kant would say, sure, but it's, you know, we issue our own laws. Of course, I think even Hume acknowledges this. Right? Because when we get offended by someone's behavior, we get offended by it, not from our own point of view. According to Hume, we get offended by virtue of identifying with this third person point of view, this mind outside of us. So I would do a little apologetics here for CS Lewis's apologetics, even if it's not put in a Philosophically sophisticated way. I think this idea of another mind is instructive because there's a sense in which morality involves another mind inhabiting us.

We must have identified, in other words. And we might. We would call that the community or society or our parents. But identification to me is a very, very mysterious thing. The way in which we can treat, we can adopt and internalize and assent to these norms. So I would. From an apologetic stance, I would. I would. That's the way I would think of this argument here. Even if you don't want to take the theological.

27:32 Dylan: You know, I think that's right. I think that that's the nub of all the things the solutions would make. Is the core of morality being identification.

27:43 Mark: Having a little trouble. Yeah. With this. You've been walking around this analogy that goes over 24 to 25.

27:49 Seth: Right.

27:49 Mark: The only thing we have access to is man. So this sort of reminds me of Schopenhauer. Right. He just observed things, but we have an inside. So. And this is supposed to give us insight about everything else. And I think it's similar to Schopenhauer. C.S. lewis is sort of. Well, it's an obvious inference, Right. Does it make sense that I'm the only thing that has an inside? That I'm the only thing that has a will? No, no, no. Actually, let's just posit that this will, that everything is kind of like what I see on my inside. And so CS Lewis is saying something similar.

You know, he uses this example of people getting mail and like, I only open my mail, but shouldn't I assume that other people's mail, and really the mail that other creations. Right. Trees are receiving metaphorically, also has ascender. So I know in my case that there is a moral law that I am subject to that I did not invent that there thing hovering out there. Is it more reasonable for me to just assume that it is just me or that this is in some analogical way the case for everything? So even though human beings get to choose, they don't have to obey the law of nature in the way that biological and physical things obey physical laws.

In fact, we partake of that so we know what that's like too. That I still fall when I am dropped and have biological problems and things like that. But yeah, so shouldn't we just assume that there is some kind of creator, some kind of mind behind everything else?

29:18 Wes: Can I just want to add one little thing to that? Korsgaard, right. Reminded us that reasons are first person entities. There are no such Thing things as reasons in the sense that we mean them in terms of justifying our behavior and motivating our behavior. Right. I had a reason to eat the ice cream because it was pleasurable or because for some reason I thought it was good for me or for whatever sort of thing I want to call a reason that's not external. Right. Again, this highlights the difference between the practical and the theoretical. If I were taking a theoretical point of view, I would talk about my brain and you know, the way the machine is, the functioning and the way one thing leads to another in this deterministic scientific way.

But I would leave out these internal, subjective reasons. So I think he's. It's important. Yeah. When we talk about normativity, we do have to talk about reasons. And this first person point of view that he's talking about, I think he's right about that. And I think. And Seth and Dylan, I think are right to point to this kind of Cartesian maybe aspect to this where you're building a foundation on this special kind of access that we have to ourselves. We're going to build on top of that.

30:31 Dylan: Yeah. On 24, where the paragraph that you got up to. He does two things. He starts with the position of the question then is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is power behind it that makes it what it is. So this is a is there meaning in the world question. And it's the kind of question that is already presuming the answer that in that is I wrote on the side, you know, do we want to know this? Because I'm not so sure that that's actually true. But he gives another analogy saying 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 the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. So there's part of that that's clever, that is making a distinction between the designer and the designed right. That seem that that is partially right and feels very, very logical. But to me, what it also does is it frames the kind of answer that many parts of science are already doing right there. Or a solution that comes out of something like emergence or self organization is they would say, well, yes, of course, you need to see how the organization arises out of the form of the constituents.

And that kind of answer is actually true for matter. You can describe how matter is arranged based upon the constituents of the matter. It is encoded in the conventional laws of nature, the way in which the matter is arranged.

32:28 Wes: There's an analogy, by the way, to there, to apperception, since that was a recent topic a little bit for us with Hegel. And consciousness doesn't show up as an object within the field of consciousness. It is the field.

32:38 Dylan: Yeah.

32:39 Wes: The creator of the universe doesn't show up within that field. Now that is in tension with, of course, all the necessary historical events that Mark was pointing to. Isn't he showing up? And I think C.S. lewis is right. He's going to emphasize the importance of testimonial evidence and those sort of historical events. But they have to join up with this first person point of view or they're not going to go anywhere. They have to be able to connect to this first person point of view and in particular to some of the psychological stuff that I've already mentioned.

The right. The surrendering of one's will and one's pride. If I don't think if the historical facts didn't connect with those sorts of things, and he even uses some psychological reasoning to say why he thinks, you know, Jesus was not a devil or a madman, he there then therefore must be the Son of God. So we need a connection between this first person point of view, which somehow is almost an opening to the outside of the universe. It's our only opening to the conditions of the possibility of experience, so to speak, the conditions of the possibility of being normative, let's say.

And then what's inside the field? The historical facts of a religion.

33:52 Mark: Yeah. So this chapter five we've been approaching, we have cause to be uneasy, which

33:57 Seth: is sort of like.

33:57 Mark: Sounds like a very mild way of putting the fear and trembling point. I was kind of comparing him to Kierkegaard in a number of places because like Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, he's not like, I am the super Christian. I have all the answers. He's pointing at like, isn't faith. Isn't this, you know, new kind of person that the Christian is. Isn't this a wonderful thing? I wonder if there are any out there. I'm not sure, but we can see that people are on the road. But this, yeah. So this, what you're referring to, Wes, is psychological is where, given that we have this apperception of the moral law and that basically that we are sinners, that we do not even come close to fulfilling this moral law, that is attention.

And this will make us miserable. So what is a story that we could accept that would diffuse this misery. Well, it's the idea that, you know, we're in this terrible fix, so we need some external intervention to get us out of it. So what if there were something like God were to have died, made himself a human and died so that we could. Because we're never going to actually, for our own steam, fulfill our own moral commands. So what if God did that for us? Doesn't that. And then. And then he goes on later to say, like, look, I don't know really how theologically.

And there's a lot of disagreement among Christians, this he died for our sins works. And you don't have to, you know, settle on a particular theory, at least at this point, but it does work. And it can only mean, psychologically, right, that we're in a sort of situation where we hear rumors, we have good dreams, rumors of the good news. So what would this good news? You know, so he thinks that the Christian story uniquely answers the human condition.

35:52 Seth: It's even more intense and wacky because he's got a kind of Manichean bent as well. Not that there's a co. Equal God that puts evil into the world and there's a struggle between good and evil in the world, but he essentially thinks that the devil is a fallen angel who's screwing up God's good works and leading us astray.

36:17 Dylan: It's the only thing that makes sense.

36:18 Seth: It's the only thing that makes sense. Of course. And in his. If you read his book in that section, you might very well believe that. So when we read Royce, I was talking about how the community aspect of Christianity is the good thing. Like, it's great that that's really what the world needs, is a lot more community and a lot less isolation, but that the exclusivity and the. The attachment to the idea that this community has a hold on the truth ultimately leads to bad behaviors on those outside the community. But combine that kind of bent with this notion that there's this war going on. And he uses metaphors like God's going to come and land the troops occupied

37:05 Wes: territory, and we're going to all become part of the Christian version of the French Resistance, basically by becoming Christians.

37:11 Seth: Yeah. If you're not joining the resistance, Right. Then you're a collaborator, essentially.

37:15 Mark: Just to remind folks, right, as it says in the forward of this, that this was literally delivered over the radio to British people while World War II was going on. So, like, this is not. Put your mind back. Like, this is exactly the situation they were in.

37:30 Seth: It is propaganda. But of the. I guess that justified sort. Anyway, my point being like. Like all the good things about Christian. His characterization does capture what I think are all the good things about Christianity as a monotheistic religion and probably the other monotheistic religions as well. But it also, to me, very much points to all of the corruptible elements that ultimately lead that community to go astray and perpetrate violence.

37:59 Wes: You know, he acknowledges in book two, chapter two, the Christianity is weird. It's weird, it's odd. It's got some really weird specifics. And of course, you know, the death and resurrection of Christ is part of that. And he rejects Manicheanism, but he understands that there is kind of Manichean ass. Manicheanism in the ad. In. In the sense of right. These two equally powerful forces of good and evil, which are independent. Right. He wants to make the tried and true theological argument that evil is derivative of goodness. In a way, it's. It's like spoiled goodness.

But ultimately, when he does give the psychological Right. Mark alluded to this, again, the psychological explanation in chapter four of book two. I think so I think that part that to me is the part that is actually the most persuasive. Right. The. In a way, what God is doing is he's modeling a psychological transformation in Christ. The surrender, the kind of dying that we need to do inside in order to transform ourselves and no longer be miserable. And there's some parallels to there to certain ideas and psychoanalysis, I think, and maybe even stoicism, but we could talk about those later.

But I was reminded why Mark was talking of. I was walking down the street and someone had a sign like street preachers, and they said Jesus is the answer. And I thought it's funny that we never. We never say the answer to what like we all know what he's supposed to be the answer to, right? And it's like your miserable life. It's implied that everyone can relate and to being miserable. And the misery for CS Lewis is supposed to have something to do with this moral commandment that we cannot shake off and we cannot fulfill.

39:42 Dylan: Now we're constantly. The terrible fix we're in is on 32.

39:46 Wes: And the pridefulness that's inherent in us of sort of wanting to be God, wanting and acting as if we were God on some. Some unconscious level, which I think is. Is spot on. And so the idea is that, well, you got to kill that version of the self as God. And what better way to learn how to do that than for God to do it himself? And say, all right, let me show you how it's done. Kill the God.

40:10 Seth: Yeah.

40:11 Mark: I hesitate to jump ahead. We're going to. It's not until you realize this situation that Christianity begins to, to talk to you. So it is phenomenological, right? It's been appealing to your moral intuitions, but then it's going to say, look here on out, you might, some of these things might not jive with your intuitions because you're not on the path yet by being recognizing this horrible situation that we're in where we're miserable and we're self torturing ourselves and we can't avoid any of the tensions. You know, we, we are both imperfect, yet we have this sense of moral perfection and we can't shake either of those things.

Only when you then become, you know, realize that, will some of the next parts actually speak to you and make any sense to you. So in that sense he is preaching to the choir because he's trying to get you to join the choir at this point. And then from there on out it's like, yeah, this is just going to get weirder and weirder, as Wes said. But the weirdness, right, it's page 42. It's not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have, which I thought was a strange, like he definitely doesn't believe.

Well, if it weren't self contradictory, then it wouldn't be faith to believe it. Like he's not that kind of Augustine thing at all. Like he really thinks all this is very reasonable. And you know, that that's why you become a Christian, because it's more likely than not that this is true. You know, by ordinary human reasoning. You don't have to become fucked up and then it starts to make sense, but there is the sense of it becomes a practical discipline. And what people, what is appropriate for them to be thinking about and to hear depends on where exactly on the path they are.

Maybe, you know, so if you hear a theological thing that doesn't make any sense to you, like original sin or whatever, well, you're just not ready for that one yet. Just ignore it. Better if you don't even hear it.

42:08 Dylan: Well, yeah, and there are two different rhetorical strategies. For the first, like 30 pages, it's appealing to our reason and a kind of philosophical underpinning like, well, let me just observe, you know, why you would believe in, in God and get you sort of at the doorstep to it thing. You know, we recognize things are Better and worse, yada, yada, yada, all that stuff. And that's an example of consistency argument. But when he gets into the. Once you've gotten through the door and you get to all the specifics with respect to Christianity, a version of, well, it's too weird not to actually be true is basically the content of the argument.

42:51 Wes: Well, I don't think it's. I mean, that's not what he. He says. It has the.

42:55 Dylan: I'm being ungenerous. Okay, I apologize.

42:57 Mark: You couldn't think. Stranger than fiction. That idea, though, is what you're saying.

43:01 Dylan: Yeah, but it is that idea.

43:03 Wes: Yeah.

43:03 Mark: A simpler story. If it were made up, it would be simpler.

43:06 Wes: Yes, yes. Right. But she's not to mean it isn't made up, it's just gone. It's encouraging that it has that weirdness to him. There needs to be more to accept it than just the weirdness. And he compares it to science. Right. So the universe is weird. I mean, it's what. Why we should always be in a state of wonder about it. Right.

43:25 Dylan: Yeah.

43:26 Wes: The table is made of atoms or

43:27 Dylan: just, you know, quantum mechanics is really weird. Do you think? Quantum mechanics.

43:30 Wes: Galaxies and. Yeah, yeah. The universe is. Is really weird. So he wants to say, you know, and so we should expect this to be. To be weird as well. It's not the most convincing part, but

43:41 Dylan: I do appreciate the way in which. I mean, this has to do with. This is related to the testimony thing. But he is. There is a strong aspect of. There's a lot of belief that's going on in your whole life. Right. And in the way in which we interact with the world. And not so different than Hegel in this respect of you're going to be believing in reason in some respect. And so he's kind of leveling it out and normalizing uncertainty in a way that allows you to not have to have things grounded in a conventional way. It's going to be. Well, you're going to get persuaded and you're going to accept it and follow it. On feel, on aesthetics. He doesn't use that word. He doesn't say it exactly that way. Yeah.

44:32 Wes: I mean, testimony is a part of it.

44:34 Dylan: Yeah.

44:35 Wes: There's the psychological aspect and then testimony is part of it.

44:38 Dylan: Yeah.

44:39 Wes: I think he gets the testimonial evidence a little bit wrong. He is right that most of what we believe. Right. We just believe because we've been told by other people.

44:46 Dylan: Yeah.

44:47 Wes: That's not because other people are necessarily authorities. The authority is in the discursive process.

44:52 Dylan: Yes.

44:53 Wes: And the testimonial chain of transmission and the psychology of that and why we think people wouldn't be lying and engaged in one big conspiracy theory to deceive us, blah, blah, blah. So he, I think he implies that the authority could be, say, in the Bible or some particular prophet. And that is not the right view on testimonial evidence. And Hume writes extensively about this. Right. He testimonial evidence. We have, in fact, a theory of testimonial evidence could tell us that. Yeah, actually the miracles in the Bible are not. They're probably wrong because we have better reasons to believe in natural science and that there are no such things as miracles.

45:25 Mark: All right, in our second half, we're going to get into where the rubber meets the road. Seems like we're describing practical reason in a way that once you get on board that this psychologically, ethically, this system is supposed to address our concerns, it's supposed to make us coherent people in a way that we weren't before. It's supposed to actually reveal our true individual selves to us, that we're not available when we were merely obeying our instincts and things like that. So come back next week for part two or become a supporter. PartiallyExaminedLife.com support and either through our website or through Patreon.com you can have part two in your completely ad free citizen feed right now. Thanks.

46:08 Dylan: Thanks.

46:09 Seth: Thanks.