Mere Christianity, Introduction and Part 1

A classmate and friend, Steven Lawrence, bought Mere Christianity to
me, in a half-joking attempt to convert me from my heathen ways. I
brought it along to read on the flights here in Asia, and found it
thought provoking, though I'm afraid not in the way Steven would have
liked.

I found it thought provoking enough that I wanted to make some
comments on it as I read. Rather than taking notes in the margins, I
decided to take notes this way, so that I can revisit and discuss my
thoughts without the inhibitions of bad handwriting and forgotten
volumes. Hope nobody minds.

Chapter 1, the law of human nature

"These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human
beings, all over earth, have this curious idea that they ought to
behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly,
that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of
Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all
clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in." - CS
Lewis (Last paragraph of the chapter)

Let me just start off by saying wow. This opens a whole lot of
possibilities in my mind, things that seem to not make any sense but
that this sort of an argument would seem to imply. Firstly, I think
that it is fascinating that the moral realm can have laws like the
physical realm, but that unlike the physical realm those laws can be
broken. How does this work? I see two possible solutions to this issue.

First, they aren't being broken, we just have the incorrect
viewpoint. This is like saying that gravity appears not to work when
you watch someone throw a rock in the air but turn away before it
begins to fall - for all the viewer knows, gravity appears to have
been broken. The solution, of course, is to take a longer look at the
effects of throwing the rock, and observe that it does indeed fall.
But how do you presume to do this over the course of human lives?
What is the long run effect of some small misdeed, unnoticed and
unpunished? When does the rock fall on their deeds, and give them
their deserved reward? Many times, it does not seem to. To salvage
this argument, one must then invoke some sort of karma or heaven and
hell in the afterlife, essentially arguing that the rock falls, but
it just falls out of sight of the living. That creates a circular
argument: it is a law because its inviolable, but you can't see that
its inviolable unless you accept that it is a law.

Secondly the argument can be made that the moral realm is
fundamentally different from the physical realm. In the physical
realm, things like mathematics and physics and science make sense,
because they have predictive qualities aimed at discovering rules
that seem to bound our observations. If the moral rules are mutable,
then we really have no predictive capability whatsoever, and we
therefore can never hope to understand or master the moral realm any
more than we can master the weather, where the air currents and
weather patterns are also mutable.

Let us concede the point though, and chalk it up to our own
shortsightedness. Let us say that there is a Law of Nature, that it
does exist, is somehow breakable and yet coherent, even predictive.
What other laws might there be? If the physical world has physics,
and the moral world has the laws of nature, then might there also be
laws of spirituality? Might there be laws of consciousness, laws of
intelligence? What would these laws look like? Would they be mutable?

I find myself speculating, imagining a universe where physical laws
were flexible, or where even the creator was rule-bound, or where
perhaps transcendency or infinite intelligence was possible. Yet,
however hard I try, I cannot take these with anywhere near the same
certainty as I can gravity. I cannot genuinely believe that I will
wake up one day able to fly, or read minds, or having reached perfect
intelligence or consciousness . I cannot sincerely imagine that I
will spontaneously become immortal the way I can genuinely believe
that I will wake up one day and gravity will make a rock fall to the
ground. Maybe I just don't have enough faith.