Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (III)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) and Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) I made two main points about the Christian religion as described by C.S. Lewis, the great British defender of the faith, in his ever-popular book Mere Christianity. In the first of my two previous installments, I noted that God is Perfect Goodness. In the second, I said that God is Perfect Love.

Now I would like to add a third characteristic: God as Perfect Penitence.

I said in the first two installments that the Christian God is Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is primarily as Father that God is the Power for Good who calls us to live by his will and not by our own self-seeking. God, as Father, is the taproot of Moral Law.

The Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, has the same sort of uncreated life as the Father: "begotten" not made. The Father and Son unendingly share perfect love for one another. Their union is the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. Lewis says that "a living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else." That is to say, what God has created or made — the world, us — comes from this "activity" of perfect Father-Son love.

But in Christianity, the Son is more than that statement alone would indicate. He is also Christ Jesus, "The Perfect Penitent" of chapter 4 of Lewis's Book II: What Christians Believe.

We can think of the crucial process as penitence, or as atonement, or as regeneration, or as repentance, or as salvation — indeed, as any of several other words and phrases that Christians use to indicate that we need to reorient ourselves back to God and Moral Law, and that we can never do so quite adequately, all by ourselves. From the Christian perspective, the core of the problem we face is that moral purity or spiritual perfection is out of reach for us, until we accept Christ's help.


Christ is, of course, the man Jesus of Nazareth who died ignominously on a cross in first-century Palestine and rose again from the dead. His disciples and apostles were sure then, after they witnessed the Resurrection, that he was God. Later the Gospels were written down, memorializing the dawning realization that Jesus was in fact the eternal Word of God. Still later, the religion that had begun to flourish in Jesus's name codified the divine relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, identifying the man, Jesus, the Christ, as the only begotten Son who is coeternal with the Father.

If all that is the truth, then (as Lewis point out in his chapter "The Shocking Alternative") the core belief which separates Christianity from all other religions — that an uncreated God became a man, like us in all ways but sin, and somehow by his death made up for our sinfulness — ought to galvanize us in a way that no other religious belief can.


For Christ indeed was, and is, the Perfect Penitent. We are called to penitence — the sincere desire to reform — but by itself our penitence is never enough. There is in this world, Lewis says, a Dark Power. By dint of it our every effort at excellence "all slides back into misery and ruin." That is true in the communal sphere, and in the individual. Hence, under this unseen Power's sway, our penitence is intrinsically imperfect.

Christ, free of our own sinfulness, remedied that imperfection by coming here to us bodily and dwelling among us in order to teach us about the Father, and ultimately to be put to death. It was the dying of One Who Cannot Die — because he is God — that forms the paradox which electrifies the heart of Christian belief.

Here is how Lewis so aptly puts it in his "The Perfect Penitent" chapter:

But supposing God became a man — suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person [with a "small-p"] — then that person could help us. He could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and he could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying ... but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

These core beliefs obviously require two others. First, they require us to believe that there is, in fact, such a Dark Power in the world as that Great Rebel who is called Satan. The Devil, as he is also known, is the Power for Evil which I talked about in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I). He is not coeternal and coequal with God, in the Christian view, but is a creature of God who has turned against his creator. As Prince of This World, he engages in ongoing rebellion, and it is part of his strategy for waging that rebellion that we would be held in in sin.

Second, we need to believe that there is another world, a heaven, an afterlife. In fact, the whole point of our accepting Christ's penetential help is to allow ourselves to become fitted for that afterlife.


This goes along with what I said in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) about the categorical difference between the Christian spiritual life, which Lewis calls Zoe, and our ordinary biological life, Bios. Zoe can be thought of as our soul-life. We, with Christ's help, cease to cling to Bios as we are "born again" in spirit or Zoe.

The meaning of that phrase, "with Christ's help," is key. Lewis brings out that meaning towards the end of his book, starting with his "The Obstinate Toy Soldiers" chapter in Book IV: Beyond Personality. After having characterized the Trinity and giving some idea what it means to say the Three-Personal God exists outside of time itself, Lewis has already claimed that being reborn to Zoe lets us in on the begotten-not-made life shared by Christ with his Father.


Now, Lewis goes on to say that we get this life only by letting Christ stand beside us and help us in making our otherwise inadequate efforts to "appropriate" that which his cross has established for us:

What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless "spiritual" life, has been done for us. Humanity is already "saved" in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work — the bit we could not have done for ourselves — has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us.

In other words, when we let Jesus stand beside us and help us as we pray, we will catch this "good infection," this neverending spiritual life, directly from him.


Lewis as much as admits that our praying is — and always must be — something of a pretense. In his chapter "Let's Pretend," he shows how it all works. Prayer, he says in italicized type, is "dressing up as Christ."

That is, we have the "outrageous cheek," when we pray to God, of "pretending to be what [we] are not." But this letting on that we are like Christ is the "good kind" of pretending, one "where the pretence leads up to the real thing." Whenever we say our prayers, we open ourselves to the realization of what we ought to be doing — perhaps even instead of praying — because we are for once able to become aware of what Christ would have us do, to grow to be like him. Or, as Lewis puts it:

The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality.

This, Lewis points out. is more than the ordinary voice of conscience:

If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once that you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person ... The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" his kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier [that you figuratively are] into a live man.

Accordingly we see that Christ Jesus plays several intelocking roles in Christian belief. He is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity whose mutually shared love for and with the Father turns into the Third Person, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. He is the eternal Word of God whose activity, with that of the Father, creates us and the world. He is the Perfect Penitent who, taking on our humanity, died on a cross to save us both communally and individually. He is the Ideal Person whom we, in prayer, "dress up as" and impersonate. And he is the Patient Partner who stands beside us each time we pray and guides us in our impersonation.

It is through his Perfect Penitence that our own imperfect efforts at penitence can fit us, bit by bit, for sharing his begotten-not-made spiritual life with the Father, forevermore.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) I said that the great British defender of Christian faith C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963, argues in his ever-popular Mere Christianity that we all believe certain immutable things about good and evil. Neither we nor our world are perfectly good though, as we very well know. Hence, the sources of pure good and evil lie outside our impure world. Furthermore, Lewis argues, the Power for Good must transcend the Power for Evil since, for us, good can be its own reward, while evil cannot.

Is the transcendent Power for Good a person, then? What would that even mean?

Christians say that the Power for Good is the God who "has brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us," and the Christian God is accordingly to be thought of as our Heavenly Father (see the chapter on "Making and Begetting" in Book IV, Beyond Personailty: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity).

When Christians (and Jews and Muslims) say God is a person, according to Lewis, they make a doctrinal assertion that they know not to be fully adequate in describing the transcendent Power for Good. That Power is a person, and more. Any such attribution of divine personhood, says Lewis, is like a map of the world. It does not give us the full experience of (say) being on an ocean, but it does guide us to the other side of that ocean in a practical way.

Like all maps, this doctrinal "map" which likens God to a person is "based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God — experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused."


Once you allow that God is a Father, a person and not just an abstract power, you start to see why Christ is called the Son of God. For good reason, Lewis makes a lot of this. If Jesus is the Son of God and not just a great moral teacher, there can (indeed, there must) be a quantum difference in what Jesus Christ ought to mean to us, above and beyond all the other great moral teachers whose advice we so often ignore.

If Christ is the Son of God, as our Christian doctrinal map tells us, he was "begotten, not made," and this was so "before all worlds" were created. That implies the Son, unlike us mere creatures, has exactly the same sort of life as the Father. Nothing that is made or created has the identical sort of life that the maker has; even the most sophisticated human-made robot would not be alive, by our standard. That which is begotten does — as a human infant has the same sort of life its own parents have.


Christians say they are called to a spiritual life, different in kind from their merely biological one. The kind of biological life we are born with, called Bios by Lewis, is one we share with all living creatures. The spiritual life, which Lewis calls Zoe, can never, like our biological life, "run down [or] decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature." Zoe or spiritual life is exactly the kind of life shared by the Father and the Son. When we are changed, in Christ, "from having Bios to having Zoe," we inherit that same kind of transcendent life on high, and we ourselves become Sons of God. Only then, we might say, are we fully persons.

Unfailingly, "love is something that one person has for another person," writes Lewis. Consequently, if "God is love" — given that we have noted that God is the Power for Good that is outside the domain of time and, never having not existed, has made our temporal world — "the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains [and has always done so] at least two Persons." These first two divine Persons, the Father and his only begotten Son, accordingly engage in "a living, dynamic activity of love [that] has been going on in God forever and has created everything else." (This comes from the chapter "Good Infection," in Book IV.)

Moreover, Lewis continues, "the union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person." Just as any fruitful human association is apt to develop a "spirit" of corporate behavior, a "communal personality" which could survive even if the original members left, the timeless Father-Son union is the "spirit" of God. It is the third Person of the Christian Trinity: the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit.

Though the Holy Spirit is also a Person, Lewis says we find "it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in [our] mind than the other two" for an excellent reason. "If you think of the Father as something 'out there', in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you ... God is love, and that love works through men — especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and Son."


We are a long way from the original idea of a Power for Good here, one that is opposed by a Power for Evil named Satan. To be sure, so far I have blithely skipped over the entirety of Lewis's Book III, a primer on Christian Behaviour, which outlines our moral obligations as Christians. I have also short-shrifted the discussion in "The Perfect Penitent" in Book II of why (at least, the best we who have such limited minds can tell) the sinless Son needed to take on human form: in order that we can say that "His death has washed out our sins." For, as Lewis demonstrates, it is simply not possible for sinful mere creatures to redeem themselves.

Accodingly, it is fair to say that the above presentation summarizes mostly the "feel-good" aspects of Christianity. It talks about love and says nothing about sin.

It is, in short, all about spirituality — as contrasted with morality. I have switched so abruptly from the latter to the former in order to bring out the fact that C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity embraces both facets of Christian faith. I think my strategy is only right and proper, because in his other Christian writings Lewis talks about the lifelong, ultimately unsatisfiable yearning for "joy" which stimulated his search for God. It was coming to believe in God which allowed him to find his joy — or, rather, to find something so far greater that his thirst for joy was utterly transcended.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In The Taproot of Moral Law and also in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion", I talked of the ever-popular book Mere Christianity. Its author, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), was an English professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University and author of such other books as the children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. During World War II, in a series of brief BBC radio addresses, Lewis laid out what he felt to be the bare essentials of Christian belief. Those addresses became Mere Christianity, which has never since disappeared from bookstore shelves.

I was something between an agnostic and an atheist when I first read Mere Christianity back in 1988. For a number of reasons, I felt at that juncture in my life that I needed to consider the possibility of believing in God. I stumbled upon Lewis's book and found myself convinced by it: there is a God, and Christ is his only begotten son.

One thing that made Lewis so convincing to me was that he too had been an atheist as recently as ten years before making his radio addresses, and even after once admitting to a divine Father's existence in the abstract he had taken years to understand and accept the implications of the Son's appearance in the form of a man and subsequent sacrifice on the cross. Because he had had to think so carefully about his beliefs, and this had happened in the not-too-distant past, Lewis consequently explained things in a way any uncommitted reader can take in, if not agree with unreservedly.


In the nearly 20 years since I first read Lewis, I find that my religious faith has somewhat dimmed, in part because my belief has atrophied. That is, practicing my faith has become a matter of going through motions, while the core beliefs that underlie such pietistic gestures have somehow faded from my thoughts.

Nowhere is that more true, I find, than when it comes to those beliefs which relate to the most transcendental aspects of Christianity: God, Christ, and Spirit as inconceivably above and beyond the material world. Also, an immaterial Force for Evil: God's enemy, known as Satan.

This has been my own fault, I know. For perhaps ten years, I have been absorbed in trying to see how the workings of the material world might vouchsafe the existence of an immanent deity, one who dwells in every atom, particle and photon of energy in the universe. It was not so much that I personally needed to apprehend that divine immanence in some mystical, New Age way as that I felt such an approach could bring Christian religion closer to acceptability for the masses of unbelievers. An immanent divinity might explain, for example, why the cosmic "dice" seem to be "loaded" in such a way as to guide evolution's progress toward intelligent creatures like us.


Immanence is, as some Christians know, an attribute of the Christian God, along with his transcendence. It's not wrong to believe God dwells at the heart of his Creation. But now I find that minimizing God's transcendence in favor of an immanentist outlook tends to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As my present rereading of Mere Christianity brings home to me, there are crucial aspects of Christian belief that can be made sense of only by imagining God to be outside material reality — indeed, outside time itself.

Not that Lewis begins his defense of Christian belief with these aspects. Rather, he begins it by noting that all of us seem to act as if there exists, somewhere, somehow, a Moral Law, an immutable standard of what is fair, right, and good to which we all will invariably appeal whenever we feel we have been wronged.

At the same time as we feel that such a Moral Law truly exists, we have to admit that none of us succeeds in living strictly by it at all times and in all places. We slight our families and neighbors and shirk our duties repeatedly and incessantly. In fact, it is as if there is an agent — call him Satan, or Devil, or Prince of This World — responsible for sowing that which is wrong or evil in our hearts.


These, then, are the two Powers (Lewis has at this early stage of the book not taken up what it means to call them Persons) that Lewis insists exist outside material reality. One is a Power for Good, and the other is a Power for Evil. This idea of supernatural powers is contrary to what an atheist holds true.

Why, in Lewis's view, is the atheist wrong? Because reality is ineluctably complex, and atheism is far too simple. For instance, the atheist will typically deny God's existence on the basis that the world is cruel and unjust; how could a good, all-powerful God let so much bad stuff happen?

Well, says Lewis, if the atheist's viewpoint about an unjust or morally indifferent cosmos refuting God's existence is correct, there can ultimately be no sense or meaning in the world. Yet even the atheist has an idea of justice, and must perforce agree that he thinks this idea itself to make absolute sense. Therein lies a contradiction. One can read Lewis's chapter on "The Rival Conceptions of God," in Book II of Mere Christianity, to flesh out this logical-flaw argument which Lewis makes against atheism.

So atheism is too simplistic, because its arguments cannot embrace all the known facts of human experience: specifically, our invariably acting as if justice is something real. But if it is absolutely real, then there must be Powers above this seemingly amoral (if not immoral) world, outside time and space, which underlie and sow the seeds of worldly Good or Evil.


Then the question becomes, is the Power for Evil coequal and coeternal with the Power for Good, rather than one of the Good Power's creatures turned in rebellious enmity against its very source of being? If so, the philosophy called Dualism is the right one.

If one assumes to be true the assumption that the Power for Good "likes" goodness qua goodness — if it favors goodness for its own sake — then a coequal and coeternal Power for Evil would accordingly choose badness for its own sake. After all, says Lewis, we often feel we like goodness for itself alone, and not always as a means to some end. But we have no experience of liking badness for its own sake.

This argument is made by Lewis in Book II, chapter 2, "The Invasion." For us, he says, cruelty (to take one example of evil) always is done to further some end — sexual satisfaction, for the sadist; money, power, or the assurance of safety, for others. Otherwise, we would not bother to be cruel. That's so because we experience an inner preference for cruelty's opposite — even if we aren't always kind to others. Put another way, we know that our default orientation is toward the good because we like goodness for its own sake, as much as for any goal-seeking purpose.


Here, then, is an example of how Lewis makes arguments by relating his conclusions to our inner experiences. If we simply trust our personal experience in such matters, we can come to believe that Lewis is right about the Power for Good having (shall I put it) existential primacy over the Power for Evil.

Specifically, the Bad Power must start out, Lewis says, by having "good things to want and then [he, the Bad Power, must come] to pursue them in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them. ... To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow and steal from his opponent."

Hence, in a very real sense, good qua good must logically and metaphysically precede evil qua evil.


Notice that Lewis' whole argument depends crucially then on our crediting and honoring universal aspects of human experience, such as our deep belief in justice. Otherwise we are free to ask, for example, why shouldn't we say that the Bad Power seeks evil for its own sake? But we are simply not able to ask that and at the same moment remain true to our inner belief that the good serves ultimately as its own reward.

That experience-based modality of argument lies at the core of Lewis's whole case for God. And Lewis is able at every juncture so successfully to relate such abstract concepts as Powers That Exist Beyond This World to our everyday experience, that it is hard to see how anyone who is in basic accord with this logcial modality which Lewis uses couldn't accept Lewis's entire worldview.

In short, Lewis argues that deep down, we all believe certain immutable things about good and evil, about justice and injustice. These things we universally believe in contradict our own behavior much of the time, and they certainly contradict what we see going on in the world around us every day. Hence, the sources of good and evil must lie outside this impure world. Furthermore, the Power for Good must be said to transcend the Power for Evil by virtue of the fact that, for us, good can be its own reward, while evil cannot.

Earthly Powers and Political Religions

Frankly, I'm beginning to regret having styled myself as a "neo-Manachaean" in my recent series of posts culminating in Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V.

The reason, in part, is that I have begun reading Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh. The British historian traces the development of "political religion" — aka "secular" or "civil" religion, meaning "the political use of religious belief" (p. 93) — in Europe from the Enlightenment through World War I.

Beginning with the French Revolution — if not with the Puritans of England a century or so before — Christianity morphed into often lethal forms in service to earthly political ends. In France, the original 1789 revolution, relatively soft and moderate in comparison to what soon ensued, quickly radicalized into an instrument of death-by-guillotine at the hands of the Jacobins, famous for their Reign of Terror.

Burleigh anatomizes the Jacobins' "underlying pathologies" in a section titled "Goodness and Virtue," in his "Puritans Thinking They Are Spartans" chapter (pp. 88-95). The Jacobins were anything but rabble, writes Burleigh. They were well-to-do professionals, many of them lawyers. As many as six percent were priests. They met openly in thousands of local clubs during their infamous reign over France, which ended in 1794. The watchwords at their gatherings were supposedly reason and civility; yet, as Burleigh details, "a tearful sentimentalism" like as not would prevail "whenever the People were invoked."


Their besottedness with "the People" as a disembodied, bloodless concept in turn reflected the Jacobins' "fateful infatuation with an abstract ought-world to which mere human beings in all their complexity necessarily failed to conform." Thus was justified the reign's "moral imperialism" and "terroristic violence," wherein "any form of dissent or opposition, real or imagined, bore the taint of moral leprosy, something to be amputated or excised from an otherwise healthy body."

The object of the revolution, in Jacobin eyes, was a "new political religion" which would foster "a regenerated people" — wherein a "new man" would supplant the old, corrupted sort. Regeneration was (and remains) a motif associated with traditional Christianity, and one of Burleigh's main points is that political religion is often a sort of Christianity-sans-God.

In revolutionary France, Burleigh indicates, many of the intellectuals were heirs of philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montaigne whose religious positions were typically Deist, if not outright atheist. Others continued to put faith in God, though not always in Church. But what kind of God?


The God of the French Revolution was, per Burleigh, a deity whose Providence could allow one Geffroy, a "local locksmith and father of three" who survived in hospital after taking a random bullet in a melee after a failed assassination attempt on Robespierre and other Jacobin notables, to be cast instead as "a Christ-like figure at what was tantamount to a revolutionary Day of Judgement in which the righteous virtuous would be separated from the incorrigibly corrupt ... ."

This "Manichaean view of the world," writes Burleigh, was one of "Openness versus Hypocrisy, Virtue versus Vice, Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness" — and it was "heavily indebted to monotheistic religion."


I would prefer to call it, in a phrase I borrow from literary critics, a "demonic parody" of Christianity. As I have discussed in earlier posts (see, for instance, Rededication: To Solidarity, Above All), Albert Nolan, a provincial for the South African Province of the Dominicans, wrote in his book Jesus before Christianity about how Christ conspicuously sat down to dinner with lepers and other outcasts. Per the interpretation of Jewish law that prevailed in his time, their sickness was taken as a sign that God found them (to borrow a phrase) "incorrigibly corrupt." They were to be shunned lest, in Yahweh's eyes, they infect all Israel.

But Jesus taught and showed by living example that there is no such thing as a moral leper.


The political religions Burleigh talks about hence would seem to be ugly burlesques of true Christianity. Where Christianity celebrates life, they wield death.

So, if a "Manichaean" outlook is in fact the wellspring of such demonic parodies and ugly burlesques, as modern usage à la Burleigh indicates, I hereby recant. I am no neo-Manichaean after all. In truth, by calling myself that I meant to associate myself with a diametrically opposite view, one in which pure good and pure evil are so mixed in every creature that "mere human beings in all their complexity" lack the capacity for self-regeneration via worldly institutions. That's why it has taken the death on a cross of a God-man who is himself without sin to accomplish our regeneration.

The Taproot of Moral Law

I talked in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion" about Mere Christianity, the primer on Christian belief by a great defender of the faith whose lectures on British radio during World War II that still-popular book recapitulates. It was a time when the great evil of Nazi aggression under Hitler threatened to undermine European and world civilization. As bombs were falling on London, Lewis told his countrymen of God's ongoing battle with Satan, the Prince of This World.

Lewis's argument toward God and Christ in Mere Christianity begins from the axiom that we all believe, deep down, in right and wrong. That is, we all think that the right is really and truly distinct from the wrong, even if our fumbling attempts to say what is right in particular situations often result in honest disagreements among ourselves, and even if none of us manages to obey even our own conscience with notable constancy.

Francis S. Collins, in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, says the Lewis book was and remains a touchstone of his commitment to Christian belief, following a period of atheism as a young man. Lewis also started out as an atheist. Collins, again like Lewis, cites the existence of a universal notion of Moral Law among us humans as (along with a common experience of spiritual longing) a prime reason why he now firmly rejects his former nonbelief on God.

Collins says science cannot explain the sense we humans invariably have of an absolutely real right-wrong, fair-unfair, unselfish-selfish, good-evil dichotomy. Lewis, in his discussion, pretty much ignores whatever advances science may or may not claim to be capable of making towards filling the "gaps" in our naturalistic understanding of why things are the way they are, including why we humans think the way we do. For the most part, he simply assumes that the Moral Law binds us, ergo there must be something real outside this world to which we are thereby bound.

At some point, it seems to me, these two arguments run the risk of circularity, of begging the question. Either by treating the phenomenon of our awareness of right and wrong as a brute fact needing no further explanation (Lewis) or by assigning it to an explanatory realm wholly beyond scientific inquiry (Collins), both arguments fail to convince those who begin from a different axiom: that all that can be explained, science will eventually explain.

Of course, those who propose such an axiom are prone to their own sort of circularity. There is something better — i.e., more good, more right — about adopting a wholly materialistic view of the world, they seem to say. But that implies a "higher standard" of what is good and right and proper, a yardstick by which their worldview ought to be judged superior to the theistic worldview.

They may well say their yardstick is reason, or human progress, or (since so many injustices have been committed by religion) justice. But even so, they are making Lewis's and Collins's point: we all believe there is such a yardstick.


My approach to resolving this deadlock of dueling circularities is to try to figure out which, if any, brute fact about our common human experience we ought to treat axiomatically, as a given.

In addressing such a question, I don't think Collins hits the nail bang on the head when he identifies the Moral Law mainly with our capacity for noble, unreciprocated, entirely altruistic acts which, especially when they are done in secret, cannot boost our evolutionary "fitness." While that argument is true as far as it goes, it doesn't encompass human goodness in its entirety. Most of the good we do is not that pure or noble. A lot of it comes, quite grudgingly, out of a sense of duty which overrides our usual inclination to bypass doing the right thing.

In this regard Lewis is spot on. He acknowledges time and again our absolute incapacity to do the right thing all the time, or even most of the time. The insufficiency in his discussion, by today's scientific standards, is that he doesn't actually specify in no uncertain terms exactly what the feature of the human soul is that we would like science to explain, without foreseeable result. Instead, he resorts to homely examples that (quite successfully, in my opinion) call up for us the experience of being committed to a higher standard.

One is tempted at first to call this scientifically inexplicable feature of the universal human experience a sense of "duty," or perhaps of "obligation." We all know we have a moral duty, an obligation to live by some high standard of conduct which, if lived by, would keep us from doing evil.

So I would say that what science has to try to explain, entirely under its own steam, is the combination of our knowledge of a higher standard and our wavering — yet sometimes passionate, and never quite dead — commitment to it.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

This goes along with something I said a while back in a post in another blog. The blog is called Beyond Darwin, and the post was Non-Crazy Questions (II). It was one of a series of posts looking into Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright, who is a science writer, not a scientist, suggests that life on earth has a non-intelligent designer: natural selection itself. Natural selection processes information in the form of feedback from the environment and "decides" which variants of existing life forms are best-suited to survive. In so doing it blindly pursues a goal: ever more elaborate expressions of living complexity.

That sort of thing is pretty much bound to result, eventually, in the advent and further increase of intelligent life, in the form of organisms that are ever better at doing their own information processing and maximizing the gains they realize from playing "non-zero sum games" with one another. Positive non-zero sum games are interactions in which both parties benefit. Wright says they predominate in evolutionary history over either one-winner-one-loser zero sum games or negative non-zero sum games in which both parties lose.

But, says Wright, intelligence is not the same as consciousness, no matter how high creaturely IQs soar. Consciousness — sentience, subjectivity, "inner" experience — is not necessary to evolutionary fitness. It's an add-on. There might exist in the world (though there aren't actually) quite clever living and breathing zombies with no inner experience whatever, "robots with unusually good skin" (pp. 320-1), who would be just as expert as we human beings are at gaming the environment and fostering their own evolutionary success.

Crucially, these imaginable-if-nonexistent zombies provide us with a moral lesson, says Wright. Because they lack subjective, sentient inner experience, they partake of the same moral standing as a computer. It is not morally wrong to turn off a computer, or to dismantle it into its component parts, or to throw it on the junk heap when its useful life is over. The same would be true of these hypothetical zombies: Thou Shalt Not Kill would not apply to them.

In other words, the taproot of our moral obligation lies in the soil of our sentience. If we were not conscious, the whole idea of moral imperatives borne toward one another would be null and void.


I find this a crucial addition to the argument that both Collins and Lewis make about how there exists a basic Moral Law, common to all humans, that serves as a signpost to God. If we are aware of bearing a shared, mutual commitment to a higher standard, however much we may waver and wobble in living by it, then both the awareness and the commitment bespeak our non-zombieness. The fact that we are conscious, something the most highly evolved robotoids could never be, shows that there is something extra in our makeup.

Accordingly, Wright's argument that the existence of God is a "non-crazy question" patterns closely with the logic of Collins and Lewis. They too advert to a "something extra" in us which Darwinian evolution by natural selection cannot account for. In their case, it is the Moral Law. In Wright's, it is the sheer fact that we are conscious, though we needn't be.

I would be remiss here if I didn't note, by the way, that Wright's ideas about human consciousness being superfluous to our underlying brain states/processes is not universally held. Philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett dispute that consciousness is anything at all above and beyond a strict identity with those underlying mechanics.

Or, sometimes, Dennett and others like him talk as if consciousness does exist as a mental state, separate from the underlying brain mechanics — but one with its own independent causal functionality, such that natural selection would "see" it and act on it.

Wright carefully admits to there being such a view as Dennett's, while stating how incomprehensible it seems to him. The gist of Wright's rebuttal, extended a bit by me, is this: if there is no distinguishable human trait of consciousness, apart from our brain mechanics, then any advanced robotoids who evolve naturally on some hypothetical planet elsewhere in the galaxy, and who have the same brain mechanics as we do, will perforce be as conscious as we, and it would accordingly be a sin to destroy them. Put another way, such non-human robotoids as these imaginary ones could never ever be — they'd be as "human" as we are!

But that would mean that Thou Shalt Not Kill would apply to them too. Reducing consciousness to a mere identity with certain neurochemical mechanics of the human brain fails utterly to obviate the Moral Law which serves us a signpost to God.

Or, if consciousness is a real mental state above and beyond the brain's neurochemical transactions, but it is not transparent to natural selection — if it produces its own causal effects in the material world, that is — then science as we know it cannot properly deal with it. "Truly scientific models," Wright says in an endnote on p. 398, "must invoke only 'publicly observable' causal phenomena (neurotransmitters, etc.)." Purely "mental forces," even if they exist, are not "publicly observable" and as such lie outside the legitimate range of scientific inquiry!

Again, in this case, science fails to explain the Moral Law. Thus Wright argues (I think quite convincingly) that human consciousness is something which science alone cannot account for. I accordingly find it to be the soil wherein lies the taproot of Moral Law.


But there is another essential part of the argument concerning the Moral Law, one which I don't think Collins pays enough attention to: the sheer impossibility we encounter in trying to live by this standard. Lewis says:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. (p. 54, Collier ppbk.)

It is this feature of our situation, our wavering commitment to a higher standard, which makes the Christian religion so specifically appropriate. Jesus, after all, made the shocking claim to forgive us our sins, just as if he were God and the wrongs we have done were wrongs against him (see p. 55).

P.D. James says in one of her Adam Dalgleish mysteries that all murders are motivated by Love, Lust, Lucre, or Loathing, with Love being paradoxically the most dangerous. You would think our sense of moral obligation would invariably be clarified by it, but no. Love can be a killer.

I attribute this wrinkle in the fabric of our nature — as well as our susceptibility to Lust, Lucre, and Loathing — to the fact that we who possess the Moral Law descend from species that do not. Their instincts, passions, and moral blindness linger on in us today. Here is another reason why Christians ought to feel Darwinian evolution is their ally, not their enemy!

C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion"

In The Burden of Evil I said that I have:

... recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I then went on to posit an alternate explanation for why we encounter such evil in a God-made world, an explanation that I think is far less "neo-Manichaean." I said that God, who could trounce evil once and for all, refrains from doing so in order to "co-opt" it instead. Our lives are thereby burdened with not only the results of evil but the tempatation to do evil deeds, or else to fail to do good ones. To be so tested and challenged is the only way we can possibly be brought to die, little by little, to our own innate selfishness.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

I'd now like to extend those remarks by noting how the great Christian defender C.S. Lewis dealt with the same subject in Mere Christianity. Lewis (1898-1963) was an English professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University and author of such books as the children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. During World War II, in a series of radio addresses, Lewis laid out what he felt to be the bare essentials of Christian belief. Those addresses became Mere Christianity, which has never since disappeared from bookstore shelves.

Lewis had been a staunch atheist in his younger years but had suddeenly come to recognize in Christian belief the most accurate way of understanding and explaining precisely what we face here in this world. The most telling aspect of our human experience, he says in the introductory chapters of Mere Christianity, is that we are, all of us, aware of a standard of good and evil which presses on us to do naught but the former. Yet we so often do the latter instead, and then we make all sorts of excuses about it. In fact, we are incapable of perfect goodness.

Lewis gives his reasons for dismissing religions that attribute everything that occurs in the world to the actions of a pantheistic God or gods, far beyond "good" and "evil." Then, in his chapter on "The Invasion," Lewis takes aim at dualism: "next to Christianity ... the manliest and most sensible creed on the market" (this is from p. 48 in my Collier Books paperback edition).

Dualism holds "that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war" (p. 48). Lewis doesn't name Manichaeanism as a dualist philosophy, but I'd say it quite obviously is. So if my self-styled "neo-Manichaeanism" isn't dualist, I'd better say why not. Otherwise, as Lewis makes clear, I'm no Christian.

To Lewis, the crux of dualism is the idea that the two "powers at the back of everything" are independent of one another. The "good" one is good for goodness's own sake. (Either that, or the goodness we each attribute to it degenerates into a matter of personal preference, in which case there is really no such as goodness qua goodness, and the whole discussion is pointless.)

So if the "bad" is equal and independent, this power "at the back of everything" must accordingly be bad for badness's own sake. But Lewis shows this to be a contradiction in terms. We cannot really conceive of badness for badness's sake. All our experience of badness shows it to be universally employed as a means to an end, such as "money, or power, or safety" (p. 49).

Actual badness or evil is in every instance "a parasite, not an original thing," Lewis says (p. 50). It takes something which is fine in itself, such as money, power, or safety, and perverts it by pursuing it in a wrong way. Evil is spoiled good.

Good therefore has primacy over evil. Good ends can be used to explain perverted ones in a way in which perverted ones cannot serve to explain good ones.

Here is where that old Christian chestnut the devil comes into the picture, for Lewis. As a fallen angel, Satan is a self-willed, rebellious, perverted creation of the good God. And we live in "enemy-occupied territory," in this world of ours (p. 51). Christ, our "rightful king," has fortunately staged an invasion. He has "landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage."


Lewis's other main point in this chapter is that the foregoing in no way justifies us in believing that our "campaign for good" can be simple or pure:

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. ... And if you are content to stop there [i.e., with false and wishful thinking about the possibility of simplicity and moral clarity in the real world], well and good. But if you are not — and the modern world usually is not — if you want to go on and ask what is really happening — then you must be prepared for something difficult. ... Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. ... Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. ... The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. (pp. 46-48)

Christianity, says Lewis, is precisely a religion which admits how complex the problem of sabotaging Satan's earthly intrigues really is.

I find that, in spirit and letter, Lewis's explication of all this is exactly what I had in mind by calling myself a neo-Manichaean before. There is such a thing as pure goodness. It is real; it is God. But in our reality, it is ever polluted by Satan's nefarious schemes, which keep us from performing facile acts of sabotage without first disentangling the good (metaphorically, the innocent civilians) from the bad — to extend the metaphor, Satan's minions.

So maybe I'm right on the mark, Christianity-wise, to believe in both a pure source of good and a morally complex world.

The Burden of Evil

I've recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I've thought of another approach to the same question of why the all-good, all-powerful God of standard Christian belief would not trounce Satan straight away and end all our suffering and vulnerability at the hands of evil. This approach, unlike neo-Manichaeanism, would probably pass muster with most theologians.

To lead up to it, I have to make an admission. I am a person who has trouble distinguishing between two categories of experience: the truly evil, and the merely burdensome. By our personal burdens I mean all the "stuff" we have to endure in life: things which we would rather not have to put up with, like hangnails and nosy neighbors, menstrual cramps and hot, humid days. By evil I mean that which either is prima facie wrong or is absolutely wrong, as I laid out toward the end of Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. From a religious perspective, it's what an all-good God doesn't want.

My admission is that I all too often identify anything which ruins my own particular day as evil.

This is a mistake that perhaps many others are prone to as well. And, I think, the problem of distinguishing between the two is rendered all the more complex because there can be actual evil behind that which ruins one's own particular day.

In my case, I have had assorted health woes of late: an operation to fix an aortic aneurysm and perform a double heart bypass seems to have brought on a reactive bout of clinical depression. A fair number of my days have been "ruined." I'm now recovered from the surgery and am taking an antidepressant to combat the mental woes. Perhaps quite naturally, this thought has on several occasions popped into my head, "Why is God doing this to me?"

Now, if evil is real, I think it's fair to identify the ground of suffering as Something or Someone Evil. Human suffering, writ large, is much worse than just "having a bad day." So another way to ask the question is, "Why doesn't God destroy the ground of suffering once and for all?"

And this is the answer that has just occurred to me: He doesn't destroy it, but he does "co-opt" it. He does turn evil into a burden for us, and for good reason. Bearing burdens is absolutely necessary for us if we are to grow as persons.

Personal growth seems to require that we die, little by little, to our selfishness. That's the bottom line. We won't die to our selfishness unless we are somehow burdened in life. Jesus was burdened with carrying his own cross prior to his crucifixion. We, too, must pay a (much smaller) price and bear a (much lighter) burden, if we are to locate a more "selfless self" to supplant our native selfishness.


Turning evil into a growth-sparking challenge to us: it patterns with a notion I draw from the new sciences of complexity. Some scientists have discovered an "edge of chaos," a fecund conceptual/mathematical region between order and chaos that is said to be the seat of evolutionary progress. The edge of chaos exerts its pull on computer models of living systems in such a way that perturbing a system into actual chaos causes a rebound toward order. During that rebound, growth and progress accelerate.

Perhaps this is exactly what happens when God co-opts evil, rather than banishing it outright.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V

In a series of posts (most recently, Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV) I've talked about being a "neo-Manichaean": seeing the world as a battleground between a good God and an evil Satan.

The "neo" in "neo-Manichaean" reflects my idea that sometimes good and evil embrace so tightly in real-life situations as to be hard to distinguish. Order and chaos are quite literally joined in battle so as to create a zone of fecund evolutionary change, the "edge of chaos." As a result, not only is chaos sometimes benign — the weather over the long term is a chaotic system, after all — but there is such a thing as too much order.


Those are my metaphysics. My stance on good and evil is more or less one of moral relativism.

Moral relativism stands in contradistinction to moral absolutism. I'll contrast the two with reference to a book I'm reading, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart.

Beinart writes (p. 121ff.) of how today's political conservatives don't want to fight terrorism by using foreign aid to attack economic root causes such as too little funding for public schools in many Arab and Muslim countries. Too many young people in the Muslim world are educated in religious madrasas, where some are taught jihadism. Yet American conservatives object to funneling U.S. tax dollars into aid to institutions abroad that would undercut totalitarianism.

Why the objection? One big reason, says Beinart (p. 121), is that such a policy

... shifts blame from the terrorists themselves, and thus threatens the quality conservatives cherish most: moral clarity. As conservative commentator William Bennett has written, the question "shouldn't we work on getting rid of the poverty and oppression that are the root causes of terrorism" bespeaks a "want of clarity about the difference between good and evil."

After 9/11, writes Beinart (p. 133):

Bernard Lewis, the eminent Arabist who became the Bush administration's leading guide to the Muslim world, explained that in the jihadists' view, "the United States had become morally corrupt, socially degenerate, and in consequence, politically and militarily enfeebled." And conservatives found that argument compelling because it matched their own deep fears about American society. They too saw the Clinton administration's foreign policy weakness as the product, ultimately, of its moral weakness — a weakness they feared had seeped into the marrow of American life. Beneath the superficial novelty of America's terror war lurked the same old conservative fears. Could America match the absolute confidence of its fanatical foes? Had liberalism produced a nation of relativists, unable to distinguish good from evil? The religion of non-judgementalism ... has permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty," wrote William Bennett, in a book titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. "We have been caught with our defenses down — our intellectual and moral defenses as much as our physical ones."

Hence, Bennett is a moral absolutist. As a relativist, I don't agree that we're in a moral morass if we don't see the world purely in black and white. That is the basis of my moral relativism.

Beinart speaks of the moral absolutism of conservatives as making the achieving of "moral clarity" or "moral purity" job number one our fight against terrorism. Accordingly, don't attack anything but terrorism itself, say the moral purists. Home in on that which is purely and unremittingly evil, and fight that.

Moral relativists such as I say that's too simplistic. The real world is ineluctably complex. Sometimes you have to fight evil using subtle, nuanced strategies that lack ideal moral clarity.

I'll come back to the topic of moral relativism later on in this post, when I will investigate it more thoroughly as a philosophical position.


Meanwhile, some words on the basic ideas of "good" and "evil." I am also reading the new book by Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is Collins' testimony that his love for science and his faith in God are not irreconcilable.

Collins began life indifferent to religion, moved into agnosticism and outright atheism in his college years, then in his mid-twenties started to take the "God hypothesis" seriously. He began to be convinced by the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that humans are universally guided by a Moral Law or "law of right behavior" (p. 22ff.). We have trouble sticking by it or discerning how it applies to particular situations, but we all have an inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all members of our species in all cultures, places, and times.

Collins says that our innate, shared human moral sense could only derive from inside us and thus bespeaks a God. Collins argues that no strictly scientific explanation, based on Darwinian evolutionary pressures or anything else, suffices to explain what Lewis called our uniquely human love for agape (ah-GAH-pay) or selfless altruism. Collins identifies our notion of true selflessness as the basic kernel of the whole concept of goodness.


I'm not wholly convinced by Collins' argument alone, which I feel could be a bit more rigorous, but I note that it goes along with something I've just read in an old college textbook, an introduction to philosophy. In the section on moral judgments, one of the book's authors points out that "the most influential writer on ethics during the last fifty years," G.E. Moore — the book I have is now over thirty years old — found a way to prove that "good" cannot really be defined.

There are some words, Moore showed, that are not meaningless but can be explained only by pointing to instances of what they convey: words like "yellow" or "bitter" or "pleasure" ... or "good." These words are all incapable of being analyzed into simpler concepts. "Yellow" and "bitter" refer to natural phenomena that are of the senses. "Pleasure" and "anger" and "fear" are natural but introspective. "Good," however, is not strictly sensory or introspective, since it is not "natural" to begin with; it is instead a "non-natural" quality.

Our capacities for pleasure, anger, and fear, Collins would argue, are natural inasmuch as they derive from evolutionary processes. But our capacity for moral judgment is by this same reasoning non-natural, just as Moore said.


Now for the further discussion I promised on moral relativism. I have a second book, this one titled Ethics and Metaethics, from 1963. Ethics or morality asks questions about how specific human actions are to be evaluated, and metaethics or metamorality asks whether, and how, such ethical/moral issues can in fact be settled, once and for all.

The book has a section on "Right Action," whose introduction by the book's author, Raziel Abelson, suggests to me that what I above called my "moral relativism" may be a misnomer. My position may actually be one of "intuitionist absolutism."

Abelson presents five readings in this section of his book, whose subtitle is Readings in Ethical Philosophy. They alternate between absolutism and relativism. The religious absolutism of Anglican Bishop Robert C. Mortimer (1902 - ?) leads off the parade with an assertion that an act is right if and only if God commands it. Filtered through "natural law," à la Thomas Aquinas, God's commands are also for Mortimer mediated by personal conscience and church pronouncements.

Mortimer's religious absolutism is challenged by the secular "conventionalism" of Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), who based morality and ethics on something other than an appeal to higher authority. This was in an age when the prerogatives of kings were giving way to the rights of individuals and their voluntary mutual associations. Instead of divine or monarchical fiat, morals and ethics were grounded by Hobbes firmly in society's own laws, customs, traditions, and agreements: "an uncritical conformity to social authority and custom," Abelson says (p. 304). Hobbes' conventionalism was relativist in that moral laws did not derive from anything immutable or absolute; still, they could not be meaninigfully challenged or criticized.

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) sought to derive moral laws from critical appeals to absolute reason, not to absolute divine will. He "was a devout Pietist and regarded Christianity as the highest moral ideal, but he made ethics more fundamental than theology" (p. 306). For Kant, "logical consistency [is] the single standard of what is right." Thus, "the single condition that qualifies a rule of conduct as a moral law is that it be logically possible to want every rational being to want to follow it under any conditions" (pp. 306-7, my italics).

Kant's rational absolutism was challenged by the utilitarian relativism of John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), who says that which is morally right is such because it produces the most pleasure, or alleviates the most pain, for the most people. Ethics derive, that is, from worldly situations. But Mill's utilitarian relativism doesn't explain why (among other things) "we feel that actions such as breaking a promise are wrong, even when we are sure that they produce more pleasure than pain" (p. 308).


Thus we come to the intuitionist absolutism of W.D. Ross (1877 - ?). Why is is wrong to cause unnecessary pain, intuitionists (or "deontologists") ask of utilitarians? Why right to alleviate suffering? Ross and other intuitionists "maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be inferred from any other facts, but must be recognized directly and immediately, as a self-evident feature of the action itself" (p. 309).

That seems to accord with my own ideas — which surprises me, since intuitionism is classified as an absolutist position. True, it doesn't appeal to divine commandment or to Kant's reasoned "respect for universal law" as the bedrock of moral judgment, but only to the highly abstract notion that whatever is right is right in itself. We must ultimately rely on our personal intuitive faculties to recognize what that right action is.

"There is no simple or easy answer" to the question of how we are to decide which of our moral duties are "absolute" and which are merely prima facie, according to the intuitionist view (pp. 310-311). Though we have a prima facie duty to keep our promises, that duty can be overruled under special circumstances, such as if we have promised to meet a friend for some trivial reason and an opportunity arises to alleviate some great suffering, at the cost of breaking our promise.

"The relative weights of our various duties," Abelson writes (p. 311), "develop slowly through the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind, and are matters of intuitive recognition." They can thus appear as self-evident to us; or, failing that, we can sharpen our moral intuition by "consult[ing] those of greater moral sensitivity and wisdom, to whom right and wrong are intuitively clear."


To me, when you start talking about the "relative weights" of various moral duties, you're very close to being a relativist. Indeed, per Abelson, "The intuitionist view as stated by Ross combines the merits of relativism with the merits of rational absolutism" (p. 311). Absolute duties are independent of circumstances, while prima facie duties are indeed situational.

Yet, whither objectivity? There's the rub, with intuitionism. How can our moral obligations be justified with reference to something other that the inner workings of our own minds?

W.R. Ross sidesteps this cavil by likening our prima facie duties to mathematical axioms such as 2 + 2 = 4, the truth of which become self-evident at some point in our intellectual development. Yet, crucially, our axiomatic prima facie obligations are unlike our mathematical axioms in that they fail to make the results they tend toward absolutely obligatory:

... no mathematical object (no figure, for instance, or angle) ever has two characteristics that tend to give it opposite resultant characteristics, while moral acts often (as everyone knows) and indeed always (as on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them at the same time prima facie right and prima facie wrong; there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa. (W.D. Ross, "Right Action," p. 374)

According to Ross, what our actual or absolute duty is in any given situation is determined by weighing the prima facie rights and wrongs of all the moral elements which make up the situation, no one of which is by itself determinative. If our conscientious decision to act causes us to shortchange one of our prima facie obligations, we naturally feel a sense of compunction and do whatever is necessary to seek forgiveness or make amends afterwards. At the same time, however, we need feel no "shame or repentance" (p. 371).

For this reason, I would prefer to call intuitionist absolutism something else. Most absolutists are like Kant, as characterized by Ross: they say "that there are certain duties of perfect obligation, such as those of fulfilling promises, of paying debts, of telling the truth, which admit of no exception whatever in favour of duties of imperfect obligation, such as that of relieving distress" (p. 369). For the intuitionist, "duties of imperfect obligation" can outweigh "duties of perfect obligation." Sometimes, relieving distress takes primacy over moral punctilio. I'd call that relativistic. It's "situation ethics."


Abelson points out (p. 312) that religious absolutism, conventionalist relativism, rational absolutism, utilitarian relativism, and intuitional absolutism form a progression:

Religious absolutism generalizes from the rudimentary moral consciousness of the small child, who identifies right with whatever his parent [i.e., God as Father] commands. Conventionalism or cultural relativism expresses the next stage of development in the child, when he becomes aware of social authority outside his home. Kantian rational absolutism recognizes the authority of individual reason which the child, on reaching maturity, employs in criticizing both parental and social authority. But no matter how well developed his reason may be, a person cannot discover the best rules of life without enough experience to predict the consequences of his actions for himself and for others. Utilitarianism brings attention to the need for this practical wisdom in evaluating rules of conduct. Finally, intuitionism points out duties and obligations independent of one's own welfare and even of the common good, and expresses the moral consciousness of the cultivated and mature man, so deeply committed to his moral principles that he no longer needs a practical motive for following them. This unwavering committment to a moral code expresses a very high level of moral consciousness. But the actual code of conduct to which the moral individual is committed may vary from one social environment to another. Consequently, intuitionism does not provide a final answer to the question, "What is right action, and how can we prove it to be right?" ... .

At this stage of the evolution of my own moral consciousness, I'd say I'm an intuitionist who doubts that that question can ever be settled, once and for all, except by an appeal to prima facie axioms of right and wrong.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV

I am not sure that in my previous posts in this series, most recently Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III, I have managed to convey adequately that my idea of what "neo-Manachaean" means is not all that much like what "Manachaean" (or "Manichean," without an extra "a") means to a great many people.

In The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Peter Beinart writes (p. 71), "Immediately, liberals and conservatives divided into opposing camps [over what to do about the leftist Sandinista rebels who overthrew the anti-Communist dictatorship of Anastazio Somoza in 1980s Nicaragua]. As in El Salvador, [President Ronald] Reagan waxed Manichean about his dubious right-wing allies, infamously calling the [anti-Sandinista] contras the 'moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers'."

That use of "Manichean" is not what I have in mind. It suggests that there is a simple, clear dividing line between good and evil, and only if we stay well to the good side of the line, exercising our might for God aganist Satan, will things turn out for the best. That sort of thinking, says Beinart, fueled Reagan's "dreams of military victory" in Central America.

The American left generally opposed Reagan with an anti-imperialistic and equally simplistic "U.S. out of Central America" stance. Yet there was a split among liberals. A few, like "left-leaning" journalist Paul Berman, defied the wishes of editors like Michael Moore at Mother Jones (yes, that Michael Moore) and condemned the "human rights abuses and disastrous economic policies" of the Sandinistas. Democratic congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma visited Nicaragua and was disturbed by "evidence of growing Sandinista repression" (p. 72).

McCurdy, Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, and others in the fledgling Democratic Leadership Council (its members were called the "New Democrats") backed nonmilitary aid to the contras and efforts at economic development conditioned "on respect for human rights ... [and on purging] former Somoza loyalists from leadership roles." By the time all was said and done, Nicaraguan voters had rejected both combatants and elected Violetta de Chamorro, the leader of the nonviolent opposition, as their new president. Beinart chortles, "Both the Sandinistas and the contras had lost, and a genuine democrat had won."

True, Beinart adds quickly, most of the forces leading to this outcome that was so fortunate from the U.S. perspective had lain outside our control. But ...

... for the evolution of liberal foreign policy, [the efforts of the New Democrats] mattered. Whether they realized it or not, the New Democrats were stumbling toward the synthesis that had eluded [President] Jimmy Carter: a liberal antitotalitarianism for the post-Vietnam world, which prized human rights without taking refuge in morally pure isolationism, promoted liberty without pretending that the threats to liberty came only from the other side [i.e., the Communists], and ceded some U.S. control to gain legitimacy abroad. It was a synthesis that would reappear years later, once the cold war was gone. (p. 73)

Neo-Manichaenism as I envision it is big on synthesis. Philosophers have noted how an antithesis (Reaganism; the contras) to a thesis (Carter-style post-Vietnam liberalism; the Sandinistas) gives way to a synthesis (the New Democrats; Chamorro). It's called dialectics, and in different guises it's been embraced on both the left and the right.

Neo-Manichaeanism embraces it as a reflection of the "dance" of good and evil in the world. One side of every thesis-antithesis pair is always called "good," the other "evil" ... though different people choose, in perfect conscience, opposite sides as truly representing the good.

Somehow, then, a synthesis emerges in which those erstwhile unbridgeable differences are bridged after all. Result: progress. But also, there is inevitably a new thesis which calls forth a new antithesis ... and the dance goes on. God never defeats Satan. Satan never defeats God. Time, and progress, march on.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II, I tried to give an indication of what I mean by saying I am a neo-Manichaean. The ancient pseudo-Christian heresy, Manichaeanism, posits (as I understand it) a God who is all-good but not (and herein lies the heresy) all-powerful, such that His struggle with Satan is ongoing. That translates, in my version of the story, into a world where order and chaos square off to create the "edge of chaos," where evolution develops its outcomes good and bad, there are new species and extinctions, and there are multitudinous births and deaths, for better or for worse.

We have at least three possible responses, the two most obvious of which are not what I urge.

Perhaps the most obvious of the three possible responses is a studied, even principled amorality. If God and the Devil are roughly equipotent, why choose sides? I find that a copout both repugnant and ridiculous. After all, good is, by definition, better than evil.

The second most obvious of the three possible responses is to go to the opposite extreme and seek — nay, insist on — moral purity. Extirpate all reflections of Satan from the circumstances of our lives.

That, too, I reject; this post discusses why. But first, here is the third option, the one I favor: Understanding and dealing squarely with the fact that, in life as we live it, goodness and purity are not the same things.


A good way to illustrate what I mean comes from the recent book by The New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

Beinart is not talking about religion, philosophy, or theology, but about political ideology. His book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears in the earliest days of the Cold War.

It was a time just after World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Communist Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, had gobbled up Eastern Europe and begun to prove itself, under Stalin, as totalitarian as the Nazi and Fascist enemies we had just defeated together. Many on the American left were themselves Communists, ex-Communists, aligned in some way with Socialism/Marxism, fellow-travelers, or dupes.

In the years from 1946 to 1948, there was a bifurcation between leftists who were willing to shortchange liberty in favor of equality and fraternity, and those who weren't. The latter group formed Americans for Democratic Action, underwrote the Truman presidency, and laid the foundation for the anti-totalitarian American liberalism to come — that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the like.


Not long thereafter was born the anti-Communist right, led by such thinkers as James Burnham and National Review founder William F. Buckley. They did not approve of Truman's emphasis on foreign and military aid. Economic assistance to floundering nations in the postwar period, countries such as Greece and Turkey whose governments, albeit anti-Soviet, were not model democracies, would, they said, just undermine our chances of winning the Cold War. Why? They betrayed our lack of moral purity and clarity.

The anti-Communist right embarked on a series of domestic witch hunts, led by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-57. "For the right," writes Beinart (p. 20), "the question lurking behind all these cases [of alleged Communist sympathies] was whether America believed in its creed strongly enough to expel those who did not." For the anti-Communist left, on the other hand, the point was exactly the reverse: America needed to be strong enough to tolerate espousers of even those ideologies most adversarial to it. Anything less would mock liberty, not strengthen it.

It came down to a recognition by the liberal anti-totalitarians that America's goodness was not the same as its moral purity. "If the cold war liberal tradition parts company with the right," says Beinart (p. xi), "in insisting that American power cannot be good unless we recognize that it can also be evil, it parts company with the purist left in insisting that if we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good."


Moral purism thus has its left- and right-wing versions. Many left-wingers have traditionally objected to pragmatic, half-a-loaf policies that aren't squeaky clean, social justice-wise. Right-wingers, to those that leave something to be desired, liberty-wise.

This is just as true in the international sphere as on the domestic scene. The dust jacket of The Good Fight says, "Peter Beinert offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure ... ."

For God, of course, there is no distinction between goodness and moral purity. For us, there is. How can this be?


Here is where my understanding of neo-Manichaeanism enters the picture. If God, the supernatural source of good, is locked in battle with Satan, the bastion of evil, then we live in an edge-of-chaos world where the back-and-forth between order and chaos can't meaningfully be avoided. To try to quell the battle by unduly purifying our own little corner of the world, silencing or casting out all complexity or dissent, is ultimately self-defeating and counterproductive.

I am saying such things as if I find them easy to demonstrate the truth of and accept. The opposite is the case. My soul is actually torn between such an outlook and a strong preference for moral purity and clarity.

Little wonder. Embracing complexity and diversity is a lot harder than calling for purity and clarity.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I, I set forth some of the reasons why I suddenly find myself something other than the good Catholic believer I had been for a decade.

Or, rather, why I still believe in a God who is all-good, but not in one who is all-powerful. We Catholics aren't supposed to be neo-Manicheans — latter-day descendants of those early Christians who were declared heretics by the Church for finding this world to be a perpetual battleground between God and Satan, neither of whose supernatural powers are limitless or decisive.

After I wrote Part I, something happened to me that I consider emblematic of what I'm getting at: I got stung on the left thumb by a yellow jacket. I had awakened from a nap and saw something on the carpet that needed to be picked up and disposed of. I couldn't tell through sleep-drenched eyes that it was alive, if near-dead. It injected me with its venom before I could say ouch. Today my swollen hand is painful.

Symbolically, chaos zapped my life with that bee sting. Though slight in itself, it set my immediate future off on a wholly unexpected trajectory.

My life will of course recover its accustomed order soon enough — which in my worldview means a personal return somewhere to the orderly side of the "edge of chaos," the locus of change and growth where chaos' eternal novelty is tempered by the world's capacity to refine what has been introduced. Evolutionarily, according to the laws of natural selection and self-organized complexity there is nothing so constant as change.

By those laws of nature, order that is statically frozen — or that repeats itself ad infinitum, world without end, amen — is never preferred. By those laws, surprising emergence is followed by graceful evolution that transpires in a mathematically describable regime at the edge of order, cheek-by-jowl with chaos. When chaos obtrudes, there is death and destruction.


That's the way I see the world. It is no longer possible for me to square it with my Catholicism.

I've never been able to square it with what I know of evangelical Christian worldviews. I have friends and relatives in that realm of religion, and in fact my own family, on my mother's side, is Southern Baptist.

Mainline Protestant outlooks, as well, are determinedly non-Manichean. My late father's abandoned Methodist upbringing qualifies here.

All Christian approaches today, as far as I know, insist that God is both thoroughly good and omnipotently great. They are heirs to the belief of the Early Church, after it had purged itself of Manichaeanism alongside a litany of other heresies, in this regard.

But it is Roman Catholicism and its closest Protestant cousin, Anglicanism, that I know best as a religious tradition.. The Church of Rome and the Church of England share much theology and a good deal of liturgical practice, including a belief in sacraments — though they still quarrel over the exact nature of (among many other things) Holy Communion. They have in common their emphasis on the Trinity, on bishops as direct successors of the Apostles, on "high" liturgies, and on the Church as a unitary institution that is God's beachhead in a sin-corrupted world.

The Church thus stands between us and God. We have a mediated relationship. Theology is essential to it — not just you and I reading our own Bibles and possibly sharing our conclusions, posssibly not.


The foregoing paragraphs suggest the sheer variety of Christian outlooks in the modern world. There is not just one. All of them assume, though, that God's victory over evil has "always already" been won.

God, theologians say, foreknew that man would fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, that he would not be able to redeem his own sin, that God's own death on a cross would be needed ... and provided, in due course, in Christ, the Son of God, who would suffer and die like one of us. He would be one of us, in all ways but sin. After his resurrection and eventual departure from this world, Satan's defeat would be secured on our behalf for the rest of time.

That defeat of Satan would be manifested, though, only at the end of time. Meanwhile, we would have our strong faith to shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

My faith in that upbeat scenario is not so strong any more.

Perhaps it never was.


It is a beautiful picture, I grant. In fact, I would say that all the elements of good Catholic understanding (I'll revert to the particular system I know best) dovetail and interlock in ways that make for a lovely jigsaw puzzle, all the individual pieces serving one another to create a compelling, seamless tableau of thought and belief.

For the longest time, I habitually averted my gaze from those details of the Catholic theological tableau which otherwise might have bothered me. Among them: the historical tendency of the Church to dictate to believers, rather than solicit assent; the tendency to stifle free inquiry; the lack of openness to other points of view; the self-protectiveness to the point of failing to confron, say, anti-Semitism within the Church; and so on.

But I also studiously ignored how central to the magisterium of the Church is its doctrine about sex, gender, marriage, contraception, and so forth. That is not properly part of my topic here, but I need to fully disclose that I now believe the coherent "jigsaw puzzle" falls apart if you, say, affirm homosexual lifestyles. I'll return to this difficult topic in some future post.

For now, let me just say that I and Pope Benedict XVI probably agree on this much: a neo-Manichaean outlook implies we humans confront evil on a completely different footing than does a "good Catholic" point of view.


To a neo-Manichaean such as I now call myself, evil is not severable from any aspect of our human experience.

I'm struggling to find the words to express my thoughts here. Please bear with me: Just as chaos is not severable from order, just as the "edge of chaos" is essential to the evolving world that has produced our human species, everything that happens, everything that we know, is potentiated by the struggle between a good God and his evil adversary.

I use the word potentiated advisedly. An electrical "potential" is a voltage set up by the difference in charge between two elements of a battery. Without the other element, nothing happens.


This is not to say that the ideas of good and evil are any different from our usual pure conceptions of them. What is good is of God; what is bad is of the Enemy. We still ought to favor good and hate evil, in my neo-Manichaean outlook. We still need to be idealists. It's just that we're also realists who recognize that it's never really possible to surgically cut out the cancer of evil from any organ of the living, breathing world.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also potentially cancerous.

As I write this, the Middle East has blown up again. Israel, responding to abductions of soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah, is engaging in military strikes many say are disproportionate. There are those pundits who recommend we deal with Iran as the only power broker in the region who might put Hezbollah back on its leash. Iran could, in fact, become a new source of regional stability, if we deal with it cagily. But we're not talking to Iran. They, after all, seem to be developing a nuclear arsenal.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also cancerous.

There are other pundits who say our best option is to treat everyone and everthing that might be anti-Israel or pro-Islamist as absolutely malignant to the rest of the world. Cal Thomas, for example, recently wrote in Understanding the Temper of the Times, "Israel's enemies are all of the same piece by whatever name they call themselves. There are no 'moderates,' at least none who have the power to make peace."

To Cal Thomas, a well-known and dedicated member of the religious right, some cells are evil, some good.

I agree with Mr. Thomas that radical Islamism, as a pure idea, is fundamentally totalitarian and evil. And the notion of a permanent, secure Jewish state in Israel is one I, too, who recognize the absolute intolerability of the Holocaust and genocide in general, support without reservation.

But I disagree with Mr. Thomas that the fight against evil can ever be antiseptic. If the white hats in America don't talk to the black hats in the Middle East, America loses power like an anode without a cathode.


But my intention is not to talk of politics and ideology. Nor is it to evangelize in favor of a Manichaean outlook on the world. It is rather to try to state what that Manichaean outlook entails, and why it appeals to me so. More on that in upcoming posts.