The inevitable possibility of bad choice

[Largely plagiarized summary of select portions of the second chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.]

If you say “God can create a creature with free will and at the same time withhold free will from it” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, “God can.”

Intrinsic impossibility
“In ordinary usage the word impossible generally implies a suppressed clause beginning with the word unless.” For example, it is impossible for Johnny to win [unless Mark, Brian and Tony are all disqualified]. However, there are some kinds of impossibility that are intrinsically self-contradictory, and are thus absolutely impossible. That is, the sentence has no qualifying clause, and is impossible in all worlds under all conditions for all agents. For example, “That square box is round.” The only way this could be true is if the nature of space were different from that we currently experience; but such a condition is entirely outside the realm of scientific speculation.

The omnipotence of God does not mean that he can do the intrinsically impossible. “You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.” The old question “Can God make a rock that is too heavy for him to lift” is mere wordplay. “It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.”

What comes with our self-identity
Any attempt to remove from the existence of free beings the possibility of bad choice is intrinsically impossible in the sense above.

I cannot be me (or at least be self-conscious) unless I perceive myself in contrast to non-me (e.g. you). If we had at all times identical thoughts, passions, and choices, then how might I comprehend my individuality apart from you?

If we are able to perceive each other, to have a mutually conscious co-relation between our beings, then we must exist in an environment which enables a contrast between us. “The minimum condition of self-consciousness and freedom would be that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God.”

This environment which enables yours and my mutual perception and relationship must be objective, that is, of a fixed nature and distinct from either of us. If, as the existentialist says, I create reality, then you don’t really exist; you are a mere character in the play which I am writing. Similarly, if we both exist, but the environment is entirely in my control, then you would be quite incapable of communicating with me or making your presence known to me, because you would be unable to manipulate matter, i.e., the means of communication between our selves. I would be animate, but you would be trapped inside a manequin. Therefore, two souls must meet in a world that is objective and “fixed”, that is, not entirely subject to my will or yours.

Now, if we are truly agents of choice created to choose, or relational beings created to relate to God, and if choice or relationship requires an objective medium through which two beings interact, then the ability to choose that which is not God, comes as part and parcel, quite unavoidably.

Now, could God have created a world in which all our bad choices would have been obviated and all bad consequences evaporated immediately? Well, if we could abstract this scenario, we would find our choice, our identity, our very selves, to be quite stripped away. If only one of our options would actually have a result, and the other action would have its effects slurped up by divine benevolence, then we would really only have one truly option. The right to choose includes the right to have the results of your choice. It seems God is not interested in pandering us as little children; he gives us, Lewis says in another chapter, the “intolerable compliment” of a world that allows the effects of our choices to play out without his (direct) interference.

So we conclude simply this, that our mere existence as free, self-conscious individuals contains within it, naturally and inseparably, the possibility of bad choices. This seems to be simply “how things are,” woven into the fabric of the universe in which our minds can operate. There are no alternative “ways it could have been.”

This train of thought – the inexorable existence of the possibility of bad choice in the world, and its seeming inevitability – brings us to question why God decreed that we would be such dreadfully free creatures (us). We thus take a step up from questioning the omnipotence of God, to engage the more challenging and intriguing question of his goodness.

Three strands in all religions (and the one with a fourth)

[Largely plagiarized summary of select portions of the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.]

“In all developed religion we find three strands, and in Christianity one more.”

The first strand is the numinous, or, that thing which produces a sense of awe of the supernatural. Man has believed in “spirits” as far back as history goes. The numinous can be imagined if I told you that there was a ghost in the next room. You would perhaps experience fear at that moment. Now, if I told you that there was a “mighty spirit” in the next room, your feeling would be fear, flavored more like awe and reverence. The source of that emotion is the numinous.

The second strand is a sense of moral obligation, or, that which produces the sense behind the feeling I ought not do that. Although the specific mores of cultures may differ, they have basic commonalities, and more interestingly, they share the attributes of being affirmed by the members of that culture and yet not being adhered to by members of that culture. They are unattested archetypes, like the “perfect body” of fashion. This sense cannot be inferred from the facts of our physical experience, and is either revelation or inexplicable illusion.

The third strand is the linking and identification of the numinous with the sense of moral obligation. Although to do so is quite natural among religions, it is not obvious why it should need to be so. It is certainly not desirable for natural man, for the power which condemns him to be “armed with the power of the numinous.” Many cultures have rejected this union, producing either immoral religion, or nonreligious morality.

Perhaps only one race of people, the Jews, made this connection perfectly; but great individuals in all times and places have made it also, and only those who take it are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralized worship or the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism….And though logic does no compel us to take it, it is very hard to resist–even on Paganism and Pantheism morality is always breaking in, and even Stoicism finds itself willy-nilly bowing the knee to God. Once more, it may be madness–a madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results–or it may be revelation. And if revelation, then it is most really and truly in Abraham that all people shall be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain-tops and thunderclouds with ‘the righteous Lord’ who ‘loveth righteousness’.

The fourth strand is one possessed only by Christianity.

There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be ‘one with’, the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law.

This claim has not been made by any other religious leader. Buddha, Krishna (as he teaches in the Bhagavad Gita) and Eckhart Tolle claim to be part of an omni-deity along with everyone and everything else, not ultimately different in essence but different in form. But they do not claim in the same sense that Jesus did, namely, “I am part of the supreme divine essence, and you are not. I am wholly other from you, I am creator, and you are creature. I am the supernatural, being above the natural, and I am the law giver, being the ultimate authority of measure.” That’s the kind of language you find inevitably implied in Jesus’ teachings, and it is almost crazy. Either you believe that he was a lunatic or a fiend, or that he was indeed the incarnation of God.

This last point is what distinguishes Christianity from every other religion and at once makes it unique, extravagantly presumptuous, dangerous, mysterious, and fascinating. All religions are men describing how to get to divine enlightenment; but Christianity says that divine enlightenment Himself showed up among us, walking the dirty streets of an old Jewish town, to make with his own hands and by his own blood the only way to himself.

I am too easily pleased

An excerpt from
The Weight of Glory
by C.S. Lewis
Preached originally as a sermon in the
Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford,
on June 8, 1942: published in
THEOLOGY, November, 1941,
and by the S.P.C.K, 1942
_____________________________

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Read the rest here

C.S. Lewis on divine omnipotence and goodness

I present for your thoughtful consideration my favorite excerpts from Lewis’ insight on God’s predestination, justice and love- relevant to the timeless tension of the Problem of Evil. These are hand-typed, so I must really agree with them!

Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible’ universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds that God could have made, but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic [man-shaped] conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.…

No answer [has been] attempted to the objection that if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering, then absolute goodness would have left the universe uncreated. And I must warn the reader that I shall not attempt to prove that to create was better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words. “It would be better for me not to exist” – in what sense “for me”? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing?

—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 2, “Divine Omnipotence”

If God’s moral judgment differs from our so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good”, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say “God is we know not what.” And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If he is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. …The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning….

We call human love selfish when it satisfies its own needs at the expense of the object’s needs—as when a father keeps at home, because he cannot bear to relinquish their society, children who ought, in their own interests, to be put out into the world. The situation implies a need or passion on the part of the lover, an incompatible need on the part of the beloved, and the lover’s disregard or culpable ignorance of the beloved’s need. None of these conditions is present in the relation of God to man. God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty—of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all his love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.

—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 3, “Divine Goodness”

Mere Christianity excerpts

Reading it, finally, and loving it.

I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we believe it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature (18).

Now this thing which judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them (19).

The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: out instincts are merely the keys (20).

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd (43).

That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed (43).

Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. (46).

C.S. Lewis, my hero

I just finished a biographical movie of C. S. Lewis. He is, I can say without cliche, one of my heroes. He suffered, and doubted. He was logical, and a man of the pen. He wrote stories, and dreams. He longed for something greater–and found it. His search for that elusive desire was so strong that it finally drew him to the truth. One day while driving to the zoo, he awoke, all of a sudden, to know God’s love. (Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!)

There was a man who was like me, in love for fantasy and writing, in doubt, in clinging to reason yet longing to be consumed by my longing. Lewis’ life strikes in me deep chords of the soul; his words remind me of the sublime thoughts of heaven, perhaps more than the words of any other mere mortal. It seems he took a path near to mine to reach our common hope, Jesus Christ.

There is something in Lewis that stirs me up and onward to follow in his footsteps toward our Lord. Well done, Jack, you have increased the joyous and mysterious sense of God’s glory unfolding, in this fellow of yours, who still walks on this side of the wardrobe.