Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.00 You Save: $7.99 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.91 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Mere Christianity
Book Review: "Simply the best..."
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is the best book on Christianity written since the Bible.
Every Christian should read this book after having read the Bible thoroughly.
Book Review: "Musturbation" versus human well-being.
Summary: 1 Stars
Lewis begins his argument for Christianity by pointing out the grammatical oddity (in English) that we often speak of things that we ought, or ought not, do. He then makes the dramatic leap that the origin of such ideas must come from some SUPERNATURAL realm, and thus opens a doorway for the arbitrary and historically contingent Judeo-Christian ideas about "god."Now, really. When you buy a new auto, and you read in the owner's manual something like, "You ought to change the oil every 3,000 miles," are you to conclude that you've just received a "supernatural" revelation?
Of course not. Some human invented that ought-statement as a way of expressing the relationship between a means and an end, in this case, maintaining one's auto properly. Moral ought statements are no different, though their origins have been lost in the passage of time. They express relationships relating to the maintenance of a workable society, with the "supernatural" sanctions associated with them acting as a kind of psychological scarecrow to improve compliance.
Moreover, since Lewis argues elsewhere (_The Abolition of Man_), following David Hume, that you can't derive ought from is, this effectively destroys the argument that the postulated existence of a god means that we ought to act in certain ways. "We ought" cannot follow in any way from "God is," so Lewis's case is dead on arrival.
Moreover, even if the origin of moral ideas is genuinely mysterious (though I don't see them that way), you can't explain a mystery by invoking an even bigger mystery ("god").
And to top off my critique, I might add that modern cognitive psychotherapy (exemplified by the popular writings of Albert Ellis and David Burns, many of them still in print) has discovered that a lot of unnecessary emotional distress results from irrational adherence to ought, must and have-to ideas. Ellis coined the term "musturbation" to describe the kind of crooked thinking responsible for so much human suffering. We can use ought statements as guidance when they serve human flourishing, but the kind of unthinking ought-idolatry promoted by Lewis and other Christian moral absolutists causes nothing but misery.
Book Review: 250 pages of text, 1000 pages of thought
Summary: 4 Stars
Lewiss Mere Christianity is an insightful and thought provoking classic work of Christian literature. This collection of World War II radio speeches retains the impact it had fifty years ago in Britain. Lewis, a layman of the Church of England, conveys issues debated by the greatest scholars and minds for centuries in a way simple enough to be understood by a young student. The quantity and quality of illustrations alone make the book worthwhile. The genius imagination of C.S. Lewis beautifully reduces difficult thoughts down to simple illustrations.Lewis begins with topics relating to all people everywhere such as morality, the conscience, and the ideas of evolution and creationism. Primarily using anecdotal evidence, Lewis logically progresses the reader from the belief in the existence of a god to belief in the God of the Bible. Christian topics like forgiveness, hope, faith, and the Trinity are addressed at the end of the book.
The books goal is to present only the core and central Christian doctrines, what Lewis calls mere Christianity. As a result, issues relating to denominational division in the Christian church are intentionally omitted. In my opinion, however, many of the topics ignored in order to reach this mutual mere Christianity are far too important to be overlooked. I also believe Lewis should have used more quotations from the Bible to support his arguments.
Lewis presents the Christian perspective in a book aimed at the skeptic, the atheist, and the fellow Christian. Mere Christianity caused me to re-evaluate the beliefs I hold and the way they are applied to my life.
Book Review: A 'Readers Digest' Apologetic
Summary: 4 Stars
If you're looking for an in depth apologetic for the Christian faith, this is not it. If you are looking for a book which will finally convince you that there is a God, I doubt this book will do it either. Do not look for an iron-clad argument for Christ, for this was not the intent of the book, i.e. the title MERE Christianity. It is an introduction, and towards that goal, it surpasses all others.It achieves this through the clarity and power of the prose, the elegance of the analogy, and the refreshing angles on suppositional questions. For these reasons, this book is a must read for those exploring faith, and especially those looking for a framework on which to hang their Christian faith.
As an agnostic undergratuate twenty years ago, this book served to rock my world view. Two decades later, a re-read emphasizes the elegant answers Christiantiy offers to the major questions of life.
Book Review: A Careful Review of Lewis's Assumptions
Summary: 2 Stars
I know many people adore this book and are very hostile to low-star reviews so I want to be very careful to explain my viewpoint in a way that is fair and reasonable.
SECULAR HUMANIST
I am a Secular Humanist. That means I believe in truth, testing beliefs, evidence, ethics, growth, enriching human life, and enriching the world for future generations. I tell you this to assure you that I believe in many positive things and generally have a lot of hope for humanity and a lot of appreciation for positive instruction. For this reason, I appreciate a lot of the positive instruction that Lewis gives in Books III and IV. I am glad he has a positive attitude and these two sections of the book may very well do some good.
However, I also believe in the testing of beliefs. I do not accept anything without question and any of my beliefs is always open to question. That does not mean I believe in nothing strongly. I very much do. But you can always change my mind with a reasonable argument or evidence. I'll never cling to any belief with complete unmoving certainty. As limited human beings I am convinced that we could never have any such invincible beliefs.
With this foundation, I read the first two sections (Books I and II) of Lewis's book. Here is what I found:
INNATE MORALITY
In Chapter 1, Lewis makes the praiseworthy analysis that all human beings have an innate morals. He shows this with undeniable examples. Essentially he shows that we all wish to be moral. Whenever someone calls us immoral, we instantly try to set our reputations right again. We may do this by apologizing and admitting wrongness or we may do it by defending ourselves and showing rightness. But either way, we are concerned with being in the right again. Either way, we are all concerned with morals.
However, at the end of this otherwise laudible chapter, Lewis makes a sudden, weighty, unjustified assumption: we largely do not meet the demands of our innate morals. We are inherently immoral. Examples he uses are "you were unfair to your children when you were tired" or "you broke a promise because you were busy".
The first assumption that Lewis makes here is that these occurences are common. I really feel they are not. I think it is rare that one breaks a promise and that it is usually on accident.
The second assumption that Lewis makes is that these occurences are altogether terrible and deserve the weighty sledgehammer of a label "Immoral". I disagree here also. These are just mistakes. Mistakes that are altogether largely not our fault. They are tied up in the limitations of the human body and mind as well as the sheer difficulty of dealing with the natural world.
MORAL LAW
But suddenly we have bigger problems because Lewis is making even bigger assumptions. Not only is he saying that we have innate morals (as he so eloquently argues for in the first chapter). He is assuming that these innate morals arise from a crystal clear Moral Law that all humans know. So not only is he saying we have moral sense, he is saying that every human situation has an obvious moral choice that every participant in the situation should know. The reason we humans do not always choose the obviously right choice dictated by the Moral Law is because of our selfishness.
Let me give you some examples which bring this assumption into question.
A man holds a gun in each hand to the heads of two other men. He asks you which of them should be killed. He will spare the other. Which do you choose?
A man is standing in front of an oncoming car. If you jump in and push him out of the way, you will be killed. Both of you have families of equal size. So whichever of you is killed, their family will suffer. Which do you choose?
Here is a final one that is probably closer to reality. You find that your country is filled with people who *appear* to want to kill you at any time. For example, you are members of different hostile social groups. You don't know for sure whether they are going to kill you but they could at any moment. Do you respect their right to human life and risk the lives of your family by not attacking? Or do you act on an unverified suspicion and risk attacking potentially innocent people but protect your family?
The "obvious" choice of the Moral Law is not so obvious in these examples. Because either choice will cost someone. All difficult moral choices are like this and they are much more common than people think, especially in our complex global society. They are difficult choices because we don't have enough information to clearly choose one side over the other.
Typically when people make different moral choices they do so because they have different information. Not because one is following the "Moral Law" and the other is not. Both people would follow the same innate morality given the same information (this has been demonstrated in scientific studies). But due to the vast complexity of the world and the limitations of our perception, we simply do not always have the same information as other people when making our judgments.
DETRIMENTAL TO MORAL PROGRESS
People like Lewis, who try to oversimplify the inherently complex global situations facing our world do much more harm than good. The most moral person would actually first recognize that they do not have all the information to make the perfect moral choice and probably never will. This person would recognize that it is their moral duty to question their own first assumptions about the situation and gather evidence to hone their perspective.
I think it is clear that belief in an immediately clear Moral Law is actually detrimental to moral progress. Because what it actually does is cause people to believe that their first assumptions are the correct ones and then fight for them uncompromisingly. We very rarely have enough information for our first assumptions to be correct, especially in complex global situations. These situations involve need-to-know history and psychology of the conflicting parties before one could even fathom making an accurate moral judgement.
Even in our everyday lives, with conflicts between just two people, two separate human lives can be so complex that one could not possibly make a satisfactory moral judgement without carefully examining both sides of the story. But the way Lewis talks, he seems to think that everyone just instantly knows what is happening and what the correct moral choice is. Lewis seems completely ignorant of the necessity of dialogue and careful examination to resolve moral issues between peoples. He thinks everyone should just "know" the "Moral Law".
THE ORIGIN OF INNATE MORALITY
Unfortunately, we are hardly past the first chapter but I am running out of room for my address of Lewis's assumptions. I've not even gotten to the part on page 29 where Lewis makes the unjustified leaps from "[there must be] Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law" to "[it is] Somebody" to "[it is] God". I agree that there is somebody or something behind innate morality. But Lewis hardly did any evidence examination to determine that it was Somebody. He just assumed it with very little justification.
His perfunctory "herd instinct" argument starting on page 9 is hardly adequate to refute the belief that morality emerged from evolution. He is going to have to do more work than that to convince anyone with an understanding of natural selection that morality isn't an obviously valuable selection trait for evolution. I think there is clearly more evidence that it is "Something" (natural selection) behind innate morality and not "Somebody". Evidence for this goes back as far as Darwin himself who convincingly argued for it. Just search "Evolution of Morality" on Google.
CONCLUSIONS
So I think no one here would deny that the concept of a crystal clear Moral Law is at the heart of C.S. Lewis's philosophy. And I don't think any reasonable person would deny that I have cast serious doubt on the reality of that concept.
Probably my biggest criticism of Lewis is that he styles is writing in a way to make it appear to be unbiased reasoning when he is actually making many biased assumptions about the superiority of Christianity. And what is worse: unlike an honest philosopher, Lewis never states these assumptions explicitely. He seems to just make them and hope you don't notice the philosophical slip. Or maybe I am being too hard on him and he is making these assumptions unknowingly.
In any case, this book is misleading for Christians because it gives them the illusion that they have objectively considered alternatives to their faith when they actually haven't. Lewis presents straw man versions of the real alternatives to Christianity (there is no mention of Secular Humanism, for example; maybe he just didn't know about it).
And finally, as a critically thinking person, it was very frustrating for me to read Lewis because of his relentless onslaught of untenable assumptions to support each successive idea. It was like watching someone try to build a skyscraper out of driftwood. And I hope that's not too harsh. But that was my honest experience.