One of the most prominent Christian apologists of the 1900s was C.S. Lewis, author of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. The latter is an allegorical retelling of broad Biblical history, even if it is only selectively accurate, while the former is a collection of radio transcripts on various issues related to general philosophy and Christian theology in particular. Mere Christianity is undeserving of praise due to its many fallacies and assumptions, however, and its errors are evident very early in the work. Within the first five pages, Lewis has already made epistemologically false claims about the nature of science and morality.
One of the first pages states the following:
"Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or hereditary, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law. . ." (4)
Laws of nature like those reflected in gravity, electrical phenonema, and entropy are not known to govern all of matter by beings with my epistemological limitations: perceiving a small area of a seemingly vast external world, being trapped in the present moment, and the confinement of human consciousness to the body all prevent humans from truly knowing if scientific laws transcend time and the geography of the cosmos. Unsurprisingly, Lewis, far from a rationalist, treats inferences based on inherently limited experiences as justification for belief in scientific uniformitarianism.
However, this is a trivial error compared to what follows. Belief in scientific uniformitarianism might be asinine on the part of beings with sensory limitations, but this is not necessarily connected to errors when it comes to core metaphysics and ethics. Believing that conscience reveals moral obligations leads to disastrous outcomes for everyone who acts in accordance with their beliefs. More importantly, popular ideas about moral epistemology and conscience are objectively false. Moral feelings (conscience) have no epistemological or metaphysical connection to morality itself.
Lewis claims that the differences in the moral ideas of various cultures are ultimately trivial at best. In doing so, he betrays his sheer ignorance of sound moral epistemology. C.S. Lewis was too unintelligent to see that a society that crucifies people after inflicting a host of tortures on them is irreconcilably different than one that imprisons people, even if both do so out of a desire for "justice" (and both are wrong by Biblical standards), and that a society that enforces strict monogamy and a society that encourages polyamory are irreconcilably different, even if both are concerned with commitment to sexual partners.
It is actually the similarities between the values of different cultures, contrary to what Lewis says in the first chapter of Mere Christianity, that are superficial at most and extraordinarily opposed to each other at worst. Many cultures might claim as a whole that they care about justice, but their differing legal punishments cannot all be morally valid at once. No one is rational or morally upright simply for having a conscience or vaguely adhering to some arbitrary concept of justice! To be just means far more than having allegiance to some assumed idea of what just actions are.
Mere Christianity. Lewis, C.S. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. Print.
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