The Great Divorce

As part of my effort to understand Christianity I have taken up the task of listening to some of C. S. Lewis' work.  Fortunately the library in my area has quite a collection of C. S. Lewis books in audio format available for download.  I have already read some of the Chronicles of Narnia as a child and read or listened to the Out of the Silent Planet trilogy.  I've seen two of the movies based on the Chronicles.   About a year or so ago I read Mere Christianity.

One of the things I notice about the work is that he has a habit of making the non-Christian position look silly by portraying a world in which Christianity is true and made obvious.  Then non-Christian characters are left to explain their position, which is of course indefensible.  Events happen in these fictional stories which provide evidence for Christianity.

Perhaps C. S. Lewis believed that our own world was like that as well as the fictional ones that he portrayed.  As near as I can tell, he believed that his own conscience and the conscience of every human provides such evidence.  He asserts that the contents of the conscience are consistent with something like the Christian world view being correct.  I believe that they are also consistent with something like evolution being correct, and for this we don't need to make as many unwarranted assumptions.

First, the necessary conditions for evolution taking place are obviously present.  Heredity and variation exist.  The variation that exists causes some individual organisms to survive and reproduce better than others.  Hence there will be a force of natural selection that can explain why organisms tend to be adapted to their respective environments.

The reason why evolution is not just common sense is that we cannot be sure that new genetic variation within the species will be introduced rapidly enough to account for evolution on the time scale allowed.  To do this we would have to know the rate of mutation and how long organisms have been around.  It is also not obvious that this process can explain how it could be that every organism on the face of the earth could be related to every other organism.  However, biologists have done the requisite work and made the appropriate observations to confirm that all this is true.

It is true that as yet there is no satisfactory explanation for precisely what natural chemical reactions could have taken place that would account for the formation of life in the first place.  Further we don't have any explanation for what made the universe that is capable of supporting the necessary complex chemistry involved in life.

Yet these are not needed to object to this argument.  So long as we can account for the formation of human moral and ethical values by resorting to natural selection, C. S. Lewis' argument will not stand, because we have a natural explanation for why those values exist and do not need to resort to a supernatural one.  One might argue against the theist that natural causes could have led to the formation of the universe and life, but this is not necessary.

The attributes that we usually think of as being moral tend to be ones that will benefit those who are close to the one who has these desirable attributes.  We tend to benefit from association with those who do good and harm results from interaction with those who do evil.  This explains our moral and ethical values.  We will want to put some effort into being the sort of person that others will want to interact with, but we will have other interests as well.  This is why none of us fully live up to our internal moral code.

Further if the god of the Holy Bible is responsible for forming our consciences, or it is at least the case that His plan is for our conscience to be such that it enables us to have a relationship with Him, it would seem odd that He would do things that would put us at odds with Himself precisely because of the contents of that conscience. Why would He put references to divinely sanctioned genocide in His word?