Mere christianity by cs lewis book assignment

The truth is, we believe in decency so much, we feel the Rule or Law pressing o us so-?? that we can’t bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. Summary: Firstly, human beings have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves, and the universe we live in. II.

Some Objections “ Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed Just like all our other instincts? ” We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct-by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel Just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different room feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

One cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen. The Law of Human Nature or the Law of Decent Behavior certainly do not mean “ what human beings, in fact, do”; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. When you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts.

You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave) We might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what e is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. – But this is untrue. Though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about it.

According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. It is conscious and has purpose, and prefers one thing to another. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe, which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make and cannot quite forget even when they try , and which they know they ought to obey.

Anyone studying man from the outside as we study electricity and cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently tot able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case.

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power-?? it is after all this, and not a moment sooner that Christianity begins to talk. (When you know you are sick, you will then listen to the doctor) Christianity-?? how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it, how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person, how the demands of this law have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save a man from the disapproval of God.