I’m sure many, if not all, the people who read this site have read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It seems like the prerequisite reading for anyone on facebook who is listed as a Christian and also who has books on their profile. A badge of honor, one might say, for any good Christian boy or girl it to have read this book at some point as if to point out that they had read the authority on logical progression from a moral law to Jesus Christ. I too have read this book and regard it with probably the same level of respect as Lewis himself gave to the works of Augustine and MacDonald. However, when I read it again earlier this year I was hoping for a renewal of confidence in my own arguments for theology. Unfortunately, I found the opposite.

If one recounts what the first part of Mere Christianity is about one will remember the foundation Lewis laid for the rest of his argument: that there seems to be a universal moral law. This idea, in and of itself, flies in the face of the modern view of pluralistic ideologies and most readers would be content to leave it at that and move on, satisfied that they had uncovered the truth beneath an otherwise innocuous stone. But for myself, I had a difference take on it this time around. For me, the problem lay in that while there was good evidence that a universal moral law existed, there wasn’t much talk about where it came from. It should be noted, Lewis himself at the beginning of the book stated that he was not writing the book as a theologian or for theologians but for the common layman and so this omission of where the values of the moral law came from (aside from the obvious conclusion Lewis was attempting to make) was not considered for the sake of brevity.

In my view though, I was left with a dry mouth. Lewis had shown that there did seem to be a universal moral law that extended throughout civilizations that was also apparently mutually exclusive to a particular religion. For example, stealing and murder were universally condemned where as bravery and self-sacrifice were extolled. The problem was no alternatives were presented to where these universals came from other than the conclusion that they pointed to the existence of a supernatural origin. I had many friends who would look at the argument then that “universal morals extend everywhere therefore there is a god” and laugh. And at first blush, as well they should. The argument can be made though that these values seem to all be within man, why should we not conclude that they are a natural extension of the animal kingdom into our animal bodies?

This argument takes place because several of our own values can be extended into the animal realm of survival. “Do not murder because it will be detrimental to the species.” “Do not steal or our means of supporting ourselves may collapse.” And so on. It would seem then, that because an alternative solution exists to the question of values’ origin that we should then invalidate the original conclusion or at least not make it the sole conclusion we can draw (and thus negate the absoluteness and the core of Lewis’ argument).

This problem has been bothering me for about a year. I tried very had to think of something that is not found at all within the animal kingdom, no trait or behavior at any rate, that could not be a relic of what we call today “human nature” or what we possess that is somehow beyond the realm of what could have been nature specific. At one point I thought I had found that music might be something unique to humans, but that fell out of favor as it did not touch upon the merit of values, only of our ability to discern that some combinations of tones were more pleasing to our nerves than others. This problem confounded me until last night as I drove home and decided to listen to an audio book as I did. I chose to listen to The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.

The Abolition of Man is a three part essay in which Lewis sets up the basis for answering this question. In this work, he does not define where values come from (he makes no mention of the Christian god) but instead where it does not come from. Specifically, he defines the moral law as something that can not be deduced from nature or instincts within man. He does this within three separate stages.

In the first part “Men without Chests” Lewis describes something he as found in a school literature book in which two professors are making the point that when something is said about an object (the example given was “That waterfall is sublime.”) the meaning of the statement is not that the waterfall itself is sublime but that the feelings the speaker is having about the waterfall is sublime. The act of giving an object value then is “debunked” and replaced with the value itself coming from the feeling the speaker has and not from the object. The conclusion Lewis draws then is that modernism is interested in removing intrinsic values and replacing them with values which stem from subjective relativism.

In part two, “The Way” Lewis moves on to say that using this new relativism based on feelings that stem from within man himself will ruin civilization. He grants exceptions to two scenarios though: that educators can find a basis for which their system of values is more valid than the one they are replacing and using “instinct” as the arbiter in which system is better. Here he separates the “moral law” (or the morals which are universal to east and west) which he calls the Tao from the man made system of values. Changes made to a system of values outside the Tao is subject to failure, says Lewis, because most external value systems are made from picking and choosing which bits of the Tao are useful and which are not. They validate some and discard the rest. The problem in this is there is no reason given that one value should be put above one other. One must discredit all or none of the Tao. Changes made from within the Tao need no special reasoning as any changes are intrinsically an extension of an existing presupposition. The difference in the Tao and external is as Lewis put it, “the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.’”

The third part “The Abolition of Man” takes the train of thought to its logical conclusion. We have thus been subjecting our moral value systems to the same conquering of nature as we have electricity and genetics. In reality, says Lewis, we are really only giving more power over ourselves to lesser and lesser men. He does not abdicate that science if evil, nor even of its misuse, but he does state that with technological advancements and man’s conquering of nature we in truth seem to only be at the will of those who wield that power whether it be bombs or power companies or radio stations. He also states that our future generations are dependant on our actions as we are dependant on those individuals who hold nature in their hands. In short, there will come a time when through eugenics and science, one generation will rise above the rest and wield the most power as possible by humanity over nature. He will have molding man to his own image and removed everything from their value system that was not man made. With his own value system created by a select few who are above the value system as its creators he creates a system based on instinct and want. IN short, man has been playing a sham all along. IN conquering nature we really only allow nature to finally conquer us.

This was the answer I was looking for. The Tao can not be something that arose from nature because it is a system that seems to push down the natural impulses or controls them and bends them to our own will. This seems then to validate the rest of Lewis’ argument within Mere Christianity. I would highly recommend that you read this book if you have a chance if you would like a better understanding of the actual base from which the rest of Mere Christianity is written and is presented in a much better way than I did in this article. I’m grateful I was able to find this book and learn from it the answers I had been looking for as well as finally hearing put to paper the types of thoughts I had been having over the last year.

You can read The Abolition of Man by following this link: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

But before I get to what my response was, I should add this. I’ve been putting off saying anything about this until today. Today I saw another group simliar to the first one. This one is on facebook as well and is called Love is the Movement. The point in this one is to tell people on the day before Valentine’s Day that they are loved. Thats a nice thought. Except the people who are actually depressed will see straight through this veiled attempt at others trying to make themselves feel better. It would seem to me that people don’t know the difference between “the blues” and actual depression. Actually depressed people don’t care what you think. They will see you for the tool you are if you decide to show them any kind of attention on one day and tell them parrot “I love you and think you are important”. Doing this on one day, to anyone, is meaningless and only serves to let those who don’t bother to understand depression to feel like they are doing something.

At any rate, here is my response to “well then what should people say to suicidal people if not the above?”:

hmm.. what to tell them indeed. Actually this is a pretty complex problem and not nearly as simple to try and work out with someone as the people in that group would like to think it its. Generally there are two types of people who contemplate and/or attempt suicide (of course each case is different). Ill try and tell you what I personally think about both of them here.

The first type is the most common, they are what I would like to label as impulsive suicidal people. These individuals are typically prone to talk about suicide as a way to get the attention of those around them. They are normally basing their decisions on irrational logic in their head. A good example would be someone who wants to kill themselves because their girlfriend broke up with them or they lost a lot of money. The problem they are fixated on is an extremely temporary issue i their lives but to them it is all encompassing and they cant see past it. What they are seeking is something or someone to either remove the problem from their lives or fixate them on something else. If and when they decide to attempt suicide their method is typically something non-lethal (or something reversible) such as trying to overdose on aspirin or cutting their wrists, or something else that takes some time to work. Its not actually an attempt to die so much as a cry out that they need someone to help them out.

A good plan of attack for helping these people is pretty straight forward. First you need to let them talk to you. Let them know that you are available to talk and that you will listen to them if need be. If they trust you enough they will probably end up spilling all the problem on you in the course of just a few conversations. The problem is one that is usually identifiable from the outset and you can then try to help them deal with that issue. Instead of telling them things will be better, try relating to them if possible. Get them to relate to you as well. share stories and experiences that are close to what they are now going through and show that in those cases eventually things did in fact get better. You have to let them work through the stages of grief on their own with you as someone holding their hand, not as someone dragging them to “acceptance” in one sitting. Eventually the problem will either be resolved or accepted and the person will be able to stand on their own again. In my experience working with people like this the response time from initial “I have a problem!” to them being stable again is about a month.

The second type of suicidal person is much more difficult to explain and treat. I would label these people as truly suicidal. You have to understand first that the decision to end their life is not about a single event, perhaps not even a series of events, its their whole being that they want to escape from. The depression that precedes suicide in these people is something that isn’t easily conveyed to others who tend to have a cheery disposition on life. The depression they are facing is something that is life long, or at least longer than a year and is all encompassing. The best way to describe what its like is this: imagine that someone’s personality is like a star. In most people they shine brightly and occasionally have their problems but all in all are happy people. In impulsive suicidal people they are like temporarily dim stars that just dont have enough fuel to keep going, or have something in their middle that makes it so they cant shine. If left alone those stars will go out. truly suicidal people are like black holes. Their personality has collapsed in on itself and begins sucking in everything around it. The person at the middle cant reach out to anyone else without feeling the need to pull them into their own despair and so they tend to shy away from previous social pleasures. Even if they try and touch someone else to let them know of their problem any positive influence is quickly sucked back into the depression and crushed with tremendous force. Its a shroud of blackness that is nearly impenetrable and that follows the person no matter where they go or what they do. It haunts them even in their happiest of moments so everything is twinged with black. truly suicidal people want to escape this blackness which emanates from within themselves and to do that they rationalize that if they remove the source (their own self) that the torment will end.

There is no clear way of dealing with this. If it was just clear cut then it wouldn’t be that much of a problem. We could just say “god has a plan” and they would feel gods love and feel better. But the problem is that these people are actually rational. All the inversion gives them time and opportunity to think about their situation. In their case, if they are on the verge of suicide and happen also to be religious, they have normally already concluded that god has abandoned them or at least allowed this to happen to them. They have prayed and prayed to god to give them peace which has not come for years and years. They will not take any advice about god from anyone without a dark smile that speaks volumes about how much they now trust god to deliver them. Also, to them, everything will not be alright no matter how much time you show them. Their life has been a constant blackness for years and its now all they know. Show them the happiest moment and they will still find the blackness hovering above it, waiting for them to be weak.

The best course of action with this situation is to just be a friend to them. This is more intense than the previous type where you merely had to listen, for this type you must be interactive with them for as along as it takes. You have to be prepared to be sucked into their despair with them to help guide them back out. You have to be able to sacrifice for them. Unfortunately, in today’s society, people would take one look at this and say that it wasn’t worth it to them. The amount of effort and the amount of immediate return is slim if any. The problem here is, either you can get sucked in as well, or you can give up half way in and leave them twice as bad off as they were because they will feel abandoned or betrayed. They need a guiding light as well as someone to lean on, someone they can trust completely so that they will follow.

Eventually they will open up and in the twisting nether of their reasoning you will have to find the one or many root causes of the depression and help them to overcome them. These root causes are generally not so simple as the previous type. While they may appear initially to be something like “my girlfriend left me” theres usually something more underneath it all like “i hate myself and push people away” or “why do i have no confidence?” You have to identify this first and then let them know thats what you think. You have to get them to question their own rationality behind connecting all the bad events in their life to their depression and ultimately to the conclusion that death is the only escape. Once you can get them to accept these root causes you can then help them try to overcome them with time.

Even if you can eventually pull them away from the edge of death, there is no solution to the depression, only degrees of it. If in the course of finding the root causes you find voids that need to be filled, you can help them fill them. But in the end that twinge will probably always hang there for them. If you can, try to get them to see a physician. Sometimes medicine is a good help to have as depression of this sort is commonly biological as well as psychological. You can get their family and other friends to help you. You don’t want to tell them everything that you have been told as that would betray their trust, but you can let them know that they need help and need it from those closest to them. If everything works out perfectly you can minimize the depression and maximize the contentment. The process will take years and be a constant battle all their life.

Anyway, the problem I have with the group you joined is that it seems like the same old thing again and again from young adults. They want to be helpful and don’t know how to be so they invent ways of pretending to help to make themselves feel like they are doing something. Suicide hot lines don’t work for truly suicidal people, neither do groups like this. I personally believe that if these people want to help the truly suicidal and depressed that they need to try and understand what kind of problems and torments plague those they are trying to help. We can all sit back and say well this and this would work on so and so, but really it doesn’t do anything but make those who use such lip service feel like they have contributed to the cause. If you want to save someone, you have to sacrifice part of yourself to that person. It takes nothing less to save a life.

I hope I answered your question…

As such, I would like to think I began a small excursion towards “enlightenment” (or really it was more me deciding to stop acting like a jackass and find something more meaningful in my life). Part of this excursion was what has turned out to be a possible end to the logical progression that started several years ago.

As I have explained before, I think that logic is the best way to find truth in anything. You start with something monumental like “Jesus is lord” and break it down into its constituent parts. For this case you would start asking “What is lord?” and “Was Jesus a real person?”. Continuing the example, the latter branch breaks down further into “Was Jesus who he claimed?”, “How do we know?”, “Where the gospels accurate?”, “Why should we believe them?” and so on.

This logical journey started probably eight or so years ago when an event in my life shattered a fairly picturesque view of God and life in general. The details are not important, but what is important is that I lost my faith once almost entirely except for a tiny piece in me that wanted to hold on to a belief in a God. Subjective and insubstantial now that I look back on it, but really, thats all that there was. Since then I have been picking apart not only Christianity, but also the fundamental building blocks of most major religions: spirituality, morality, societal mores, an afterlife, etc.

The purpose ultimately was two-fold. One, I wanted to prove to myself that I was not just blindly following the supposed words of a prophet from two millennia ago whose existence may not even be real. And Two, I wanted to discover the true joy in finding God and maybe share it with others. The first part of this, to me anyway, was essential to the second. Proving God’s existence through logical argument should be possible if God exists as described within the Bible. To quote Galileo, “I do not believe that a God that gave use logic and reason would mean for us to forego their use.” What was essential to me was a picture built, not of stories and lose fitting feel-good messages, but a solid picture of something I could touch and explain.

The second part stems from the first. Over my few years of being on earth, I have discovered one thing: non-Christians who become christians tend to have a fuller and deeper faith then those who had grown up in the church. C.S. Lewis, Saint Augustine, Francis Schaffer, among others, all came from disbelieving backgrounds, sought out to disprove God and ended up finding him instead. Their journey netted them understanding, peace, and what I consider to be a more “real” relationship with God. As such, their writings spell out for the non-believer what our faith means and by extension can help those who would initially reject God outright gain a foothold in the path towards understanding. This is my main goal: to reach an understanding as best I can and then help share my spiritual journey with those who have spent their lives with the same scientific and philosophic backgrounds as myself and who categorically deny God. Maybe I can plant a seed of self-reflection.

But I digress. The end result seems to have netted some logical arguments that are at the root of the God question and other problems as well. I will cover these more in depth in future articles but I will share them with you here as well. If you would like to contribute your thoughts on these I seriously welcome any argument for or against. I currently believe these are indivisible, root arguments but I would like to be proven wrong ( I would hate to have the arrogance of saying “I found it!” when I’m only 23).

1) Q: Given that belief in God requires a certain leap in faith, how large of a leap must there be from total atheism to the start of a journey to God? (i.e.. To start becoming a christian, would you have to accept all of Jesus all at once, or is there something smaller that can be built upon?)

A: The smallest leap of faith required between atheism and the beginning of the belief in God is the belief that humans posses a soul, or something within them that is not material that without the body continues to be human.

2) Q: What is the fundamental difference between atheism and theism?

A: How a person from either persuasion views the concept of death and how they adjust their lives accordingly.

3) Q: Historical trends of relativism can, in part, explain a loosening of societal norms over the last half century and can be argued that they are contributing to a decay of social stability, but can something more concrete be at the root of these trends?

A: While it itself is a consequence of these trends, a fear or unwillingness to commit to anything philosophically solid (meaning it would force us to conform to something outside of ourselves) can be found at the root of nearly all growing social “ills”. (e.g.. divorce, sexual promiscuity, crime, etc)

These are the three big ones. I am sure there are others. I will probably be writing an article on each of these three and I would very much appreciate any and all feedback on them. If you have any insight you can comment here or send me an email at kami at falseblue.com.