Enough of Lewis

[avram]

I read the first few chapters of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity today, and I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off on behalf of everyone who’s ever been taken in by this dishonest piece of propaganda. Check this shit out, from Book 1, chapter 4, “What Lies Behind the Law”:

Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; […] The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. […] Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

See what’s going on there? He’s aware of the vague notion most people have that religion is an old-fashioned belief and atheism a new, modern belief, and wants to break this association in his audience’s minds. And that’s fine — believing something because it’s new and exciting-sounding (or because it’s old and established-seeming) is a form of sloppy thinking that an honest person does well to argue against. But look here, at the start of Book 2:

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. […] The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority — lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc, against the modern Western European materialist.

What? Suddenly, instead of being a view that appears wherever there have been thinking people, materialism is just a little minority view from Western Europe. And not only is Lewis contradicting himself here, and not only is he trying to convince us that the religion that brought us the homoousios-vs-homoiousios flamewars is some kind of paragon of liberal toleration, but the very point that he spends his opening paragraphs making here is not logically tied to anything. He just goes on to another matter. He never says “Most people have believed in a God or gods, and therefore ….” As well he shouldn’t, because doing so would draw the reader’s attention to the logical fallacy he’s trying to get you to swallow unnoticed — that truth is a popularity contest.

I’m maybe a quarter of the way into the book, and that’s as far as I’ll go. I want to throw the damned thing across the room. I don’t think I’ll be able to read anything of Lewis’s again.