Mere Christianity

Recently, Richard Dawkins published a book called, "The God Delusion." This manifesto discussing Dawkins' atheist viewpoint made a lot of press, both good and bad. NPR's Fresh Air had him as a guest on March 28, 2007. The next day, Fresh Air had Francis Collins, a Christian scientist, on the show to discuss his belief that faith in Christianity was compatible with his scientific viewpoint.

Twenty five minutes (25:00, actually) into the podcast version of this show is where Collins begins his discussion of his initial atheism and his transformation to a Christian. At 27:38, he mentions a book written by an Oxford Scholar who was an atheist who wanted to back up his atheism, and the results had an unexpected outcome--"Mere Christianity," by C.S. Lewis.

This notion perplexed me. How could a reasonable atheist be converted to Christianity, especially one smart enough to be a part of the sequencing of the human genome? As a result, I picked up my copy of the book and began to read it (a Christian friend of mine gave it to me many years ago). The results might surprise you.

The foundation of Lewis' argument is morality. Lewis discusses the detail that humans tend to have a common view of what is moral and what is immoral. He states this as a fact. Lewis misses the detail that this isn't a fact and that different people and cultures do actually have different definitions of morality: e.g. abortion, capital punishment, slavery, women's rights, genocide, rape, consumption of animal flesh, etc... For each of these examples, there are (or have been) people that fall on either side of the discussion of the morality of the topic. In Christianity, Lot was considered a righteous man, though he gave his own daughters up to be gang-raped. Slavery is condoned in the new and old testaments of the bible. God *supposedly* performed a genocide of his own when he spared Noah and his family, while wiping out all the rest of humanity. Clearly, morality isn't the black-and-white issue that Lewis and Christians tend to believe it is.

For the sake of argument, though, let's disregard this difficulty in Lewis' "proof" and continue. The foundation of his argument depends on one additional claim. Given that we humans have a common notion of the moral ideal, the moral ideal must actually exist... it must have a source or an example. Unfortunately, this logical claim breaks down very, very quickly. Lewis claims that we can't call a line crooked without having a notion of what a straight line is; we would notice being wet, but a fish would not; if the universe had no light, then there would be no creatures with eyes, and we would not be able to comprehend the difference between light and dark. Each of these examples is flawed.

First of all, a blind person is capable of comprehending the difference between light and dark, specifically that one is the presence of photons within a specific frequency range and the other is the absence of them. Likewise, a deaf person is capable of understanding that sound is merely vibration of air molecules. While we have never experienced it, we are capable of comprehending that space is silent--with no matter to vibrate, there can be no sound. We are perfectly capable of imagining that a substance exists and that something travels through that substance. Take as an example ether. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were looking for evidence of the "ether." As it turns out, it was rather, um, ethereal. Scientists imagined that light traveled through this "ether" and assumed that they could figure out how fast the Earth was traveling through the "ether" by measuring the speed of light in various directions. As it turns out, they were wrong. Just like imagining darkness in a universe with no light, we imagined the "ether" in a relativistic universe.

Next, implying a fish does not feel wet because it is a water creature implies that a human would not feel dry because he is not a water creature. Likewise, it implies that we are not capable of appreciating air because we have never experienced a vacuum. This is an inappropriate example, so I'm having a very difficult time coming up with an appropriate counterexample.

Most importantly, the biggest flaw in Lewis' argument is the notion of a straight line. This brings us to mathematics and geometry. I prefer the example of a circle. A circle is the collection of points on a plane that are a specific distance from another arbitrary point on the plane. We are capable of comprehending each of these logical ideas, but sadly, none of them exist. A point is a man-made concept, an infinitesimally small dot. An atom is infinitely larger than a point. No one has ever seen a point, and no one ever will. The same is true of a plane. The same is true of a circle. No one has ever seen a circle, and no one ever will. It's a concept. The fact that we are capable of imagining the concept does not prove the concept exists.

Furthermore, it's important to point out that the concept of a circle is a human construct, and its lack of real-world existence is not a hindrance to the furthering of mathematics or physics--not unlike how the lack of god's existence hasn't affected religious apologists.