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The Flaws in ‘Mere Christianity’ by C. S. Lewis
It sold millions of copies, but it doesn’t persuade me
C. S. Lewis met with rejection early in his career before going on to sell 200 million copies of his books. One of them, Mere Christianity, published in 1952 and consisting of previously published or broadcast works, became one of the most influential books for Christians in the late 20th century. It remains popular, having sold some 4 million copies in the first two decades of the 21st century in its original English alone, and it is also available in dozens of other languages.
If I were primarily a businessman who worked for a publishing house and someone sent me this jackpot manuscript, I would say: So. Much. This.
But as I primarily care about the integrity of arguments, instead I say: “Oh, honey.”
Here’s the problems with Mere Christianity. First, I respond to its discussions of moral knowledge, moral disagreement, moral action, moral diversity, and spiritual diversity. Then, whether evil comes from ignorance or from bad feelings. I talk about free will, the reason to be good, the feeling of moral knowledge, God’s disappointment in us, the importance of human relationships, the “Mad, Bad, or God?” argument for Jesus, the end of the world, faith, sex and marriage, forgiveness, pride, and hope. After this, I believe I will have shown why the book fails.
Moral knowledge
Lewis assumes that there are facts about moral right and wrong, that people generally have intuitive knowledge of these facts, and that the obligation to choose goodness is a kind of natural law except insofar as it can — unlike other natural laws, say, gravity — be disobeyed. But a moral fact is entirely unlike other facts of nature, and we don’t get an explanation of what makes it a “fact” at all.
Lewis doesn’t even grant that moral intuitions are fallible. They obviously are, and this is…
