This is my first post on an occasional series reflecting on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Quotes in italics is from C.S. Lewis. The rest is me.
Lewis’ basis of his first argument is that there is a law of morality that all people agree upon. He calls this the Law of Nature.
“ Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.”
“The law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one.”
Lewis then argues this by saying that what people said “about the war” would be wrong otherwise. We need to understand the historical context for this. Lewis is lecturing on the radio, and his audience is the British people of the early 1940s. “What was said about the war” has to do with arguments about how evil the Nazis are. But the fact is, the evil of the Nazis are seen by their bombing of London, and not about any intellectual arguments. Everyone in London would agree about the evil of the Nazis, no matter what they had thought about them previous to the war. This is an emotional argument, but not one that stands up historically. I think Lewis makes more solid reasons for his idea of a universal morality at other places.
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