Don January 13th, 2009
We take a break from the poetic history to bring you a condensation of my review forthcoming in Mythlore of an attack on Lewis that should actually be taken seriously.
C. S. LEWIS AND THE SEARCH FOR RATIONAL RELIGION. Revised and Updated. John Beversluis. Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007.
One of the most controversial books in Lewis studies was the first ed. of John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Eerdmans, 1985). Billed as the only book-length critical study of Lewis’s rational apologetic, it concluded that none of his arguments succeed. The first edition sometimes gave the impression Beversluis thought accusing Lewis of a fallacy was equivalent to demonstrating he had committed it. Few who had appreciated Lewis’s apologetics were convinced.
Now we have a new revised, updated, and expanded edition. It has already caused much exultation on atheist websites and dismissive eye-rolling among Lewis fans. Neither reaction is justified.
Beversluis has rewritten his critique to the point that this version is a completely new book. In the process, he has strengthened it considerably. While I still find it mostly unconvincing, it does keep its promise to provide the strongest sustained critique of Lewis’s apologetic available. As such, it performs a valuable service. Those who wish to continue using Lewis’s arguments will have to get past Beversluis in order to do so with credibility, and they will be stronger for the exercise.
Beversluis takes seriously Lewis’s statement in MC that he does not ask anyone to accept Christianity “if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.” Beversluis wants to know if Lewis succeeded in showing that the best reasoning supports Christian faith. He concludes that Lewis fails.
Beversluis’s objections can be summarized in two points. First, the “apparent cogency of [Lewis’s] arguments depends on his rhetoric rather than on his logic” (20). Lewis was such a good writer that people are carried away by his words. Second, Lewis’s arguments are fallacious, and his besetting fallacy is the False Dilemma. Lewis will claim there are only two choices, refute one, and thus seem to leave Christian theism standing sole possessor of the field; but in reality, there are other alternatives not considered, and the one rejected is a straw man.
Clearly, Beversluis’s first criticism is valid only if the second is upheld. It is hardly a fault to write well unless that writing can be shown to be in the service of error. The second criticism will likely be debated for some time. The question will be whether the additional alternatives B tries to posit do not in fact ultimately reduce to the set of choices that Lewis’s more incisive analysis had set before us in the first place. In most cases, I think they do.
For example, Beversluis argues that Lewis’s refutation of moral subjectivism is vitiated by his treating it as a single genus, when actually “there are more sophisticated and nuanced versions that . . . cannot be disposed of so easily” (83). The example B offers is Hume’s theory of morals as based on feeling, which B claims is not susceptible to Lewis’s “loose-cannon generalizations” (87). Well, I think it is. In fact, it is doubtful whether Hume’s is properly a theory of ethics at all, as it has absolutely no answer to Lewis’s charge that subjectivist ethics is unable to account for the word “ought.” When the jargon is stripped away from the “more nuanced” views, it is not clear at all that B has made his charge of False Dilemma stick.
In the discussion of the Trilemma (“Lord/Liar/Lunatic”), the alleged missed alternatives include the possibilities that Jesus did not make the statements on which the argument is based, and that a person could be mistaken about being God and still be a great moral teacher. In the first case, B himself commits the fallacies of Hasty Generalization and Ad Verecundiam, telling us that “All mainstream New Testament scholars agree that the synoptic Gospels are . . . internally inconsistent and written by people who were not eyewitnesses” (123). All?? That generalization has never been true, and it is even less true today. (See Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Eerdmans, 2006, as just one counter-example. ) Surely one can be mistaken about many things, including even one’s own identity, and still be a good moral teacher. But we are asked now to believe that one could wrongly think he is the Creator of the Universe, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal Being who thundered from Sinai, and still retain any credibility on anything else he might say! B rightly argues that Jesus’ moral statements would still be true even if he were a lunatic; but this misses the point. Lewis assumes the validity of the teaching; it is the credibility of the Teacher that is on trial. B’s “alternatives” to Lewis’s choices aren’t very impressive.
What my own best reasoning tells me is that people who want to escape Christian theism can always find a loophole that will satisfy them. Beversluis is particularly good at it. It does not follow that theism is false or that Lewis’s arguments for it are bad. Whether you agree with me or with B about Lewis’s arguments, one thing is certain: the discussion is sure to continue. I look forward to that.
Donald T. Williams