Objections to the Moral Law

Mere Christianity began as a series of Radio broadcasts during WWII. Lewis reports having received feedback from numerous sources, both positive and negative. He addresses some of the objections to his idea of the Moral Law in the book. As Lewis points out, he has not yet posited the idea of the Christian God, nor any deity for that matter. Lewis chooses to address objections from that standpoint. That is, only objections to a moral law in general. Because we are assuming that those we speak with in apologetics are savvy, educated, and informed, I think it's safe to think that most will understand this argument and where it leads, and very quickly and jump to some more specific arguments. I'm going to summarize Lewis' responses in this post, and address the more specific objections in the next post very soon.

Lewis first addresses the idea that the moral law is simply the result of "group think", herd mentality, or just following the pack. The instinct to protect the "herd" is present. Also present, however, is the instinct to preserve one's own life. When our society proclaims someone a hero, it is often because they acted without regard to their own safety. The moral law is neither the protection instinct, nor the self-preservation instinct. It is that which tells the hero to ignore the instinct for self preservation, and to save his fellow man. Some may argue that heroes are valued so highly because most of us would simply act in self preservation; that not all of us have that third thing that tells us to ignore the danger. Most truly heroic people that I've heard give accounts of their actions say that any decent human being would do the same thing. Even if they would not however, we cannot dismiss the Moral Law, because something is telling us that what the hero did was a good thing. Many of us spent our childhoods daydreaming about being the hero. That value has to come from somewhere.

A second objection noted by Lewis is the notion that the idea of right and wrong, of proper behavior, is built into us through education since childhood. He agrees that we might learn these things from our parents, but that does not make it a human invention. I would argue that we may actually be teaching our children to try to get around the Moral Law. It is considered child-like to demand that all things be fair and equatable, but where did our children get that idea in the first place? Surely not from adults; our first response to a child's complaint of unfairness, at least internally (and often spoken) is "life's not fair." It just might be that life under a Moral law that came from somewhere (Lewis still has not connected to a Christian God at this point, although you and I have) beyond ourselves really is fair. I would agree that we, as a society, teach our children the particulars of how, when and where the Moral law applies. This explains why different cultures have different standards. In passing, we can note that the existence of those different standards, and our opinion about them, is in itself support of the Moral Law. If we claim one standard is evil (the Nazi standard, for example), and one is good, then we are measuring these standards, and that measurement must be bigger than the standards themselves. As is often the case, no one can address this more clearly than C.S. Lewis:

"For example, one man said to me, 'Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Would you call that the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?' But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe three are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours, or drive them mad or bring bad weather - surely we would all agree that is anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principal here: the difference is simply about matter of fact."
(Mere Christianity p. 14-15)

Lewis very plainly addressed the objections to the Moral Law in General. In my next post, I will address some of the objections to the argument for God from Morality.