Hello, and welcome to the Christian Worldview. My name is Matthew J. Coombe. I'm the Vice President of the Institute of Biblical Defense. With me is Dr. Fernandes, President of the Institute of Biblical Defense and Pastor of the Trinity Bible Fellowship. Doc, always a pleasure. It's great to be here, Max. Alright, 1898, Belfast, Ireland. a man was born. He was born with the name of Clive Staples Lewis. Hated the name. When he was two years old, he said, call me Jack. You know, you know there's something pretty significant about a guy who, when he's two years old, he has enough intellectual capacity to name himself. He grows up in a Christian environment. About 15 years old, he gets pushed towards atheism by the man he refers to as the Great Knock, which you read about in Surprised by Joy. Later on in life, about mid-30s, I think it was 33, comes back to Christianity and then goes on to write a series of books on the Christian worldview, all the way ranging from fiction to non-fiction. He was a professor of medieval literature and renaissance literature at Cambridge and Oxford, at the Madeline School, and he has gone down as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, and also one of the greatest Christian thinkers, and we're talking about C.S. Lewis. If you didn't catch the Clive Staples part, but C.S. Lewis. And I've heard you argue many times that you think that Schaeffer and Lewis, you're saying these guys were the prophets of this last age. Yeah, and I'm not using the term like prophet, where they would claim to speak infallibly for the Lord, but just as an overall assessment of their ministry, they played the role of a prophet, whereas they pronounced warnings and coming judgment if Western civilization doesn't repent and those warnings have gone greatly unheeded. And so a lot of the problems we're seeing come about today, you know, Lewis saw this way back in the 1940s and Schaefer was very much aware of it. Lewis called it the abolition of man and Schaefer called it the death of man. And so both were very, very aware. I think we've lost that, the Christian church, at best we have brilliant thinkers who can use strong arguments for God's existence, and those are good things, but very rarely do we have great Christian thinkers who see what's going on today, and from their knowledge of God's work, can tell you what's going to happen tomorrow because of it. But Lewis and Schaefer were two that would definitely fall into that category. Yeah, he was definitely a brilliant man and the stuff that he says and wrote about, I mean it feels like, well some of the stuff I'm reading I feel like he's talking to me. Like his chapter in Mere Christianity on Pride, man that knocked me to the floor. He was not a professional philosopher, as you mentioned he was a professor of video literature And so he was kind of a little bit hard on himself because he took a lot of debates with philosophers and all and eventually he reached the point where he just stopped taking debates. And I think the problem was more semantical than anything. They were using words he was not familiar with and misreading his arguments and finding supposed fallacies in them. now decades later, he's been vindicated time and time again. Yeah, and I even came across, I forget who it was, this one guy who studied Lewis's language and saw that he was referring to some philosophical term or issue, but yet didn't know that philosophical term. If you guys have ever, if you're out there and you've never study philosophy, go sit in on some philosophers talking about metaphysics. You'll think they're speaking another language. It really is. When I was working on my masters, we had some guys that were meeting together to study for one of Moreland's metaphysics finals. And this gal brought along her boyfriend, and he was just sitting with us. After about five minutes, he just kind of got up and left and was frustrated because he had no idea what was going on. I remember when I went to a national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in the mid-90s in San Francisco. And so I was attending all the lectures of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, a small subgroup of that made up of philosophers. Well, Craig Hazen was there, and at that time he was the president of Simon Greenleaf School of Law. Now he works, he heads the Master of Arts in Apologetics for Biola. But at that point he was not real familiar with philosophical terminology, and so he found out I was a nice guy, and he just went around with me from talk to talk, and I would translate for him. Anytime somebody was saying something, William Lane Craig, Moreland wasn't there, but Craig was there, and I believe Douglas Guy did, and I remember Miller, Jay Harrison, but David Clark, as they present papers, they say something, he looked a little puzzled. Give him a layman, break it down, but it's good job security for philosophers to use words that nobody else understands. They will think we're really smart. But Lewis was actually much more brilliant than even he knew. I think it was Richard Taylor who, he lost an argument to a female philosopher, C.S. Lewis, and that she supposedly proved that his argument from reason to God, from reason with a small r to reason with a capital R, that it was fallacious somewhere. And I could be wrong, but I believe it was Richard Taylor who who just said, hey, no, she just misunderstood what he was saying. And this is how it really works. And then he took it further and gave an explanation. Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about Richard Taylor, but the spin he took on, but just a little illustration he gave for C.S. Lewis's argument from Reason from his book entitled Miracles. All right, well, let's let's jump into it. We're going to cover. Well, here's what here's where our plan is. Today, I'm going to be interviewing Dr. Paniz on the non-fictional works of C.S. Lewis, namely Miracles, Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, and The Abolition of Man. Next week, he's going to be interviewing me concerning some of his fictional works, most notably the Narnia series, the Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, and Screwtape Letters. It'll work better that way because I don't have a creative side. And I am a big nerd and I do have a creative side. So let's jump right in there. Let's start off with probably the Christian work that Jack is most known for is the work of Mere Christianity. Yeah, and let me put a disclaimer out before we even get started because I think we briefly talked about possibly doing this last week, like you threw out the idea, and I just spaced it out, didn't think about it again until you mentioned it about an hour ago. And so it's, any C.S. Lewis fans that are out there, if I start confusing what argument comes from which book, just keep in mind it's probably been over a decade since I've read any of Lewis's works, although I do refer to them from time to time as I prepare for debates and dialogues and write books and things of that sort. But yeah, Mere Christianity, it's a tiny little thing, almost a booklet really. It's so short compared to some of his other works. But I think the two things that I remember most about them are his moral argument, which is a very extended moral argument, even very detailed, very extended, in some places actually I would even say hard to follow. But he has a moral argument there, and then I believe it's in his Merit Christianity where he presents the trilemma about Jesus. So I guess we can start with the moral argument. Basically he argues that we all make moral value judgments and especially when we're the one who's been wronged. When we do things that are wrong, we don't often think of it as wrong, but when people wrong us, immediately we bring in a standard and hold them and place them under the judgment of that standard. Now, C.S. Lewis then would talk about how each culture has its own morality and that he said that too often people, philosophers will spend too much time focusing on the differences between the moral laws of different societies and they'll act like well then there's no absolute moral law because each moral society has their own laws and look these you know you could have a society where they could invent car well you know in Great Britain they drive on the left side of the road we drive on the right side of the road so you could have all kinds of things like that and C.S. Lewis said but that's ignoring the point that they all do have some idea of morality. They all do have this moral code. And so even though they have differences, you can't find a society totally without a moral code. Everybody's got a moral code. So it's like that morality is a part of them. And then he also argued, thinkers often ignore what they have in common. Like very rarely are you going to find a culture, I don't think any, I think those argue you'll never find a culture where everybody wanted to be a coward. You know, so you can have some extremes, but you never get to the extreme where people are saying, yeah, I want to grow up and become a coward someday. And so there are some moral standards that obviously are cross-cultural. What he's basically saying is the whole idea of morality is not an invention of a culture. It is something that is innate to being human. And you see that even, you know, Adolf Hitler had a moral compass. Mother Teresa had a moral compass. Now, they might have been totally polar opposite when it came to the degree in which they thought something was evil and something was good, but the most important part was they both thought that certain actions were good and certain actions were evil, which means they had a moral compass. Yeah, Hitler thought that by applying social Darwinism, he was neo-pagan in his thought, but he He was also Darwinian as well. He was not an atheist, but he thought he was actually doing what was best for mankind by trying to further the cause of what he believed to be the master race. And so even he thought he was doing good. So if a Hitler and a Stalin cannot escape the idea of right and wrong, then nobody can. So it's morally warped as they were. they still believe in the categories of right and wrong, good and evil. And so I think Lewis does a really good job arguing in mere Christianity that if there are these moral laws, and by definition moral laws are not descriptive, they don't describe the way things are, they prescribe the way things ought to be, And prescriptive laws need a prescriber, therefore these moral laws need a moral law giver. Now what I did over the years is I added, I think with Lewis you'll find that one individual, you'll find within his writings that one individual, if there's no absolute moral law, If there's no moral standard above individuals, if each individual is the ultimate moral standard for himself, then one individual cannot condemn the actions of another individual. So if we condemn the actions of another individual, like a Hitler or Stalin, it's wrong. There's got to be a moral standard. We're appealing to the moral standard above individuals. So then somebody might say, well maybe it's the society. But Lewis would say, well then one society wouldn't be able to condemn the actions of another society. But I think you go even further to like a world consensus and say the world consensus was wrong in the past. Plus even atheists, even more relativists try to make the world a better place to live. They're trying to change the world consensus. So they're appealing to a standard above world consensus. And then it seems to me that atheists are even trying to condemn the actions of the past and try to build a better future so their act like this moral standard above all individuals, all societies, and any world consensus is a moral standard that doesn't change with time. And so what you end up needing is a moral law giver above all individuals, all societies, any world consensus, and a moral law giver that doesn't change with time. So I think we could take a few things there and add it to Lewis to just kind of strengthen that argumentation, but we've got to remind ourselves the guy who invents the wheel, that's the difficult part. Once we figure out how to make a car, if it wasn't for the invention of the wheel, it wouldn't do us any good. So the fact that he got the ball rolling in that area, and there were guys who had moral arguments. Aquinas had that type of moral argument. Immanuel Kant is famous for more of the modern type of moral argument. But certainly C.S. Lewis did a great service to the 20th century with his moral argument. Like I said, it was very rigorous. And numerous pages, I remember reading through it and thinking, gee, isn't there an easier way to spell this out? But even when I first started reading it, too, sometimes when I'm reading him, he's such... One thing I love about Lewis is he doesn't waste any space. You know, you see some authors today, they're just... I mean, it takes them four pages to say something that he could have said in a paragraph or a sentence. And I'm just like, come on. But anyways, when I was reading Lewis, sometimes I'd be like, where are you taking me with this? Because I know you're not wasting any space. So this is important. Because even he starts off his moral argument, not even talking about moral things. He says, you know, it's like if someone sits in a chair, and then gets up, and then he comes back and someone else is in that chair, and they're like, hey, I was there first. And he says, well, why should we say that something like, I was there first, be important? Why would that even matter? He says, even in non-moral issues, we appeal to the standards. The standard of fairness. Fairness, exactly. I was writing about this in my book. We use morality as a comparative agency in order to justify our actions. Such as, someone says, well, I'm not that immoral. I've only slept with three people. That person over there has slept with eight. So she's the slut, or something like that. But even in that, you're saying that it is better to or to be less promiscuous than that. So even in that, where they're just using morality as a comparative agency, it's still going back to this existence of a moral standard. And like what you said, if there's a moral standard, there's a moral law that must be a moral law giver. And it's interesting you brought that up too, because even moral relativists will try to justify their own actions. Yet, if there's no absolute moral law, then there's no need for justification. But you see it time and time again, moral relativists try to justify their actions just as quickly as a moral absolutist. So then, Lewis also, I believe in American Christianity, where he brings up this trilemma about Jesus. And a lot of people, it's interesting, a lot of people attribute this argument to Josh McDowell in his book, More Than a Carpenter. Because he's the one who really kind of spells it out. He spends a paragraph. Well, if you don't know, the trilemnar argument is he says, you know, Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or he is Lord of Lords and King of Kings. And Josh McDowell took that in More Than a Carpenter and he's like, was he a liar? And then did like a page on that. Was he a lunatic? Did a page on that. But where C.S. Lewis just kind of eloquently stated, you know, it's like you can call him a liar, you can say he's a lunatic, or you can lay on his feet and worship him as King of King and Lord of Lords. In fact, I quoted that statement of Lewis in one of my books. I can't remember if it's, I think it's in No Other Gods. And, but yeah, he does very eloquently state that he has not left us with the option that he's merely a good man or a great teacher. because he claimed to be God on numerous occasions. I mean, there's no explanation as to why Jesus was executed if he didn't claim to be God. And so he claimed to be God on numerous occasions. So either, I mean, you know, if you're teaching a Bible study, your students don't go home and tell their friends and family Yeah, Matt's a good Bible teacher, it's just that he claims to be, he only has one problem, he claims to be God. You know, either you're going to accept the guy as God, or you're going to reject him as a liar, or maybe he's self-deceived, maybe he's a lunatic, and that's what C.S. Lewis said. So when most people on earth refer to Jesus as being a great teacher, or even a great prophet, or a great man, he did not leave those options open to us by declaring himself to be God. You've got either Brandon, a liar or a lunatic. By the way, I don't even do that. I don't even argue against Jesus being a liar or a lunatic anymore because nobody believes that. Now there aren't like hyper-skepticism. Yeah, well what it is is that the one option that Lewis didn't deal with was legend. He's a liar, lunatic, or lord, but what about legend? Well for Lewis there really wasn't a need to do that. Because he was an expert on ancient classics. He was an expert on how mythology was written. He even talks about at one time how he and another skeptic, an older professor than him, that was teaching at either Oxford or Cambridge or wherever he was teaching at that time, and the older gentleman whom he respected, Lewis respected him very much, He said, the thing that bothers me about the New Testament, he said, you and I both know it's nothing but myth. But it doesn't read like myth. Doesn't read like mythology. It reads as if the authors really believed that they were recording historical data. And Lewis said he couldn't sleep from that night on. He had a hard time sleeping. Because he thought to himself, how come I've been lying to myself? I'm an expert. I know what myth looks like. I know what legend looks like, and I just classified the New Testament in that genre, and it doesn't fit. And so, once Lewis converted to Christ, it was just so easy for him to see that these guys who are apostles were not claiming to write cleverly. And so, these are the eyewitnesses who knew Jesus, and it's a historical fact. He was crucified by the Jewish religious leaders when they turned him over to the Roman authorities. And so the evidence that Jesus claimed to be God is really strong. And nowadays we need a little further argumentation than Lewis had back then because the arguments for the legend hypothesis have become more sophisticated, though I would still say rather weak. And I feel that even really what it does is instead of the legend arguments, all that really does is put liar or lunatic on other people. even like Anthony Flew, when he debated Gary Habermas. He was like, well, in order for Paul, for these things to be the case, and it didn't actually occur, then he would need a messiah complex of some sort, where he saw God, not what he was God. Some form of schizophrenia as well. So basically, and the same thing with the, you see people like pseudo-scholar Dan Brown, and it's like, well, the apostles made it up, so they were liars. So really what people have done, because of the historical evidence and reliability and these factors and the internal consistency of scriptures, they said, okay, we're not going to get us to admit, or anyone really to admit, that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic. So let's kind of pat the buck on to the apostles and to And too, like the Apostle Paul. But you know, like C.S. Lewis knows, it takes, what, like 500 years or so for myths to come about? For full-blown legend, it takes two to three centuries. A.W. Sherwin-White was the expert on Roman history that came up with that. But it takes a couple, just a couple generations for it to get, like, kick-started. So it works perfectly when you when you apply those principles, those dates to the deification of Buddha, or when you apply it to Gnosticism. I don't think you see any miracles true to Buddha, I think for like 450 years or something like that? Well, he wasn't deified for about 4 or 5 centuries. And same thing with... With Gnosticism, this perversion of Christianity, you see that creeping in, right about two generations later, so the Gospel of Thomas about 140 AD. And that's because the eyewitnesses of New Jesus died, and their pupils died. So he only had one apostolic father living beyond 140 AD, and that was Polycarp, and he died about 156 AD. And so it makes it a little bit harder to say, well, I was taught by an eyewitness of New Jesus. But whatever the case, Gary Hyramas has shown that 1 Corinthians 15, 3 to 8, the ancient creed, giving the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, that that goes all the way back to the early 30's A.D. to within 3 to 7 years of Christ's resurrection. Gerd Ludmann, one of the world's leading New Testament scholars and very liberal in his thought, and he's a member of the Jesus Seminar, yet he dates the creed to a year after, to at the latest, a year after Jesus' crucifixion. So you can't get a legend in just one year's worth of time. And the content of the 1 Corinthians 15 is pretty clear. It's a post-resurrected appearance. It's talking about being seen by James by over 500 brethren at one time. He died, rose from the dead. Died, was buried, rose from the dead. N.T. Wright shows in his work, The Resurrection of the Son of God, that he died, he was buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead, that in Jewish thought, when you die, then life after death begins. So if he rises, if he's buried and rises from the dead on the third day, that's not life after death. That's life after life after death. In other words, NT Wright is showing that you can't, if it was a spiritual resurrection, it would have been he died and rose. But since he died and rose three days later, he's alive after, he's spiritually alive after his death, but then there's a life after life after death, so it has to be a resurrection of the body. This is the only way 1st century AD Jews or non-Jews talk about it. The Jewish conception... Hegero, to raise up, anastasis, resurrection, all the Greek words for resurrection, even if you denied the resurrection, those words meant a bodily resurrection. The Jewish conception, because they did have an idea of the resurrection of the, not necessarily the church, but a large set of resurrections, but Yeah, it was considered bodily. And you see even some Jehovah's Witnesses and stuff like that who claim that it wasn't a full body and all this stuff. But yeah, you really get away with that in the first entry. Another thing too that plays a very big part of this that we really didn't mention is that C.S. Lewis was raised on the classics. And he loved Greek mythology. And like you said, he knew mythology. I mean, he knew it well. One of the books we'll be talking about next week is Till We Have Faces. He takes this myth and retells it and adds kind of like this problem of pain scenario to it in an allegorical fashion. But it's very brilliant. So this guy knows He knows what it looks like, how it reads, what the dates require in order to come by it, and what he said is he's stuck in this position where he's like, oh my gosh, this doesn't meet any of the criteria. Yeah, and now New Testament scholarship is catching up with what was a no-brainer to Lewis, that the New Testament is not mythology, it's not legend. New Testament scholarship is now confirming that, so you have the resurrection accounts, the post-resurrection accounts going back to three to seven years after the resurrection. Then you also have Larry Hurtado from the University of Edinburgh, his work, The Lord Jesus Christ, where he claimed that the early church from the early 30s AD was already worshipping taking part in Benetarian worship. They were monotheistic Jews. They believed in only one God. They were strict monotheists, yet they worshipped the person of the Son of the Lord Jesus alongside the person of the Father. And so he calls it Benetarian worship. He said they didn't quite have the Holy Spirit figured out yet. But he says it goes back to the early 30s AD. And that's a 600 page tome. So these are some of the world's leading New Testament scholars. Richard Baukham out of St. Andrews, Scotland. He now writes a book arguing that the author of John's Gospel, he doesn't think it was the Apostle John, but he thinks it was another disciple named John of Jesus that just lives in the Jerusalem area. But he argues that the author of John's Gospel was an eyewitness who knew Jesus. So these guys are not, we're not talking about guys that are members of the Evangelical Theological Society either. These are critical New Testament scholars. They've been trained to be critical of the New Testament, but even using higher principles of higher criticism, they've come to the conclusion that this stuff is not the stuff of legend. that this is very early stuff, and that to deny it, the burden of proof would be on you. So Lewis's trilemma, I think, really holds. If you were to add a fourth leg to the legend hypothesis, there are easy ways to refute that, to shoot it down. So that's his mere Christianity. I don't know if you wanted to talk about Miracles, his work Miracles? Absolutely. Okay, Miracles. A lot of the book, a large portion of the book is devoted to just arguing for the possibility of miracles. So he's kind of... Lewis tended to refute the work of great thinkers before him without ever really mentioning them by name. But whatever the case, David Hume comes to mind, Benedict Spinoza comes to mind with their arguments against miracles. And so Lewis just basically argues that the natural laws are the exact opposite of moral laws. Natural laws are descriptive of the way things generally occur. They're not prescriptive of the way things have to occur. And so natural laws don't dictate whether a miracle can or cannot happen. And Lewis pretty much just argues along the lines that to argue that miracles are violations of the laws of nature and the laws of nature cannot be violated therefore miracles are impossible you're stacking the deck because if just your statement that the laws of nature cannot be violated you're already presupposing that miracles have not happened. And so, Lewis would be more open to saying that defying a miracle, not as a violation of a law of nature, but as a superseding of a law of nature. Or apparent violation. Yeah, it might be an apparent violation, but it's really not a violation of the law, it's just a superseding of that particular law. And you know, once you acknowledge that Aquinas had an argument from design for God's existence, where he said when the mindless things of nature move towards the same goals, that shows that there's a mind governing the affairs of nature. And so when acorns always grow into oak trees and not apple trees, it shows that there's a plan there, there's a purpose there. And And so Aquinas would say natural laws are actually evidence for God, even without miracles. Natural laws are evidence for God. There's a plan, a complexity, a design to nature. And so natural laws are an argument for God. Once you posit the existence of a God who pre-planned and designed the world, if there's a God who is above the natural laws and put them into play, then he can supersede the natural laws anytime he wants to do so. And then I would say he's willing, so he's able to do that, and I would think he might even be willing to do that if he created beings in his image who could reason with God, and if he wanted to catch her attention, why not catch her attention? by superseding these natural laws and performing the miraculous. I'm glad you brought up these two different types because when I'm teaching about miracles and explaining to someone who wants to know more about them. I usually say there's two types of miracles, and these two types are actually two different schools of thought, but I tend to just consider them two types of miracles. One are what I call natural miracles, and then supernatural miracles. A natural miracle would be something like you know, the parting of the Red Sea. A strong wind parting the Red Sea, naturally that's possible. It's theoretically possible, although it's not very probable that it would happen at the time that you would need it to happen. Yeah, I would say the Red Sea is kind of kind of stretching it a little bit. So I would say maybe like when Jesus had Peter catch a fish and there was a coin in it. How many fish have swallowed coins throughout history? I don't know but it's probably some. And it doesn't need to be a miracle. So the miracle there is in the timing. Jonah being vomited from the fish's mouth and when he prayed, being swallowed by the fish. Those things have happened before. But it's the timing of them. It's the timing. Yeah, I agree. And what I like about that is that it shows that a miracle, too often philosophers will define miracles as a superseding of natural laws when some of the signs some of the miracles of the scriptures, there was no superseding of a natural law like Jonah being swallowed by a fish. So sometimes it's just the supernatural knowledge or the supernatural timing that makes it a miracle. And that's what I call a natural miracle. And then you have something like a supernatural miracle, which is something like, well, there's not a single thing in naturalistic history or a scientific understanding that would help us understand a body being buried and dead for three days and then rising again. And I think that's what you're talking about, if God wanted to get somebody's attention. I would argue that both of these things would get their attention. They're both equally miraculous, but these are just the two different types. So which one do you think So you're saying that C.S. Lewis would lean towards which of those types of miracles? Well, he's confronting the, he's entering into, although he's not a philosopher, he's entering into a philosophical discussion. So he's kind of accepting the definitions that are in place. So he's going with where the natural laws are either violated or superseded, whatever one, and he's just basically arguing that it is possible. So when it comes down to it, really, the Miracles are possible if the theistic God exists. That's really what it comes down to. That if a personal God created this universe and set the laws of nature in motion, or the laws of nature just described the way God generally as things occur, then he's not going to have any problem superseding those laws or interrupting those laws to get man's attention. And so Lewis really does a really good job there. But he also brings probably my favorite argument for God's existence of his argument from reason. He says that if there is basically arguing, and I'm oversimplifying it here, that if you argue Once you recognize reason with a small r, human reason, there's no basis for trusting in the validity of human reason unless it came from reason with a capital R. So basically what he's saying is we use, our atheists will use their reason to try to argue against God, but then they assume that their reasoning is valid, their reasoning processes are valid. but they have no basis to believe, if our reasoning processes evolved, if it's, you know, where do you get valid reasoning processes from a mound of dirt? Living things evolved from non-living material, it was all something that got here by chance, by accident. So there's no basis for us to trust, so if your reason tells you that atheism is true, there's no basis to trust your reason. And now Richard Taylor He came up with this illustration, he was a philosopher that came up with this illustration to put a little exclamation point on Lewis' argument there. And he said, supposing you're a lady on a train and you're entering into Wales, let's say you've never been there before, but you see those white stones on the side of the hill that spell out, welcome to Wales. Okay? So she believes she's entering into Wales. She's never been there, but she sees this fellow saying, welcome to Wales. She believes, okay, well, I'm entering Wales now. Well, let's say that Richard Taylor says, let's say that welcome to Wales represents human reason. Okay? So this lady is free to believe that human reason got there by the white stones randomly rolling down the hill and just accidentally spelling out, welcome to Wales. She's free to believe that. But if she believes that, she has no basis then to believe the message and believe that she really is mentoring Wales. So, atheists are free to believe that our reasoning process has got here by chance, by accident, and not by a rational cause. But if they believe that, then they have no basis for trusting in the validity of their reasoning processes. That's a brilliant argument. And Richard Taylor is not claiming that he's expanding on C.S. Lewis' argument. He's just kind of explaining it a little bit more, just breaking it down a little bit more with this illustration. Alright, is there anything else you want to talk about in miracles? No, no, I think maybe just lack of time would deal just real briefly with the problem of pain and then maybe move and spend a little bit of time in the abolition of man. Sounds good, sounds good. Okay, so you mentioned it before, problem of pain. I think it's probably one of his more intellectual works. I mean, it's definitely not an easy read. That being said, wow, it's a brilliant work, you know, like probably the most famous quoted The passage from there is, you know, it says, God speaks in our pleasures, whispers in our consciousness, and shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. And I think you, so you hear that a lot, you hear people always say, you know, yes, pain is God's megaphone, and they love that quotation and stuff. something like that, but yeah, it's definitely a brilliant work. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's I thought I found that as devotional as it was philosophical so that sometimes and Lewis not being the philosopher the professional philosopher he will sometimes you're reading him philosophically and then all of a sudden you realize, okay, now he's in the existential realm and it's like, you know, it's like, you know, sometimes you feel like, okay, he's debating an atheist in a lecture hall and then five minutes later from his responses you feel like, no, he must be counseling someone who's just lost a loved one and But whatever the case, you know, Lewis is basically showing that evil and innocent human suffering does not disprove the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God. And the way the argument used to go is that if God is all-good, he would not want evil to exist. If God is all-powerful, he could prevent evil from existing. but evil exists, therefore no all-good, all-powerful God exists. And Lewis is right in the lineage of Augustine and Aquinas there when he argues that an all-good, all-powerful God is justified by allowing evil and innocent human suffering so long as he allows it for purposes of a greater good. Lewis believed in free will So God cannot be blamed for the origin of evil. He gave us, God gave us free will and we use that free will to turn on God and to actualize the possibility of evil. And in order for someone to argue against that, they would have to basically claim that freedom is a bad thing. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, people could say, well, it's like somebody said, well, what's the difference between God not actually creating evil or creating the actuality of evil, but instead just creating the possibility of evil. That's just a bad one. The possibility of evil is free will. He just gives freedom to us. People don't protest with signs down with freedom. Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. I love that analogy that you give. And I believe the The late Dr. Walter Martin, I believe was the first one I heard that used that analogy, and he might have stolen it from somebody before. I stole it from you a couple times too. That's good. That's good material to steal. So with the problem of evil though, he's basically saying that there are greater good, greater purposes for God allowing evil. The courage is a good thing. Heroes are a good thing. But there'd be no such thing as heroes and courage if there was, you know, no evil. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing, no evil to combat. You know, the atheist film producer might say, well, this is not the best possible world. If there's an all-good, all-powerful God, he could have done better. But then he tries to make, to produce the greatest possible movie. And lo and behold you got lots of evil, you got a monster coming after a princess and at the end of the movie her prince returns, slays the dragon, rescues his bride and they live happily ever after. I mean you got all this evil and a plot and all this other kind of stuff. And so it seems like deep down inside we can see how an all good, all powerful God would create this trauma that we see in the world. And Lewis, as you said, the megaphone illustration shows that one of the greater goods is that pain and innocent human suffering, that's one of the things that draws us to God. William Lane Craig, in his debates, one of the great Christian thinkers, one of your former professors, He says that the problem of evil against God, the argument against God from evil sounds real powerful in a philosophy lecture hall but apparently it's not very persuasive in the real world. Because where biblical Christianity is in decline is in western nations, America and Europe. And that's where there's the least amount of suffering. In third world countries we have the greatest amount of suffering. Southern African countries, Eastern countries, Central and South America where suffering is at it's highest point, that's where Biblical Christianity is growing at a quicker rate than any other time in the history of the world. And so you see in Jesus' ministry the poor and the disabled were much more likely to come to him than the wealthy. and the healthy, and so C.S. Lewis sees that as almost goes so far to say it's an act of God's grace that he would allow the amount of evil and human suffering that occurs to bring us to himself, to draw us to himself. Yeah, and I think that he also, he goes in there I think a couple unnecessary tangents to, he talks about animal suffering. I think that's a good point though, because I haven't even heard, um, I don't even remember who it was, I think it was Lowe or, or, um, Martin, um, talking about, one of their arguments was, you know, like let's say a deer is in the woods and a tree gets struck by lightning and it falls over on the deer. That might have been Jeffrey J. Louder. Louder? Yeah, and then says the tree slowly burns and this deer slowly burns to death and then there's no one to see it, there's no one really to learn from it, so he's like, so how does something like that type of evil justify? Yeah, and with Lewis, Now that debate with Lauder was 99. When I was reading in the 1980s, Lewis bringing up dealing with animal pain, the problem of pain, I thought, you know, what a waste of paper. But Lewis, he saw the handwriting on the wall. So I'm not saying he predicted the animal rights movement. You know, he died in 63. I'm not saying he predicted the animal rights movement, but something told him. that when mankind, when the West continues to flee from God, that even animal suffering would be used as an argument against God. But there's, you know, there's an argument against God from gratuitous evil, in other words, evil that no good that we can think of can come from. But some philosophers, I believe Ronald, the late Ronald Nash argued that, well, what if Gratuitous evil, meaningless evil, is one of the products of the fall. In other words, when you just look at, you know, if the things get so bad, that you see evil and you can't see any good that could come out of it and stuff, our only refuge is to turn to God. And so if gratuitous evil, if we hear about evil that we can't seem to get any good out of and that causes us to turn to God, then the gratuitous evil really wasn't gratuitous at all to begin with because it's one of the things that's leading us to God. In other words, the gratuitous evil would would be on the outer fringes of reality, just a meaninglessness to existence, and the only escape from that would be God. And even, not so much as the gratuitous evil, but they also say the amount of evil, or the amount of suffering. And who is it that you were debating, and they said, child dying of leukemia, did he have to suffer that much? Was that amount of suffering necessary? Who was that? That was probably Jeffrey J. Lowd, because what I did there was that I stated that it was at a major atheist conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I said that Alvin Planting, in God, Freedom and Evil, he pronounced the death of the deductive argument against God from evil. Explain what the deductive argument is. The deductive argument argues from the universal to a necessary, absolutely certain conclusion, particular conclusion. And so the deductive argument from evil would just basically To simplify I would just say that the existence of God and evil are mutually exclusive. It's impossible for God to co-exist with evil. And that argument has thoroughly been refuted because of the possibility of God allowing a good, all good, all powerful God allowing evil for purposes of a greater good. And so Plantinga pronounced the death to that. So because of that, knowledgeable atheists no longer use the deductive argument. Now they use an inductive argument. So they're arguing from the particular to the whole. And so they only get a probable. So they say, instead of saying God definitely doesn't exist, they say God probably doesn't exist because of the amount of evil in the world. And I said, well, let's... I'm going to call your bluff on that. And the whole audience are atheists, so... So I said, I'm going to lessen the amount of evil in the world down to one person. And let's call this one person Lenny. Only Lenny suffers and dies. Nobody else does. I said, are you guys then going to become Christians? No. I said, let's be honest here. You're not going to become Christians. You're going to tell me, how can God exist? Look at Lenny. And so what that tells me is any amount of evil is too much in your thinking. So when you claim to be using the inductive argument of evil against God, you're actually masquerading, disguising the deductive argument, which you've already admitted. has failed, so let's just admit the whole project's a failure and stop using evil as an argument against God." And there was just total silence in the audience. And you know, and that's the thing too, is like, I just can't stand is, you just hear the same tired arguments over and over again. And most of these have been refuted back with Augustine on the problem of evil, and then, like you said, like Jack, he goes in and does a great job of taking this line of thinking to another step, but you know, just asking this question, I don't understand how God could allow this, just asking it over and over again is not a very good argument, it's not very winsome in any way. Yeah, and just asking, how could God allow this? You're asking where is the justification for God? Why does God need to be justified if there's no moral categories? So, I mean, just the fact that we even think along those lines. You know, the atheists will say, well, I'm only positing the existence of evil because if Christianity is true, then these things would be evil Well then is the atheist saying he really doesn't believe in evil? So that when he gives me an example of a guy on his deathbed dying of AIDS, and says that's a product of evil, it's not the way things ought to be, he's saying I'm just bringing it up as a hypothetical case, I really don't believe that that's a product of evil. I mean, even atheists believe in evil, evil is real. William Lane Craig has an argument, if evil exists, And God exists, evil exists, therefore God exists. And it's really interesting, because the only way there could be real evil... It has to be a perversion or a corruption of that which is good. And that goes back to Augustine too. Even Doug Guyot too, he has an argument for the existence of God based on evil. It's something like, evil exists and is a departure of the way things ought to be. If there is a way things ought to be, then there must be someone who sets the standard for the way that things ought to be. That's good. And that's in his work on evil? Yeah, I think it's on his Was Haberbach's name on that one? No. Was it Miracle's book? No, it wasn't a Miracle's one. I don't know. It was Evil and Evidence for the Existence of God was the name of the book. I've got it back on my shelf, but I haven't read it for a while. So, I don't know if you want to... Yeah, let's go on. We've got about ten minutes. Okay, yeah. Abolition of Man. Abolition of Man. Men Without Chests. Yeah. What caused him to write this, and he wrote this in the 1940s, so this is like way ahead of its time. But he saw a British textbook, I believe it was an English textbook. Yes. And that it was teaching moral relativism for no apparent reason, it just threw it in there. And to grammar school children, and he said that if you teach children and to deny God's absolute moral laws, this is going to kill culture. And if this is something that's spreading throughout the West, this is going to kill Western civilization. And so he said that this would lead to the abolition of man, that's how he titled the book. And he referred to the type of humanity, the world of post-humanity, the type of humanity that produces men without chest, men without moral consciences. And he said that science is man's attempt to, part of science, a big portion of science is man's attempt to control nature. Like, you know, there's the moon. Can we get to the moon? You know, of course, Lewis wouldn't say that in the 1940s because man hadn't landed on the moon yet, but man trying to control his environment, trying to control nature. But Lewis points out that the scary thing is there's a thin line between science, man's attempt to control nature, and magic or superstition, man attempting to control nature. and have power over nature. And the thing that he saw that caused that thin line was science being grounded in God's morality that would prevent us from crossing that line. But once you throw morality out the window, then science knows no boundaries. You do things just because you can. You don't ask is it right to clone humans, is it right to do this, is it right to do that. you just do it because you can. And he said, so if science is the attempt to control nature, and you throw out all moral boundaries, the last thing in nature to be controlled is man himself. And so, Lewis saw that science would be in the hands of the leaders, the rulers, what he called the man-moulders of the new age. That was the 1940s, before we even as a phrase in the New Age movement, but he said the few would control the billions. He said that laws would be set up, and the laws, good human laws reflect, either directly or indirectly, God's absolute moral laws. But if you throw out God's moral absolute laws which sustain a culture, you could actually not know the true God, your culture, but if you have God's absolute moral laws that could sustain your culture, But if you throw out the absolute moral laws, then man's laws become arbitrary. And in the end, the only reason for these laws, these man-made laws with no basis in God's absolute moral laws, these man-made laws would be made by people in positions of power for the sole purpose of keeping themselves in power. And so the laws would just be set up. to further the agenda of the man-molders of the new age who were the few controlling the billions. And so Lewis foresaw all of this in his Abolition of Man. I think it's interesting that not a lot of people know this, but C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on the same day, which is also the same day that JFK was shot and assassinated. I want to talk about this a little bit next week, but not much. But, you know, look at all this Huxley's works, too. The Huxleys were famous atheists, but yet, same thing, he writes about in Brave New World, is these science and technology being used to take away the things that make humans essentially human, just for the purposes of this contrived civility and the quote-unquote peace and order. Yeah. And so, you know, Lewis understood that when we take God out of the picture, man plays God. And somewhat of a deification of science, a deification of the state, and the production of an authoritarian state that this world has never before seen. I mean, you're talking about things that not only would cause the ancient Roman emperors to salivate, the kind of technology we have to track people now, but this would cause the Hitlers and the Stalins to salivate as well. But Lewis saw this, and this is where I see his prophetic voice coming out most clearly. in his work, The Abolition of Man, which is one of his earlier works, but he saw what was going to happen to Western civilization as she continued her flight from God. And it's kind of, you know, said before, he's a prophet. He's not necessarily a prophet as classically defined by scriptures, but you have a guy in the 1940s who's saying, okay, listen, technology is going to be used in a way that is unethical, and will also be used in a way to control the masses, and all of a sudden you start looking at what's going on, like you've talked about before, the research in animal-human hybrids, like let's take a rhino and slice it with human genes, we'll make him as intelligent as a human, as strong as a rhino, and then they'll be manning our front lines. So he really did have these prophetic tendencies, going through talking about this stuff, it's very scary. Yeah, and it's a, you know, a prophet doesn't have to receive a vision from God and proclaim a message or predict the future, but a prophetic voice could just be someone who proclaims God's truth and then applies it to the current situation and then sounds a warning and performs somewhat of the role of the watchman in the book of Ezekiel. And I think that C.S. Lewis did that. I think Francis Schaefer did that. We'll have to do a show on Schaefer's apologetic methodology as well someday. But I think that Lewis definitely had, I would not say he was a prophet with the gift of prophecy, but I would say he had a prophetic office in that he and Schaefer really sounded that alarm And not only did the world not heed it, but the Evangelical Church in the West did not heed it as well. And now we enter the 21st century where the Evangelical Church is much of the world. We just want our ears to be tickled. It's funny, you know, you've talked about this before, but it's almost like the perfect storm, too. You mentioned before, you know, if we had a legit constitutional government, the way our Founding Fathers suggested, let's say, you know, early you know, after the conception of the United States came about, someone like Adolf Hitler was president of the United States, there was very little he could have done. He would have been handcuffed by the Constitution, and that's the way the founding fathers wanted it. Now the fact of the matter is we can get somebody one-tenth as bad as Adolf Hitler, and he could probably do almost as much damage as Adolf Hitler did, in a very short amount of time. Because the President of the United States is no longer handcuffed by the Constitution, nor is the Supreme Court, Congress, if they would just stick to the Constitution, could reel in both the President, the Supreme Court, it could also reel in the United Nations, but the fact of the matter is Congress has just become the yes-men. Exactly. Except for congressmen like Ron Paul. Yeah, exactly. But you know, like I said, it's like a perfect storm. You have this government that is weak, it's a very blurry vision of what our founding fathers wanted, and then you have these men without chests, these relativists, you have also the rise of paganism, and all these factors are coming together, and it's coming about to a brave new world. Yeah, yeah, and I can remember the 19... 70s, early 1970s, I think it was at an 8th grade graduation party and there was one girl smoking a cigarette at the party and asked me if I wanted a cigarette and I said no and she said, what's the matter, are you too cool to smoke? and I think that she was actually ahead of her time because back then she was just weird, everybody laughed at her but she was kind of ahead of her time because We live in a society already where, you know, we have been programmed to be men without chest, men without moral consciences, so that if you're the male or the female virgin, and you're in your 20s, you're the weirdo. And they act like, in fact I even heard, well, it gets beyond the, by bringing it up it'd be a tangent, but we're at that point where if you're obeying God's moral laws, you're the weirdo, and then people almost act like you need to do your service to society, to the community by sinning without a conscience. And I think Lewis predicted all this, and he predicted it's going to get a lot worse, and I still don't think we've... Not only that too, not only sinning without a conscience, but our society is trained that if somebody does that, the worst possible thing you could do is tell them that what they're doing is wrong. Yeah. Then you're judging it. Yeah. Not only are we set up to a system where we are designed or are being groomed to not feel guilty about our lifestyles, but also making it the most socially taboo thing you can do is to point out, even if it's to the betterment of the person. Our society can forgive anything, adultery, any kinds of horrible sins, but it cannot forgive judging another person. And so anytime you try to take a stand for traditional morality automatically you're intolerant, you're the bigot, and it's all done in the name of intolerance. Now a lot of people would think if they start talking about C.S. Lewis they've gotten way off topic. And it's like no. This is what Lewis said was going to come about, the abolition of man, and we I mean, when I look at my students in their free time texting all the time, I'm not saying texting is bad and this and that, but it just seems we've gotten so depersonalized. If you put 15 young people in a room, they may not even talk to each other. They're all on their cell phones texting other people. It's just like they long for artificial relationships. and they can't handle real flesh and blood relationships. Are you just bringing this up because I was texting during the meeting earlier? No, no, just because you were texting during this interview. No, this recorder is very sensitive. I think they can hear me because I'm a pretty good texter. But then again, I was born in the 80s. But yeah, I agree though. I am a big technology geek and stuff. I have all these sorts of stuff. But I agree. It's getting to a point where... this idea of technology or the products of science. And obviously we're not anti-science in any way. We're for guided science, saying it should be used for the betterment of people, not to enslave them. Obviously we're not for that, but there is this idea of we're getting enslaved by these contraptions. And actually longing the contraptions even more than we long for real relationships with human beings, And then we have what looks like it's going to be a real relationship with a human being, we just treat each other like objects. Yeah. And so you'll get, you know, the guy who sleeps with this gal one night, and another gal another night, and then you find out the gals are doing the same thing. Yeah. And they don't think anything of it, have no shame about it whatsoever. These are the men without chest. Yeah. That C.S. Lewis talked about. This is the abolition of man. I forget, I was watching some interview and they were talking about how the college culture, and secular colleges, is so sex-oriented. I remember this one lady, I don't even remember what it was, it was some interview on TV, and she was saying that she was talking to this girl, and the girl who was a part of this stuff, she just said, you know, I just wish a guy would just talk to me. you know, and get to know me. And so here it is, she's like, you know, is going right from not knowing someone to having sex with them. And then it's like, and they're okay with it. Then she's like, well, you know, I kind of wish that I could actually kind of have like maybe a relationship with them. Yeah, you could have, you could have said no, and you could have walked away from this idiot. But, but it's just like, we're programming young ladies not to expect much. Yeah. That don't expect any real personal communion. because it's just not there. And so I think we see this abolition of man coming out in our midst, just as C.S. Lewis said it would. And you bring up a good point, too, because the worst part about this, to remind me when you said this, The people who have this abolishment, who have these Men Without Chests, they look at people who are classical moralists like ourselves, and they think these people have not evolved. And these people have... they're intolerant. And they're against free thought and free expression. And you know, there's coming a time, and time is, where Christianity as a mainstream is not going to be accepted. Yeah, and then even worse than that is going to be the fact that the man-molders of the New Ages, as Lewis called them, they're going to see those who hold to traditional morality as a threat to their power. And hence the need for re-indoctrination camps and maybe even extermination of those who don't. You know, if you say Hitler, people might be listening and saying, these guys are nuts, that'll never happen in America. Where does America have the exemption? It could happen in Germany under Hitler and the Nazis, but it can never happen in America. Hitler was elected. And somehow we have an exemption. They are still one of the best educated countries in the world. Yeah, I think Spielberg did a great job in Schindler's List. when he had the two German soldiers chase down an old guy in his house and blow him away, he was an enemy of the state, and the guy falls on a piano, and then one of the soldiers takes off his helmet, throws the dead guy's body aside, and starts playing classical music on the piano, so the other German soldier takes off his helmet, and then another German soldier runs in, and the one with his helmet off stops him, and makes him take off his helmet because they had great respect and admiration for this classical music. And it showed that these guys were very cultured and very educated, yet they could ruthlessly kill human beings. And another scene, one of them shoots a guy in the head with a semi-automatic pistol, but it jams first. And then he kind of you know, readjust it, and then shoots the guy in the head and kills this innocent guy, just for pleasure, really. He just decided to kill one of his prisoners. And then he's puzzled about his pistol. He can't understand why the pistol didn't function properly. And so here's a dead human being, and he has no concern about that. He just killed this innocent human being. All he's concerned about is, why didn't my pistol work? And that was kind of, you know, there a little bit of You know, I'm more concerned about my gadget and my equipment working properly, my technology working properly, than I am about this human being, innocent human being that I just blew away. Hitler referred to disabled people as useless eaters. That they were holding back human evolution by eating the food that could have been eaten by healthy master race types. And that was one way he helped the economy too. He was like, well, we'll get rid of all these people, then we don't have to spend any money taking care of them. And so now, of course, Hitler, a lot of the things that he did, when Lewis was writing this book, we weren't fully aware of how messed up Hitler was. Although there was some glimpses of it, but Lewis is basically saying, the entire West is going to be controlled by Hitler-type thought and Stalin-type thought once we fully abandon, once we complete our flight from God and fully abandon his moral absolutes. Alright, well, let's leave it there. I challenge you guys Read T.S. Lewis. He's got so much works out there. The guy, he just wrote. He wrote a lot. You know, it's funny. He even tried to write back to every child that sent him a letter as well, too. I don't know how he did it, considering all this stuff. And that's the thing, too. He never even learned how to use a typewriter. He wrote everything by hand, too. So, this guy wrote a lot. Brilliant works. I was in college and my friends would make fun of me because any time we had a theological conversation I would just quote Lewis. Why don't we end with a little commercial for Dr. Habermas, a good friend of ours from Liberty University. I think he's one of two or three guys that edited a work on the philosophy of C.S. Lewis. So people would search for that over the internet. I'm sure they'll find it. but that just came out. I only read a couple chapters of it and just those chapters alone were well worth it. Yeah, I saw it. I haven't even read it yet, but I did see it. So, join us next week. We're going to talk about some of my favorite C.S. Lewis fictional works and my favorite analogies and allegories from those. So, please, join us next week. Until next week, thank you for joining us for the Christian Worldview. My name is Matthew J. Coombe, Vice President of the Institute of Liberal Defense. With me, as always, Dr. Phil Fernandez, President of the Institute of Liberal Defense and Pastor of Trade Bible Fellowship. Thank you for joining us, guys. Take care and God bless you.