Nature Is Not All that Exists
The 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, respectively (August 6 and 9, 1945) have caused me to again give thought to a 1948 C. S. Lewis essay. Titled “On Living in an Atomic Age,” the essay appeared in an annual magazine, Informed Reading (vol. 6, 1948, pp. 78-84). Today, it can be found in the book Present Concerns, which contains nineteen Lewis essays, edited by the late Walter Hooper.
Early in the atomic bomb essay, Lewis asked the following questions: “What were your views about the ultimate future of civilisation before the atomic bomb appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end?”
In this context, Lewis states, “If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life . . . outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibilities of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it” (Present Concerns, 93). However, Lewis affirmed that what “the wars and the weather and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in. . . . And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. . . . [N]ow we can begin to talk about realities. . . . The important question is not whether an atomic bomb is going to obliterate ‘civilisation.’ The important question is whether ‘Nature’ . . . is the only thing in existence” (94, emp. added).
Naturalism is the view that nature is the only thing in existence and there is no God. There is nothing beyond nature (cf. Conway, David. The Rediscovery of Wisdom, 6-11). Masterson summarizes this philosophy in the following: “There is neither any basis nor any need to go beyond the world of experience and scientific explanation for an ultimate account of the meaning and value of reality in general and of human existence in particular” (Atheism and Alienation, 99).
All Naturalism leads to a “hopeless discord between what our minds claim to be and what they really must be if Naturalism is true. . . . [Our minds] claim to be spirit; that is, to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles [i.e., The Law of Rationality; The Laws of Thought or Metaphysical First Principles] and universal moral laws” [i.e., law that “rises above the provincial and transient”—Robert H. Jackson. The Nürnberg Case; The Warren-Flew Debate 1976, 2016].
Lewis argued that if it really is the case that our minds are merely the result of a chance arrangement of atoms, then the certainty of any conclusion (including this conclusion) would always, at best, be questionable. He wrote, “For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature . . . [but if] our own minds are the result of a chance arrangement of atoms . . . we should have no reason for believing in them. There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view” (98-99, emp. added)
The “much earlier view” to which Lewis referred is the view of Christian Theism. Prior to the publication of his 1948 atomic bomb essay, Lewis had delivered his historic BBC Radio talks (1941-1944). The earliest of these talks was a two-part series consisting of five talks in each part (1941-1942). These ten talks were originally published in print, “with some alterations,” and titled Broadcast Talks (July 1942). This is the base for the remaining fifteen BBC Radio talks and the earliest foundation of the popular Lewis volume, Mere Christianity (1952). In Broadcast Talks, Lewis, a former atheist turned theist, sets forth two arguments for the existence of God. The first argument is set forth as “Part I: Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” The argument here is from moral law to the Moral Law Giver.
The second argument is set forth in “Part II: What Christians Believe.” Here Lewis stated the following “There are all sorts of different reasons for believing in God, and here I’ll mention only one. Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a bye-product, the sensation I call thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk-jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God” (37-38).
Precisely stated, Lewis affirmed the following:
1. If there is no creative mind behind the universe, then no one designed the human brain for the purpose of thinking.
2. If no one designed the human brain for the purpose of thinking, then thought is the chance arrangement of atoms.
3. If thought is the chance arrangement of atoms, then thought cannot be trusted to be true.
4. If thought cannot be trusted to be true, then one cannot validly use thought.
5. It is false that one cannot validly use thought.
6. Therefore, it is false that there is no creative mind behind the universe [i.e., God exists].
The late James D. Bales, who served as Thomas B. Warren’s moderator in the historic Warren-Flew Debate, wrote, “The assault upon God in the name of reason finally ends up with the assault upon reason. Man, while trying to justify his claim to being the supreme intelligence, ends up with the denial of intelligence. Is it not a striking thing that God has so made reality that he who denies God ends up denying his own rationality when he lives by the logic of materialism?” (Man on All Fours, 52).
At the heart of the “realities” to which wars, weather, atomic bombs, et al. should awaken us is the reality that we are not merely the chance arrangement of atoms in skulls. Nature is not the only thing that exists! There is within us the link to Ultimate Reality—God. There is the metaphysical—absolute moral law beyond geography (the provincial) and time (the transient), and spirit, reason, and conscience (cf. Romans 1:18-20). Lewis summarized: “We come from somewhere else. . . . There is ‘another world’. . . . And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we ‘belonged here’ [ultimately] we should feel at home here. . . . Those who care for something else more than civilisation are the only people by whom civilisation is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best” (Present Concerns 99, 101).
“[He] has put eternity into man’s heart . . .” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, ESV).