Looks like the fine folks at “Truthbomb Apologetics” have set up an impromptu “debate” of their own between Richard Dawkins and C. S. Lewis. It has this in its favor: it’s short.
Richard Dawkins: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
C.S. Lewis: “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
Notice the difference in the two approaches. Dawkins’ approach is based on reason and evidence: we consider the consequences that would result from having a universe created by a good God for the purpose of bringing souls to eternal bliss, and the consequences that would result from the absence of such a God, and then observe which set of consequences is closer to the data we actually observe. Lewis, on the other hand, uses an equivocation fallacy to make it sound like the evidence has to point to God no matter what form it takes.
The equivocation Lewis exploits is the ambiguity between “meaning,” in the sense of being able to infer context and implications of a given piece of data, and “meaning” in the sense of some specific interpretation or implication regarding some specific piece of data. The universe is full of meaning in the first sense of the word. Science is all about discovering meaning, in the sense of discovering the contexts and implications of the real-world evidence. Nothing in Dawkins’ argument has anything to do with an absence of meaning in this sense of the word.
When C. S. Lewis thinks about “the meaning of the universe,” by contrast, he’s thinking about an entirely different category of meaning: he’s thinking (superstitiously) about a very specific meaning that he ascribes to the cosmos, namely that God exists, and is good, and has a good design and purpose for life. This is “meaning” in the sense of a particular, specific dogma. It’s not the same as the first sort of meaning at all: the absence of this specific teleological “meaning” for the universe would not mean that meaning, in the first sense, was absent or impossible. It would just mean that the Good Creator was just a myth.
Thus we see the difference in mindset between the skeptic and the believer. The skeptic bases his conclusions on reason and evidence, and draws different conclusions depending on which hypothetical set of outcomes happens to match real-world conditions. The believer, however, attempts to subvert our reasoning into supporting his conclusions no matter what form the evidence takes. By confusing the difference between “meaning” in the broad scientific sense, and specific “meaning” in the catechetical and sectarian sense, Lewis pulls a bait-and-switch con that deceives the unwary into thinking science proves God, when it does not.
8 comments
Skip to comment form ↓
Roxane
November 10, 2011 at 11:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Human beings are meaning-making machines. There is no “meaning” that isn’t made up by the human brain.
Tom Clark
November 10, 2011 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve always hated C.S. Lewis; possibly because I feel like he and I have such similar thought patterns, yet the things he said are so abominably stupid.
sailor1031
November 10, 2011 at 1:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m now going to promulgate sailor’s internet law:
“He who first introduces C S Lewis into discussion automatically loses the debate”
Roger
November 10, 2011 at 3:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Tobe fair to Lewis, he was a literary scholar, so he was psychologically predisposed to think of everything as having a specific definable and discoverable meaning. It was only after he’d been an atheist by default and a scholar by vocation that he became a christian. That’s aside from the psychological aspects which would affect a veteran of WWI.
sumdum
November 10, 2011 at 6:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And if my mom had feathers and a bill she would be a duck.
Richard Simons
November 11, 2011 at 9:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When I was about 12 a friend persuaded me to go to church with him for about a year. It was (to me) completely baffling verbiage like C.S. Lewis’s that convinced me that religion had no meaning.
Johnny Vector
November 11, 2011 at 2:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And if my mom had feathers and a bill and great nasty sharp teeth, she’d be a crockoduck! And then I would win.
Helmi
November 24, 2011 at 8:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, equivocation. I can’t believe how often this logical fallacy pops up, not just for Christian arguments, but creationism, and superstition in general. I could swear that half the arguments are equivocation, and the other half are “everything else”.