# C.S. Lewis, Genius or Religious Kook? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 7, 2000, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268 "2000-01-07T19:32:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/41 "2000-01-11T20:54:00Z")
Gaudere - please, not James Joyce! Eric Clapton or Haile Selassie, OK. But Joyce? I could barely deal with _Portrait of the Artist_; if I have to read _Ulysses_ or _Finnegan’s Wake_ to attain enlightenment, I’m doomed! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/42 "2000-01-11T20:58:00Z")
I stalled out on page 40 or so. Even worse, I pick up the “voice” of whomever I read, both in my writing and in my own thoughts. I could hardly understand my own thoughts for a while! But they were very pretty, poetical and profound. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/43 "2000-01-11T20:59:00Z")
Wendell Wagner Member posted 01-11-2000 09:17 AM > [@](#): > > If we’re going to be debating Lewis, let’s cite the passages with at least this amount of specificity. Considering the fact that it was in the _The Case for Christianity_ paragraph, abd _The Case for Christianity_ was the only nonfiction book that I mentioned, I thought that it would be obvious what book I was talking about. What Lewis is doing there is replying to a certain form of objection to his previous arguments. He had made arguments for the existence of morality independent of what people think during a particular historical period. Someone had asked him about witch-burning. Isn’t this a case where people just a few hundred years ago believed in doing something which was then considered moral but is now considered immoral, and hence doesn’t this prove that our ideas of morality and their ideas of morality are completely incommensurable? > [@](#): > > Lewis replied that if you sincerely believed, as most people did just a few hundred years ago, that there really were such things as witches, people who had sold themselves to the devil in order to get supernatural powers and who used these powers to kill or make sick their neighbors or their neighbors’ animals, you would also sincerely believe that these people are traitors to the community and hence deserved to die as traitors. That’s a cop-out. Many Germans sincerely believed that Jews had betrayed them in WWI. Were they justified in participating in the Holocaust? > [@](#): > > What has changed, Lewis argues, is not morality, but our knowledge of the world. But our knowledge _hasn’t_ changed. Back then, people didn’t know for sure whether or not witches existed. Today we don’t know for sure whether or not witches exist. We have more knowledge that makes it harder to believe in witches, and easier to believe in other explanations, but what has really changed is that we no longer consider a possibility of us getting hurt to be worse than the certainty of someone else dying. That is what is at the crux at the witch hunts. People preferred being **certain** that someone else would die to the **possibility** that they would die. That’s incredibly selfish, and is now consideration barbaric. Granted, there are still some people that think that way, but they are largely considered to be immoral. There are similar things that we believe in, like murderers and child molesters. But in our society, it is generally considered wrong to kill some one just because that person has been accused of murder or child molestation. > [@](#): > > I think Lewis is correct in arguing that the objection given to him doesn’t disprove his previous arguments. Well, **I** don’t. How can anyone look at witch burning and say “Nope. Same basic morality.”? > [@](#): > > Of course, you still need the arguments in the previous section of the book, but this objection doesn’t in itself disprove his overall point. And those arguments are complete bunk as well. > [@](#): > > What’s different today? At least in the U.S. today we’re not executing people for merely having different opinions. What’s at least helped is our belief in due process. Some of the child abuse accusations happened in small towns. When the cases were appealed to higher courts, sometimes clearer heads prevailed. Exactly. Today, it’s considered uncivilized to kill someone just because they practice a different religion than you. And it’s considered uncivilized to deny people due process. > [@](#): > > Are we really that much better today in getting the facts straight before enforcing our morality? I think that the emphasis on getting the facts straight is _part_ of our morality. We consider it immoral to make a decision that ignores easily obtained evidence. And I think that that emphasis has yielded results. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/44 "2000-01-11T21:16:00Z")
Addendum: The paragraph before Wendell’s second quote should have been deleted. It was quoted from Wendell. Later on, I meant to say “That’s incredibly selfish, and is now considered barbaric.” And when I said that there are similar things that we believe in, I mean things similar to witches. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/45 "2000-01-11T21:25:00Z")
RTFirefly: I hope that you mean that you perceived the Gospels to be too realistic to be inaccurate, rather than that the Gospels are so obviously realistic that they must be accurate. It’s one thing to give subjective reasons as to why one believes something, but I have found that often Christians give subjective reasons why **I** should believe something. I wasn’t sure which you you were doing, so I wanted to make you aware of the ambiguity. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5f8ce5/32.png) [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Peyote_Coyote)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/46 "2000-01-11T22:28:00Z")
I vote for Genius. * * * The Coyote gnaws … but he does not swallow. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2000, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/47 "2000-01-11T22:43:00Z")
Ryan - how about if we say, ‘too realistic to be a big put-on, and attempt by the disciples to start a religion with themselves at the center of it’? I’m _not_ saying that the Gospels, taken any which way, constitute anything approaching incontrovertible evidence in Jesus’ divinity. Strong evidence for the disciples’ having believed in the veracity of their stories, I’d argue, but I don’t think the envelope can be pushed any further. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2000, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/48 "2000-01-12T07:39:00Z")
I agree that there is little evidence that any of the Gospels were written solely by the apostles, or any other individual (although it is a remote possibility). I believe that the Gospels are the result of a “collaborative effort”; they a combination of previous mystical traditions, actual events, and revisions by a culture’s collective unconscious. That my personal conclusion, and everyone else has the right to their own conclusion. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2000, 7:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/49 "2000-01-12T07:44:00Z")
BTW, you weren’t alluding to a particular religion started by a certain SciFi writer were you? IMHO, neither Christianity nor any other major religion approaches that level of phoniness. ---
**Author:** ![Phaedrus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@Phaedrus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Phaedrus)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2000, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/50 "2000-01-12T07:49:00Z")
I won’t argue the point in this thread, but there is plenty of evidence that the New Testament was written by the original authors. My point was that without the little literary technique most people and this includes you, Ryan, would say the New Testament was only myth or allegory or some such other rubbish. As it stands it IS a little hard to make the claim ( at least without looking foolish) that it was made up. The writers wrote down what they saw. Period. End of story. Ken ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2000, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/51 "2000-01-12T14:10:00Z")
Ryan - no, I’m not alluding to Scientology; all I know about it is what I read in the papers, and I try to skip over most of that. Phaedrus - I was using ‘writing what they saw’ more in a community sense, although the writing and compiling itself, I certainly believe, was done by individuals. For instance, nobody claims Luke was an eyewitness of what he wrote until well into _Acts_; he’s upfront about having gathered information and having talked to as many of the original participants as possible. And clearly he was familiar with at least the equivalent of a rough draft of Mark’s gospel, and perhaps the work in its entirety. And who was Mark? There’s no mention of anyone named Mark until Acts 12; early Church tradition says his primary source was Peter. Still, that doesn’t, IMO, undermine the notion of the telling detail. In their various communities, the original eyewitneses would have told their stories frequently, until their listeners could visualize the details and feel the emotions themselves. As the eyewitnesses started falling to age and persecution, their listeners would have considered it important to write down the stories, and put them in an ordered form. Still, they would have seen themselves as trustees and caretakers of the stories; besides which, their fellow community members wouldn’t have appreciated any embellishments in the written record that they hadn’t already heard from the eyewitnesses. Mark may have been an eyewitness for some things; perhaps he was on the fringe of the events in the Gospel. He surely wasn’t there at the Transfiguration, for instance; he had to have gotten this story from Peter, James, or John. Scholars have wondered aloud if the young man who ran away naked from Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-52) was Mark. We’ll never know in this lifetime. Nor will we know for sure if the evangelists Matthew and John were the tax collector and the son of Zebedee, respectively. Personally, I’m satisified that the Gospels, at worst, are an honest retelling of eyewitness accounts. And that’s enough for _this_ lifetime, for me at least. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2000, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/52 "2000-01-12T16:03:00Z")
The Ryan writes: \> Considering the fact that it was in the \> The Case for Christianity paragraph, abd \> The Case for Christianity was the only \> nonfiction book that I mentioned, I \> thought that it would be obvious what book \> I was talking about. You made some interesting and basically correct points in your post, but it’s going to take me a while to write a reply. In the meantime, what I was asking for when you mentioned the passage about the morality of witch burners in your post was not for just the book that the quote was in, but the exact point in the book. That’s why I explained which paragraph and which chapter it was in. I also mentioned that _The Case for Christianity_ is now mainly available in the ominibus volume _Mere Christianity_, because otherwise people looking for that book in a library might think that it’s unavailable. I was more curt with you than I should have been because early in this thread Tominator2 mentioned a passage in Raymond Smullyan’s _This Book Needs No Title_ but didn’t give any indication where it is, and I was still a little ticked off about that. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2000, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/53 "2000-01-13T09:03:00Z")
Phaedrus Member posted 01-12-2000 01:49 AM > [@](#): > > I won’t argue the point in this thread, No, you’ll just make a bunch of opinionated claims. > [@](#): > > but there is plenty of evidence that the New Testament was written by the original authors. The Gospels were written by the original authors? Well, yeah, that seems pretty obvious. I take you meant that the Gospels were written by the four “people” (and that’s in quotes because a name does not constitute a person) credited with writing them. Which is kind of strange because: one, my Bible (New American Bible) says that Biblical scholars aren’t really sure who these four “people” are. How can you credit someone with authorship when you don’t know who they are? And two: none of the Gospels were written in the first person. We have three possible scenarios for the people that first wrote down the Gospels: they were present, but never bothered mentioning the fact, even though it would have been in their nbest interest to do so; they weren’t present, and heard the stories from other people (in which case you’re wrong, and they didn’t actually write the Gospels); or they just made the stories up. > [@](#): > > As it stands it IS a little hard to make the claim ( at least without looking foolish) that it was made up. Well, if I’m given the choice between being gullible and looking foolish, I guess I’d go for looking foolish. {quote]The writers wrote down what they saw. Period. End of story. [/quote] Well, I’m so glad that you, O fountain of absolute, infallible knowledge have deigned to grace us with that knowledge. May I humbly beg you to indulge this unworthy, ignorant fool and explain just how the writers of the Gospels managed to ascertain, with their own eyes and without relying on anyone else, such pieces of information as: the fact that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, private conversations involving King Herod and other high officials, the exact transcript of Jesus’ conversation with Satan in the desert, and what happened during the Transfiguration? RTFirefly posted 01-12-2000 08:10 AM > [@](#): > > their fellow community members wouldn’t have appreciated any embellishments in the written record that they hadn’t already heard from the eyewitnesses. Well, you certainly can believe that if you want. However, my belief is that a group of people that have dedicated their lives to following the teaching of one man would appreciate any new affirmation that they made the right choice. Wendell Wagner Member posted 01-12-2000 10:03 AM > [@](#): > > In the meantime, what I was asking for when you mentioned the passage about the morality of witch burners in your post was not for just the book that the quote was in, but the exact point in the book. That’s why I explained which paragraph and which chapter it was in. Yeah, if this had been a formal paper, I would have given an exact page number (although I suppose that would depend on the edition). In a situation like this, where it’s less formal but people still need to know what you’re talking about, it’s not quite clear how much detail is necessary. If anyone had really wanted to check it out, but couldn’t find it, I would have provided more detail. > [@](#): > > I was more curt with you than I should have been because early in this thread Tominator2 mentioned a passage in Raymond Smullyan’s _This Book Needs No Title_ but didn’t give any indication where it is, and I was still a little ticked off about that. Seeing as how he didn’t provide either a location or the quote itself, he might as well not have posted at all. But I considered my post more along the lines of Phaedus’ quotes from C.S.Lewis, which provided quotes and the book they came from. ---
**Author:** ![Phaedrus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@Phaedrus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Phaedrus)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2000, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/54 "2000-01-13T12:47:00Z")
Ryan…don’t be bitter. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Phaedrus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@Phaedrus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Phaedrus)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2000, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/55 "2000-01-13T12:50:00Z")
RTFirefly: Thank you for your lucid explanation. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2000, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/56 "2000-01-13T16:10:00Z")
The Ryan writes: \> Yeah, if this had been a formal paper, I \> would have given an exact page number \> (although I suppose that would depend on \> the edition). In a situation like this, \> where it’s less formal but people still \> need to know what you’re talking about, \> it’s not quite clear how much detail is \> necessary. If anyone had really wanted to \> check it out, but couldn’t find it, I \> would have provided more detail. I think that in a situation like this, the minimum is still a chapter and the approximate place in the chapter. Since there are different editions, page numbers are sometimes misleading. I think we need to assume that we are being read by people who’ve never read the book we’re talking about and hence who need a more precise reference. ---
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2000, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/57 "2000-01-13T16:42:00Z")
WW: You’re right, it must have been Eerdmans Publishing on those Charles Williams titles. I checked ABEBooksearch and their association goes back to well before I started reading him. Sorry. I probably BOUGHT the books in Weiser’s store here in NYC back in the '70s, and confused the two. ---
**Author:** ![Tominator2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@Tominator2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tominator2)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2000, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/58 "2000-01-17T15:45:00Z")
> [@](#): > > I was more curt with you than I should have been because early in this thread Tominator2 mentioned a passage in Raymond Smullyan’s _This Book Needs No Title_ but didn’t give any indication where it is, and I was still a little ticked off about that. Relax, I’m just recovering from the flu from hell. I’ve found the passage I was looking for on pp. 22-23, in the section titled “On the Self-Perpetuating Nature of Anxieties”: > [@](#): > > He continued the position (which I think he got from C. S. Lewis) that one has to be all one’s life feeling on the edge of a razor between salvation and damnation, and that one was never safe nor could relax; salvation requires a _continually renewing attempt_. In other words, anxiety all one’s life is the price one must pay for salvation. If one loses this anxiety and becomes “smugly assured of one’s salvation” one might thereby lose it. Admittedly, Smullyan doesn’t attribute this directly to C. S. Lewis so I could be off-base here. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2000, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268/59 "2000-01-19T06:19:00Z")
Phaedrus Member posted 01-13-2000 06:47 AM > [@](#): > > Ryan…don’t be bitter. I wasn’t bitter, I was sarcastic. Isn’t the difference obvious? 🙂 But seriously, I really wonder how anyone can look at the Bible and think that it’s a first hand account. How could anyone possibly see everything that’s mentioned? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/c-s-lewis-genius-or-religious-kook/17268.md?page=2)