Ockhamism
I’m writing a review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis. It’s a gripping read, at least if you’re interested in argument and belief and arguments for belief in god and the problem of evil and theistic epistemology and the difference between rhetoric and argument. Beversluis shows carefully and in detail what is wrong with Lewis’s various claims. It’s a gripping read if you’re interested in reasons for believing things, and if you’re not interested in that, you ought to be; everyone ought to be.
The most gripping chapter, in my view, is chapter 10, ‘C S Lewis’s Crisis of Faith.’ Beversluis argues (and shows, I think) that in his despair after his wife’s death Lewis (without admitting it) gave up his Platonist view of morality – that good is prior to god and good because it is good, not because god loves it – and was stuck with the Ockhamist view that the good is whatever god damn well says it is, no matter how horrible we think it is.
Beversluis points out (p. 291) that the Ockhamist view is philosophically untenable but also more compatible with the biblical God than the Platonist view is. There are a few people in the bible, like Job, who question god’s goodness from a moral point of view, but they’re ‘glaring exceptions to the standing rule that God is to be obeyed no matter what – that is, no matter how flagrantly his commands violate moral rules including the Ten Commandments.’ He cites some nasty examples (God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, but he doesn’t stop Jephthah from killing his daughter). Then he points out (p 292) that the Ockhamist god, ‘who is not good “in our sense,” is the god of ‘the vast majority of orthodox Christians, most of whom have never heard of the Platonist alternative and, when told about it, typically reject it out of hand. Orthodox Christians unhesitatingly believe that obedience to God is absolute and unconditional – that he is to be obeyed simply and solely because he is God.’
This is an interesting and deeply depressing thought.
I’m fond of Lewis’s Narnia books because they helped to put me off religion as a child. I do worry what would have happened to me had “Northern Lights” been published a couple of decades earlier. ;-)
As for the platonist view of morality, that cannot survive the story of God telling Abraham to kill his son, can it? (And if it does, there’s the matter of God’s fallibility…)
It is, as you say, OB, a deeply depressing thought. But watching Lewis come back to this point of view in the end, after talking about the Cosmic Vivisectionist, is a remarkable (and troubling) turning point in Lewis’s thought.
And the conclusion is just as remarkable. He had watched his wife die in terrible pain. He recognised that if there is a life following this one there is absolutely no reason why she should not suffer terrible pain in that one too. ‘I’ve seen what he did to her here,’ he writes. And yet, even then, he has to come back to the point where he says, that his anger at this was, after all, just anger, an emotion, and not a reasonable response to suffering.
The key to Lewis’ understanding of suffering is that, if he gave up faith at that point, at the point of his anger and anguish at his wife’s suffering, the whole point of the suffering would be lost. It would just be a surd, unaccounted for, unmeaning.
And so he returns to faith, much chastened, but in contradiction within himself. The point about Job is that he never does give up his sense of God’s injustice. Even at the end, when he ‘repents in dust and ashes,’ he does not repent of his view of God’s injustice; what he recognises is that God is as unpredictable as the world. As in the story Uzzah, killed because he steadied the ark, God is unaccountable and upredictable power. There is no answer, so all he can do is bow before the forces that crush him.
Which is all the more reason why we should give up this primitive way of trying to understand what happens to us. Now we know, more or less, even if we cannot always control the powers the govern us.
But the real problem here is that the whole idea of moral value gets tied up with what happens to us in the course of natural occurrences like accidents and disease. This is the big mistake, to suppose that sickness comes upon us for some moral reason. If we can make the distinction – and CS Lewis was struggling towards it, even though he didn’t quite make it – then we can see how foolish it is to think that there is any other source of morality than we ourselves. It doesn’t make suffering easier to bear, perhaps, but it does put it into proper perspective.
It is not clear to me that Ockham actually held what Beverluis says that he held (although I have no read his book – your review might convince me to do so). Ockham was a nominalist, and so denied the Platonic forms, but he did have a theory of right reason which is the primary norm of thought. He also argued that right reason also directs us to love God, who is infinite good, and therefore obey him; this is in fact the secondary norm. So there is still room for conflict, and later philosophers found it.
In fact, I rather think that most Christians are Platonists, not Ockhamists, and that they believe that, while there are forms of good separate from God himself, only God knows what they are, so that we should obey God on this account. Very few Christians, I suspect, would endorse a plain divine command theory of morality, but would accept divine commands because, in fact, only God can distinguish right from wrong. The human attempt to do so will always fall short.
So, most Christians, I think, accept what might be called a modified Platonic theory, and not an Ockhamist theory at all. That’s why most Christians cannot understand the Eythyphro dilemma. For them, God loves the good because it is good, but only God can know that it is. As the story says, humans have not eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So only God knows. If we knew, we would be as gods ourselves. That’s what had God shaking in his seven league boots.
Oops, sorry! I was wrong, as you will see (have already seen?).
Of course, we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That’s what all the bruhaha in the garden was all about.
The reason God shook in his seven league boots is that we might also eat of the tree of life and so become as gods and live forever. I still think that the rest of my analysis is right though. What is perhaps more puzzling is why we think we cannot know what is good, since we have eaten from that tree. Why is it thought to be hubris to claim to know?
Anyway, that’s how it is. Only God can know, really know. That’s why we must bow humbly, and take what comes, because the rest is mystery.
Eric, about Ockham – Beversluis says in Notes (p 342) “Unlike Aquinas, who held that God’s will necessarily chooses what his intellect judges to be good, Ockham held that God’s will is radically free and that actions are right and wrong contingently and solely as a result of divine fiat.” He cites Copleston’s History vol 3 pp 103-10 “for a lucid account of Ockham’s position.”
“But watching Lewis come back to this point of view in the end, after talking about the Cosmic Vivisectionist, is a remarkable (and troubling) turning point in Lewis’s thought.”
Yes. Beversluis devotes a chapter to that, and it’s my favourite chapter in the book. He wrote to Lewis at the time, to ask if he wasn’t in fact still hanging on to the Platonist view despite having reluctantly accepted the Ockhamist one in A Grief Observed. He reproduces Lewis’s answer, which is very interesting. Beversluis comments on it, “Lewis’s letter reveals that although he speaks the language of Ockhamism in A Grief Observed, he never extricated himself from a qualifed Platonism.”
Qualified or modified Platonism. It comes to very much the same thing. I’m not sure that Copleston gets it right. Indeed, having read through Copleston’s entire history of philosophy a long long time ago, he often, as I recall, gets things wrong. (I dumped the volumes a long time ago as well.) He was too much of a Roman Catholic not to. But I stand to be corrected. I haven’t read Ockham for years! Forty, perhaps.
I’m not convinced that Lewis speaks the language of Ockhamism in A Frief Observed (although I’ve ordered Beversluis’ book already, even before I’ve read your review). I think Lewis is possibly confused, as grief certainly has a way of doing, but I do think he really believed, as so many Christians do, that God really knows, and that we can’t. That was his base course. He had to return to it in the end,otherwise things wouldn’t make sense any more. But he never believed that God could make something good just by fiat.
Is it true, as you say, that “part of Lewis’s problem was that he was committed to the view that god is good in our terms”? Well, it may look like a gambit, but it’s taken very seriously by Lewis and other Christians, that, though things look, in our terms, very bad, they look, from God’s point of view, very good. So, no, he wasn’t committed to thinking that God was good in our terms at all. In our terms God looked very bad indeed – that he could not deny, after experiencing the death of his wife – but he believed that, in the end, what seems bad in our terms, will look good from the point of view we then will have. We will be able to see all our sufferings, no longer in our terms, but with God’s much clearer view of things. That’s why I say that Lewis does not accept what Beversluis would call an Ockhamist view (even in A Grief Observed), but a modified Platonic view. But I await with some interest the arrival of my copy of Beversluis’ book.
Having said all that, Lewis’ book is a very troubling portrait of a man trying his damndest to be honest with himself, but finding, in the end, the need to retreat back into faith, unable to accept the horror of what he had discovered through his own experience.
Well it’s true that that’s what he had written in the past, at least. Yes, he was committed to thinking that God was good in our terms – that’s one of the things he defended. Then he found he couldn’t believe it any more.
Having said that, I did wonder about Coplestone’s possible Jesuit erm bias.
It occurs to me that I’m not convinced there’s a difference between the Ockhamist (to accept that adjective for utility for the moment) view and the ‘only God knows’ view. It seems to amount to the same thing. Either way, whatever god does is ‘good’ because god does it. Either way we’re not allowed to say ‘this is bad and if god exists god is a shit.’ Either way we’re required to accept the unacceptable merely because god is god.
Well that’s obvious enough I suppose. That’s why we (atheists and skeptics) don’t buy it. We flatly refuse to say that bad is good merely because it is the will of a putative god. Theists are desperate to believe that god is good so they throw out everything else, including any meaningful sense of good, to retain that belief.
This is why theists are ultimately so horrible. They care more for their horrible god than they do for a real sense of what is good. They swap the one thing that makes humans tolerable in exchange for the privilege of worshipping a sadist.
Beversluis is perhaps saying the same thing. Page 287:
“The God who knocked down Lewis’s house of cards is not recognizably good in any Platonic or qualified Platonic sense. Lewis can only continue to call him good by providing himeself with an unlimited supply of extraneous reasons…The God who knocked down Lewis’s house of cards is an Ockhamistically conceived deity who is called good no matter what…’Good’ now means not only ‘whatever God commands‘ and ‘whatever God wills or permits‘ but also ‘whatever God is or does.’
This is what’s so awful. God is just good by definition – so ‘whatever is, is right.’ So…Auschwitz is right, Rwanda is right, Congo is right, Darfur is right, the Irawaddy floods are right, drought is right, famine is right; everything is right. And there is nothing that could show God is not good. So we’re stuck with the nightmare.
OB, I don’t want you to think that I am arguing in favour of Lewis’s claim. I think he funks it, and that the evidence for this is there in A Grief Observed.
However, every religious argument which tries to account for the ‘apparent’ evil all around us, must, logically, either take the apparent evil as not really evil, or hold that what is only apparently evil, looked at from the limited human point of view, is really (when we know that to which it leads) good, despite seeming evil to us.
So, God cannot turn Auschwitz into something good. It is not. In itself it is unreservedly evil, and I suspect that most religious people are of this view. However, it can be seen to be retrospectively good – this is the religious claim – when seen from the point of view of eternity. Now, we know this is all bullshit, and it is important to point this out, but it is not altogether fair to attribute to religious people beliefs which they do not hold.
On the other hand, the fact that they cannot see that this is bullshit allows religious people to overlook monstrous evil. This point comes out clearly in Lewis’s book on his wife’s death. Did he not take these evils into consideration already? How did the death and suffering of this one person then undermine his faith? It must all have been a house of cards. But this is something he cannot acknowledge, so he covers up his suffering by dismissing it as mere emotion. His beliefs were the truth. He had simply been derailed by emotion.
And we can see it happening right before our eyes on page 61! He turns his sorrow into nonsensical babbling. Here it is:
“An then one babbles – ‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?
It was allowed to One [did you see the magic wand?], we are told, and I find I can now believe again.”
That’s where it’s all done, quicker than the eye. But what Lewis doesn’t notice, while he’s waving the wand, is that he covered up his wife’s suffering, and the suffering of Europe, and all the people who ever suffered, under a blanket called faith. We can overlook all that, and that’s what is so dangerous about faith. Not that it calls evil good, but that faith is a blanket that hides the evil that we know all too well. It makes us feel safe in the dark. And Lewis, I think, knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it just the same.
Eric,
Is that true? Every religious argument that tries to account for evil must either say evil is not evil or that evil is good (which is the same thing)? I don’t think that is true. You could have a religious argument that didn’t have to include an omnipotent benevolent god, for one thing.
And not so fast, about most religious people being of the view that Auschwitz is evil. Don’t forget that Richard Swinburne and others argue that Auschwitz provided the world with opportunities to show courage and the like. That doesn’t necessarily mean that most religious people agree with him of course – but his view is not considered flaky except by atheists – at least not that I’ve seen.
Ah, well, you have to add so many qualifications in religious arguments that it’s almost impossible to know what religious people say.
I think most religious people would hold Richard Swinburne’s understanding of the good qualities that come out of Auschwitz flaky. Of course, I can’t speak for them, but even in my ‘religious years’ Swinburne was considered a bit of a joke.
It is true that some religious people do accept the limitedness of God’s power. Kushman does it in Why do bad things happen to good people?, but the move has not been widely supported.
But even if you accept Swinburne’s idea that good can come out of evil, you are also accpeting that the evil is evil, but that some evil is necessary if some forms of good are to exist. It’s not a very compelling argument.
Most religious people, I believe (and obviously I can’t speak for them all, if indeed any would allow me to speak for them), do not believe that God can make evil good. What they believe is that what is genuinely evil, both from our and from God’s point of view, will be seen to be worth the good that will come from it. Something like Swinburne, but not so simplistic in conception.
And then, of course, there are arguments like those taken from Simone Weil about the sharing of human suffering in order to produce a much greater good than would have been available had suffering not existed.
Now, I don’t share these beliefs, but I do not think it is altogether fair to saddle religious people with the rather simplistic view that what is evil to us is in fact good to God. Even Swinburne, for all his shallowness, doesn’t claim that.
Some philosophical theologians, like DZ Phillips, in his last book (I believe) The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, holds that many Christians (and other religious people, no doubt) are quite aware that theodicy can be a betrayal. As he says: “Such writing should be done in fear: fear that in our philosophizings we will betray the evils people have sufferred, and, in that way, sin against them. Betrayal occurs every time explanations and justifications of evils are offered which are simplistic, insensitive, incredible, or obscene.” (xi)
I don’t think Phillips succeeds in solving the problem, but he is aware of the moral dangers of trying. This is something that Swinburne is blithely indifferent to, and I do not think his views are taken seriously except by a lunatic fringe of believers, though I may be wrong. And if they would accept this view, then they should be dismissed as simply out of touch with reality. The kaleidoscope of evil is much more varied than the good that might derive from it.
I think religious people need to consider their own sufferings, or the sufferings of those dear to them, and look at them steadily and to see them whole (to borrow words from Arnold). This is precisely what Lewis failed to do, and that is why, in the end, his wife’s death did not touch his faith. Well, it did, momentarily, but then he dismisses it, because faith was more important to him than one woman’s suffering, even though he loved her. His faith buckled under the strain, and nearly broke, and he recognised that, but went on believing anyway. He should have betrayed his faith, not his wife. I have often wondered whether he felt no guilt at such a betrayal.
Once you allow your own sufferings to address your faith, you cannot go merrily off dismissing the sufferings of others, something that religious people find it rather painfully easy to do. (I suppose, in some respects, we all do, otherwise we would impoverish ourselves to help relieve them.) At least that is what I found. For the nine years that my wife was ill, declining visibly each day, I undertook a study of the Holocaust, and when she died, if was their sufferings as well as hers that I mourned and mourn still. God was nowhere to be found in any of it.
I am in the midst of reading Richard Evans’ new book (the third volume of his history of the Third Reich) The Third Reich at War. It is perhaps one of the most terrible stories of them all. In such a world, no one is in charge. And anyone, like Swinburne, who tries to justify what happened, has lost their humanity, no matter how rationally they appear to speak.