Mere Christianity

Lewis begins by recapping the arguments of the previous chapters—namely, the difference between natural law as it applies to objects versus human behavior. Now, Lewis wishes to address what this tells us about the universe.

He points to two general approaches to this issue, the first of which is the materialist view. Those who hold this view believe in the Big Bang theory. Lewis emphasizes that this view involves a series of flukes where the odds were one chance in a thousand. The religious view, meanwhile, believes that “what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know” (22). This mind is conscious and has purpose.

Lewis argues that science alone cannot prove which of these two theories is correct, since the religious view is attempting to answer a fundamentally different kind of question than those posed in science—not how something works but why there is anything to “work” in the first place, and whether that means something. To get around this impasse, Lewis notes that there is something that we understand through non-scientific means, and that is humanity. As human beings ourselves, we do not just observe humanity from the outside; in fact, any creature observing humanity from the outside would fail to understand key elements of human experience, including our sense of moral law, since this is not only about what we do but what we ought to do.