What Lies Behind the Law

Big idea

Summary

Building on the previous chapter's conclusion that the moral law is real, Lewis now asks what this implies about the nature of the universe. He lays out two long-standing worldviews: the materialist view, which holds that matter and energy exist by sheer accident and that conscious life emerged through an immense chain of coincidences, and the religious view, which holds that something more like a mind, conscious, purposeful, and preferring one thing to another, lies behind everything that exists. He notes that both views have coexisted throughout history rather than one simply replacing the other over time, and that science itself, being built to observe and describe what happens, cannot adjudicate between them, since the question of why there is anything at all falls outside what any experiment can test.

Lewis's key move is to argue that human beings possess a unique source of evidence unavailable anywhere else in the universe: we are not simply observing man from the outside, as we would a rock or a chemical reaction, but living our own case from the inside. Because of this 'inside information,' we know something a hypothetical outside observer could never detect purely by watching our behavior, namely that we experience a real moral law urging us to act rightly, one we did not invent and cannot simply erase from conscience. He suggests that if a power really does stand behind the universe, this inner moral pressure is exactly the kind of clue we would expect it to leave, since such a power could not appear to us as one more observable fact within the universe, any more than a house's architect could be found built into one of its walls.

Having argued that this power seems to communicate through the moral law, Lewis contends it is more reasonable to think of it as something like a mind rather than as mere matter, since matter cannot originate commands the way a mind can. He is careful, however, to mark the limits of what has been shown so far: the argument does not yet establish the personal, forgiving, specifically Christian God, only some director or guide behind the universe who communicates through conscience. In an appended note, he also addresses 'Life-Force' or Creative Evolution views, arguing that if the driving force behind evolution has purposes and strives toward goals, it is functionally identical to a mind, and therefore to what religious people mean by God, while if it lacks a mind, the language of striving and purpose makes no coherent sense at all.

Key points

• Two rival worldviews attempt to explain what lies behind the universe: the materialist view of blind chance and the religious view of a mind-like power with purposes.
• Science can describe what happens in the universe but cannot answer why there is a universe at all or whether anything lies behind observed facts.
• Humans possess unique 'inside information' about themselves that no external observation of behavior could ever reveal.
• The moral law functions as the one place a power behind the universe could plausibly make itself known, since it could not appear as an observable object within the universe.
• Lewis argues the power behind the moral law is more like a mind than like matter, and stops short of identifying it with the personal, forgiving God of Christianity at this stage.
• He critiques 'Life-Force' or Creative Evolution as either secretly identical to belief in God, if it has purposes, or incoherent, if it does not.

Illustrations & analogies

• Lewis compares the 'Something Behind' the universe to a house's architect, who could never literally be a wall or staircase within the house, so any controlling power outside the universe could not appear to us as one of the observable facts inside it, only as an inner influence or command.
• He uses the image of a uniformed postman delivering letters: he trusts that other people's unopened letters contain writing because his own letters do, just as he infers a 'sender' behind the universe from the one packet he is allowed to open, himself.
• He contrasts the way a stone is compelled to obey the law of gravity with the way a human is merely urged, not forced, to obey the law of conscience, showing that the 'letters' delivered to different kinds of things differ in content.
• He characterizes the 'Life-Force' idea as offering the emotional comfort of religion without its moral demands, comparing it to a 'tame God' that can be summoned when convenient but never obligates or interferes with anyone.

Notable lines

We do not merely observe men, we are men.

C. S. Lewis Book I, Ch. 4 — What Lies Behind the Law

The only packet I am allowed to open is Man.

C. S. Lewis Book I, Ch. 4 — What Lies Behind the Law

Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

C. S. Lewis Book I, Ch. 4 — What Lies Behind the Law

For reflection and discussion

1. What does Lewis mean by saying humans have 'inside information' about themselves that we lack about the rest of the universe? Do you find this a persuasive kind of evidence?
2. Why does Lewis insist that science cannot answer the question of whether there is anything 'behind' the observable universe?
3. Lewis says he is 'not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology.' What do you think is still missing from his argument at this point?