I’m reading Mere Christianity and The Fellowship, and just finished the part of the latter that discusses Mere Christianity. I’m thinking at the moment about Lewis’ argument from the Moral Law.

Does the Moral Law really have to have come from a personal being? Could it have evolved? If it serves some survival purpose, what is it?

Lewis also calls it the "rules of decent bahavior", which I like because it’s more descriptive and evokes the substance of the thing at a glance for me. The only survival advantage conferred by the rules of decent behavior is their contribution toward society, though they are imperfect at best at promoting society. (E.g., it might help society more if we simply executed all criminals, outlawed anything damaging to our health, and gave the former group’s property to proven contributors to society, but this would offend our sense of the moral law. Or am I just arguing from my own revulsion at that idea, since it does seem pretty common for people to believe in the greater value of people who contribute to society - their lives are considered to be worth more than others?)

Lewis is mostly talking about "oughts". You ought not to move my stuff and take my seat in a crowded theater when my back is turned. If anyone thinks that’s right, they feel compelled to explain why the usual rules don’t apply there, which is to acknowledge their existence. (Interesting that we also have a sense of the ways in which the rules might be suspended.) So can there be oughts without God? My knee-jerk reaction is to say yes, because oughts might just be part of a system evolved in us to promote the good of society, which is ultimately better at keeping our genes around than the alternatives. Groups of humans that cohere form civilized societies, and groups are better at survival.

One might ask at this point whether this argument isn’t too strong: Why don’t we all have the same opinions about everything, then? We would certainly cohere a lot better if we didn’t disagree. I think the answer there is that diversity is also essential to surviving unexpected events, so any truly resilient solution would have to balance diversity and unity, and this, it is postulated, is the source of our common understanding of the rules of decent behavior.

Lewis may be oversimplifying the "herd instinct" as he calls it. Impulses are uncomplicated in his view. I’m not sure he’s wrong either. He says herd instinct tells you to do right by your neighbor, and is one of several instincts we have, but that the moral law cannot itself be any of these because it sits in judgement upon them. This is intriguing. He treats them as notes on a piano, and the moral law as advising the piano player. But what if the moral law is just a more complicated instinct? He says that it can’t be because it’s not consistent, so to speak: it doesn’t always advise the same notes to be played. In fact, any of them can be regarded as "bad" by the moral law, and any can be regarded as "good", depending on the circumstances. This, he says, shows that the moral law is not itself an instinct.

I’m not sure. People have tried to write down the rules it follows, and in fact, this is how we teach one another what morality is and how to live by it. It is true though that none of its codifications feel like they capture the whole thing, and those that feel like they capture it better seem a bit vague, or mysterious (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount).

I’m reminded here of an argument I make for why we perhaps should be able to discover the workings of our own consciousness: that God has no parts and we are created beings, so therefore there must have created us by some means, and therefore we ought to be able to discover them. The relevance for the current topic is that similarly, if we are actually capable of following the moral law, we ought to be able to write it down.

An argument I have against my argument above is a common one with me: we may be, loosely speaking, part of God’s imagination, and therefore we don’t actually have to follow discoverable rules, since he’s infinite and therefore necessarily largely undiscoverable. It therefore seems possible that the rules of our own consciousness and the rules of the moral law both belong to the wider world of God’s infinite understanding, and that the discoverable rules of the universe make up a finite subset of the rest of God’s mind.

Anyway, back to the question of whether the moral law could simply be some useful behavior for survival, and therefore no evidence of God’s hand on us. It seems suggestive that I feel like I can’t just throw off the question with an "of course". Why not? Just because morality seems elusive as well as common and clear? To summarize Lewis, we all find in ourselves a common understanding of the rules of decent behavior, even accounting for our variations on the subject and for the fact that we often break them and excuse ourselves, and that it can’t itself be merely due to the herd instinct because it sits in judgment of the herd instinct. (And all others, deciding which of our instincts prompts we ought to obey: "But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.")

More quotes:

"The Moral Law tells us which tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys."

"If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win… But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses… And surely it often tells us to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is."

"If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good’, always in agreement with the rule of right behavior. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage… Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right’ notes and the 'wrong’ ones… The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts."

But, I think to myself, what if the Moral Law is the instinct to bring up the tune, plus the tune itself, and the tune has been bred into us through natural selection? What if the tune is encoded in our DNA, and its particular pattern cultivated by mutation and natural selection to improve our chances and give us an edge over other species and the environment?

Firstly, evolutionary arguments are either too hard or too easy to make. It’s quite easy to say that the moral law must confer some survival advantage, but quite hard to explain how. The engineer in my says that you shouldn’t claim to understand something until you can build one yourself.

Secondly, is it explaining or explaining away the very strong feeling that something is really wrong (e.g. genocide)? And once we’ve made that argument, that we only think it’s wrong because, e.g, we’re on the whole averse to anything that would reduce the genetic diversity of the planet by so much, why do we largely disbelieve that that excuses us from following it? Materialists disbelieve in the evil of genocide, but feel very strongly compelled to make arguments against it on other grounds. I think this is double-talk: It’s not wrong (because there’s no such thing as right and wrong) but you shouldn’t do it anyway.

On that note, if Mind really is a fundamental thing about the Universe we live in, and not merely some late emerging property, how would we even go about convincing ourselves of it? Couldn’t we always come back to saying, "well, I just feel that way because I am a mind and naturally want to turn everything else into one."

At this point, it just seems more honest to me to say that the Moral Law and Mind in us really are pointers to something fundamental about the Universe. I can understand a distate for the thought, since it seems unapproachable in the way that we’ve grown used to approaching things since Science came on the scene. It also seems a bit inelegant once you’ve tasted the beauty of mathematics and physics. But when I’m not troubled by this, it’s because beauty itself is supposedly rooted in God, and a pointer to him.

To make that a bit more precise, God is simple. He has no parts. All that is good and right in the world is a projection into the finite and multidimensional what to him is infinite and singular. Hard to explain quite what I mean, but I’ve heard it said that we talk of God having characteristics and aspects like we seem to, but in actuality he is a single, simple… Someone. Elegant and beautiful not even at an extreme, but fundamentally. Elegance Himself.

When am I allowed to just give up and believe these things? I run myself around in circles, and even come back to the same conclusions again and again. God is who he is. Mind came before Universe. It’s just the best explanation in a world of uncertain explanations. Perhaps I distrust it because I feel like a creature of supernatural meaning and purpose, and the world feels created. Or perhaps I distrust it because I often feel like a meaningless, accidental creature in a cold mechanistic Universe.

For the moment, though, I’ve convinced myself. I wonder if the spark of belief here can be fanned into flame. As I say often, God has much more to do than merely exist, so whatever effort I’ve already expended, if I conclude that he’s there, my work has only just begun.