Maverick Philosopher

The Lewis Trilemma

Does it prove the divinity of Jesus?

I argue that it doesn't at the top o' the Stack. People who think otherwise, Peter Kreeft for example, bluster.

People love to bluster.  Galen Strawson's rejection of theism is pure bluster.

C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed.  This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects.  "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."

So far, so good. It is equally true, however,  that two people being tortured to death  is worse than one person  being tortured to death.  Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.

I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists.  Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe."  And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.) 

My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.

The Future as the Most Completely Temporal of the Temporal Modi and the Least like Eternity

A tip of the hat to Brother Inky for reminding me of the following intriguing passage from C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. The following is lifted verbatim from Powerline:

Another classic passage that bears on the essential maliciousness of the modern “Progressive” mind comes from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. If you’re not familiar with this work, it is the fictional ironic letters written to a junior officer in Satan’s army with instructions on how to corrupt the particular human assigned to this junior tempter. Although geared to higher spiritual matters, here and there are passages of great perception about modern ideology. Like this one from Chapter 15, which illuminates the malignancy of Progressivism’s fixation on “the Future” and the “side of history” that they always want to help move along at a faster pace:

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.