July 21, 1998 Dallas A. Willard

Lewis on Truth and Logic

C. S. Lewis was devoted to the pursuit of truth, and was sure he had captured or been given a great deal of it. His confidence in this respect did not make him arrogant and close-minded, but was, to the contrary, the foundation of his remarkable humility and openness. In his third BBC lecture under the heading, “The Case for Christianity,” later published in Mere Christianity, he responds to those who might think he had been too hard on human beings in his previous lecture. There he had pointed out that human beings constantly fail to behave as they expect others to behave. He says to the potential objector: “I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out the truth. And from that point of view the very idea of something being imperfect, of its not being what it ought to be, has certain consequences.” (Mere Christianity, p. 13)

This is a very characteristic statement for Lewis. He understood the pursuit of truth to require devotion to logic as well, and hence to the following out of the consequences of truths discovered. Lewis took logic very seriously as a primary means of securing truth and avoiding falsehood. In the third BBC course of lectures, titled “Christian Behavior,” he comments that “We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior.” “Religion,” he continues, “involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set.” (Mere Christianity, p. 58)

The Christian tradition, as well as its alternatives, must—on his view—essentially contain claims about reality which are either true or false. The fundamental task we face is to determine which claims are true and what logically follows from them. Only so can we come to terms with reality and successfully direct our lives into harmonious relationships with it.

In response to anticipated complaints about the difficulty of basic Christian doctrine he remarks further on in his BBC lectures: “Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim is false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason.” (p. 121)

Now Lewis held what has traditionally been called the “correspondence theory of truth.” This could properly be called the classical theory of truth, because it was held with little exception up to the 19th Century. He held, in other words, that truth is a matter of a belief or idea (representation, statement) corresponding to reality. In the course of rejecting the view that moral laws are mere social conventions he insists that they are, to the contrary, “Real truths.” “If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazi less true,” he says to his reader, “there must be something—some Real morality—for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said ‘New York’ each meant merely ‘the town I am imagining in my own head’, how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all.” (Mere Christianity, p. 11; cp. The Abolition of Man, pp. 27-29)

The Contemporary Disdain of Truth: “Postmodernism”

The case for “Real truth” is, unfortunately, much more complicated and harder to make stand up (or even get a hearing) now than it was when Lewis wrote these words in the early 1940's. Not intrinsically or in itself, of course; for that does not change. But in terms of numerous popular presumptions that have arisen, mistakenly, against “Real truth.” Nowadays truth itself, in the sense in which Lewis and most of his contemporaries still thought it to be of central human importance, is in the fire.

To be sure, this is not exactly a new thing. David Hume long ago (mid-18th Century) consigned truth to the flames in the famous passage at the end of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. There he advised us to look through our libraries and ask of each book whether it deals with matters mathematical or sense-perceptible (feelable). If it does not, he said, we should “commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Truth, of course, is not a matter of quantity, not mathematically describable; and it also is not sense-perceptible or feelable. Truth is not something physical or “naturalistic,” as we would now say. And our general intellectual, artistic and academic culture has by this time caught up with Hume in rejecting “Real truth.” Two centuries of cultural development were needed for that. Truth, along with goodness and beauty (both of which David Hume manipulated into something feelable or sentimental), are no longer generally thought of as realities independent of human attitudes. And that, of course, is simply what it means to say they are not “objective.” Lewis believed they were objective, and spent much of his time explaining and defending their objectivity.

In the face of present attitudes, however, even earnestness about truth—also about goodness and beauty—is definitely uncool. It might be tolerated in a Freshman. But he or she would be expected to wise up quickly, and might pay a stiff price for not doing so. The idea of devoting one’s life to truth, goodness or beauty is now quaint if not ridiculous, on the campus as in the corporation. They are not considered to be objective realities against which human life is or can be measured.

That is certainly the message that comes to us from the polymorphous clouds of Postmodernism(s) that hang over all our intellectual, artistic and cultural life now. Christopher Norris, one of the very best writers on these subjects, points out that in Postmodernism's most emphatic representatives, such as Jean Baudrillard and Richard Rorty, “the ideas of truth, validity or right reason simply drop out of the picture.” (What’s Wrong With Postmodernism, p. 165) There is for them no possibility of achieving “an accurate match between real-world objects or states of affairs and concepts of pure understanding.” (p. 167) “The idea that one can criticize existing beliefs from some superior vantage-point of truth, reason or scientific method,” Norris continues (168), is considered a self-delusion deriving from the Enlightenment period of Western thought—by now supposedly shown by history to be a delusion.

Of course Baudrillard and Rorty still believe that their own views of truth, validity and reason are true, valid and reasonable. They believe that their own views of how language and thought relate to reality present us with how things really are. (Let them simply state the contrary if they do not.) And I have noticed that the most emphatic of Postmodernists turn coldly modern when discussing their fringe benefits or other matters that make a great difference to their practical life. They also—on many occasions during each day—discover that some of their ideas, beliefs and statements about very ordinary matters do (or do not) match up to the actual condition of what those beliefs and statements are about. They share this with every competent human being. (They thought their keys were on the table, for example, but found that they were wrong.) But a powerful thrust of the Zeitgeist such as Postmodernism is not to be impeded by little details such as these.

A Devil’s Advice

Lewis clearly saw the early stages of the present situation, though I doubt he could have begun to imagine the attitude toward “Real Truth” maintained now by its contemporary “cultured despisers.”

In the fabulous Screwtape’s first letter we find him advising his nephew devil, Wormwood, that argument is not the way to keep his, Wormwood’s, “patient” from the Enemy’s (God’s) clutches. “That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier,” he says. “At that time,” Screwtape continues “humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that,” Screwtape points out. “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” (Screwtape Letters, p. 7-8)

Instead of argument, which, Screwtape says, “moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground,” Wormwood is advised to hold his patient's attention—just as David Hume would have it—to the “stream of immediate sense experiences,” and to “Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.” (p. 8) In that stream of sensations, of course, neither truth nor logic is to be found.

On Facts and Reality

One gathers from all this, I think, a clear and accurate impression of Lewis’s outlook on truth and its vital importance for human existence. Now we turn to some reflections—in the spirit if not with the power of this friend of truth—on the contemporary situation of Real truth, as it stands in the flames of current disdain and ridicule. We begin with some clarification of what a fact is, what it is to be real, and then what a truth is.

We all have, as a part of the equipment necessary to enable us to navigate the course of our existence, the ability to discern properties things have and relations things stand in.

A child quickly learns to distinguish milk from Coca-Cola, and to tell which bag of candy or scoop of ice cream is larger. As time goes on it learns to articulate what goes into such differences, and to distinguish, not just milk from coca-cola, but the different properties—flavor, color, etc.—that enter into such differences as that between milk and coca-cola or dog and cat.

Our education as human beings largely consists in becoming able to identify and interrelate the very large number of properties and relations that are distributed over the various types of entities that make up our self and our world. Such ability is essential to human competence. One could hardly cross the street, much less hold a job of the simplest sort without it. Now we must hold onto these ideas of properties and relations as we continue.

If an entity, regardless of type, has a particular property or relation, its having that property or relation makes up what we here call a fact. This is an extremely common notion, and one that has received much attention from philosophers. (Cp. B. Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, 1st Lecture) It is, for example, a fact that I am standing before you now or that you are reading this paragraph.

Reality, then, taken as a whole, is the sum total of facts. And to be real, to exist, is to be a constituent in a fact.

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