Since the author thought materialism was thoroughly false
That’s actually one of the reasons I’m more inclined to interpret it that way. If Lewis thought there were also materialists with superb reasoning abilities who believed in materialism by correctly exercising those reasoning abilities, I wouldn’t think a passage about poorly reasoned materialists was meant to be a generalization.
this constitutes one of the mildest attacks on the character of materialists he could have written
Hypothesis: Lewis was well aware that there are materialists who are good people. Yet his religion forced him to think bad of materialists. He handled this cognitive dissonance by thinking bad of materialists in one of the weakest ways possible. In other words, he knew too much to be able to believe that all materialists are power-hungry maniacs, but he couldn’t avoid at least politely thinking they were all materialists because of everyday human foibles.
It’s like Lewis’s beliefs about homosexuality. He was forced by his religion to believe that homosexuality is a sin and that all gay people should abstain from sex, but he tried to be as polite to them as he could within the confines of these beliefs and did not write about how gays are a menace to our children.
If Lewis thought there were also materialists with superb reasoning abilities who believed in materialism by correctly exercising those reasoning abilities, I wouldn’t think a passage about poorly reasoned materialists was meant to be a generalization.
Why do you think he didn’t think this? I’m having a hard time not seeing this exchange as you projecting negativity onto Lewis, when he was writing about fully general cognitive biases and weaknesses with compassion towards all humans who share those biases.
If he thought that materialists became materialists by reasoning correctly, he would either have been a materialist, or would have taken one of a particularly narrow set of positions (such as “materialism is based on correct reasoning, and how something can be false and correctly reasoned at the same time is one of God’s mysteries” or “materialists are only materialists because they start with different premises from me, but correctly reason from those premises”) which as far as I know he didn’t. (Or else taken no opinion on materialism, which he wasn’t going to do.)
That’s actually one of the reasons I’m more inclined to interpret it that way. If Lewis thought there were also materialists with superb reasoning abilities who believed in materialism by correctly exercising those reasoning abilities, I wouldn’t think a passage about poorly reasoned materialists was meant to be a generalization.
Hypothesis: Lewis was well aware that there are materialists who are good people. Yet his religion forced him to think bad of materialists. He handled this cognitive dissonance by thinking bad of materialists in one of the weakest ways possible. In other words, he knew too much to be able to believe that all materialists are power-hungry maniacs, but he couldn’t avoid at least politely thinking they were all materialists because of everyday human foibles.
It’s like Lewis’s beliefs about homosexuality. He was forced by his religion to believe that homosexuality is a sin and that all gay people should abstain from sex, but he tried to be as polite to them as he could within the confines of these beliefs and did not write about how gays are a menace to our children.
Why do you think he didn’t think this? I’m having a hard time not seeing this exchange as you projecting negativity onto Lewis, when he was writing about fully general cognitive biases and weaknesses with compassion towards all humans who share those biases.
If he thought that materialists became materialists by reasoning correctly, he would either have been a materialist, or would have taken one of a particularly narrow set of positions (such as “materialism is based on correct reasoning, and how something can be false and correctly reasoned at the same time is one of God’s mysteries” or “materialists are only materialists because they start with different premises from me, but correctly reason from those premises”) which as far as I know he didn’t. (Or else taken no opinion on materialism, which he wasn’t going to do.)