I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
Where are you getting this from? Not from any reading of Lewis, it seems.
C.S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism”
I think one of us is misunderstanding Jiro here; isn’t s/he saying not that Lewis thinks God creates the moral law, but that Lewis thinks God is a perfectly reliable source of information about the moral law? (Epistemology, not ontology.)
[EDITED to add the second instance of “Lewis thinks” in the previous paragraph. I hope my meaning was clear anyway.]
(I’m fairly sure that Lewis wouldn’t have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim promulgated by the Church of England, or every moral claim a reasonable person could extract from the Bible, so I find Jiro’s argument less than perfectly convincing. But I think you’re refuting a different argument.)
Lewis would likely have regarded himself as committed to accepting every moral claim he thinks was made by God. He might not believe that the Church of England is perfect at figuring this out, but whatever source of God-claims he uses instead of the Church would produce results as arbitrary as using the Church. (Except to the extent that he uses motivated reasoning to decide what God is claiming.)
It is not “motivated reasoning” to argue that God doesn’t claim a thing, if you have reasons for believing both that the thing is false, and that whatever God says is true.
Lewis, however, does believe that God makes moral claims and that he (Lewis) can know what at least some of them are.