Let’s suppose that Islam taught that every time someone drinks wine, ten random non-Muslims automatically will go to hell. Do you think that Lewis would have been less angry if consequently Muslims tried to ban wine for everyone?
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
Neither Lewis nor anyone else living at that time would have specifically legalized gay marriage, or even thought about it.
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
One could as well argue that “Jiro’s beliefs” are arbitrary
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
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.
I could speculate, but you could just say he wouldn’t act according to my speculation. Do you have any examples of Lewis believing that something harms others, and yet still refusing to ban it (and for similar reasons)?
But if he had lived at the transition point the question would come up. If he has exceptions that let him ban things that are condemned by society, he could argue that the fact that gay marriage was universally condemned makes it more like banning murder than banning wine.
Religions have a habit of throwing in “this thing is bad” purely on argument from authority, an authority Lewis considers himself bound to believe as an infallible source of truth. Nonreligious people have the step “figure out if it’s really bad” in there, which Lewis does not—if God says it’s bad, it’s bad.
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.