God is the Absolute Fact | Ch. 9-12 of CS Lewis's Miracles

Welcome to the Parker’s Ponderings read-along of Miracles by C.S. Lewis. This is the fifth companion essay I’ve put out and in it I’ll be covering chapters 9-12 of the book. If you’re just discovering this read-along for the first time, you can catch up by reading companion essays below:

Essays on chapters 1&2, on chapter 3, on chapters 4-6, on chapters 7&8

Here’s the read-along schedule again:

March 31st - Chapters 1-2 – World-and-life views, presuppositions, and the philosophy of fact

April 9^th - Chapter 3 – Three Arguments from Reason Against Naturalism

April 11^th – Chapters 4-6 – Four or Five More Arguments from Reason

Zoom Call for Paid Subscribers #1 – April 13^th from 1:00pm – 2 or 2:30pm central

April 15^th – Chapters 7-8 – common objections to miracles, the nature of nature, and what miracles are not

April 21^st - Chapters 9-12 – The Author Analogy, The Ultimate Fact, Doctrine of God

Zoom Call for Paid Subscribers #2 – to be determined

April 28^th - Chapters 13-14 – Presuppositions and Argument from Reason revisited, Criterion of Miracles, a Theology of Religions

May 5^th – Chapters 15-Appendix B – The True Myth, One vs. Two-Floor Realities, Against Monism, Author Analogy Revisited

Zoom Call for Paid Subscribers #3 – to be determined

Chapter 9 – A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary

CSL says that chapter 9 of Miracles is not strictly necessary—he even made that the title of the chapter. So why isn’t the chapter strictly necessary? Well, because CSL is addressing a specific objection that he had to theism but which is more of an emotional objection that may be out of place in a philosophical book on the nature of the world and the possibility of divine intervention. But he deals with it nonetheless in case his readers have the objection as well.

The emotional objection is an objection to teleology, or design and purpose in the universe. CSL said it didn’t feel good to look at a sunset and think that it had been made or painted by someone instead of happening on its own. He gives a hilarious analogy of seeing a field mouse by a hedge and finding out that it is “a ‘clockwork’ mouse put there to amuse [] or (worse still) to point some moral lesson”. (101). I really love this example. Finding out the sunset was painted by God is like finding out a mouse you saw wasn’t a real mouse but just a windup toy or robotic mouse meant to make you laugh or meant for moralizing. I get Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep vibes here, which is one of my all-time favorite science fiction stories so I should understand CSL’s point, but I confess, I’ve never had a thought like this at all—quite the opposite. I’ve always felt that if there was no one behind a sunset then it’s not actually beautiful at all. Finding out that there was no one behind a sunset would be like finding out a beautiful picture I admired was generated by AI instead of painted by an artist.

CSL goes on to discuss Nature as ‘creature’ rather than as the absolute, an idea I’m sure he’s picked up from G.K. Chesterton—the “C.S. Lewis” who came a generation before the actual C.S. Lewis. The idea is that ‘mother’ nature is really more like ‘sister’ nature. She is a creature like us, fallen like us, capable of beauty and good, as well as (natural) evils. And there’s coming a day when she too will be fully redeemed as we are. She will be cured but not tamed.

CSL makes a really fascinating contention that the naturalist who touts Nature as the absolute and as the whole show, doesn’t know Nature nearly as well as the supernaturalist. For only supernaturalists truly see Nature, just as only those who know some other language know the ‘englishness’ of English. He says,

you must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. (104-105)

CSL also begins to broach the ‘author analogy’ for the God-world relation in this chapter, comparing God’s creative freedom to that of a playwright or novelist. This is a reoccurring theme in CSL and it’s a fruitful way of conceptualizing how God relates to His creation. God is to the world as an author is to their novel or a playwright to her play. But more on this theme later.

Chapter 10 – Horrid Red Things

In chapter 10, CSL gives us a treatment of ‘religious language’. Religious language is a major theme in the philosophy of religion, systematic theology, biblical and theological studies, and comparative religion. There are all sorts of thorny issues in this subfield focused on speaking of and speaking to God. Can we speak literally of God? What role does metaphor play? What’s the difference between analogical predication (roughly: attaching a predicate to a thing by way of an analogy) and equivocation (speaking with two voices, i.e., shifting the meaning of the word, using multiple senses of the same word in the same thought or sentence). Is God ineffable? Is He incomprehensible? How can we speak of that which we don’t comprehend? All of that fun stuff and more is included in the religious language conversation. CSL, however, focuses his treatment of religious language mostly on metaphor.

He starts his chapter by noting a trend in liberal, modernist Christian denominations which seek to naturalize their faith and end up explaining away the miraculous and all the distinctives of Christianity. CSL says he is going to do the opposite. He’s going to explain away that which gets in the way of us focusing on the miraculous, because CSL rightly notes that there is no Christianity without miracles, “you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian.” (108).

In his treatment of metaphorical language, CSL claims that “all speech about supersensibles is, and must be, metaphorical in the highest degree.” (115)—‘supersensibles’ just being those things above or beyond the senses. I may want to quibble here and argue that language about supersensibles is sometimes metaphorical and sometimes analogical. The difference being that metaphorical language is literally false but conveys a metaphorical truth, and analogical language can still be literally true but not univocally true, that is, not true in the exact same sense. Here’s an example of a metaphor: “Tim is a fox” is literally false, Tim is not a fox, he’s a human being, but he’s handsome or maybe sly like a fox is (depending on the context the metaphorical truth will be made clear). And here’s an example of an analogy: “God is the author of the world.” Now, God is not a human author, He didn’t create the world with a pen and paper or with key strokes and a word processor, but He did create the world by His word, He did speak His cosmos into being. He is outside of his cosmos like an author is outside their novel, and yet He’s everywhere present in it, like an author is present on every page of his novel. So predicating authorship of God looks like it’s literally true of God, it’s not literally false like calling Tim a fox, but it’s not univocally true, there’s an analogy between God as an author and Tolkien as an author, both are literally true of their referents but not in the exact same way—whereas calling Tolkien an author and calling CSL an author is univocally true. Hopefully I didn’t lose you there. But this is the kind of stuff you’ll find in the religious language literature and while you may not like it, it is actually important.

Anyways, CSL makes a helpful distinction between ‘explaining’ metaphors and ‘explaining away’ with metaphors. Explaining metaphorical language helps people understand what is being said and why it’s not literally true, like explaining why God is described as having human anatomy while elsewhere being described as being spirit and not having hands or feet or eyes, etc. This mode of teaching promotes deeper understanding of what is actually present in the text and CSL argues that the thoughts accompanying metaphorical mental images like the hands of God may be “sound” even while the metaphorical images are not—again that’s what metaphor is, literally false, but non-literally true: “there’s nowhere the hand of God can’t reach you”.

Explaining away but using metaphors is completely opposite. This is a mode of obfuscation. The text is presenting something as literally true and the modernist seeks to metaphoricalize it to find some non-literal truth. So this is like denying the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus and claiming it’s really a metaphor or allegory for… I don’t know some stupid crap, I don’t want to have to think it up myself or research it, you know what I’m talking about.

CSL combats this ‘explaining away’ ploy by giving a trilemma, reminiscent of his “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” trilemma in his book Mere Christianity—for those unfamiliar, CSL argues that you can’t claim Jesus as a mere good teacher or moral truths since he claimed to be the Son of God, he’s either a liar, or he’s a lunatic who thinks he’s something he is not, or he is Lord—the actual Son of God. But here in ch. 10, CSL argues that miraculous claims are either lies, or legends, or actual history, but they can’t serve the purpose that the modernists want, that is, to point to some metaphorical truth, because they weren’t presented as such, they were presented as historical events. So they are either flat out lies, or they are legends that grew into something other than what literally happened in history, or they are actually historical happenings.

Chapter 11 – Christianity and ‘Religion’

In chapter 11 we get to see CSL’s doctrine of God on display. CSL compares Christianity to ‘religion’ which he argues is almost synonymous with pantheism. He says self-styled religious intellectuals get to some form of pantheism (pan = all, theos = God) by a. form of apophatic theology—that is negative theology, theology which seeks truth by saying what God is not, e.g., God is not limited, God is not finite, God is not mutable, God is not weak, etc. The pantheists get to pantheism by cutting off anything that looks to them like an anthropomorphism, a human-ification of the divine. These folks are comfortable talking about the transcendentals (truth, goodness, beauty, unity, etc.) and a cosmic consciousness or mind, or a great spiritual force, but not a personal God with a personality and plans of His own. CSL gives his own positive take on apophatic theology on pg. 143, but gives principled reasons throughout the chapter for why we need a personal deity and thus, why we cannot cut away personality from our conception of God as though it were a mere anthropomorphism.

CSL gives a brief history of pantheisms on page 131-132, arguing that the idea is almost as old as we are and finding it in India, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Modern Europe, in British Idealism, American Transcendentalism, and elsewhere. He says pantheism is something like our natural bent. But he goes on to argue that while the Christians and the pantheists both claim that God is omnipresent (present everywhere in creation), God cannot be an abstract thing, or a universal medium, as the pantheists claim, but He must be a concrete thing,

But if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events, then God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality… If anything is to exists at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an ‘ideal’ or a ‘value’, but an utterly concrete fact (138-39)

CSL hangs a lot on this concrete/universal distinction. Things are concrete. A particular kids toy shaped like a triangle is a concrete thing. The form of ‘triangle’ is an abstract entity, it’s not concrete, it’s either a human abstraction existing in our minds; or it’s somehow diffused throughout reality in those things which instantiate it; or it’s an actual abstract object residing in Plato’s heaven, the realm of the forms or ideas, the ideal realm—maybe that’s in the mind of God. But whatever the case, abstract objects aren’t the kinds of things which can cause things to be. The form of ‘triangle’ doesn’t efficiently cause toy triangles to be triangular, the toy participates or resembles or exemplifies or instantiates triangularity and perhaps ‘triangle’ is the formal cause of the toy’s shape, but there had to be another concrete thing to fashion the plastic into the form, namely, a toy maker.

So, CSL is arguing that if pantheism is true, God would be diffused throughout reality and not a particular item of reality, a universal medium, not a concrete entity. Thus, the god of pantheism cannot serve as the explanation of the cosmos because universals are causally effete, they can’t cause anything to be, only concrete entities have efficient causal powers. I don’t know how well this argument actually stands up, though. It seems like the god of pantheism would be a concrete entity and not a universal. It may seem like a mist or something because it is diffused throughout the cosmos but mist is not a universal, it’s a concrete thing, is so far as mist is a cloud of concrete particles. I think the real problem for pantheism is that there’s no personal agency and so it cannot explain the teleology we find in the world, and if there are abstract objects, they are better accounted for by placing them in the mind of God than in a non-rational diffused deity. But I’d like to hear from you guys on his argument against pantheism.

CSL also touches on his ‘Beyond Personality’ chapter of Mere Christianity and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions on pgs. 135-36 when he briefly mentions the doctrine of the Trinity,

The Christian means by this that God has a positive structure which we could never have guessed in advance, any more than a knowledge of squares would have enabled us to guess at a cube. He contains ‘persons’ (three of them) while remaining one God, as a cube contains six squares while remaining one solid body. We cannot comprehend such a structure any more than the Flatlanders could comprehend a cube. But we can at least comprehend our incomprehension, and see that if there is something beyond personality it ought to be incomprehensible in that sort of way. (135-36)

His next line is a much better argument against pantheism than the abstract/concrete argument I recounted above:

The Pantheist, on the other hand, though he may say ‘super-personal’ really conceives God in terms of what is sub-personal—as though the Flatlanders thought a cube existed in fewer dimensions than a square. (136)

We need a personal being to serve as the Creator of the universe but pantheism doesn’t give us a personal being but a sub-personal essence or agglomeration which only forms finite personalities when constructed in the right patterns apparently, like the pattern of the human life form. So, pantheism cannot explain all that Christian theism can, and Christian theism is to be preferred as an explanation of the cosmos.

I love CSL’s doctrine of God as the “fountain of facthood” (141), “the ultimate fact” (140), “The Absolute Being”, the “basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood (145), the self-existent I AM who “is so brim-full of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything.” (141).

He finishes the chapter with one of the most brilliant sections in the whole of his corpus. He describes the intentions of those who dabble with religion as a safe kind of hobby or something to assuage one’s conscience, and I need to just quote it at length:

An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunger, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?(150).

Chapter 12 – The Propriety of Miracles

Chapter 12 is exceptionally short and straightforward. CSL gives us a fascinating analogy of a race of people who examine paintings solely by looking at the microscopic paint molecules instead of by taking in the whole painting at once. These folks will find lots of complicated relations between the individual paint molecules but “what they painfully reconstruct from a million dots, arranged in agonizing complexity, [the painter] really produced with a single lightning-quick turn of the wrist, his eye meanwhile taking in the canvas as a whole” (155). In making this analogy, CSL is arguing that God is more like a painter than a physicist. God paints with time and space but His focus is much more on the themes portrayed in the painting than the microscopic relations between the different paint drops. There’s a rule behind the rule that describes the connections of the paint drops—it’s the design in the painter’s mind which he is realizing on the canvas. So the paint examining race may come up with all sorts of regularities based on their study of the paint drops but the painter may use a different swipe next time and confound their rules.

On page 156, CSL makes mention of Dorthy Sayers’s fantastic book, The Mind of the Maker, where she gives her own author analogy for the God-world relation. CSL notes that deus ex machina, is the mark of a poorly told story. If you have to bring something from outside the story, like God or an angel, or something brand new that doesn’t fit within the story, to save the day, then that’s a mark against the story. But not if the story all about deus ex machina. If the story has always been about God acting from without, then it’s no mark against the story for the author to make divine action the climax of the story. CSL’s point is that the story we live in has always been about divine action and thus finding a miracle at the center of the story is no mark against the story but the whole point of telling it in the first place. The grand miracle CSL has in mind is the incarnation of the Son of God, his wrongful death on a Roman cross, and his resurrection to life.

We live in God’s story, “it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers.” (158).

So now I want to hear from you all! Leave me your thoughts and questions in the comments and like this post so it gets distributed out to more CSL nerds here on Substack! If you guys are benefitting from this read-along, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and help support this kind of work.