The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis 4

LETTER XXVIII

The next letter contains a truly incredible admission:

Atheists have often made the point that the Christian system of salvation gives people a perverse incentive to die while young. After all, a person who dies before the “age of accountability” is guaranteed an eternity of bliss in Heaven, while a person who lives past that age has a better than even chance of ending up eternally damned (given that the majority of the world’s population is not Christian). As I have seen it put elsewhere, what is the point of life on Earth if all it represents is a chance to throw away salvation? It would be like a college professor who gives an incredibly difficult and complicated final exam, which most of the students who take it fail; but at the same time, this professor gives straight As to students who never even bother to show up in class.

But this is the first time I have ever seen a Christian apologist acknowledge this. And Lewis has it exactly right: if death before the age of accountability means instant no-effort salvation, then the majority of the population of Heaven will be made up of people who died in infancy or very early childhood and never had a life on Earth at all. This is even more true if, as many Christians believe, even a single-celled embryo is a person with a soul. By some estimates, as many as 75% of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually before the woman ever realizes she is pregnant ? a vast number of souls that will get into Heaven for free, while the majority of the unlucky few who happen to survive into adulthood will end up consigned to eternal torment.

The bizarre, ludicrous illogic of this system turns notions of morality on their head. The logical conclusion from these beliefs would be that it is a morally praiseworthy act to kill children, thereby guaranteeing their salvation. The corollary is that life on Earth is a terrible misfortune and something to be avoided at all costs, veering extremely close to the ancient Gnostic belief systems condemned as heresy by the church. Why in the world would God even bother to create the Earth if “human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death”? Why not just create a race of beings that all die in the womb and have their salvation assured? Lewis mentions these glaring facts, but never addresses their implications for Christianity.

LETTER XXIX

The next letter seems to represent an attempt to explain the theological discrepancies raised in the last one, as Lewis has Screwtape discuss how a mortal world of dangers and threats will inevitably produce virtue:

This is similar to Lewis’ argument in The Problem of Pain, where he writes that suffering is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. As such, it suffers from many of the same problems. One of the most important is one that perenially comes up to topple Christian theodicies: if what you say is true, then how do you account for the existence of Heaven? Presumably, there will be no dangers or threats in Paradise. Does this mean that virtue will fade away there as well? Will people become cowardly and lazy because there is no evil to exercise their moral muscles? And whatever answer a Christian proposes to explain this dilemma, why is the same exact answer not applicable to Earth?

LETTER XXX

In the next-to-last letter (and the last that I will comment on), as bombing raids on the patient’s hometown are being stepped up, Screwtape provides some advice on how Wormwood can turn the carnage to his advantage:

Lewis’ caricatures notwithstanding, there is a perfectly consistent way to make sense of these two sentences. In both cases, what is being said is that the emotions associated with an experience are real, but that those emotions are not necessarily justified by the facts. In the first case, people at a religious revival undoubtedly do experience feelings of ecstasy and rapture. An atheist would be a fool to deny that. What we deny is their interpretation of what produced those feelings. Religious believers attribute those feelings to God’s presence; atheists say they can just as easily be explained by the intensely charged atmosphere produced by peer pressure, strong expectation, and the measures taken by the revival organizers to whip up excitement, without invoking the supernatural.

Similarly, in the case of the high dive, the complacency of the person discussing it on the ground is not supported by the facts of the matter: the peril of such an experience and the reaction it will likely produce. In both cases, the principle at work is that there is an emotional reaction that may not be justified in light of the evidence.

I know of no atheist who believes that happiness is less real than hurt and suffering, and again, Lewis provides no examples of people who hold such a view. Far too often, he indulges in the habit of attacking conveniently unnamed opponents of Christianity who hold views vulnerable to easy refutation, and the format of this book makes this especially easy, since the demons are more interested in abstract lessons than specific examples. On the contrary, we believe that happiness is just as real a part of existence as sorrow; what we deny is that there is any good reason to believe that either one originates from a supernatural source.

The idea that Christianity is true and all objections and evidence to the contrary are tricks of demons has been one of the most effective memes by which the Christian religion has stifled criticism, even in its own followers’ minds. No matter how superficially convincing it may seem, it warns, all contrary argument is an evil deception that must be rejected out of hand. But, to disarm this way of thinking, one can point out that the “that’s what the demons want you to do” meme can be used against any position with equal ease. In particular, it can be turned back on the believer. If there was such an entity as the Devil, dedicated to the temptation and destruction of humanity, how could he achieve his goal more effectively than by teaching people to believe blindly, to never doubt or question, to decide what is true and what is false before even looking at the facts, and to force these unexamined beliefs on others and cause endless war and strife in the process? What could possibly be a better strategy for the Devil to keep his deluded followers in thrall than to inculcate in them an invincible faith-based certainty that their viewpoint is right and all others are wrong ? even to teach them to think that other viewpoints are demonic illusions? How could a believer ever tell whether any or all of their own scriptures and traditions ? including the ones that teach them about demons in the first place ? were actually inspired by evil spirits?

Turned back on the very belief system that gave birth to it, the devil-phobia meme collapses in a self-referential spiral of contradiction. On the other hand, those who recognize the dangers of blind belief can be confident that, whether devils exist or not, reason is still the best way of learning about the world. If there are demons, that is the best and the only way we can hope to penetrate their deceptions and learn the truth, and if there are not, reason is still the most effective way to learn what is true and how we can control the world to our benefit. In either case, faith has no part to play, and the paranoia that our every thought may have been implanted in our minds by malign spirits dissipates in the recognition that there is no reason to fear what we do not have evidence to believe in.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/essays/the-screwtape-letters/