TSAWTB Section 6 - Interlude - A Miscellany of Items

282 Section 6 - Interlude
1. Lewis refers to Freud’s claim that “all thoughts are due to complexes”.
The illogicality of this is that Freud clearly assumes that his statement is true
and is not due to any complex he has! He is effectively saying he is the only
person who is free of complexes - a doubtful proposition indeed.
2. Lewis similarly shows that Marx’s claim that all thoughts stem from
class-conditioning is illogical. Marx infers that only his thinking is a true
statement and is free of class bias. With his deceptive philosophy and
impoverished background, his writings are full of bitter envy of those who
have property and a secure position in life. He is just as class-conditioned as
everyone else; in fact even more so.
3. The Rationalist philosopher Hume concluded that it is only reasonable to
believe in God, but as we know that God does not exist, therefore human
reason cannot be trusted.
His error is that pointed out by Lewis; he is excluding from his
generalisation the very statement that he is making which is a rational
deduction. In claiming that his reasoning is true, he is effectively disallowing
everybody else’s but making his rational statement the sole point of reference
in the universe.
Hume never extended his arguments to propose what could be used as a
final authority in men’s lives, but left the whole subject “in the air”. He
thereby betrayed his lack of rationalist rigour, for had he done so, he knew
that he would have destroyed the whole basis of his viewpoint. In fact, he hid
the weaknesses of his case under a mass of convoluted arguments.
So poor was Hume’s case that Paley had no difficulty in demolishing it in
his Natural Theology. This book was a bastion of strength of the Christian
faith. It went through 18 editions and was required reading at Cambridge
University until 1922. As we know, Darwin, when studying to be an Anglican
minister, delighted in the clarity of his writing and learned by heart many of
the logical arguments he set out in support of the Christian viewpoint. With
so many thousands of copies having been printed, it is strange that now it is
almost impossible to obtain a second-hand copy. What, one wonders, could
have happened to them all?
This lack has now been filled by Bill Cooper’s The Sighted Watchmaker
(Coo97) which is a reprint of this classic with minor clarifications and
modernisations. The title is a riposte to Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker.
4. There is the argument that “All religions ultimately lead to God.” What is
ignored is that all religions claim they have an exclusive path to God, and that
they are the “only true way”. With them all claiming that only they have the
right way to god, it is possible that none of them are correct, or that one, and
only one, might be correct in its claim - all others must then be false. What is
certain is that they cannot all be correct, and therefore the statement is false.
In addition, it is not only false, it is misleading, for it gives a veneer of
respectability to all other religions and deceives non-Christians into believing
they will eventually enter heaven.
There is the opposite argument used that “It is unacceptable that Christianity
rejects all other faiths. It must be more tolerant of them.”
The illogicality here should be obvious. Before reading further, we suggest
that you pause here, examine the sentence and see if you can see what it is.
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The answer? The speaker is insisting that Christians should be more
tolerant, but he himself in intolerant of the Christian position. If he is wanting
the Christian to be more tolerant, then he should be more tolerant of the