What Lies Behind the Law

Today's Reading

Read Acts 17:24-28: Paul's address to the Athenians on Mars Hill, where he declares that God "made the world and everything in it" and that "in him we live and move and have our being."

Then read Hebrews 11:6: "And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him."

Reflection

Having established that the moral law is real — not merely instinct, not merely convention — Lewis now asks the decisive question: what does its existence tell us about the universe?

There are, Lewis says, two basic views. Either the universe is simply a brute fact — matter and energy doing what matter and energy do, with no purpose or mind behind it — or there is "something behind" the physical world, a directing intelligence.

"We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is."

Science alone cannot settle this, Lewis argues, because science studies what the universe does from the inside. It can tell you that objects fall at 9.8 meters per second squared, but it cannot tell you why there is a universe that contains falling objects in the first place. That question is philosophical, not empirical.

But the moral law gives us a unique piece of evidence. It is the one thing we know from the inside — not by observing it externally, but by experiencing it as a command upon our own conscience. And what it tells us is that behind the universe there is something more like a mind than like mere matter, something that cares about right and wrong.

"If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe — no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house."

Paul says something strikingly similar at Mars Hill. The God who made the world does not live in temples made by human hands — He is not one more object inside the system. Yet He is not absent: "in him we live and move and have our being."

Going Deeper

Hebrews 11:6 tells us that faith begins with believing two things: that God exists, and that He rewards those who seek Him. Lewis's argument in Book I is essentially a philosophical case for the first of these — a case built not on Scripture (which his original BBC audience may not have accepted) but on the universal human experience of moral obligation.

The genius of Lewis's approach is that he does not ask his audience to believe anything new. He asks them to take seriously what they already know.