A meme with a C. S. Lewis quote has been going around the internet for years now. It reads: Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a bye-product, the sensation I call thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk-jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
There is already a fine response to the meme published by Celsus (Matthew Ferguson) ("C. S. Lewis' Milk Jug: Apologetics and the Retreat into Epistemology" <https://celsus.blog/2013/07/07/c-s-lewis-milk-jug-apologetics-and-the-retreat-into-epistemology/>). I, however, wish to argue that there are even simpler and more obvious reasons why the quote shouldn’t be shared.
1. Lewis apparently disavowed the passage.
We know that the words about the milk jug were first published under the title Broadcast Talks in 1942. They made it into the American version of the material, which was given the title The Case for Christianity. Then, in 1952, Macmillan published Mere Christianity. On the title page of the Macmillan version, the book is described as a "revised and enlarged edition … of the three books The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality." What I found peculiar is the fact that the "milk jug" passage was excised from the material that was originally published in the U.S. as The Case for Christianity, and other material had to be revised for the sake of coherence (Compare Case for Christianity, Macmillan, 1948, p. 39 with Mere Christianity, HarperCollins, 2001, p. 38). According to Worldcat.org, the earliest version of the material was published last in 1996. It can only be purchased second-hand.
2. As written, the argument makes an elementary philosophical mistake.
Lewis asked, “How can I trust my own thinking to be true?” Antony Flew, who knew Lewis personally, explained why the question isn’t sensible on the first page of the first chapter of his book How to Think Straight Second Edition: What is true, or false, is propositions. What is valid, or invalid, is arguments [thinking]. These notions and these distinctions are absolutely basic. To say that an argument [thinking] is true or that a proposition is valid is as uncomprehending or as inept as to say that someone got to first base in basketball or that someone made a home run in tennis. (Prometheus, 1998, p. 11)
Lewis’s words could still be salvaged, but only if one adopts an obscure metaphysical outlook called phenomenalism. For more on that philosophy, see John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion Revised and Updated (Prometheus, 2007) p. 149.
3. Lewis evidently didn’t know the difference between evolutionary products and non-evolutionary products.
In the early days, Lewis seemed to think that all products and "bye-products" of "mindless nature" were like a stream or spilt milk. In the speech "De Futilitate," he said, "[T]he Gulf Stream produces all sorts of results…. What it does not produce is maps of the Gulf Stream. But if logic, as we find it operative in our own minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then it is a result as improbable as that" (The Seeing Eye, ed. Walter Hooper, Ballantine, 1986, p. 87). By the time that the revised Miracles was released, the parallel passage delivered in the "Broadcast Talks" (the “Milk Jug” meme) had been quietly removed from the record. Apparently, by then, Lewis had acknowledged that not all products of mindless nature are the same. He at least mentioned the phrase "evolutionary product" (Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised, HarperCollins, 2001, p. 32). It would be too easy for a critic to point out that evolutionary products are not like other products of nature.
Bonus: An Intelligent Designer may not be essential.
Richard Dawkins famously argued that natural selection is the “Blind Watchmaker” in the book of the same title. Long before, Michael Scriven, a contemporary of Lewis, argued, Brains that did not work during [one million years of development] did not consistently survive, and the ones that do not learn now survive with difficulty, if at all. Brains that did work efficiently, i.e., in harmony with reality, not only survived but reproduced themselves through the mechanism of heredity, and thus there evolved the present modest achievement of human reason. Improvement for 1 million years is not mere chance, and it is not a miracle; it is the pedestrian operation of natural forces. And it completely explains the efficacy of reason, such as it is. (Primary Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 1966, pp. 130 & 131, emphasis added)
A similar argument can be found in a much more obtainable book. See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988; Bantam, 1996) pp. 12 & 13.
For more information and ideas, see a rough draft of “Requiem for Lewis,” a chapter in my forthcoming book Insuppressible Fallacy-mongers: <https://www.scribd.com/document/400592801/Requiem-for-Lewis>
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