Why Does Matter Matter?

Lessons in spiritual formation from C.S. Lewis‘ The Problem of Pain, pt.I

Why does matter even exist? What is its meaning?

If you believe, like I do, that ultimate reality is spiritual and not material, then you better have an answer to that question, on pain of basing your life on a gravely incomplete worldview.

Christians believe that ultimate reality is not matter, but a mind, or spirit, the triune God. For Christians, the individual’s struggle with that question is reflected in the church’s struggle with it. From its earliest days the church was plagued by heresies like those of the Gnostics or the Manichaeans, who taught that matter is a prison for the spirit, and that the goal of religion is to escape that prison. Although those cults were wrong, their logic is not wholly without merit. After all, Christianity agrees that ultimate reality is a purely spiritual being (John 4:24). Also, traditionally Christians believed (rightly, in my view) that human beings have bodies but are souls. Thus, a strong metaphysical penchant for spirit, or the immaterial, is part and parcel of Christianity.

Still, the demeaning of matter, and of the body along with it, is wrongheaded and not part of Christian doctrine. Nowadays theologians stress that God created the material world as “good” (see Genesis 1). (Many of those theologians may fall into the other extreme of denying the existence of souls, but that’s another matter). However, that alone does not yet tell us why matter is good, what the meaning of matter is.

This lacuna I will attempt to fill here, based on reflections from C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.

The argument in the context of the book

The Problem of Pain (Lewis 1962, first published in 1940) is Lewis’ first apologetic book and one of the best-known treatises on the theodicy problem: the problem how God can allow suffering to exist.

Lewis’ book is a brilliant masterpiece of something we might call ‘pastoral scholarship’. True, The Problem of Pain is first and foremost an intellectual answer to the problem of suffering. And yet, all good pastoral answers must be grounded on a sound scholarly foundation. Conversely, intellectually deficient answers create twisted and harmful pastoral care.

The book starts out with an introductory chapter in which Lewis traces the religious instinct of mankind to the Numinous, perhaps best translated as ‘awe’; an awe of something that transcends the material world, not fear of a physical danger, more something akin to fear of a ghost. The Numinous, Lewis holds, ultimately points to God, and people across ages and cultures have felt it; but only Christianity (and to some degree Judaism) have been able to identify the source of the Numinous with the source of morality. And thus what one gets in Christianity is a God who is not only the sovereign and awe-inspiring Creator of the universe, but also wholly good. And with this observation the problem of suffering takes off.

Lewis understands the problem in the classical way, according to which there is a triad of propositions which, so the argument goes, cannot all be true:

1)    God is good.

2)    God is almighty.

3)    Suffering exists.

The idea is that if God is good and almighty, then there should be no suffering, for God would be both able and willing to remove it; or else God is either not almighty or not perfectly good, either of which would obliterate the classical conception of God. God in the Christian sense could not exist.

Lewis assumes (at the beginning of chapter 2) that the problem could be solved by using proper versions of the terms ‘divine omnipotence’ and ‘divine goodness’; the folk editions will not do. He therefore proceeds to discuss first omnipotence (ch. 2) and then divine goodness (ch.3). It is in the context of the discussion of divine omnipotence that Lewis offers his reflections on the meaning of matter.

Why God had to create a material world – unsuccessful arguments

God is omnipotent. However, omnipotence, as Lewis rightly points out, does not include the logically impossible. God could not make it the case that 2 + 2 = 5 or that a sheet of paper be white and black all over at the same time.

Lewis sees yet another restriction of divine omnipotence:

I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature. (19)

Wait, we may object, could not God just have created souls without a world, and such that they could commune?

The first problem Lewis sees about this is that according to him, self-consciousness or self-knowledge is not even possible without the existence of something other than oneself, a place naturally filled by the material world.

There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a ‘self’, can exist except in contrast with an ‘other’, a something which is not the self. (ibd.)

I think that Lewis’ claim does not go through as easily as he supposed. There may in fat be reasons to think otherwise. For example, the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) proposed a thought argument in which a man is created in the middle of an endless fall. He is supposed to have no sense experiences of either his fall or his body. This flying man, Avicenna held, is still aware of himself as an immaterial substance, a soul.

That’s not to say Lewis has no point here. Avicenna’s argument can be contested, and we have reason to believe that individual self-consciousness arises in an infant through interactions with his parents (Eilan 2005). At any rate, Lewis holds that “apprehending God” is the minimal requirement for a soul to become self-conscious. Thus, a first reason for the existence of a material world is off the table.

But Lewis has more arrows in his quiver. Even if souls can be conscious of themselves merely through their relationship with God, can they communicate with one another, Lewis asks? He is skeptical about that. Here is why: if there is no world, no matter to use for communication, then a soul would have to put her thoughts directly into another soul in order to make herself heard. However, the receiving soul already has thoughts of her own. If a thought is inserted into her by another soul, how would she know that that thought comes from another soul and is not hers? According to Lewis, she cannot know. Her own thoughts would be indistinguishable from inserted thoughts. Communication – even the recognition of other souls – would be impossible. The result would be a dismal solipsism.

However, things may not be as bleak as Lewis claims. He himself admits that direct thought insertion is what God and Satan sometimes do in our world; yes, they are mostly overheard, but only mostly (21). Some people manage to distinguish a divinely inspired thought from one of their own. Thus, it argument becomes a matter of probability, not of impossibility, whether a soul can grasp an inserted thought as inserted. This is in line with one approach to self-consciousness in the philosophy of mind, according to which my own thoughts have a ‘flavor’ of ownership or “mineness” that inserted thoughts would not have. Thus, the second reason pondered by Lewis for the necessity of a material world also crumbles.

The true meaning of matter

There is a third one, however, quite independent from the first two, that I shall discuss shortly. Before that, I wish to point to an important feature of the material world that Lewis apparently considers as contingent. For Lewis, one can already speak of a world or environment if there is just space and time:

Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting between disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiously the idea of, at least, a common space and common time, to give the co- in coexistence a meaning: and space and time are already an environment. (21)

Imagine souls were placed in a container of empty space where they can move around (and communicate telepathically). The only perk added in comparison to souls existing sans world is movement – albeit in empty space, where there isn’t exactly much so see, and any place is as empty as the other. It does not seem as if a world in Lewis’ minimal sense has added any new value or insight into why there must be material world.

You may complain that that’s too radical and outlandish. After all, the point of the material universe is precisely that it is not empty but filled with all sorts of things. And you are right, of course.

So, add to the world in our though experiment as much structure and entities as you want. Make it even as rich as our universe. We still haven’t gained anything: on the plausible assumption that souls without bodies cannot interact with matter they are more like bystanders in that world than participants. And since they still could not talk to each other but through thought insertion, we would not gain anything on the communication front either.

We can now see a key point about how the material world needs to be structured, one that Lewis does not stress (although it is implicitly present in his writing). Not only should the material world be rich in content, but also souls need bodies to properly participate in it. And with embodiment, things become really interesting. For once souls are embodied, the possibility of doing harm to one another arises – along with occasions for lavishing a rich texture of goodness on one another. That, I believe, is the true meaning of matter. It gives us opportunities for significant choices to do good or bad. The choices are so significant because the consequences are real. Thus, what above seemed like an untoward feature of matter actually becomes its true meaning. And with this answer we at once get at least the possibility for suffering.

Of course, Lewis is absolutely right that in order for this to be so, nature must be stable environment, one governed by laws, in modern parlance. Only if the agents participating in the system of nature can reasonably predict the outcomes of their volitions is a meaningful “society of free souls” possible. If I want to tell you something, I rely on the soundwaves behaving like yesterday, when I told something similar to someone else, and I rely on them not changing their behavior while they travel from me to you. In short, we rely on nature doing the job to transport the information we want to bring across. This is goes likewise for blessings and curses; hence the significance for morality. We may wish for the soundwaves of a slanderer or demagogue to fail their poisonous speech; but, then, how could we ever talk to one another, barring telepathy?

But the stability of nature is also important outside of communication. The sharpness of the knife is what allows me to slice vegetables. It also allows me to cut someone’s throat. We may wish for the fire to be cooler so as to not hurt the poor people trapped in the burning building; but then no one could heat up anything with fire. In our world, pulling the trigger on a gun does not result in bubbles coming out of the barrel, the way Thanos neutralizes Peter Quill’s weapon in Avengers: Infinity War. In our world, matter has an intrinsic unchanging nature. We are responsible because we know how it behaves.

This, Lewis affirms, is the reason why nature must be the way it is: endowed with a reality of its own, a reality that is both stable across time and not subject to our wishes and whims. However, this stability is relevant only once a material world is in place. It does not tell us why a material world is necessary in the first place. That answer is inextricably bound up with free will and the possibility of suffering - and of remedying it.

References

Eilan, Naomi. 2005. Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford University Press, USA.

Lewis, Clive Staples. 1962. The Problem of Pain. MacMillan.

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