Did C. S. Lewis's Natural Desire for Joy Show the Supernatural Reality of God and Heaven? The Evolutionary Psychology of Religious Experience

The end of the movie--but not the stage play--"Freud's Last Session" suggests that Freud has been persuaded by Lewis's Argument from Desire for the reality of Heaven.  

On his train back to Oxford, Lewis looks at the book that Freud had slipped into his coat pocket.  It's Freud's copy of Lewis's book The Pilgrim's Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2014, originally published in 1933).  Lewis sees that Freud has written inside the book "from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  Lewis smiles as his train enters a tunnel, and then the movie fades out.

The quotation is so enigmatic that most viewers will be confused as to what it means, although they can see that Lewis is pleased or amused by it.  As I noted in a previous post, the quotation is an altered version of a quotation from Francis Bacon: "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."

Anyone who has read The Pilgrim's Regress could see how this applies to the book.  It's the story of the pilgrim John whose journey to an enchanting island takes him through adventures with a series of people, most of whom are allegorical representations of various errors that he must avoid.  In the "Afterword to the Third Edition" of the book, Lewis explained it as a depiction of his own experience of intense Desire as he progressed "from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity" (231).  In later writings--particularly, in Surprised by Joy (1955)--Lewis called this Desire Joy, and he said that "in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else" (17).

THE ARGUMENT FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF JOY

In the "Afterword" and in Surprised by Joy, Lewis indicated that there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Joyful Desire.  When people feel this Desire, they think they know what they are desiring.  A child looks wistfully at a distant hillside and thinks he would be happy "if only I were there."  Or he reads a fairy tale and thinks he would be happy if that fairy-tale land really existed.  A man in love thinks he would be happy if he possessed the perfect beloved.  Or a man longs to travel to foreign lands, and he thinks he would be fulfilled if he could see visit those places.  Or a man driven by ambition to gain great status and power thinks he would be happy if he could satisfy that ambition.  Or a man absorbed by his studies in philosophy or science thinks he would be fully satisfied if only he could achieve a full intellectual understanding of his subject.  

Lewis claims that by his own experience he has proven all of these impressions to be wrong.  Every one of these supposed objects for this Joyful Desire is inadequate because having any of these objects would not satisfy the Desire.

"It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.  This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur's castle--the chair in which only one could sit.  And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist" (PR, 237).

Lewis concludes that the One who can sit in that chair is God.  So our search for Joy can be satisfied by nothing in the natural world but only by our entering the supernatural Heaven where we will be united with God.  Freud was perhaps suggesting his agreement--"from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."

But is this really the truth?  Has Lewis made a cogent argument for this conclusion?  John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion) has made a good case for saying No.  And I agree with Beversluis that Lewis's desire for Joy--for religious transcendence--is not evidence for the transcendent reality of God and Heaven.  

But I disagree with Beversluis's claim that this is not a natural desire at all.  There are good reasons for believing that the desire for religious transcendence is one of the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature, although the natural reality of this desire neither proves nor disproves the supernatural reality of its transcendent object.

As Beversluis indicates, Lewis's Argument from Desire can be framed schematically as either deductive or inductive.    The deductive version goes like this (Beversluis, 41):

1.  Nature makes nothing in vain, that is, every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it.

2.  Joy is a natural desire, but not for any natural object because no object in the natural world can satisfy it.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object must exist.

Lewis suggested this deductive form when he used the word "must" in his conclusion: "And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist."

The inductive version of the argument goes like this (Beversluis, 43):

1.  Many natural desires have objects that can satisfy them.

2.  Joy is a natural desire for a kind of satisfaction that no object in the natural world can satisfy.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object probably exists.

Lewis suggested this inductive form when he used words like "a pretty good indication" and "most probable explanation."   In "The Weight of Glory," he wrote:

"Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.  But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it?  'Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.'  But I think it may be urged that this misses the point.  A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic.  But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.  In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.  A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world" (The Weight of Glory, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 32-33, italics added).

In Mere Christianity, he wrote:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world" (120, italics added). 

In his play (p. 16), but not in his screenplay for the movie, Mark St. Germain has Lewis repeat this passage but without the sentence on sexual desire. 

Beversluis correctly observes that Lewis's argument--in both its deductive and inductive forms--fails.  The deductive argument fails because it begs the question at issue: the major proposition assumes that "every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it," but that's what Lewis needs to prove.

The inductive argument rests on a false analogy: it's not at all clear that the desire for supernatural transcendence is a natural desire of the same kind as the natural human desires for food and sex or the duckling's natural desire to swim.  From the fact that the natural desires for food, sex, and swimming have natural objects that can satisfy them, it does not follow that a natural desire for a supernatural bliss probably shows that there really is a supernatural object that can satisfy it.

The natural desire for religious transcendence is different in kind from all other natural desires, because it is the only natural desire that aims at a supernatural end that cannot be achieved in the natural world.  Beversluis contends that this desire is so radically different from all other natural desires that it should not be considered a natural desire at all.  Here is where I disagree with him.

Although Lewis does not explain what he means by natural desires, his examples--human desires for food and sex and a duckling's desire to swim--suggest that he means innate desires that arise spontaneously in all normal members of a species as part of their evolved nature.  Natural desires are evolutionary adaptations that are necessary for the survival and reproductive success of a species.  But, Beversluis observes, Lewis's Joy does not seem to be biologically instinctive in this way, because it is not necessary for the survival or reproductive success of the human species.  Moreover, if it were an instinctive desire of evolved human nature, one would expect to find evidence that it is universal for all human cultures throughout human history; but Lewis has not provided such evidence (45, 52-53).

LEWIS ON THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Lewis does suggest, however, an evolutionary explanation of religious experience that could be judged in the light of the modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion.  Showing the influence of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), Lewis sketches the evolutionary development of religion through four stages in the Introduction to The Problem of Pain (16-25).  The first stage is what Otto called the experience of the Numinous--the feeling of dread and awe in the experience of the uncanny.  Otto coined the word "numinous" from the Latin word numen for "divinity."  According to Lewis, this arose first among prehistoric human beings.  "Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits" (17).  This dreadful and awful feeling of ghostly invisible spirits was "the seed of religious experience" (God in the Dock, 189).

The second stage in religious evolution came with the human feeling that there is a moral law--the sense that we "ought" or "ought not" to engage in certain kinds of conduct.  Human beings agreed in prescribing this moral law although they often failed to obey it.

The third stage in religious development was when human beings identified the Numinous Power as the guardian of that moral law.  The Jews in the Hebrew Bible show this identification of the Numinous with the moral law:  God is righteous and loves righteousness.

Finally, in New Testament Christianity, a man is born who claims to be the son of, or the same as, that Numinous Power who is also the giver of the moral law.  The teaching of the New Testament--the incarnation of Jesus as both human and divine and the promise that his sacrificial death and resurrection will redeem sinful human beings so that they can be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven--is the completion of all previous religious development.  Because now, for the first time in history, human beings can satisfy their deepest natural desire for supernatural happiness by being resurrected after death to eternal life in the presence of God, and thus return to the true home from which they came.

Lewis suggests that this evolution of religious experience through four stages could be explained in two ways.  It could be a fully natural evolution of human religious experience through four stages of the biological and cultural evolution of the human mind.  Or it could be that at each of these four stages of natural evolution, there was some human experience of a supernatural Revelation from God.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Lewis was a theistic evolutionist, who thought there was no conflict between the natural science of evolution and the supernatural Revelation of Christianity, because Christians should see that God could carry out His will through the natural process of evolution along with some supernatural interventions into natural history (such as the Incarnation of Christ).

So, when prehistoric human ancestors first began to experience the Numinous--feeling dread and awe in the belief that "the universe was haunted by spirits"--Lewis says there are only two possible explanations:

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe.  Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given" (Mere Christianity, 20-21).

Presumably, most readers of this passage will dismiss the first alternative--"a mere twist in the human mind"--as unsatisfactory, and thus they might think there is no good alternative to Revelation as an explanation.  But here Lewis displays one of his favorite rhetorical tricks--the false dichotomy.  Anyone who knows anything about the evolutionary psychology of religion will know that to explain the appearance of the first religious experience of a world "haunted by spirits" in human evolution, we are not forced to choose between "a mere twist in the human mind" that is inexplicable and a Revelation that erupts miraculously in human experience. 

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In saying that a mental capacity for religious experience would be "serving no biological function," Lewis adopted the position of Alfred Russel Wallace, who agreed with Charles Darwin in developing the theory of evolution by natural selection, but who denied that this could explain the higher mental and moral capacities of human beings.  Wallace argued that since the mental power for religious experience does not serve any biological need for survival and reproduction, this mental power could not have evolved by natural selection.  So natural selection shaped the "animal nature" of human beings but not their "spiritual nature," which must arise from "the unseen universe of Spirit."

But now the evolutionary psychology of religion--as developed by Justin Barrett, Jesse Bering, and others--can show how although the propensity to religious experience has not evolved directly to serve a biological function, it has evolved as a byproduct of innate mental mechanisms directly shaped by biological evolution for detecting agency--for identifying objects in the environment (particularly, animals and other human beings) that move themselves for the sake of goals as guided by mental states like beliefs and desires.  Once such agents have been detected, the human capacity for mind-reading generates predictions about the mental states of these agents and how these mental states might direct their actions.  As naturally social animals whose survival and reproductive fitness has depended on a subtle negotiation of the complex social interactions among human agents, human beings have been endowed by evolution with intuitive mental tools necessary for social life.

For that reason, our agency detection device becomes hypersensitive: we detect agency based on limited evidence.  Particularly, in urgent situations of distress, where we cannot account for what is happening based on natural causes, we are quick to infer supernatural agents at work.  We then want to negotiate with these supernatural agents--spirits, ghosts, or gods--to protect ourselves from harm.  All human societies throughout history show this natural propensity to believe in supernatural agents to be a human universal.  The original expression of that religious experience was in our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had shamans as mediators with supernatural agents, and who lived in a world "haunted by spirits"--feeling the awe and dread of the Numinous, which Lewis saw as "the seed of the religious experience."

The subsequent development of religion beyond this original experience of awful spirits came through cultural evolution, in which some religious traditions had a selective advantage in that some were better than others in satisfying the innate mental tools of the evolved human mind for detecting supernatural agency.  Justin Barrett has argued that the Abrahamic monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are more naturally attractive to the human mind, because the human mind is naturally inclined to believe in the divine traits of the Abrahamic God--God as moral, God as superknowing, God as immortal, God as superpowerful, and God as Creator.  This would confirm Lewis's claim that Judaism and Christianity became the most humanly satisfying forms of religious development.

But this Darwinian science of the biological and cultural evolution of religion as culminating in Abrahamic monotheism does not either prove or disprove the real supernatural existence of the Abrahamic God.  A Christian evolutionist like Justin Barrett can see this as showing that the natural evolution of religious belief is compatible with believing in the truth of Revelation, because we can believe that God used the evolutionary process to create a human mind that would have a desire for religious transcendence that would be fulfilled by faith in the revealed truth of God and Heaven.  But an atheistic evolutionist like Jesse Bering can see this natural evolution of religious belief as showing the natural human propensity for believing religious illusions.

Thus, Lewis's natural desire for Joy--for the Paradise of eternal life with God in Heaven--does not by itself prove the reality of that supernatural object of his desire.

We are left, then, with the unresolvable debate between Reason and Revelation, in which neither side can refute the other.  But as Lewis saw in his many years of debating atheists and skeptics in the Oxford Socratic Club, a modern liberal social order can secure the freedom of thought that makes it possible to have such a public debate that would not be possible in a more theocratic or illiberal social order.

And even if the Socratic and Darwinian zetetic philosophers lack the absolute knowledge or wisdom that would be necessary to refute Revelation, they can find such joy in the philosophic life of loving wisdom even without ever fully achieving it that they can attain the natural happiness possible in this life, so that they need feel no longing for a supernatural happiness in some heavenly afterlife.  Those living the philosophic life might even find joy in understanding--in at least some limited way--that everything in the Universe, and even the Universe itself, must eventually die.

I have written about the evolution of Heaven and Hell and given some reasons for agreeing with Wallace Stevens that "death is the mother of beauty."

Lewis was mistaken in thinking his desire for Joy was a desire for Heaven.  A deathless life in a heavenly paradise would not satisfy us, because it would not be a human life at all.