In this episode, Trent joins David Bates from Pints with Jack to explore C.S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters and discuss the cunning ways the Devil leads us away from God and how we can, through the grace of God, resist his temptations.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
And welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn, and today I get to be a guest on the Pints with Jack podcast. Now you’ve probably heard of Pints With Aquinas, that’s a podcast hosted by my friend, Matt Fradd, but Pints with Jack focuses on the work of C. S. Lewis hosted by my friend David Bates, who actually just married a colleague and friend of mine here at Catholic Answers, Marie Dixon, who is now Marie Bates.
What David does is he has a different co-host on each week. He has regular co-hosts, but oftentimes he brings on guest co-hosts to discuss the works of C. S. Lewis. This week he’s talking about The Screwtape Letters. In these letters, a senior demon in hell, Screwtape, is instructing a junior demon, Wormwood, in the best ways to tempt human beings away from God, and actually the best ways to tempt us are the ways you’d least suspect. The devil is quite crafty after all.
In this episode, David Bates and I sit down. We go through the letter and we talk about all of the dastardly ways the devil would try to damn us and how through the grace of God, we can escape his clutches. Stay tuned and I hope you enjoy this guest starring episode on Pints with Jack here on the Counsel of Trent podcast.
David Bates:
Because one of the things that Screwtape is going to say throughout this letter is we want to confuse the humans. We don’t want them to be able to think clearly, and that’s embodied in today’s quote of the week, and Screwtape says, jargon not argument is your best ally in keeping your patient from the church. In addition to the quote of the week, we naturally have a drink of the week, but because I’m a Trent, it’s a little different.
Normally we have beer, we have scotches, but we are having Sprouts’ chocolate milk because it’s both a little too early for a pre breakfast scotch and also Trent is something of an aficionado of chocolate milk.
Trent Horn:
You bet. Well, so David, when I would travel… Back when we actually were traveling a bunch before the pandemic, I would go maybe one to two times a month on airplanes to go speak at conferences, speak at parishes, especially when I would leave early in the morning. I always had the same routine before I got in an airplane. I wanted to drink something, just kind of nice and calming that would give me a little bit of a boost in the morning and I hate coffee. I’m not a coffee drinker. I never got into it, and so I just… well, I’m just going to get a chocolate milk. It has a sugar hit, has a protein hit, it’s smooth and enjoyable and now I’ve gone to so many airports and I drink the stuff. I have like my favorite brands that I’ve listed and that I talk about. I can know what’s worth drinking… because there’s some brands that are just absolutely terrible. I will pass over them in an airport.
Honestly, I think that it’s healthy. I’ve checked the stats and a chocolate milk has half as much sugar as a soda. I mean, that’s actually… it’s not as bad. It’s just a nice calming thing that I enjoy and especially for me. I’m not a breakfast person, I don’t eat breakfast. I don’t like it. I mean, American breakfast is terrible anyways. I mean-
David Bates:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
You guys have your… what do you do? Blood sausage or something?
David Bates:
That’s a little bit more Irish breakfast, but-
Trent Horn:
That’s Irish. Yeah, but what do you have like beans.
David Bates:
Usually sausages, beans, toasts. Some rashers of bacon.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. That works when it’s kind of protein based and… That’s funny when I was in Australia, they had baked beans for breakfast, and I realized, “Oh, this actually works.” Here in America it’s just awful so I don’t eat breakfast, but if I want a hit of something just to get me going in the morning and I don’t want to be all jittery from coffee, I just run a chocolate milk and it’s actually pretty delightful, and the brand you got is delightful. I don’t know which one it was, but I know it’s the best, David, are the ones that come in a glass bottle.
David Bates:
Absolutely. Well, I got this one from Sprouts. It’s their reduced fat chocolate milk and it was because my wife told me that you were looking longingly at a bottle of it. She had bought and kept in the fridge at work.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. When it comes in a glass bottle you know they’re putting a lot of effort into it. It’s good stuff.
David Bates:
Well, normally at this point we would toast one of our gold level supporters on Patreon, but I thought that today we’d toast your unborn son, John Paul. If you’ll please raise your glass.
Trent Horn:
All right.
David Bates:
John Paul, we raise our glasses to your good health and imminent arrival. May your delivery be swift and safe and may you give your two older brothers a good run for their money.
Trent Horn:
Cheers to John Paul for that.
David Bates:
Cheers. That is really nice. When I was growing up in England, Nesquik was a thing and that was the powder.
Trent Horn:
Oh, it’s the worst. I mean, I was a kid I did, and kids don’t know any better. Kids like that thing. I would make chocolate milk with Nesquik powder and I would put like four giant scoops in to the glass and I thought, this is the greatest thing ever. Now though, when you get older you realize that was pretty terrible.
David Bates:
Today we’re going to be reading, as I said, the first letter from uncle Screwtape, and this was first published in The Guardian on May 2nd 1941. Any chaps out I’m going to give now a hundred word summary. In earlier seasons I did 150 words but since these chapters are small, I have to tighten my limit. Here we go. Screwtape’s correspondence begins by encouraging his nephew to use jargon rather than argument to secure his human, explaining that argument awakens the patient’s reason and moves the struggle onto God’s own ground.
Wormwood is told to impress upon his patient what Screwtape calls the pressure of the ordinary, the stream of immediate sense experiences so as to distract the patient from matters eternal. Screwtape illustrates this by telling the story of one of his former patients reading in the British Museum. The senior devil concludes by underscoring for his nephew, that he is there to fuddle his patient, not teach him.
That’s going to be today’s letter. Do you have any initial thoughts when you were looking through it in anticipation of this?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I thought it was interesting, the distinction about jargon. The idea that it’s not an argument that we need to keep people away from God, it’s using things that just confuse them or jargon. It made me think about how Lewis was an expert at reaching the common man with reasons and avoiding using jargon because I think honestly, David, one thing that is not helpful in the world of apologetics are people who go out and defend the faith, but they use so many sophisticated terms, what we would call jargon, that it kind of overwhelms the audience and they can’t actually receive these important truths that the speaker is trying to communicate to them.
But Lewis was an expert. You read Mere Christianity, you read his works and he was an intelligent man. He was aware jargon’s not a bad thing. I mean, when we discuss among experts and you’re talking about different issues, jargon or terms are just shortcuts in a conversation to speak about certain things. We’re talking about Christology. We discuss the hypostatic union, the beatific vision of God. We’re talking about heaven.
It’s important especially among people who are at a higher level of discussion, it’s a nice shortcut to keep the conversation moving forward.
David Bates:
And it also provides some clarity.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
The purpose of the jargon there is to provide clarity for exactly what you mean with well-defined terms that we all understand.
Trent Horn:
But if you don’t understand the terms, the jargon no longer provides clarity. It instead makes things very unclear because the person’s struggling to understand. Lewis would have understood these jargon terms in literature, philosophy, or theology, but he specifically chose not to use them in his works that were written for the common man. Originally written as radio addresses for the common man.
I think that’s important and that’s something that I’ve also tried to do in my own work. I’ve tried to avoid, like especially in my book, Why We’re Catholic. I remember I was writing a sentence once and I wrote the sentence saying, I said as nonchalantly as possible and that’s the perfect word to describe the tone that I was using, but then I thought to myself, most people won’t know what that word means. I just took it out and said, I said and as relaxed a tone as possible, because I didn’t want to add… The theological truths I’m discussing with the reader are heavy enough to consider. I don’t want to unnecessarily add burdens to them with jargon that’s not necessary.
David Bates:
Dr. Steven Beebe’s written a book on C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication. One of the features of his work, the identifies is that Lewis is audience centered. He knows who he’s talking to. The example of Mere Christianity is a really great example because that was… those talks went through multiple revisions because originally Lewis went around preaching to [RAF 00:08:41] squadrons, and he actually thought it was going really badly because he thought he was going way over their heads and using languages that they didn’t understand and also stuff they just didn’t care about.
As he honed it to that environment, he got better at his craft and when the BBC asked him to do these radio addresses, he would write a first draft and then one of their people would look at it and give him feedback. It was only through multiple revisions of that, that we end up with Mere Christianity, probably one of the greatest apologetics works ever.
Trent Horn:
Right, and I think that there are certain areas among Catholic apologetics and theology where this hazard can arise. For example, if you’re trying to explain the work of St. Thomas Aquinas or Thomistic philosophy, there is very specific jargon that is helpful and necessary to understand Thomas but when you start out explaining it to people, you either have to spend a lot of time explaining the terms or you just have to not be afraid to kind of be folksy about it and explain to people. Terms like act, essence, potency, these are all things that are important, but you don’t want to just immediately throw them out there because it’ll go over people’s heads.
I also think David that sometimes a temptation among apologists to use jargon comes from a feeling that well, people won’t take me seriously unless I sound sophisticated. People won’t take me seriously, and there’s a concern that you want to be “respected” as an intellectual but honestly, the sign that you’re intellectual is that you can take a complex topic and you can explain it to someone in a simplified way that maybe it loses a little bit of nuance, but it’s still true. That’s really the sign.
I would give advice to apologist or anyone who’s trying to explain the faith, don’t be afraid to be a little bit folksy about it and reach people at their level. It reminds me of what St. Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians, to the Jews I became a Jew to win over Jews. To the Greeks I became a Greek. To the weak I became weak. I become all things to all people that I may win some for Christ. That’s what we have to be able to do. You see, you have to put away your pride a little bit and say, “All right, how can I serve my audience?” Now, if my audience is graduate students at a college, then the jargon will be more helpful there. If it’s lay people at a parish talk, it won’t be.
I think that you make a good point there that when we communicate and share the gospel to imitate Lewis, we should be very audience centered as we do it.
David Bates:
The missionary that really brought my faith alive at university, she always said that there were three parts to a talk. You had to have good understanding of theology, know who your audience is, and then bridge it through your own life and your own experience. Those are all of the good ways that you can use jargon and that’s not what Screwtape wants Wormwood to do. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
He wants the bad ways.
David Bates:
He wants the bad ways. Screwtape begins by saying that Wormwood wrote in his last letter, a lot about guiding the patient’s reading and making sure that he sees a lot of his friend who is a materialist. All of this seems like quite logical advice. Simply given that the two principle means by which Lewis himself converted to Christianity were books and friendships, human rights in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that a young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
What’s interesting is that, then Screwtape immediately turns around and says that he thinks that Wormwood is being naive because he’s getting the impression from what Wormwood is saying that Wormwood thinks that argument is the best way to keep the patient, the person he’s tempting away from God. Screwtape, he says that this might have worked in the past a few centuries earlier. He says that in that time, humans still pretty much knew what was proved and what wasn’t, and if it was proved and they believed it and they alter their way of life to accord to that truth, but he says that our devilish tactics are weapons of hell such as the media.
We’ve managed to change the way humanity operates. This is kind of chilling. He says, “Your man has been accustomed ever since he was a boy to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily as true or false but as academic, practical, outworn, contemporary, conventional, or ruthless. Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the church.”
Trent Horn:
Oh, I love that when he talks about how you don’t… that modern man doesn’t think about whether something is true or false, rather he thinks about what community does that statement belong to. It’s a very relativistic way of thinking. I think it’s just unfortunate, David, that most people in the modern age have not been taught how to think through arguments, or they’ve only been taught that to think through an argument is just something that stuffy philosophers or theologians do.
That’s not what the average person can do, but the average person does that all the time. They consider reasons, they reach conclusions. They’re just put off from philosophy by jargon. You’ll get people tell them, well, you have to make this inference. You don’t want to have a fallacy. It’s like, well, people already do that. They already make inferences and they can already detect when somebody’s doesn’t sound right. They just don’t use specialized terms for it.
What we need to do is to teach people, you already do this. Don’t think that certain aspects of theology or philosophy, the fundamental elements of our faith are only for the eggheads, only for the professors. It’s for everyone. You just have to refine. You already have these skills inside of you to detect the truth. Now we’re just going to tell you the proper names that have been given to these skills that you already have and you’ve been using for a while.
David Bates:
I was having a discussion with someone who is… he’s definitely a skeptic. I was sharing with him some of the proofs for the existence of God and he said, “This doesn’t seem fair that I have to kind of rely on you to have read this philosophy and then explain these things to me. How is the average person meant to be able to do it?” I said, “All philosophy is, is just thinking clearly. Thinking rightly.” There are technical terms and we tidy up the arguments a bit, but all that really is just about being logical and thinking clearly.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Kirke, he laments when he’s talking to the children when they can’t follow the logical conclusion for what their sister Lucy has told them, and he keeps saying, what do they teach them in these schools? He wants them to think logically.
Trent Horn:
And this isn’t just restricted to philosophy. When we look at any domain or field we would ask the average person, he says, “Well, why should I expect it to go this deep?” Well, you don’t have to go that deep, but your life will be intellectually impoverished if you don’t. I mean, you can pick up a cell phone and make a call and talk to people and you can do all of that without pondering the deeper question, how am I able to talk to someone on a cell phone? And to answer that question, well, you’re going to have to do some legwork and read books or watch videos on science about how electric currents flow and magnetism. What you’ll have to do is you’ll have to start at some basics to understand to get the jargon filled in, but then that will illuminate these other mysteries that you have, whether it’s in science or literature or history.
I mean, you can go all about the world without asking questions like, why are things the way they are today? Most of the reason things are the way they are in human conventions or government or cultures is because of events that happened in the past, and you can just live your life in ignorance of all of that but it’s going to be intellectually impoverished. When you start the journey of asking, well, why are things the way they are? It will be difficult at first. It’s mental exercise, just like physical exercise. It’s difficult.
You see people who are in shape, well, why should I go to all that work to have a body that’s in shape? Well, you can live a life where you’re sick and you’re tired, and it’s not that… you’ll survive without devoting yourself to physical fitness, but it’s just not really a life that’s that worth living or it’s kind of subpar. The same is true for mental or academic fitness, which ultimately then is superseded by spiritual fitness but you can get through life just surviving, but life is not just about surviving. It should be about thriving but you’re only going to thrive if you put the effort in.
David Bates:
Screwtape then returns to the subject of materialism, and he says, “Okay, your patient with regards to materialism, he doesn’t need to think about it as being true or false.” He says, “Make him think of it as strong, stark, courageous.” Again, he’s using this jargon. It’s forget about the truth value of the proposition. Think of it as strong, stark, or courageous. He even says that it is the philosophy of the future, and that alludes to a real struggle that Lewis had in his own life.
He had this, he called it this Great War with Owen Barfield, a man who would later become an inkling. They argued about a lot of things, but they particularly addressed Lewis’ chronological snobbery. He’s built an idea that new ideas must necessarily be better. The old ideas and old things found in old books, well, they’re old so what value could they really have?
Trent Horn:
Well, it’s the same. It reminds you of the common atheist objection to the Christian faith. People say, how can you trust something that was written in a book 2000 years ago? Well, what does it matter when it was written? If I write a statement about the shape of the earth or any other kind of truth, if I wrote it today, or I wrote it 2000 years ago which was when actually, you go to [Erastianis 00:18:05] in ancient Greece, thousands of years ago discovered that the earth was round. People didn’t know that.
I mean, it’s a myth that like Christians believed in a flat earth until the time of Columbus and people told Columbus, he was going to sail off the edge of a flat earth. That’s not what… people got that from a Looney Tunes cartoon. That’s not actually what happened. Nobody in the middle ages believed that the earth… there might’ve been one crank out there, but the vast majority of people knew that the earth was round. This idea that things are… well, if they’re newer, they’re better and they’re truer than if they were written a long time ago. That’s just not true.
It also is wedded to this kind of scientism that, well, science always finds the way for us and so we should trust the newer science versus the older science because we had Newtonian physics and that replaced earlier Aristotelian physics and then Einstein replaced Newton. Although it’s funny, David is that, that should not actually give us that much confidence in modern science. You could just say, well, we should trust science because it always replaces and corrects things in the past. You would say, well, how do you know it’s not wrong now when it was… back when now is 300 or 400 or 800 years ago, they thought they were right then, and then how do you know everything you believe as a scientist now won’t get overturned in a hundred years.
I think that it’s important to look at this problem of chronological snobbery and really help the modern man be disabused from this idea that his salvation and ultimate truth is found in the future rather than in the past, because that’s where it’s hard. How are you going to tell me some guy speaking 2000 years ago that he’s the truth? The truth is somewhere in the future I have to get to. Well, no, there are truths there for us to find, but the ultimate truth is found in a real event that happened actually in the past that has implications today.
David Bates:
Yeah, and Screwtape wants to obscure all of that by using jargon. Lewis loved words. He was best friends with talking, a philologist. He sees how one of the things that he loves can be twisted. As Screwtape is talking about this jargon, it really makes me think of advertising.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
It’s not about, for example, whether you actually need this product. It’s about all of the things that are going to be attached to it. Is it strong, stark, courageous, the item of the future.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, it reminds me of a book written back in 1985 by Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death. As it was interesting back in 1985 and they released a newer version of it in 2005, but Postman was concerned. People were asking in a panel I think, what do you think dystopia will look like? This was in 1985 and this is… you’re talking about, of course, George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four and so they’re thinking, well, what will dystopia look like. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t look like what George Orwell thought 1984 would look like.
That for Postman dystopia was not a tyrannical government that would overreach and take away freedoms. He said that modern dystopia would not be like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would be more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where everybody’s just hitting themselves up with Soma, the drug in that futuristic world that dulls all of your senses and our Soma is just television.
What Postman was worried about is that people would, instead of trying to pursue truth through the mediums that truth is most easily communicated like the written word, they’re just going to be entertained and seek truth in television. This is back in 1985 when Postman was saying, look, you watch news, the news isn’t really news. It’s just entertainment. It even has theme music to help set the mood to know how you should feel when the story is read to you instead of you reading the story, and that was back in 1985 when news… well, there’s probably three news networks and it was way more professional and better than the state it is in 2020.
That people would rather be, instead of learning things, they’ll only tolerate learning something if they’re being entertained at the same time, and that’s a hazard then in that people won’t want to pursue hard or difficult truths because they’re just not being entertained while they’re doing it.
David Bates:
Now what’s interesting is as you mention those different dystopian novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, I’d also think Animal Farm. In all of those books, there is always an element of how language is used to bring about this dystopian future. In 1984, they literally are rewriting the dictionaries to take away people’s capacity to express themselves.
Trent Horn:
Newspeak. Yeah.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Or in Animal Farm you have sentences and phrases that sound nice, but they actually don’t make sense. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Like, oh, okay. You’ll hear these platitudes that the culture will give people to try to soothe them and say, oh, everything’s fine even though the worldview that you’re embracing is contradictory and incoherent, it doesn’t make sense. You just kind of embrace the absurdity.
It’s important when watching language, that’s why it’s important to learn how to think if you’re operating that… Lewis is saying with jargon and advertisement, look, don’t get into think about it. Just say, well, that feels right to me and I like the words associated with that but if you actually thought it through you’d realize, wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all and so that’s why Screwtape is really concerned here.
We don’t want him thinking through the modern world because it might sound right, but it isn’t right. When you start thinking about it, you’ll get past the sound right and realize it isn’t right.
David Bates:
And he says something quite telling. He says the trouble with argument is it moves the whole struggle onto the enemies ground. He can argue too.
Trent Horn:
For Screwtape the enemy is God.
David Bates:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Reason moves it over to God’s domain because reason is ultimately the light that God has given us to come to know him. The first Vatican council made it clear by the light of human reason God’s existence can be known. You can’t know everything about God, but you can use reason to know that God exists and you have to respond in a certain way to him.
David Bates:
And Screwtape says that not only can arguments be made in favor of God, but he says there’s something inherently dangerous in allowing your patient to argue at all. He says, “By the very act of arguing you awake the patient’s reason, and once it is awake, who can foresee the results.” Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you will be strengthening in your patient a fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.
Trent Horn:
Amusing Ourselves to Death, going back to Postman, this idea. I think that’s… one of the hardest things, David, for me as an apologist, people say, what’s the toughest objection for you to overcome? And I’ll be honest with you. The toughest objection for me to overcome would be the argument from apathy. Well, why should I care? Who cares? And that’s what’s hard. Is that 2000 years ago when the gospel was being preached among those who were shrouded in pagan darkness, they at least had an understanding of sin and a problem.
That they knew that when they would die, they would go to a ghostly afterlife that would not be pleasant. They understood sin and evil and being enslaved to the passions. They knew there was a problem, they just weren’t sure what the right answer was. Today however, nobody thinks there’s a problem. No one has a problem. I can go home. I can order food on Instacart. I can watch stuff on Netflix. I can have anything delivered to me at the touch of a button. I can pull open my laptop and get work done even from home and I can enjoy all these comforts and luxuries, why shouldn’t I even worry?
What Screwtape is speaking about here in mid 20th century England, it’s even more amplified now that people could say, I don’t need to care about all that ethereal theological mumbo jumbo. I’m fine. My life is just fine right now. Shaking people out of their complacency, out of the Soma they’ve doped themselves up with, the throw back to Aldous Huxley, that to me is one of the biggest challenges that we face.
David Bates:
And he’s also predicting the ship on the movie, Wall-E.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Where everyone is just extremely corpulent and is moved around by robots and they have given into the passions. They’ve allowed their passions just to determine what is good, what is bad? What is right and wrong? What is true? And the passions sometimes get it right, but the problem is that the passions are highly unreliable to determine that let’s say something is right or wrong.
If a man is trying to determine, should the exercise of his sexual powers, is it good or bad in a given instance? Well, his passions, he might by chance get it right if he happens to be with his wife, but odds are, if he’s with someone who’s… he’s going to be with someone who’s not his wife. The passion is there. It’s like playing Russian roulette. The idea that you’re going to get it right just by following them, because the passions they always lead us to a good. Like if a man desires sexual pleasure it’s not because sexual pleasure is bad. It is a good. The problem is it’s become bad if it’s ordered towards an improper end, like someone who’s not your wife, for example.
So that what’s nice is when we have reason, when reason tells us, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s not what this is for. This is not how I’m supposed to live.” That’s why Screwtape doesn’t want people to use reason. He wants them just to follow their gut and their passions, which sometimes get it right but they’re too highly unreliable. It’s like you go back to Plato and he would talk about the passions and use the analogy of the horses and the charioteer. We don’t want the horses guiding the chariot. That’s the job of the charioteer. That’s reason. The horses are the passions. They give it the energy to go, but you want someone actually guiding them so they don’t run amok.
David Bates:
Absolutely. I want to focus on one of the other items in that previous quotation where Screwtape talks about this stream of media sense experiences.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
That also to me sounds like he’s predicting social media. It’s your newsfeed, it’s 24 hour news. There’s always something else to focus on.
Trent Horn:
Our phones have broken us. I’m broken. I’m a broken person. I treat it like crack cocaine. I’m always going back to see… Companies have created addictive algorithms and interfaces for us to always go back to them to get another hit, to scroll through and we end up doing things like digital munching, digital snacking, looking at… and what’s funny is we’re reading. We’re kind of learning stuff, but usually it’s kind of useful… I mean, sorry, useless things, as opposed to focusing on… Now, it can be harnessed, I think, to things that are useful.
Once again, there is good hidden in all of this but it has to be properly ordered.
David Bates:
Yeah, but it’s very easy to regard your Facebook stream or your Instagram feed as real life.
Trent Horn:
Oh, yeah.
David Bates:
And it’s not.
Trent Horn:
No. It’s not, and especially that you look at something like Twitter, for example. I think 20% of the users do 80% of the tweets. You add it all up, what you see on Twitter represents about one to 2% of the U.S. population. When you see on social media, it’s not real life, but Lewis would say here that that’s what Screwtape wants, to suck us away from real life into whatever sense experiences can keep us distracted.
David Bates:
Exactly, and keep it moving and changing so we don’t actually go anywhere else or do anything different. Now, during this discussion, when Screwtape is describing what he calls the pressure of the ordinary, this sense experience that it was just constantly being fed to us. He alludes to an advantage that God has in this area.
Trent Horn:
Mom, can you tell me about the advantages of the T-Rex? He says it all the time at home. I love it. The advantages.
David Bates:
Oh, don’t worry. Your kids are doing well. Screwtape writes, remember he is not like you a pure spirit. Never having been a human, oh, that’s abominable advantage of the enemies. You don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. Here he’s alluding to the incarnation when God became man. In Hebrews, it talks about he became like us fully human in every way in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service to God.
Trent Horn:
Right, but without sin but yes he became… but also that he was tempted. That’s important for Hebrews that he was like us in all things except sin. Hebrews 4:15. He was like us in all ways but… so he was even tempted. He can identify with us that the God man, the creator can identify with the creature and become that model for us to be able to imitate him.
David Bates:
I have a question. It’s like, is it really fair to say that God gained an advantage by doing that? I mean, he’s God. I mean, in scripture it does talk about the incarnation in Mark about Jesus growing, increasing in wisdom and stature, but did God gain any insight that he wouldn’t have had otherwise?
Trent Horn:
No. Well, God is omniscient. We wouldn’t say that God has gained anything in the incarnation because God already contains all perfections and goodness. Rather, what we would say in the incarnation is that humanity gained something and that in virtue of God becoming man, it’s not like God learned something new. He never had before. God is omniscient but in becoming human, humanity itself completely changed and gained something new in response to that.
Now, that doesn’t take away of course, that Christ in his human nature did acquire new things, such as Luke 2:52 says that he grew in wisdom and stature. For example, he learned things by experience. Learning how to do woodworking or stone cutting that Joseph would show him how to do this. There are some things that you learn by experience. Now, of course, Christ being omnipotent because he’s a divine person, he’s omnipotent. He could simply grant himself all these abilities if he so chose to but if you go to Philippians 2:6 through 11, the great kenosis or emptying him, St. Paul says that Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a slave like us.
As a part of that emptying, he voluntarily chose not to use his divine attributes to give him perfect awareness of things within his human nature, so that he identifies with us and we can identify with him.
David Bates:
Yes. One of the church fathers, I forgot what he said, that which wasn’t assumed wasn’t saved.
Trent Horn:
Right. And he completely assumed human nature in becoming man that he’s fully man and fully God so that he can be that perfect mediator between God and men. A mediatorship by the way that we all participate in. Some people will say, well, you don’t need to ask the saints… pray to the saints. You have Jesus. Well, if that’s true, I don’t have to ask you for prayers either because I have Jesus.
David Bates:
And you’re about to have a newborn so you need all the prayers you can get.
Trent Horn:
Yep. Sure do. Very good.
David Bates:
Screwtape brings all this together in an anecdote. He tells of one of his former patients who he says was a sound atheist and who liked to read in the British Museum. He writes, one day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. Before I knew where I was, I saw my 20 years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone.
Screwtape says that he wasn’t so foolish. He went to the part of the man that he says that he had best under his control, his stomach and he suggested that it was time for lunch and this was far too important to tackle on a tired brain and an empty stomach, and then he says, once he was in the streets, the battle is won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper and a number 73 bus going past and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him and an unalterable conviction that whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of real life, by which he meant the bus and the newsboy, was enough to show him that all that sort of thing just couldn’t be true.
Trent Horn:
Real life. That’s the issue here and that’s what Screwtape, that’s what the devil does to us in trying to convince us that this world even among believers, that it is this world, that is the material world around us, the pressing concerns that we have. This is the real life that matters and all this other stuff about religion, about God, the spiritual life, that’s just an extracurricular activity you add on to things. When actually from the Christian perspective, it would be reversed. That what we see in heaven, that’s the true reality.
Now I’m not becoming a Plato here, platonic, but it relates to it that even the pagans understood. You look at Plato in the Republic, the famous Allegory of the Cave. People are trapped in the cave. They just see shadows of real things and then they leave the cave and see the light and see what’s real. For us, we need to see that God is the actual most real thing that exists, and anything we see in this life that is good is because it’s a faint reflection of God in some way, even if it is distorted heavily by sin it still reflects some aspect of God’s goodness.
We have to get out of this mindset of that our little trivial… the things that seem very important to us but in the span of eternity are not. That’s the problem, I think what Lewis hones in on here when it comes to real life. Trying to understand, well, what is real life? Because when I’m talking to people, David, they just assume I’m fine without God, because they have this assumption that I, my life is just a span of about 70 or 80 years and if I can fill it up just enough with everything to make me happy, I’m set.
To which I asked them but what if it’s not? What if you’re going to live forever. You’re never going to fill up a everlasting life with enough stuff to make you happy. Instead, you’ll be eternally miserable. That’s what hell is. I think that’s an important thing we need to have people to dawn on them as we talked about this stuff.
David Bates:
Yeah. Screwtape wants the patient’s senses filled up with all of the day to day to distract him from the eternal. It’s the immediate and local rather than the eternal and heavenly.
Trent Horn:
Well-
David Bates:
He says, they find it impossible to believe in the unfamiliar. Well, the familiar is before their eyes.
Trent Horn:
Well, it’s like when I have my children and I try to explain to them what we’re doing for the day and maybe a plan changes, or I promise them something really good that we’re going to go to. Like finally, the Air and Space Museum has reopened after the pandemic and I want to take them. We want to take them to the park or something really good, and they’re just completely fixated on a Lego thing they’re trying to build right at this moment, and completely lose their composure when I say, “Well, no, it’s time to go.” “But I have to get this done.”
I want to laugh. Like you’re acting like it’s the end of the world. You couldn’t put your little Lego pieces together, but from God’s perspective it’s like you’re acting like it’s the end of the world. You couldn’t get your little elements of your mortal life together that you wanted. When from the view of eternity, there’s so many bigger things for you to be concerned about.
David Bates:
And Lewis speaks about this in his sermon, The Weight of Glory. He compares ourselves to children playing mud pies because they don’t know how great it is to have a holiday at the sea. He says that our passions are not too large for God. They’re usually too small. We mess around down here with money and sex and power and eternal glory is waiting us.
Trent Horn:
British childhoods just sound very sad. I just imagine someone sitting around in some kind of gray foggy environment like making mud pies and worrying about a blitzkrieg or something like that. I’m sure you had a delightful British childhood, but I guess I always think it’s either that, or there’s some orphan somewhere. I just think like, what is David Bates’ childhood like? Well, I’m sure he just lived in a giant house with other kids. He’s like, please sir. Can I have some more? More. [crosstalk 00:37:07].
David Bates:
All I’ll say is don’t knock mud pies until you’ve made them and I’m more than happy to come around and teach your sons how to make mud pies and then leave, walk away.
Trent Horn:
Right. Leave me with damage. Alrighty, good, good.
David Bates:
Now, there are actually a couple of things about this anecdote that Screwtape says I think is worth mentioning. He’s talking about the reading room at the British Museum and if you look at pictures of it, it is gorgeous. High vaulted ceilings, massive windows. It’s in this environment with books that Screwtape sees his patients going in the wrong direction. What he does is he has to snatch him out of that environment. That environment of quiet, out of beauty, out of thoughtful reflection and new ideas, and then just stuff him with sense experiences.
We live in a generation where we are starved of silence. We are starved of beauty. We go and consume our media feeds instead.
Trent Horn:
Well, Cardinal Sarah wrote that book a while back on silence. Was it the dictatorship… Power of Silence.
David Bates:
Power of Silence. Ironically enough, I actually have that book on audio because… Well, audible-
Trent Horn:
I can’t possibly sit quiet and read this. Yeah, it was the Power of Silence about how we get annoyed, I think almost in the presence of silence. I’ve actually read accounts of people who have visited places like Pryp’yat’, Ukraine, which is the major town right outside of Chernobyl. Because of the radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear incident, there’s no wildlife there. There’s no wildlife, there’s no animals, no insects. There’s nothing.
On a day when the wind is not blowing some people have described it as the silence is deafening. Like it almost hurts people’s ears how quiet it is that we get so uncomfortable being just with ourselves, not having something to distract us, which is why when I work, I always end up having… I play music from the Disneyland queues.
Here’s one that I will highly… I highly recommend if you want something to lifeline in the background when you’re working, the music from the line of the Jungle Cruise. In the line of the Jungle Cruise, it is a foe 1940s news station playing music and giving little updates on what’s happening in the jungle. Silence is good. Shoot for that, but if you can’t, I think it’s an enjoyable treat.
David Bates:
Disneyland is better. Okay. One of the other things about the story is how Screwtape gets him out of there, and it’s out of control over his stomach. This is why in the Christian tradition we fast.
Trent Horn:
Their God is their belly as St. Paul would say. That’s what people worship. I mean, Lewis even talks about… it’s so funny. He talks about the wrongest of pornography and he tries to make an analogy once and he says, imagine if someone just watched a television of someone just making food and drooled over it and we would see how bizarre that would be. It’s like yeah, of course but now we have whole networks devoted to that and it’s weird when I watch… I’ll go to the doctor’s office, I think, and they have the food network on.
It was just someone making food and dribbling chocolate over it. I was sitting there like this is porn. This is food porn and even people who like it will admit that’s what it is, but it appeals to our base desires to get us away from reason.
David Bates:
And that’s why we fast, because it’s often seen as something negative. The catechism actually explains it beautifully in paragraph 2339. It says fasting is an apprenticeship in self-mastery. It’s a training in human freedom. We don’t think of it in that way. Human freedom. It says either man governs his passions and finds peace or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. That’s why we fast. The reason why we have fish on Fridays. Well, that’s not really much for-
Trent Horn:
If we’re not able to deny ourselves of the food we want, of a good that we want, how are we going to be able to deny ourselves when sin which is dressed up as an extremely attractive good that is not good for us, how are we going to be able to deny ourselves of that when it presents itself?
David Bates:
Yeah. Just before we get on to that last bit about science. When I was researching this letter, I found correspondence between Lewis and his editor, Jocelyn Gibb talking about this letter because people wrote in commenting that there is no way that the patient could have seen the number 73 bus near the British Museum. It was nowhere near the route.
Trent Horn:
Oh my gosh. The nitpickers. They still exist. I mean, even today you think like on the internet, people will say, well, that’s not right or you didn’t get that right. That people have to right in to show and get that wrong to miss. That’s the devil right there saying fine, use their reason but get their reason towards the most trivial thing possible.
David Bates:
But speaking as a pedant, I also do understand it.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
At the end of the letter, Screwtape gives some parting advice. It relates to science and what Wormwood’s job is here. Screwtape warns Wormwood too steer his patient away from the real sciences. He says that these will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. So often science is seen as this great enemies of faith, but Screwtape is saying, no, no. If he’s getting into science, he’s going to be thinking and reasoning about things that he can’t actually see with his naked eye.
He says, this has been the case among some of the modern physicists. He says, well, if he has to dabble in science, keep him in economics and sociology. Don’t let him get away from that invaluable real life. The next comment just makes me think of most social media comments. He says the best idea of all is to let him read no science, but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is the results of modern investigation.
Trent Horn:
Right, but he’s relying on other people to do the legwork for him saying, “Oh, well, I saw a TED Talk on this once.”
David Bates:
I saw this on YouTube, it must be true.
Trent Horn:
Right, and so you don’t understand that some experts who are legitimate experts in one field, they’re not going to be experts in another. Neil deGrasse Tyson has many valuable things to say about astrophysics, not as much about God. Same with Richard Dawkins, many valuable things to say about biology and evolution and genes but when it comes to God, the philosopher, Alvin Plantinga says that his work to call it sophomoric would be an insult to sophomores everywhere.
I think that’s [inaudible 00:43:36] sinner. I like what he said though about science saying, fine, if he’s going to do sciences, do economics. Keep him still rooted in people not the most… like you go to the very basic sciences, like it’ll take physics or even before that, it’d be a science “mathematics” that ultimately Eugene Wigner back in 1960, wrote an article talking about the applicability of mathematics. It’s amazing we come up with these mathematical structures and theorems and that they perfectly correspond to the world around us and Wigner said that it’s a miracle that they actually do that, that there’s this deeper structure to the universe that we can model with math and then we do mathematical calculations and we can predict things that actually occur in the real world.
We can discover new particles, like the Higgs boson or planets should be in a certain place just by applying this. I think it’s right. He’s saying, “Oh use science but keep them away from those big questions.” What’s interesting, David, is that people think, “Oh, well, doesn’t science just make people atheist. Well, no. Actually, if you read the book, Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Ecklund. It’s a 2010 book. She did research of this and it’s true. Scientists are more likely to be atheists, but that’s only because atheists are more likely to become scientists.
It’s not that the science made them atheist. They became atheist much younger in life and then they thought science is where they fit in, but rather if you approach it with an open mind there are many scientists who see… or you look at Francis Collins, the director of the NIH-
David Bates:
Whose conversion was actually partially bought him out through Mere Christianity.
Trent Horn:
Right, and so he wrote the book, The Language of God and seeing in the genetic code and in the laws of nature, he saw the handiwork of God when he approached it with an open mind.
David Bates:
When I read this section, it actually reminded me of something I heard [Peter Craft 00:45:26] say in a talk about the different kinds of science. He says that there are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and among cosmologists and astrophysicists but there are many atheists among sociologists, psychologists, and historians, and he then says, the reason seems obvious.
The first studied divine design, the second human undesign, and then Screwtape then wraps up the letter by telling one word, what his job is here. He says, do remember you are there to fuddle him, to confuse him from the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach. That just brings us full circle the fact that this is not through argument, it’s through jargon and confusion.
Trent Horn:
Right. That’s what the devil wants to do. When he sows confusion, then he can lead people to him. I mean, it’s funny. The devil is incredibly smart. He’s like one of the smartest creatures that exists but he chooses not to attack us with a well-formulated argument to overcome objections. It’s not like he doesn’t usually send… if you’re in the British museum, he doesn’t send an atheist there. Well, here’s why this is all wrong and here’s this argument. He’s so smart. He knows he doesn’t have to do that.
Instead, he knows if I can just get you distracted by the things of this life and worrying about what’s in your guts or worrying about how you’re not going to be bored later this afternoon or at this present moment, then that will accomplish his mission, but he knows it’s a gamble for him that he could try an argument. He could try reason, but for the devil, it’s just a highly… it’s just a riskier proposition because now when you’re thinking about these important things, yeah. Maybe you could get reasoned into being a stalwart philosophical atheist who knows all the arguments backwards and forwards to combat those Christian apologists.
He could try that, but odds are many people going down that route will make a left turn into seeing no, wait, the truth makes more sense in a Christian worldview. It’s safer for him to say, don’t even get him thinking about that stuff in the first place. Keep them on the banal, the mundane and that’s why I would say to our listeners, don’t stick around with that stuff. If you’re always checking your phone, I’m guilty of this. I’m totally guilty of this, but we have to be cognizant of this, not to be distracted by the mundane elements of this life because that’s part of Screwtape’s trap. That’s the devil’s trap.
David Bates:
Yeah and in the mode of giving advice, we now move in to Screwtape unscrewed. Screwtape has been giving this advice to a fellow demon and it’s all this twisted logic. In this section we try and untwist it. We try and put it in its positive form. Some things I would suggest that this lesson teaches us is connect thinking and doing, as he says people used to do that. Know what’s been proved and unproved. Don’t just blindly believe all [inaudible 00:48:12] or everything you hear and see. Think of it in terms of true and false.
A big one, I got out of the anecdote. Take some time for quiet reflection and do this in beautiful surroundings and consider universal eternal things. I mean, you and I live in San Diego, but really how often do we remember that and make use of it? You go out into the street, you ask how many people went to the beach this weekend. It will be a very small number, or even just out to one of the other beautiful spots there.
Trent Horn:
I will say I went the other day. I got to go by myself. My lovely wife, Laura, let me have some alone time. Because when you go to the beach with children, it’s very different when you go by yourself. When you go by yourself, you can ponder the eternal and hear the waves crashing, feel the warmth of the sun and it’s an excellent ideal opportunity for that. When you take children, you’re just always making sure someone doesn’t drown.
David Bates:
Drown or eating sand.
Trent Horn:
Drown-
David Bates:
Or bury their sibling.
Trent Horn:
Right, or go and run through some of the kids’ sand… I mean, there’s a million things that can go wrong. You just can’t ponder. Now, pondering. What’s funny is with kids, I mean, there are those moments though with children that do bring you the ability to ponder the universal. That when you see a child’s ability to simply trust and love their parent or to see even a child just sleeping soundly and peacefully, and understand that paternal or maternal bond that you have.
Now, in those moments you can actually sense the universal and the divine even stronger I feel than to sometimes when I’m just out hiking in the woods or something like that, because you see that interpersonal relationship, because God ultimately is… I mean, he’s not a person like you and I are persons, but he’s not a force. He has will, intellect. To know God is to know a person that just is love itself.
I think sometimes while children can make it hard to have that ideal prayer life we always have when we’re singles. Well, special moments with them help you to understand the fatherhood of God, God’s parental attributes as creator, as one who loves for us as 1 Peter 5 says. We can cast our anxieties on God for he cares for us. It’s all about finding those moments and yeah. Getting away from the more distracting things in life.
David Bates:
The final thing I had to say for Screwtape unscrewed is also take an interest in science and realities that you can’t see with your naked eye. Read books by believing scientists. You mentioned Francis Collins’ book earlier. The Language of God. Also Stacy Trasancos, Particles of Faith.
Trent Horn:
Particles of Faith is a great book. Stephen Barr has a wonderful book called Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, is another one. Luke Barnes has a great book on the fine tuning argument for the existence of God, how the laws of nature point towards God. I’d also add as a helpful bit of advice for people who may say, well, I want to learn about this stuff, or I want to go deeper, but I’m concerned there’s so much to learn, or I want to answer these objections to our faith but there’s just so many.
I think for a lot of people, David, they don’t want to get involved with thinking hard about this because they don’t want to confront what seems like an endless number of objections or questions. It just feels overwhelming. My advice is that… and I say this to myself when I feel overwhelmed. It’s not Hilbert’s hotel. Hilbert’s hotel is a thought experiment devised by, I believe his name is David Hilbert, a mathematician. It’s the idea about how, if you had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. That would be contradictory, it couldn’t actually exist, because for example, you could do trans finite arithmetic and lead to contradictory results. Like if all the guests in the odd numbered rooms checked out. Infinity minus infinity would be infinity because all the even number guests are there, but all the guests after room four checkout infinity minus infinity is four. You get these kinds of contradictions with the hotel.
This plays in arguments, William Lane Craig does with the cosmological argument, but the point I bring up at the hotel is I think to myself, no, the objections are not Hilbert’s hotel. There are not an infinite number of rooms that I have to go through. There’s actually a finite number. These questions, objections, and issues to discuss, there’s a finite number, and if you dedicate even just 10 to 20 minutes a night towards learning scripture or reading a book on science or an audible book, you will grow in knowledge and it just takes time.
Lewis makes this very point in Mere Christianity when it comes to growth. We can’t see ourselves growing at the very moment. You only see it by reflecting on the past by looking at a picture and saying, “Oh wow, I’ve really grown since then.” Don’t be frustrated. It will take time for that spiritual and academic growth, but it will be well worth it if you invest in.
David Bates:
I think that’s a good way to wrap things up with an exhortation to learn your faith better and engage in some apologetics.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
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