Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Ever wondered?

The Law of Human Nature

When people quarrel, a person is trying to show that the other person is wrong. In order for this to happen, both of them have to agree on what is Right and Wrong. Just like in a soccer game, we cannot say a player commits a foul if the rule is not agreed by everyone.

This human morality of Right and Wrong is called the Law of Nature. to be more exact, The Law of Human Nature. In modern days, people refer to the Law of Nature as the law of gravity, chemistry, or heredity. We live by this kind of Law of Nature, our physical body has no freedom of choosing to obey or disobey the rule of gravity. We throw a rock, it falls. We jump up high, we fall back to the ground. We obey the Law of Nature no matter how much we are trying to go against them.

This is very similar to the Law of Human Nature. These laws are also called the Moral Law that all humans agree to. For example, you must not put yourself first before others. True that different cultures might have different morals. One culture says it’s Right for a man to marry just one woman, and the other culture says it’s Right for a man to marry as many women as he desires. But both cultures have a common morality of men having to marry the woman he likes. the Law of Human Nature is the soccer game’s rule that all humans agree to, consciously or unconsciously.

In other words, we are rather “pressed on” by the Law of Human Nature. However, we never truly follow these rules of descent behavior. Even if we do not believe in it, our conscience brings guilt to us when we do not behave decently. Because we cannot help facing the fact of breaking it.

We are left off by two points. Firstly, all humans on this earth have an idea that they should behave in a certain way, and that we have no power against it. Secondly, we always fail to behave in that certain way. We have the ability to know it, but not the ability to practice it. This is a big clue and foundation to the meaning of us and the universe we live in.

Some Objections: Instincts

The Law of Human Nature—better known as the Moral Law—has been misunderstood as one of our herd instincts that we all are born with. But they are two different things. Our herd instincts give our strong will or desire to act in certain ways: motherly love, sexual desire, desire of food, and desire to help. But what if you have two opposing herd instincts: desire to help a drowning man and the desire to keep out of danger. You know you ought to help although your strong will is to keep out of danger. This realization is a third thing that neither comes from these two instincts. This third thing judges the two opposing instincts and makes a decision based on a certain law. When you play the piano, you are given the music sheet, the keys are your instincts after reading the music, but you decide which key to play because you are the Moral Law.

Looking back at the drowning man example, you might face a dilemma between your two instincts. You must then be following your strongest instinct. You weigh the strength of each instinct by thinking that you would prefer to be safe than to drown with the man. But even if this instinct is the strongest, we often consciously stimulate our other instinct—the instinct to help—to be stronger, because you know it is the Right instinct. My instinct is to go hit the snooze button in the morning, but I’m stimulating my instinct to do what is Right, which is to get up and get ready for work.

Another way of looking at this is that no instinct/impulses have good or bad. We cannot claim that sexual and fighting impulses are bad instincts and motherly love and food impulses are good instincts. It’s just these instincts that we call “bad”, have to be more restrained often than other instincts. There are times when men are encouraged to fight as soldiers. And in the same way, motherly love is only permissible for the mother’s child and not others’. Back to the piano imagery, there are no bad or good, right or wrong keys. This key is the right key at one time and will be wrong at the other time.

Some Objections: Education

The Moral Law is also often misunderstood as something that humans’ minds create, something that our parents, teachers, and society feed us as education every day. But this is not the case. We learned the multiplication table at school, we know it because our teachers taught us. But people who live in deserted areas who do not know about the multiplication table also has the same mathematical idea.

Now, if every group of people have different morality, do you think a morality is better than the others? If yes, have the worse morals been improved for the better? Because it is a necessity for moralities to improve. If no, you are implying that there are no better or worse morals. This means the morality of Nazis and the morality of Christians are no better or worse than the other.

In fact, we all believe that some moralities are better than others. But in order to think that way, we ought to compare these moralities to another standard that is not a part of these moralities. That is the Real Morality. It is the absolute real Right that is independent and not relative to what people might say. Your impression of New York and my impression of New York might be different, but we have these impressions because there is a real existing New York that we base our thoughts on.

We might be familiar with the saying “whatever each nation happens to approve”. This statement in other words is saying that there is no better worse of moralities. If so, there will never be a moral improvement in this world.

The Reality of Law

We are back to the odd opposing facts that humans are followed by the idea that they are expected to act in certain ways, and that they fail to practice it in reality.

You say that a tree is a “bad tree” because it does not provide you enough shades from the sun. And you call a stone a “bad stone” because it is not suitable for rockery. But you do not blame the tree and the rock for what they are. You refer to them as bad because they simply are not suitable for your specific purposes. The tree could not been better if the soil or weather were different. Therefore, both the “bad tree” and the “good tree” are following the Law of Nature. We can also say that this is what the Nature, in fact, does. But in our case, the Law of Descent Behavior does not mean what human beings in fact do. In terms of humans, there is something above the actual facts. The facts, for instance, are how humans behave, and there is something else, that is how they ought to behave. and because of this something else, we cannot say what we call decent behavior is the behavior that pleases us. We choose to do the test honestly when it is easy to cheat, we help a person although it means we are putting ourselves in danger.

Saying the truth or what is Right does not mean that brings you any further. If someone asks you what the point of playing soccer is, you would answer “to score goals”. That is indeed true, but that does not bring you anywhere, because you score goals to play the game. Similarly, when someone asks you, “why should I be unselfish?”, and you answer “because it pleases the society”. Then the question goes on, “why should I please the society?”, the answer would be back to where we started, “because you ought to be unselfish”. Do you see how we should have stopped at “why should we be unselfish” question?

Now, this is where we stop at, the Moral Law itself. It is clearly different from the Law of Nature we know. It is not facts explaining the law of gravity and physics. It is also not humans’ idea of behaviors that please certain people. Because behaviors we refer as bad does not always bring us inconvenience, and vice versa. We realize that in the Law of Human Nature, there is an actual fact beyond the fact itself. And this real Reality is not from one of us, let alone something that our minds create, an absolute Law in which we are unconsciously immersed in.

What Lies Behind the Law

From the previous catalog, we know that The Law of Human Nature, the Law of Right and Wrong is something above the facts of human behavior. It does not come from us nor something that mere humans invent. It is something we know we ought to obey whether we like it or not.

Humans see how and why the universe exists in two views.

First is the materialist view: The universe and everything in it just happens to exist. When it formed, the temperature and conditions just happened to be right for life to be created. About why humans think and behave in certain ways, there are no particular reasons or purposes.

The other view is the religious view: behind the existence of this universe is a mind that has purposes and reasons. This mind has preferences and intentions. About what the purposes are, we do not and never will fully know, but part of it is to create beings who also have a mind, like itself. Both of these views rise at the same time, therefore this is not a matter of old and modern views. The idea of this mind cannot also be solved by science. The job of science is to conduct experiments, observe and describe facts. And remember that the universe and everything that lives in it are simply facts. And science cannot observe what is above the facts nor claim if somethings exist or not. Even humans can never know this something above the universe, unless it reveals it to us in a certain way. In the real world, it is never science who conclude these claims. It is usually the journalists or writers who gather fragmented pieces of science and use it to describe something far beyond it.

Now let’s think about it. Even if science is ever made complete, that all the mysteries of the universe are known. Can we go back to the questions, “What is the meaning of the existence of the universe?”, “Why does it behave in certain ways?” and answer them? These questions would remain as they were.

A third view regarding how and why the universe exists rose: the Life-Force philosophy or the Creative Evolution. This is that creations evolve from the lowest forms to Man. This is probably the most favorite view among us, because it gives us emotional comfort and no painful consequences.

We, as men, observe things that are happening around us. But we do not observe men, because we are men. We know that we behave in certain ways and not the others without having to study and observe it. If there is something out there that is observing us, he would never know if we have the Law of Descent Behaviors and if we ought to behave in certain ways. He would just observe how we behave, period. Similarly, we, as the observers of this something beyond us and the facts, would never truly figure out what it really is, because we are observing it from the outside.

If this Reality beyond the facts really exists, it is not one of the observed facts. It is in fact, the cause of why the facts exist. And the facts cannot find it. Think of a carpenter who creates a table. He makes the table, so the table is not the carpenter. He is far beyond his creation, and the table can never understand the carpenter’s intention. Now if the carpenter is to reveal itself to the table, the carpenter cannot show himself as one of the creations, because he is the creator. The only way to reveal himself is in his creation itself and how the carpenter commands itself to be used for certain purposes.

We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

You might think that this whole idea is a trap to get you into my “religious jaw”. But if this is all about religion, the world has tried that. For those who think this way, there are three things for you to mind.

All of us believe that we need progress. However, we only make progress when we move on to the right direction. When we are doing mathematics, we try different methods to solve a problem. When we realize that a method does not work, we do not continue on solving with that particular method, because that would mean progress to the wrong direction. We ought to erase all the hard work and start over with a new method. To progress does not mean being pigheaded, stubborn, and continue on whatever we’re doing no matter what. To progress means admitting your mistakes and turn back. Witnessing the present world, we must have realized that we have been “progressing” on the wrong road and we should immediately turn back.

Secondly, we have not even talked about religion, churches, let alone God so far. We just talked about Something or Someone behind the facts and the universe. We are still trying to see what we can conclude about the Somebody. We have two hints about the Somebody. First is about the universe that He made (and He must be quite an artist, knowing how beautiful the universe is) and that he is an unmerciful Someone who cannot be a friend of men (for the universe is a dangerous and terrifying place). The second hint is that He has put a Moral Law to our minds. The second hint is better than the first because it is inside the fact, unlike the universe, that is only a fact. Just like you knowing a person better after you have a conversation with him, instead of after you see the house that he built.

Moving on, if we believe that the Moral Law tells us to be what we call good: unselfish, patient, and kind, we must then agree that God Himself is good (for He is the One who put the Moral Law to our minds). But God being “good”, does not mean that He is indulgent, soft, and sympathetic. The Moral Law itself is not soft! We save a person from drowning although we know it’s a dangerous act to do. If you then say that a “good” God is a God that forgives, you’re moving on too quickly. Because only a Person can forgive. And so far, we have not talked about a personal God yet, just a power and a mind. It is logically ridiculous for you to ask Him to make approvals and allowances on your behaviors.

If God is good, then He must hate what we do, and we are hopeless again. God is the One who brings us comfort and terror at the same time, the One we most need yet also the One we want to hide from the most. This is why, people who cling on an absolute goodness should see that an absolute goodness can bring safety and an extreme danger as well, depending on how we react to it. And we have been reacting the wrong way.

My last point is that Christianity makes no sense without understanding all the things above. Because Christianity teaches about repentance and the promise of forgiveness. We cannot repent if we do not aware of what to repent on. And we will never know what to repent on until we realize about this Moral Law, and the Power beyond it. If you have gone this far, then you must have known that you have committed wrongdoings and that you must repent not to the Moral Law, but to the Power of the Moral Law. Not until this point, will Christianity speak.

From these understandings, emerge Christianity’s ideas of how we love the absolute goodness and hate it at the same time. They also tell us how God is simply a mind behind the Moral Law and also a Person. They tell us the expectations of this law that we cannot meet, but have been met on our behalf by God becoming a man to save man from God’s disapproval. And it goes on and on and we are not going to discuss about this in the book, that is not where we are going.

I believe that Christianity begins with dismay instead of comfort and safety. We are going for that comfort and safety, but before, we must fight in a war of dismay. And it is as well true that the Real reality is never the easiest, never the simplest and never full of dreamy rest—not at the start.

~ Summary of Mere Christianity Book I by CS Lewis

“Maybe that’s why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn’t able to do what it was meant to do… Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken.”
~Hugo (2011)