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Obviously, this observation has serious implications for Western philosophy in general, especially for those who would posit a Divine Absolute. Yet C. S. Lewis, the resolute theist, offered a similar critique, though in a more folksy idiom, in his essay "Meditation in a Toolshed," first published in 1945. Lewis begins by recounting an experience in which he was standing in a dark toolshed with only a beam of light coming in through a crack in the door. When he looked at the sunbeam, he saw nothing but specks of dust with darkness behind them. But when he moved so that the sunbeam fell across his eyes, he no longer saw the toolshed, or the sunbeam, but rather he could see outside—grass and trees and sky, even the sun 90 million miles away. He concludes, "Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences."2
Next Lewis offers a series of contrasts between looking at and looking along: the way it feels to be in love versus the way a biologist would describe hormonal activity; the actual process of thinking versus brain function as a neuropsychologist might observe it. Then he asks, which is the truer picture: looking at or looking along? Someone standing beside him in the toolshed might discount his description of the world outside because all they could see from their vantage point was the sunbeam. But then someone else could be standing to the side, observing the observer. As Lewis concludes, "In other words, you can stand outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled."
The following year Lewis applied this perspectivist paradigm to Freudian and Marxist critiques of religious belief. In " 'Bulverism,' or the Foundation of 20th Century Thought," he begins by noting that Freudians interpret individual thought processes in terms of "bundles of complexes" and Marxists in terms of "economic interests," both dismissing Christian arguments for belief as "ideologically tainted."3 But Lewis reminds them that "Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought as Christian theology. … The Freudian and the Marxian are in the same boat with all the rest of us, and cannot criticize us from outside. They have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other hand, they say the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but also saved ours along with it."
Lewis's criticism resembles what is now known as the Mannheim paradox, first formulated by Karl Mannheim: if all ideology is motivated by economic interests, whose economic interests does Marxism serve? How is Marx immune from his own generalization, and how does he explain his own access to real causes behind ideology?
Lewis's critique of Freud has been amplified by Paul Vitz in his essay "The Psychology of Atheism."4 Vitz examines the lives of Voltaire, Freud, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and several other notable atheists, finding in each case an unusually troubled relationship with the father. It would seem possible that each has tried to kill the male parent symbolically by projecting him into a transcendent sphere and then declaring he doesn't exist. As Vitz's rather impish analysis suggests, it is just as easy to construe unbelief as neurosis as it is belief.
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