Okay. So first off let me just say that I love C.S. Lewis. He is the most insightful guy ever.
I used to believe very firmly that God was real and always there and always had been. Then in eighth grade my grandmother died and I began to question. It wasn’t that all of a sudden I was in doubt. It happened slowly over time. I began to wonder if there really was an afterlife and if there really was a God. Then last year in my ward there was a foreign exchange student from China who had never been introduced to Christianity in any form. At first she was stiff at church and didn’t really participate, but by the end she was praying and said she felt something warm inside. And I thought, if this girl who knew nothing of God can come from a country where talk of religion in general is discouraged and feel something, there must really be something there. I started to think about that and how there must be a God because if there wasn’t no one would have ever thought that there was. People all through history have come to believe in a higher power, and why would they if there was nothing there?
C.S. Lewis said that when he was an atheist he insisted there was no God because the world was too unjust. But then he asked himself where he had gotten the idea of just and unjust and what was he comparing it to if the world had simply happened by chance. He told himself it was his own idea, “But if [he] did that, then [his] argument against God collapsed too-for that argument depended on saying that the world really was unjust…Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist- in other words that the whole of reality was senseless-[he] found [he] was forced to assume that one part of reality-namely [his] sense of justice- was full of sense.” It’s crazy, but just before reading this I was reading in Second Nephi when Lehi is preaching to his son Jacob, and amazingly C.S. Lewis and Lehi make similar points. Lehi tells Jacob that if there was no law, there would be no sin, and if there was no sin, there would be no righteousness, and if there was no righteousness there would be no God. Or in other words because there is a sense of right and wrong there is a God.
If we had just happened to be we would have no use for laws. We would have no sense of right and wrong. If we really came from an amoeba I doubt we would even be able to think logically at all. We would be like dumb animals, running around naked eating whatever and whoever. We would have no reason to feel an awful guilty feeling if we ran around as prostitutes. Why would we? There would be no one to answer to and so there would be no remorse or feelings of guilt.
We feel that someone is there watching us because there is someone watching us. That’s all there is to it.
Hallejuluah amen. You can tell when you read this article that Lewis was an atheist at one point because everything is so logical rather than spiritual. Not that its entirely spiritless, but still. I think it's suiting because with super logical atheists as an audience, you'd best speak in a way they understand. He is the most insightful guy ever.
ReplyDeleteMatt Lipps
I love C.S. Lewis. He is one of those people that I look forward to seeing in heaven. He has amazing insights about Christianity and about the universe, and I find myself agreeing with almost every one of them. Great article!
ReplyDeleteMy all time favorite CS Lewis quote (and granted, I am not a big time CS Lewis reader like all of you)...but I do have the quotes app and it does give me a really good CS Lewis quote. Anyway, this is it:
ReplyDelete"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."
I love it. And it's sad that the world's view of God and religion is so convoluted. In my Honors 202 class, we often read excerpts of Galileo or Descartes. When reading these, I am consistently struck at how deep their "testimonies" are. They lived in a time of apostasy, and yet, they are all for personal relationships with God and believing in His existence. Galileo basically said, science proves God's existence and that science is a peek into the mysteries of God. Descartes decides one day to forget everything he thinks he knows and then start over, weighing every idea or thought against his reason. And then boom, his second conclusion is that there is a God. Basically I love when people weigh their beliefs and don't just accept them as fact. So go CS Lewis and go Christianity. Woot.
It's amazing what C S Lewis understood without the fullness of the gospel. One can only imagine what he could have understood and shared (and hopefully will) with such a knowledge. He makes wonderful logical sense. People don't become converted through logic, but it helps.
ReplyDeleteSven Wilson said
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting point there, how anyone have believed in God if there were no God. Although than again there were people that believed in other Gods like Zeus, hmm. I guess all gods may have stemmed from the concept of the God of Abraham and Moses. I think back in the day gods were ways to explain science but I'd rather think of God as our Father in Heaven.
-Sven Robert Wilson