C.S. Lewis responds:
Book II
What Christians Believe
1. The Rival Conceptions Of God
"I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin
by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If you
are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are
simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the
main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.
If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the
queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist
I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always
been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a
Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian
does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions,
Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic — there is only one
right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong
answers are much nearer being right than others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some
kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity
lines up with the majority — lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans,
modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the
modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be
divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different
ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and
evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But according to
some people that is merely our human point of view. These people would say
that the wiser you become the less you would want to call anything good or
bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is good in one way
and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different. Consequently,
these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of
view the distinction would have disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad,
they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful
surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view.
The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely "good" or "righteous."
a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us
to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views — the one
that thinks God beyond good and evil — is called Pantheism. It was held by
the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, by
the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of
God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to
speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost
is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything
you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different.
They think God invented and made the universe — like a man making a
picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die
if his picture is destroyed. You may say, "He's put a lot of himself into it," but
you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His
skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his
hands. expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians
hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction between
good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this
world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and
God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is
separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary
to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you
could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also
is God." The Christian replies, "Don't talk damned nonsense."4
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world — that
space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals
and vegetables, are things that God "made up out of His head" as a man
makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong
with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on
our putting them right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the
world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen
to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling "whatever
you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and
easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all
your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then
that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.
But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line
crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this
universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless
from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show,
find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls
into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing
but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against
God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world
was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.
Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other
words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume
that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense."
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has
no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as,
if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we
should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Grrrrr! I do not seek to exalt myself.
