Posted by
Jason Cunningham on Thursday, June 21, 2007 6:46:05 PM
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.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
One of the questions that always pops into my mind when I'm confronted with an atheist, especially a vocal one, is: "Have you ever read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis?"
This classic work of Christian apologetics -- written by an atheist-turned-Christian -- pulses with logic. Lewis has been a large influence for good in my life, particularly in helping to mold my style of writing and thinking and argumentation, and Mere Christianity is a book that everyone, including atheists, should read before settling on answers to the great questions of life: Is there a God? Does life have a meaning? Do I have a purpose?
In light of a new book titled god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens, I felt compelled to once again look into the pages of Mere Christianity, this time to re-read some of what Lewis had to say about his former atheistic belief and about atheism in general, and to share it with the world, particularly the Hitchensian types. The following is an excerpt taken from Book Two, Chapter 1 ("The Rival Conceptions of God") of Mere Christianity:
"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 has 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 answer 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 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 a word without meaning."
In other words, atheism is intellectual laziness. Choosing atheism means avoiding a confrontation with that difficult question that Lewis asked: "If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?" Answering this question forces one to do some serious thinking. Lewis eventually gave it a healthy amount of thought, and he was forced to admit that the problem was not with God but with us: God is real, and good, and made a good world, but we messed it up, and we will never put things right again by taking the easy road of simply saying there is no God and that's why there's injustice. True vanity is not in believing that you are part of a divine plan (an accusation sometimes thrown at Christians), but in believing that you are all that there is and that you can therefore do as you please.