The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.
So begins C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, a title I’ve long been familiar with but never read. Feeling like the time has come, I checked it out of the library today and am really, really glad I did. I’m going to just collect several key points so far in Lewis’s words. All I’ll say at this point about my own reaction is that I feel refreshed.
This book isn’t going to be an argument trying to prove the existence of God from Nature:
Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform. At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin.
He suggests four stages in the development of a religious mind in humanity: the Numinous; the moral law; the uniting of the two, so that the “haunter of Nature becomes the author of the moral law”; and, in Christianity, the historical event (Christ with his claims). Christianity is ”a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity.” His intent is to put the problem of pain in its right context, not to make a case for Christianity’s truth.
I love that we’re not going to try and deduce God from nature. I’m so ripe for some new categories!
Here’s the problem of pain that Lewis is going to work through, stated most simply:
If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.
This isn’t where I am spiritually right now, but I do find my mind running on this track (if that makes any sense). When I try to grapple with what I’m seeing and feeling about the world, the only tools in my box seem to be this line of reasoning, which I know is somehow incomplete… My own reasoning and data seem to veer away from things I know to be true sometimes. It looks like Lewis is going to be my knight in shining armor! (He looks weary already, doesn’t he?)
