“…for
many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this
question, because I kept on feeling that, ‘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?’”
“My argument
against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how
had I gotten 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.”
C.S. Lewis
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