Is it Reasonable to Believe in God? - Mere Christianity

Every once in a while I read a book that is so good that I get a little upset.  This happened to me the first time I read a Charles Dickens novel.  I was 20 or 21 years old and I read Nicholas Nickleby.  I marvelled that there could be such writing - such thoughts - such wisdom out there, and I hadn't been aware of it until I was in my twenties!

So I read a second Charles Dickens novel (Great Expectations) and I marveled again because I realized that the first time wasn't a fluke!

Later, I read Jane Austen books for the first time - I found that there was a whole world of these great minds out there - great thinkers who wrote their thoughts on paper and their words were sitting on library shelves - waiting for me to discover them!

Why did this upset me?

Because it had taken me 20+ years to find them!  I knew I could have been much wiser in my youth if my mind had been opened a little by these wise stories.  As I read them, I knew they were books everyone ought to read, so I wondered why I didn't know how important they were.  I knew it was my fault - I was used to all the watered-down versions of great writing that you get in text books, and that's what I had chosen.  I'm sure I read a few classics in high school, but I skimmed them just enough to get a good grade - I didn't realize what they had to offer.  After all, I already knew everything back then.

Once I realized what I was missing, I felt determined to get it!   It's too bad I didn't realize it when I was younger though - I had a lot more time to read them!  Now, as a busy mom, I'm plugging away at them - slowly but surely!  However, I'm probably getting more out them now than I would have back then anyway. 

I just finished Mere Christianity and it was one of those books that upset me.  It was just so good and I hadn't known until now!  I saw the great need for this book in our world, and felt sad that it sits on shelves - untouched by so many who could really use it (I feel the same way about the Bible and the Book of Mormon - these histories speak to our Spirits and witness of their truth.  Mere Christianity is the type of book that opens your mind and allows you to let truth enter, so your Spirit can be uninterrupted by the clutter of preconceived notions about what truth "ought" to be).

I especially enjoyed it because I was talking to a friend about atheism recently.  She mentioned that she thought a person could only come to believe in religion through their feelings, and since feelings couldn't be trusted - a person could not really know that there was a God.

I wanted to explain that it not only feels right, but that it also makes a lot of sense if you really take the time to ponder and think about it.  Not too many people will put this kind of mental effort into life.  It is easy to go through the motions in life without stopping to examine them very thoroughly The truth penetrates your heart, but it can also penetrate your head if you can manage to get rid of some pre-conceived notions and really try to seek what is real.

That is just what C.S. Lewis did.  Mere Christianity puts those truths in a very logical and clear way.  He lifts the fog from our minds for a minute.  C. S. Lewis was a very intellectual atheist who became a very intellectual Christian.  He not only explains how it is very reasonable and logical to believe in God (as many great thinkers have), but takes it a step further and shows how it is also reasonable to believe in Christ.  I'm not saying that an atheist who reads it will suddenly become Christian.  You need both your mind and your heart to go that far (you can talk yourself out of anything if you really want to - no matter how much sense it made to you at one time).  I do, however, think that a person who is being kept from believing in God because certain things don't make sense to them, will have an enlightening experience if they choose to read this book.

If I tried to write my favorite quotes, I would be writing down the whole book, so I will have to settle for writing down a few of passages that I liked.

On judging:

"It is as well to put this the other way round.  Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we reagard as fiends.  Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say , of Himmler?  That is why Christians are told not to judge.  We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material.  But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.  Most of the man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked....We shall then, for the first time, see everyone as he really was.  There will be surprises."

On choice:

"People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing'... I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before..."

On anger:

"One man may be so placed that his anger shed the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at.  But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both.  Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it.  Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is in the long run doomed if he will not."

"Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse---so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable.  But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be."

 On science:

"Science works by experiments it watches how things behave...Do not think I am saying anything against science.  I am only saying what its job is.  And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science---and a very useful and necessary job it is too.  But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes---something of a different kind---this is not a scientific question.  If there is "Something Behind," then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way.  The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make.  Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe.  Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?'  Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this.  There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation.  That one thing is Man.  We do not merely observe men, we are men.  In this case we have so to speak, inside information; we are in the know..."

Obviously, I could go on and on - it's all wonderful.   If you haven't read it - read it!  I'm thinking I need to read the rest of his books...