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.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity http://www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt
