"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."
So begins Chapter 2, "Divine Omnipotence," of C.S. Lewis's short book, "The Problem of Pain." What follows is some very good reasoning by Lewis against such a notion - for instance, that God cannot contradict himself, for that is nonsense (versus a perfect God) - and in that, to have free will and perfect happiness (for example) would be contradictory. But that is word play, just as the above quote is We know, when we look into our hearts, that word play is not enough to describe Being.
But Lewis is popular exactly because he does not get lost in the war of words. He comes home to the heart again and again to make us really feel his points even if we do not fully understand the wordplay, and that is exactly what he does in this book, tackling the biggest problem that there is concerning the concept of an omnipotent, all - loving God. How could He allow such suffering? How could He (It) make a world in which suffering is unavoidable, as is ours? While nimbly describing the need for contrast and pain in a world of free will, Lewis also delves into the mysteries of God that allow only the words of poetry: that God loves us absolutely, and in that, It desires our perfection, not for It, but for us; for to satisfy our desires, we must have God (who is all, just as we desire all); and to have God, we must be perfect; and to be perfect, we must perfect ourselves through the travails of suffering that try our free will. As Lewis is a Christian, he then leads us to the historical point of the absolute love of God - of Christ dying on the cross for us - that closes the deal, albeit in a mysterious way: so that, through God's suffering with us, our need for absolute self-perfection is mollified, replaced with the need for absolute faith.
On this we will delve more thoroughly as the book proceeds, but of greatest insight to me so far has been the opening gambit of the book: why do we believe in God, anyway? To look at nature, says Lewis, we find no materialistic confirmation of a spiritual being of any sort. It is a world of cold and hot, of tooth and claw and deprivation and satiation. Where in all of this is God?
Lewis's answers are many fold, but the first and greatest is: we, all people, have always felt the numinous, the spirit behind life, and in this he is right. In the past, this always led to a religious belief system of sorts. Today, this is not necessarily so, but the atheist of today who purposefully directs himself away from the gods or God, for a myriad of reasons, still feels the numinous: the awe elicited from the night sky, the bliss from a beautiful sunset, the startling discovery of love in his newly born child. It is, says Lewis, these feelings which have naturally led to a belief in God, not the empirically produced reasons of the scientist- primarily made from notions of the ignorance of the primitive mind.
It is on this latter that I believe the modern intellectual places himself on the horns of a dilemma; for to say that all of humanity before the current time has been wrong, and our Western materialistic notion right, is ethnocentric in the extreme. But, what, then? Does the modern empiricist then embrace primitive beliefs that he himself cannot believe in?
In Lewis, who is more than familiar with the arguments against God, we find an exit: go, he urges us again, to the heart. Do not deny the love and beauty that comes to you in this world; instead, let it sink in, for in that, one will find a grateful prayer to life; and in that, a prayer to whatever it is that we have named God. And in that, a realization that behind all is this goodness, is this love bigger than all of our love. In that, and only in that, we overcome word play to find the truth of divinity within all things great and small. With that, pain and suffering remain a problem, but not an obstacle to greater realization. FK
So begins Chapter 2, "Divine Omnipotence," of C.S. Lewis's short book, "The Problem of Pain." What follows is some very good reasoning by Lewis against such a notion - for instance, that God cannot contradict himself, for that is nonsense (versus a perfect God) - and in that, to have free will and perfect happiness (for example) would be contradictory. But that is word play, just as the above quote is We know, when we look into our hearts, that word play is not enough to describe Being.
But Lewis is popular exactly because he does not get lost in the war of words. He comes home to the heart again and again to make us really feel his points even if we do not fully understand the wordplay, and that is exactly what he does in this book, tackling the biggest problem that there is concerning the concept of an omnipotent, all - loving God. How could He allow such suffering? How could He (It) make a world in which suffering is unavoidable, as is ours? While nimbly describing the need for contrast and pain in a world of free will, Lewis also delves into the mysteries of God that allow only the words of poetry: that God loves us absolutely, and in that, It desires our perfection, not for It, but for us; for to satisfy our desires, we must have God (who is all, just as we desire all); and to have God, we must be perfect; and to be perfect, we must perfect ourselves through the travails of suffering that try our free will. As Lewis is a Christian, he then leads us to the historical point of the absolute love of God - of Christ dying on the cross for us - that closes the deal, albeit in a mysterious way: so that, through God's suffering with us, our need for absolute self-perfection is mollified, replaced with the need for absolute faith.
On this we will delve more thoroughly as the book proceeds, but of greatest insight to me so far has been the opening gambit of the book: why do we believe in God, anyway? To look at nature, says Lewis, we find no materialistic confirmation of a spiritual being of any sort. It is a world of cold and hot, of tooth and claw and deprivation and satiation. Where in all of this is God?
Lewis's answers are many fold, but the first and greatest is: we, all people, have always felt the numinous, the spirit behind life, and in this he is right. In the past, this always led to a religious belief system of sorts. Today, this is not necessarily so, but the atheist of today who purposefully directs himself away from the gods or God, for a myriad of reasons, still feels the numinous: the awe elicited from the night sky, the bliss from a beautiful sunset, the startling discovery of love in his newly born child. It is, says Lewis, these feelings which have naturally led to a belief in God, not the empirically produced reasons of the scientist- primarily made from notions of the ignorance of the primitive mind.
It is on this latter that I believe the modern intellectual places himself on the horns of a dilemma; for to say that all of humanity before the current time has been wrong, and our Western materialistic notion right, is ethnocentric in the extreme. But, what, then? Does the modern empiricist then embrace primitive beliefs that he himself cannot believe in?
In Lewis, who is more than familiar with the arguments against God, we find an exit: go, he urges us again, to the heart. Do not deny the love and beauty that comes to you in this world; instead, let it sink in, for in that, one will find a grateful prayer to life; and in that, a prayer to whatever it is that we have named God. And in that, a realization that behind all is this goodness, is this love bigger than all of our love. In that, and only in that, we overcome word play to find the truth of divinity within all things great and small. With that, pain and suffering remain a problem, but not an obstacle to greater realization. FK
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