Mere Christianity
I had been meaning to pick up this book for a while, but hadn’t gotten to it. First from lack of funds, and later from being too lazy to drive down to Barnes & Noble to use my giftcard. Now I have it, its a damn fine book. I’ll give more detailed thoughts besides “damn fine” at a later time, but for now I leave you with this nice passage:
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 univers 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 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 a word without meaning.
February 26th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Neat. Yeah, I’d heard of that book. Haven’t read it, but it sounds great.
February 27th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
“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”
Atheism from that particular argument is too simple. That doesn’t mean that it’s too simple if you’re using some other argument.
And, if the universe as a whole has no meaning, but individual parts of it do, then we would be able to recognize the fact that the whole thing has no meaning. Like, the human race as a whole doesn’t have a self-recognized purpose in existing (the whole world doesn’t wake up and say, “What is our purpose for existence today”) but individual people may have purposes in life.