God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

Dr Johnson, speaking of an eighteenth-century theologian, remarked that he ‘tended to unsettle every thing, and yet settle nothing’.

There are, however, I expect, others like myself who are more concerned with whether a book is true than whether it was written last week.

Because Lewis knew how to adapt his material to suit the audience he was writing for, the essays differ both in length and in emphasis. Nevertheless, all share a particular seriousness. Not ‘gloominess’, for they sparkle with wit and common sense; but ‘seriousness’ because of the high stakes which Lewis believed were involved in being a man—a possible son of God or a possible candidate for hell.

Regardless of one’s education, it is impossible to decide whether Christianity is true or false if you do not know what it is about.

For Lewis, who believed that to be born meant either an eventual surrender to God or an everlasting divorce from Him, this was a serious matter.

hand, ‘there is nothing’, Lewis argued, ‘in the nature of the younger generation which incapacitates them for receiving Christianity’. But, as he goes on to say, ‘no generation can bequeath to its successors what it has not got.’

much of the ignorance today is rightly attributed by Lewis to ‘the liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel’.4 And what Lewis would most emphatically not do is ‘whittle down’.

he believed that our methods of getting the truth across must often vary.

he never overlooked the obvious in favour of the hypothetical.

‘The ancient man’, Lewis wrote, ‘approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock.’

Lewis struck me as the most thoroughly converted man I ever met. Christianity was never for him a separate department of life; not what he did with his solitude;

his ability to see beyond the partial perspectives which limit so many existentialists.

Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?

If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate.

The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome.

Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being.

Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good.

A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence.

It means believing that bad men like badness as such, in the same way in which good men like goodness. At first this denial of any common nature between us and our enemies seems gratifying. We call them fiends and feel that we need not forgive them. But, in reality, along with the power to forgive, we have lost the power to condemn. If a taste for cruelty and a taste for kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could the one reprove the other?

The master can correct a boy’s sums because they are blunders in arithmetic—in the same arithmetic which he does and does better. If they were not even attempts at arithmetic—if they were not in the arithmetical world at all—they could not be arithmetical mistakes.

There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in fact, the New Testament has a good deal more to say about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam.

Thinking along these lines you can avoid Monotheism, and remain a Dualist, only by refusing to follow your thoughts home.

I HAVE KNOWN ONLY ONE PERSON IN MY LIFE WHO CLAIMED to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it.

In other words, seeing is not believing.

Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural. Any event which is claimed as a miracle is, in the last resort, an experience received from the senses; and the senses are not infallible. We can always say we have been the victims o...

whether miracles have really ceased or not, they would certainly appear to cease in Western Europe as materi...

Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.

that the interpretation of experiences depends on preconceptions, is often used as an argument against miracles.

But there is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say. We must not say ‘They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.’ This is nonsense.

If a man had no conception of a regular order in Nature, then of course he could not notice departures from that order:

Nothing is wonderful except the abnormal and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.

For while the materialist would have at least to explain miracles away, the man wholly ignorant of Nature would simply not notice them.

The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First we must believe in a normal stability of nature, which means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular patterns. Secondly, we must believe in some reality beyond Nature.

The belief in such a supernatural reality itself can neither be proved nor disproved by experience. The arguments for its existence are metaphysical, and to me conclusive. They turn on the fact that even to think and act in the natural world we have to assume something beyond it and even assume that we partly belong to that something.

The concept of nature itself is one we have reached only tacitly by claiming a sort of super-natural status for ourselves.

No doubt most stories of miracles are unreliable; but then, as anyone can see by reading the papers, so are most stories of all events. Each story must be taken on its merits: what one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.

modern people have an almost aesthetic dislike of miracles. Admitting that God can, they doubt if He would. To violate the laws He Himself has imposed on His creation seems to them arbitrary, clumsy, a theatrical device only fit to impress savages—a solecism against the grammar of the universe.

many people confuse the laws of nature with the laws of thought and imagine that their reversal or suspension would be a contradiction in terms—as if the resurrection of the dead were the same sort of thing as two and two making five.

The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on a smaller scale.

the power behind it is also personal—is

some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do.

every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine.

The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient’s body. What the doctor does is to stimulate Nature’s functions in the body, or to remove hindrances.

In a sense, though we speak for convenience of healing a cut, every cut heals itself; no dressing will make skin grow over a cut on a corpse.

if God exists, that energy, directly or indirectly, is His. All who are cured are cured by Him, the healer within. But once He did it visibly, a Man meeting a man.

Where He does not work within in this mode, the organism dies. Hence Christ’s one miracle of destruction is also in harmony with God’s wholesale activity. His bodily hand held out in symbolic wrath blasted a single fig tree;14 but no tree died that year in Palestine, or any year, or in any land, or even ever will, save because He has done something, or (more likely) ceased to do something, to it.

Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked within it is no small part of the world’s future.

To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process.

what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument.