Path: ultra.sonic.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!195.99.66.215!news-feed1.eu.concert.net!news-peer.bt.net!btnet!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!news.demon.co.uk!demon!aslan.demon.co.uk!Lance From: Andrew Rilstone Newsgroups: alt.books.cs-lewis Subject: Re: CS Lewis - Atheist? -- overall Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 10:55:51 +0000 Organization: The Small Carrot Shop Distribution: world Message-ID: <39Im8HA3GyU0Ewtl@aslan.demon.co.uk> References: <3452E0D8.759F@dragontree.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk [158.152.30.126] MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Newsreader: Turnpike Version 3.03 <3aYeJUWAsGS1FwPCwFgLAUIQiZ> Lines: 54 Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.books.cs-lewis:9731 In article <3452E0D8.759F@dragontree.com>, "mary@dragontree.com" writes >Again, this is all rough and approximate, and I may be quite wrong. It reads pretty accurately to me. Lewis had a primary experience (joy, the numinious, a sense of morality.) He made a hypothesis ("This is an experience of God.") He then tested the hypothesis--"I suppose that morality comes from God. But the world is full of evil. Doesn't that disprove the hypothesis." He concluded that the Christian theory (1: The world is fallen. 2: God uses pain for good ends) answered this objection. He therefore saw no grounds to reject the hypothesis. The atheists (can they all be as crazy as our random sample?) are therefore right to say that Lewis (and, presumably, nearly all people who are not pure Richard Dawkins reductionists) arrived at his beliefs, not by reason or logic, but by intuition, imagination, mysticism. They are wrong to say that these beliefs are simply arbitrary and meaningless and illogical, since he held that these beliefs could and should be rejected if they were found to be illogical (inconsistent with themselves) or not to fit in with what we observe about the universe. But they are right to say that these arguments, in themselves, cannot possibly cause someone to believe in God. Lewis says that the ontological proof of God, if you accepted it, would have no religious significance. Bertrand Russel is said to have held that the proof is logically sound, but to have remained an atheist. Lewis says in his brilliant essay "The Seeing Eye" that, when you are examining yourself, and your conscience, you may come to believe that the "voice that speaks in your deepest joys", your moral conscience, and the thing behind the universe are, in some way, the same thing. But he adds that this will only happen "if you a certain sort of person." So in fact, we have two sorts of people. One, the "religious" who say "We believe that the experience of our intuition, of mysticism, of supernatural revelation" can be a path to truth. The other, the "rationalist" (not all atheists are rationalists) says "We believe that only logic and rational discourse can lead to truth, and your mysticism is illogical -- indeed, some of us think it is a sign that you are mentally ill, and say so in our .sig file.s" The problem comes in deciding which of these are "true". Note that we Christians cannot use mysticism or intuition to prove it; nor can the rationalists use logic or rational thought to prove it: because both of those methods are, as Lewis would say, "in the dock." There is no point in having a trial by jury to find out if trials by jury are fair... -- Andrew Rilstone lanceATaslanDOTdemonDOTcoDOTuk http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/ *************************************************************************** PLEASE NOTE: NEW E-MAIL BOX MESSAGES TO OLD BOX MAY NOT BE READ IMMEDIATELY ALL SPAMMERS ARE...PEOPLE IN NEED OF HELP AND RE-EDUCATION ***************************************************************************