If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781414390949
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Reason in Apologetics

As we noted earlier, Lewis was an atheist himself while a student at Oxford University. His move away from atheism, initially to theism and then to Christianity, partly reflected his growing disenchantment with the imaginative deficiency of a godless world. It was dull and drab. He found that the “glib and shallow rationalism” he had adopted was intellectually unpersuasive and existentially unsatisfying.

Lewis believed that Christianity was reasonable. He also believed that reason could not fully grasp the richness of the Christian faith. In 1926, while beginning to move away from atheism, Lewis commented to a friend that he was now convinced that reason was “utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things.”[74] What really mattered lay beyond reason’s ability to grasp it—even if it proved to be eminently reasonable once it was grasped. Does Lewis contradict himself here? Surely not. The point Lewis is making is that there are limits to what we can work out about the meaning of life for ourselves. He’s right. Let me try to explain.

When I was young, I was very interested in astronomy. I had a little telescope, and enjoyed looking at the moons of the planet Jupiter and watching the slow movements of the planets against the background of the stars. Once I tracked the movement of the planet Mars for a period of weeks. I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. Mars drifted eastwards for several nights, then seemed to stop and move westwards. Eventually, it moved eastwards again.[75] I was baffled.

Having completely failed to make sense of this, I asked my science teacher to explain this to me. He drew some diagrams to show me the relative motions of the earth and Mars. It was all about the earth rotating round the sun faster than Mars. After about five minutes, I got it. I could see what was happening. The penny dropped. But someone had to tell me. My teacher gave me a framework for understanding what I had seen, and it made perfect sense. I couldn’t figure it out for myself, but when someone wiser than me explained it, I could see it with clarity.

That’s the point Lewis is trying to make. Christianity gives us a “big picture” that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But once we are given it, we discover just how much sense it makes. When Lewis tells us that faith is both “beyond reason” and “reasonable,” he means that we need to be told and shown the way things really are. Yet once we have been given this way of seeing things, we discover just how much sense it makes.

Lewis developed approaches to apologetics based on an appeal to reason during the 1940s and early 1950s. Both Miracles and Mere Christianity argue that the Christian faith makes more sense of things than its religious or secular alternatives.

Lewis was quite clear that reason was unable to prove the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith. But it could nevertheless point us in the right direction.

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