#notalwaysluminous

Lewis spends a lot of time in this section making rational arguments about religious “truth,” including proving that a single Creator God exists, and it’s kind of a miss for me. His need to paint religious truths as inherently logical, in the scientific sense, and as something that can be derived using the scientific method, result in his reducing complicated, nuanced concepts (like “good” and “bad”) to simplistic ghosts of themselves.  To be honest, the fact that he’s trying to “prove” anything in the scientific sense disappointed me.  Religion isn’t science, and science isn’t religion; each has its own sphere of truth, and each would do well to stay out of the other’s sphere.  Proofs like the above feel uncomfortably Venn-diagram-y to me, with science trying to do religion or vice versa.  There’s a reason we go on about “Mystery”; sometimes you can’t science your way through something, and that’s where religion comes in, because it’s a different kind of thing and provides or illuminates a different kind of truth.

(Also, Karen Armstrong addressed the religious truth vs. scientific truth thing really well in A Short History of Myth and The Case for God, and I want to send copies back in time to C.S. Lewis to see what he’d make of them.  I’m genuinely curious.) 

Anyway, once he finishes proving a single creator god, he tries to logic his way through soteriology, specifically atonement.  Part of my struggle here is that I’m not sure how literal he’s being.  It’s like… you know how Marcus Borg had to write an entire book re-presenting commonly-used Christian words?  The previous chapters — with their emphasis on logic and rational arguments — make me wonder if maybe Lewis wasn’t a bit of a literalist, in a way that I’m not, and so maybe his words don’t have the same shades of meaning that they have when I use them.  I agree with him on the surface, but if we pull the surface back, there may be a gulf between our different understandings.  This surprised me; I don’t know why.