You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. God in His omnipotence could have made it impossible for people to sin against each other, but He made man with a free will and the ability to choose his actions. Some pain arises when individual beings assert their own wills which then clash with each other. Some pain is inherent in nature: fire warms when used rightly but burns when one gets too close to it.

Lewis spends the next couple of chapters talking about God’s omnipotence and goodness. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both” (p. Mankind tends to think that “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving (p.

Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a wise and good Creator or the work of chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the religious problem. Either Christ was “a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. In Christianity there is one more thread: the historical event of the death and resurrection of Christ. The Numinous is either “a mere twist in the human mind…or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given” (p. It’s a question that troubles believers and unbelievers alike and one which was a major hindrance to Lewis’s own conversion.Ĭhapter 1, “Introductory,” traces three threads through human philosophy and development that lead to religion: an awe or dread of unseen beings, which Lewis calls the Numinous a sense of some kind of morality and the connection between the Numinous and morality.

Lewis sets out truths and speculations about why a wise, loving, kind, and omnipotent God would allow so much evil, suffering and pain in the world.

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