Insufficient Christianity: 5:3

To finish up chapter 5 of Mere Christianity, Lewis continues:

Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.

It still does not make sense to me, because the “fact” described herein are not face – merely rationalization. Lewis has arrived at this point by believing Christianity is true at the outset, and then proceeding to rationalize his beliefs if a five-chapter circular argument.

 Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power–it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

In that case, since Lewis has failed to prove there is an absolute moral law given by god, Christianity will continue to not make much sense to me. 

When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.

Good doctors don’t treat illness unless they have solid evidence to back up their diagnosis. If Lewis were a doctor, he would assume before you walked in that you had a broken leg, and then based on his diagnosis, rationalize that all of your symptoms fit that of “broken leg”.

When you have realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.

Ha! I’ve had some people tell me that “god became a man to save man from the disapproval of god” misunderstands Christianity (Actually, I put it like, “god sent down himself to have his creation kill himself as a sacrifice to save his creation from himself”) yet here Lewis uses similar phrasing and tells his reader that Christianity can explain this oddness. What he does here is assume that doctrines of Christianity are true and that the Christian religion can explain it.
A person of another religion could say the same thing – that the doctrine of their religion is true and that their religion is the best explanation of said truth. This would probably be quite unconvincing to Lewis, or any other Christian, for that matter.

All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts–to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.

As I have explained already, sometimes it does not make sense to ask those questions in the first place. 

And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort.

 But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth–only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion.

I might say the same thing about the conclusion of atheism. Of course, that woould not really add anything to the persuasiveness of atheism, as you could say the same thing about any religion, worldview, etc.