C.S. Lewis on God and Good Vs. Evil

Author C.S. Lewis at his desk. (date unknown) (Wikimedia Commons)

British writer C.S. Lewis couldn’t fathom how a just God presided over a world that was so cruel and unjust. In his book Mere Christianity he wrote, “If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?” To Lewis, this meant either God wasn’t good or He didn’t exist at all.

Born in Ireland in 1898, Lewis was raised in a religious family that belonged to the Church of Ireland, an Anglican Church. He despised religious studies in his youth and viewed the study of Christianity as a chore. At age 15, he became an atheist. He translated the ancient Roman poet Lucretius to justify his choice:

Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.

To Lewis, it was clear the world was unfair and unjust. As he matured, a question began to nag at him. If the universe is in fact unjust, then “how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” He suspected his desire for justice might be a seed planted by the Creator himself.

In the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense.\

Using the principles of reason he’d studied at Oxford University, he concluded atheism was too simple. If the universe has no meaning, then why would the idea of meaning even be on our radar? He reasoned, “if there is no light in the universe…we’d never know it was dark.” This posed a problem. “We live in a universe that contains much that is bad and meaningless but contains creatures like ourselves who know it is bad and meaningless.” To Lewis, there were only two views that could reconcile this contradiction. Either we live in a good world gone wrong or we live in a world of Dualism.

Lewis defined Dualism as the belief there are “two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one good and the other bad…One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy…Both powers existed from all eternity.”

There is much sense in Dualism but it has a catch. “If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own…