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