Day 41 – a “good” God in a “bad” world
There was one question which I never dreamed of raising… If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? –C. S. LEWIS
The Argument from Supernatural Belief focuses on the overwhelming consensus throughout history that the supernatural exists and argues that such a belief could have arisen only if a supernatural reality let us know. It states that nature alone could not possibly have been the author of our awareness of things beyond nature, just as an atlas of North America alone could not be the source of our awareness of things in the southern hemisphere. Belief in the supernatural, therefore, implies and demands the existence of the supernatural itself.
What is just as astounding is the tendency through the ages to ascribe to this supernatural reality a benevolent disposition. It is one thing, a distance we cannot ourselves jump, to go from a worldview limited to nature to a one that includes the supernatural. That is evidence enough that the supernatural is real. It is another thing, a leap of equal magnitude, to profess a belief in the cruelty of nature and then begin to believe the supernatural to be anything but cruel. This is not at all what you would expect in a world considered so bad and impersonal.
The atheist keeps reminding us ad nauseam of the disorder and chaos in the universe and tells us there is no way he or she can attribute this to a loving God. The remarkable thing to remember is that the majority of humankind has disagreed. They have come to the baffling conclusion that behind nature's apparent injustice and malevolence is a just and benevolent Spirit. Somehow the atheist must explain this paradox. He may say that humans have deduced the goodness of God from nature itself, but this would go against his basic view of nature as cruel. Or he may claim that belief in a loving God originated from outside nature, but then he will be admitting there is more to reality than nature itself. The atheist, then, has painted himself into a corner. There is for him no logical escape.
Daily Quotation
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 15.
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