Mere Christianity -- Book 2, Chap. 3
The Shocking Alternative
Christians believe that there is an evil power who has made himself to be the Prince of this world.
But is this God's will or not?
If it is, then this is a strange God, and if it isn't, then how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
"Anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another." The person in authority commands a certain action from his inferior while at the same time he allows for the inferior to not obey his command. You made it voluntary and therefore you will made it possible that they would not obey you.
Answer: God created human beings with a free will, meaning that humans can either do good or bad.
If a free creature is able to do good it can also do bad. "Free will" is what made evil possible.
But why did God give them free will?
Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is the only way to truly make possible real love, goodness, and joy worth having. The only alternative is to have a world of robots who love you because you made them that way.
"The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free."
God knew that we would use our freedom in the wrong way but it was worth it.
But someone might disagree with God about the way he made us, giving us free will (cf. Rom. 9:19-20).
"But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on."
If God says that the presence of evil in the world is worth it in order to have free creatures, then we must believe that it is worth it.
Someone might object, "But why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?"
But the better stuff a creature is made of the freer he is and the better he is able to do right and the worse to do wrong. So how did the creature made of the best stuff -- the Dark Power -- go wrong?
The moment you have a real "self" or "person" there is the possibility of putting yourself first -- wanting to be the center of the world -- wanting to be God. This was the sin of Satan and the sin that he taught the human race.
"What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods' -- could set up on their own as if they had created themselves -- be their own masters -- invent some sort of happiness outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history -- money, poverty, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery -- the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
"The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."
This is just the way the world is. We (in human history) build up great cities only to see them fall. Why? Because we are trying to run our lives on the wrong juice. This is what Satan taught us.
So, what did God do for us in exchange?
1. He left us a conscience to determine right from wrong. And throughout history people have been trying to obey it and have not succeeded.
2. He sent the human race "good dreams." The parts of all ancient religions where a god dies and comes to life again and his death somehow renews man -- Lewis is referring to those ancient religions that prepared humanity for Christianity -- as was his purpose in Chronicles.
3. He formed the Jewish people and spent centuries "hammering into their heads the sort of God He was." The OT gives us the "hammering process."
4. Then the REAL SHOCK -- among the Jews comes a man who forgives the sins of others as if He was God. As a Jew, He claimed to be God -- being outside the world and making all there is. He forgave the sins that others committed against another person. "This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin."
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him" 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You cannot shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
See Screwtape Letters # 23.
