S1E10 – MC B2C2 – “The Shocking Alternative”

Does the presence of evil in the world mean that God wills it? This and several other very important questions will be tackled by C.S. Lewis in today’s episode. Jack looks at humanity’s attempt to be happy with “something other than God”, as well as God’s initiatives to call mankind back to Himself.

S1E10: “The Shocking Alternative” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

–

Toast

• David and Matt were both drinking Shock Top Belgian white.

Discussion

01. “The Problem of Evil”

• How is it that evil is present in the world? Surely either God wills it or he is not all-powerful? Well, Jack says that anyone who has held a position of authority over others will see the resolution of this dilemma.

Anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another … You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

02. “The Flipside of Free Will”

Free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

• Upon seeing the tradeoff, some might ask if it was worth it. According to Jack, God certainly thought so, and arguing otherwise is pointless.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes … 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.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

03. “Rotten Stuff”

• A man once asked Lewis why God would create man out of such bad stuff? Lewis explains how the greatest virtue can turn into the greatest vice.

When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, as somebody once asked me: ‘Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?’ The better stuff a creature is made of – the cleverer and stronger and freer it is – then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best – or worst – of all.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

04. “Something Other Than God”

• We return now to the devil. Jack asks, ‘what caused Satan to go wrong?’…

How did the Dark Power go wrong> Here, do doubt, we ask a question to which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty. A reasonable (and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong, can, however, be offered. The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

• Then, Lewis says something rather chilling …

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’ … invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

• David mentioned Jennifer Fulweiler‘s book, “Something Other Than God”, which details her conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Matt casually said that he hung out with her at a Notre Dame football game a few weeks ago…but then abandoned her to go tailgating! #BadMatt He is clearly trying to one-up David after he (very humbly) mentioned in the episodes on the Preface that he had met the Preacher to the Papal Household, Raniero Cantalamessa.
• Lewis shows the example of how we do it all wrong.

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.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

You made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will wander restless until we rest in You.

St. Augustine, Confessions

• This quote is also the sign-off used in David’s other podcast, The Restless Heart.

05. “God’s Response”

• What has been God’s response to our attempts to alienate ourselves from Him?

1. He gave us conscience.

First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

2. He sent us “good dreams”, stories scattered throughout other religions which speak of a god dying and coming back to life in some way, preparing us for and pointing us towards Jesus.

Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

3. He chose and formed Israel, who was called to point the other nations towards God and to welcome the Messiah when He came.

Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was – that there was only one of Him and that he cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

06. “Enter Jesus”

• The fourth part of God’s response is a divine person.

4.  Jesus.

• It’s popular to say that Jesus never claimed divinity. Lewis shows that this isn’t reasonable, particularly given what Jesus said and did within the framework of monotheistic Judaism.

Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the INdians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. God, in [the Jewish] language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

• Jack notes one often-overlooked aspect of Jesus’ ministry – He claimed to forgive sins as though He was the one chiefly offended by the sin.

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins … what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? … Yet this is what Jesus did. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He were the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences.

• David compared this to Psalm 50/51 where David speaks of his sin against Bathsheba and her husband:

Against thee [God], thee only, have I sinned,
    and done that which is evil in thy sight,
so that thou art justified in thy sentence
    and blameless in thy judgment

Psalm 51:4

• Matt reminded us that when someone sins against us, we should really desire their reconciliation with God even more than reconciliation with ourselves.
• Jack also points out the ludicrousy of this behaviour when Jesus simultaneously claims to be humble. This would only make sense if he was indeed God.

Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

07. “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”

• It is popular to think of Christ as merely a good moral teacher, rather than God Himelf. Lewis ends this chapter with one of his most famous arguments, the trilemma.

A man who is 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 Go: or else a madman or something worse. You can 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Shocking Alternative

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

• The outline for this chapter is available here.

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