In Mere Christianity Lewis explains Christianity using rationality and reasoning. He starts off with a common ground where everybody, or mostly everybody, could agree on; which is the fact that everyone is under a certain moral law. This basic moral law is the common throughout any culture and any point in time. Lewis explains that this moral law different is different any other kind of law that human beings are under. We under the law of gravity, and we have no choice but to obey it. However, we can choose whether or not we will obey the moral law. As a matter of fact, despite the moral law, every human has broken that law. Lewis goes one and talks about how there must be someone behind this moral law, but he doesn’t talk about how that could be the God of Christianity. He simply leaves that hanging at this point.
I really like the way Lewis explains what it means when someone is a ‘Christian’. Just as the word ‘gentleman’ simply used to be a fact not a quality, the word ‘Christian’ should be a labeling for people who believes in the Christian doctrine. It shouldn’t be a quality judging whether or not a person follows their beliefs well or not. Lew is says,
“When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it s much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.”
Although this concept is not something that we can moral lessons from, I think it is a good way to clearly explain and a categorize people.
I really like how Lewis explains that science is the wrong tool in trying to discover whether or not there is a God. This is one of biggest ways Christianity is being attacked today. People say that God can’t be real, because He can’t be scientifically proven. Lewis says that science is the study of finding causes and effects. However, Lewis explains,
“But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind – this is not a scientific question.”
I really appreciate the fact that Lewis brought this up to explain that science is the wrong tool for proving the existence of God. I guess it’s somewhat similar to the fact that many things in history, such as historical figures, cannot be proven by science. But just because they can’t be proven by science doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s false.
I also really enjoyed his thoughts on the topic of the label "Christian" and how we have to be careful not to let it become a useless term the way 'gentleman' has. I thought it was really interesting because I did know the history of the word and how it had become distorted. You point out a second very interesting topic when Lewis discusses how science should not be used to prove the existence of God. I agree that not everything can be proved with science.
답글삭제I really like how you talked about trying to prove God's existence with science. I think in society today we put way too much emphasis on science. If it can't be proven by science we believe it isn't true, even though there are a lot of things that can't be proven by science. I think this leads back to the idea of looking at and looking along. It seems that our culture puts far too great an emphasis at looking at things.
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