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S Lewis vs the New Atheists
S Lewis vs the New Atheists
S Lewis vs the New Atheists
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S Lewis vs the New Atheists

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The book will counter the 'new atheist' movement using the arguments of C.S. Lewis, thereby appealing to readers interested in both loci and showing that there is nothing especially 'new' about the new atheism.

How might C.S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, respond to the twenty-first century 'new atheism' of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and company? Might Lewis' own journey from atheism to Christian belief illuminate and undercut the objections of the new atheists? Christian philosopher Peter S. Williams takes us on an intellectual journey through Lewis' conversion in conversation with today's anti-theists.

'This book shows the breadth, depth, and durability of Lewis's Christian apologetics.' Michael Ward, chaplain at St Peter's College, Oxford
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 1, 2013
ISBN9781780780931
S Lewis vs the New Atheists
Author

Peter S. Williams

Based in England, Christian philosopher and apologist Peter S. Williams (MA, MPhil) is Assistant Professor in Communication and Worldviews' at NLA University College in Norway. Peter is a trustee of the Christian Evidence Society, and both a Mentor and Travelling Speaker for the European Leadership Forum. He has authored various books, including: (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Outgrowing God? A Beginner's Guide to Richard Dawkins and the God Debate (Cascade, 2020), Getting at Jesus: A Comprehensive Critique of Neo-Atheist Nonsense About the Jesus of History (Wipf & Stock, 2019) and A Faithful Guide to Philosophy: An Introduction to the Love of Wisdom (Wipf & Stock, 2019).

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    S Lewis vs the New Atheists - Peter S. Williams

    C.S. Lewis vs the New Atheists

    C.S. Lewis vs the

    New Atheists

    Peter S. Williams

    Copyright © 2013

    19  18  17  16  15  14  13    7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    First published 2013 by Paternoster

    Paternoster is an imprint of Authentic Media Limited

    52 Presley Way, Crownhill, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ES

    www.authenticmedia.co.uk

    The right of Peter S. Williams to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS

    British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    ISBN 978-1-78078-093-1

    Unless otherwise stated Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, a member of the Hachette Livre UK Group. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of Biblica, UK trademark number 1448790.

    Other versions cited: CEV, GNB, NIV 2011, TNIV.

    Cover design by David McNeill (www.revocreative.co.uk)

    This book is dedicated to Dr Peter May

    Contents

    Foreword by Revd Dr Michael Ward

    Author’s Preface

    1. Old-Time Atheism

    2. The Positively Blunt Sword of Scientism

    3. A Desire for Divinity?

    4. The Argument from Reason

    5. The Problem of Goodness

    6. Jesus in the Dock

    Conclusion: First Things First

    Selected Resources

    Notes

    Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason,

    because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

    C.S. Lewis, ‘The Weight of Glory’

    Foreword

    This book shows the breadth, depth, and durability of Lewis’s Christian apologetics. In his extraordinary body of work, Lewis gives an account of Christianity which is ethical, aesthetic, and rational – or, in other words, he argues that the faith once given to the saints is Good, Beautiful, and True. And he defends these qualities not because he believes in ‘hypostatised abstract nouns’, but because he believes that God is himself the source of all goodness, beauty, and truth, and, correlatively, because he believes that human beings, having been made in God’s image, naturally want to share in those divine attributes. All of us, whether Christian or non-Christian, find in ourselves an urge (which is both a desire and a need) to be happy, attractive, and right. The very existence of this urge reveals how God meets us before we meet him. He is our Beginning and our End.

    Apologetics is the explicating – or unfolding – of these matters in ways which have traction with unbelievers. But of course one cannot go on unfolding forever. Eventually, one will arrive at that which is simple, without folds. At the end of the day, to use Lewis’s own terms, one will no longer be speaking a language made up of master’s metaphors which can be rearranged to suit one’s intellectual preferences, but will be speaking pupil’s metaphors, living humbly and contentedly within the linguistic paradigm given by the One who is Ultimate Reality, the Master of all masters.

    The distinction Lewis draws between magistral and pupillary metaphors is found in an extremely important but much overlooked article, entitled ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare’ (in Selected Literary Essays). It is here also that he gives his clearest definition of those slippery terms ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’. Reason, he says, is ‘the natural organ of truth’, imagination is ‘the organ of meaning’, and meaning itself is ‘the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood’. For Lewis, then, reason is necessarily imaginative because reason cannot operate without (imaginatively discerned) meaning. And imagination ought not to operate without reason because without reason imagination’s products will be merely ‘imaginary’, containing no insights into truth or falsehood. Reason and imagination are mutually, if asymmetrically, informing.

    It would therefore be a mistake to divide Lewis’s various titles into two groups labelled on the one hand ‘rational’ and on the other hand ‘imaginative’. In his view, a purely rational product is impossible and a purely imaginative product is undesirable. The division we should make is rather one between works that are ‘less story-like’ and works that are ‘more story-like’. The less story-like works include Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain: these are relatively impersonal, abstract, argumentative, propositional. The more story-like works are obviously titles such as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Divorce, and The Ransom Trilogy, which are personal, concrete, narrative, dramatic.

    Although Lewis clearly values both the less story-like approach and the more story-like approach, he ranks them. The more story-like approach is the better way of trying to understand reality, he thinks, because Reality itself is more like a story than it is like an argument. History has a narrative shape and God himself is the supremely concrete Being, a Being who is not a proposition but a Person, indeed a dance or drama of Persons in that original and final simplicity which is the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

    It is with this mystery, or a version thereof, that Lewis ends what he regarded as his best work, Till We Have Faces. The heroine of the story, Queen Orual, in the climactic scene, meets ‘the god of the mountain’, the One who has perplexed, tantalised and haunted her throughout the tale. Orual takes off her veil and as she does so finds that the god will at last meet her face to face. Orual says: ‘I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.’

    It is good to pit words against other words, to battle out ideas and arguments in a keen encounter of wits. That is the right and proper task of apologetics, and it is demonstrated thoroughly and helpfully in this excellent volume. However, as Peter Williams reminds us at the end of the book, God is more than the conclusion of a syllogism; and philosophical analysis, though it may be necessary, is certainly not sufficient to the life of faith, hope and love.

    When all is said and done, we want not analysis (things loosened into fragments and explained in other terms) but religion (things tied together into a Unity so perfect that it is self-explanatory). The babble of analytical words will fall silent before the Word himself as he brings peace to our moral action, peace to our aesthetic sense, peace to our intellectual understanding.

    Dr Michael Ward, Senior Research Fellow, Blackfriards Hall,

    Oxford

    Author’s Preface

    Many thanks to commissioning editor Dr Mike Parsons for inviting me to rediscover C.S. Lewis, a formative influence originally introduced to me by my parents. Thank you, Mum and Dad, for reading the Narnia books to me as a child and lending me some of his apologetic writings as a teenager. Through Lewis you stoked the fires of both imagination and reason within me. Thanks are also due to copy editor Mollie Barker and production manager Peter Little, to Dr Mike Strickland for acting as a sounding board at the start of this project and to all those who have supported and encouraged me during the writing process. Finally, my gratitude goes to Revd Dr Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008) – cf. www.planetnarnia.com/ – for honouring me with a foreword.

    This book is about the most influential twentieth-century defender of the Christian faith, but it is dedicated to a friend whose ministry in ‘persuasive evangelism’ straddles the centuries: Dr Peter May (MRCS, LRCP, MRCGP). Dr May (1945) studied medicine at The Royal Free Hospital in London, was a lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England from 1985 to 2010 and chaired the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (www.uccf.org.uk/) from 2003 to 2010 (having been a staff worker in the mid 1970s). Since 2008 Dr May has partnered with Professor Keith Fox and myself in running the ‘Reasonable Faith?’ course at Highfield Church, Southampton (www.highfield.org.uk/church/index.php?id=184). Soon after retiring from general practice (and while undergoing chemotherapy) Dr May chaired the committee, of which I was a member, organizing William Lane Craig’s October 2011 Reasonable Faith Tour of England (cf. www.bethinking.org/who-are-you-god/introductory/audio-video-from-the-reasonable-faith-tour.htm). I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dr May for the inspiration, fellowship, encouragement and opportunities he has given me, and to draw attention to some of his work in apologetics:

    Audio

    • Christian Persuader’s Interview www.uccf.org.uk/download/cp-podcast-peter-may

    • Peter May and John W. Loftus in Conversation, Part 1 www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?medi-aid={ED9F643A-3DBD-4A5F-8628-7F00E7624ED5} and Part II www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?medi-aid={1CD5DAB8-2F2B-4176-9828-A54A430A36E7}

    • Peter May and William Lane Craig – Tour Preview with Q&A www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?medi-aid={BBBB39AC-EDFF-4991-8B12-DDD46E0CEED5}

    • ‘Reasonable Faith?’ Course Audio Archive www.highfield.org.uk/church/index.php?id=469

    Online papers

    • ‘The Atheist’s Problem with Suffering’ www.faithinterface.com.au/apologetics/the-atheist’s-problem-with-suffering

    • ‘Avoiding the Circular Argument’ www.faithinterface.com.au/apologetics/avoiding-the-circular-argument

    • Bethinking Papers www.bethinking.org/search/author/Peter%20May

    • Christian Medical Fellowship Papers www.cmf.org.uk/publications/authors/?id=173&index=0

    • ‘Fine-Tuning the Multiverse Theory’ www.faithinterface.com.au/science-christianity/fine-tuning-the-multiverse-theory

    • ‘Hawking Strikes Again’ www.faithinterface.com.au/apologetics/hawking-strikes-again-dr-peter-may

    • ‘Responding to Goldilocks’ www.faithinterface.com.au/science-christianity/responding-to-goldilocks

    Printed works

    • ‘Claimed Contemporary Miracles’, Medico-Legal Journal 71:4 (2003)

    Dialogue in Evangelism (Cambridge: Grove, 1990)

    • ‘The Faith Healing Claims of Morris Cerullo’, Free Inquiry 14:1, Winter 1993/1994

    • ‘Focusing on the Eternal’, in Signs, Wonders and Healing: When Christians Disagree (ed. John Goldingay; Leicester: IVP, 1989)

    • (With Revd Dr Ernest Lucas) ‘The Significance of Jesus’ Healing Ministry’, in Christian Healing: What Can We Believe? (ed. Ernest Lucas; London: Lynx, 1997)

    • ‘Something to Shout About?’, Skeptic magazine, October 1991

    Peter S. Williams

    Southampton, January 2012

    1.

    Old-Time Atheism

    Being an atheist is what’s cool now.

    Frank Skinner¹

    God’s obituary appeared in The Economist magazine’s millennium edition:

    After a lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history. Or did he?²

    He didn’t. Millennial rumours concerning the waning of belief in God were ‘greatly exaggerated’ (as Mark Twain said of the New York Journal’s premature publication of his obituary). Indeed, in God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World (Allen Lane, 2009), Economist editor John Micklethwait and Washington bureau chief Adrian Wooldridge acknowledged that ‘God is returning to intellectual life.’³ Dinesh D’Souza observes:

    The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion. Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is Dead’ is now proven false. Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world’s population . . . God is very much alive, and His future prospects look to be excellent. This is the biggest comeback story of the twenty-first century.

    Timothy Keller recalls: ‘When I was in college . . . people looked at Europe and said, See how secular Europe is getting, how unreligious people are? That’s where all of humanity’s going. Except it’s not working that way at all.’⁵ As the New Statesman observed in 2010: ‘A century ago, many progressives believed that religion was in steep decline. Secularisation, they thought, was irreversible. Today, the situation looks rather different.’⁶ Theologian Alister McGrath talks about the subsequent ‘crisis of confidence which is gripping atheism’⁷ at the moment. Likewise, David Fergusson observes that ‘much modern atheism is . . . not merely dismissive of religion but angry and frustrated by its re-emergence as a powerful social force.’⁸

    One can see this frustration in English philosopher A.C. Grayling’s lament: ‘One would have thought that by now the intellectual dinosaurs of superstition would have slunk away to die of their own absurdity.’⁹ ‘Never more than today,’ complains French philosopher Michel Onfray, ‘has there been such evidence of vitality in . . . religious thinking, proof that God is not dead but that he was merely and briefly dozing . . . The trend has escalated to such an extent that we are now obliged to take up old defensive positions.’¹⁰ As D’Souza comments: ‘The atheists thought they were winning, but now they realize that, far from dying quietly, religion is on the global upswing. So the atheists are striking back, using all the resources they can command.’¹¹

    Hence today’s lively public conversation about God was, somewhat ironically, inaugurated by a loose confederacy of atheist writers who characteristically believe that ‘religion is not only wrong; it’s evil.’¹² These so-called ‘new’ or ‘neo’ atheists, members of what C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) once described as the ‘bitter, truculant, sceptical, debunking, and cynical intelligentsia’,¹³ display ‘an enthusiastic advocation of atheism and a scathing criticism of both religious belief and cultural respect for religion.’¹⁴ As Oxford philosopher Keith Ward observes:

    In the early twenty-first century atheism seems to have taken on a new lease of life. Buses in London carry the slogan: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ A recent Christmas billboard in New York read ‘You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason!’ In the United States and in Britain there seems to be a concerted campaign to persuade people that atheism is the only reasonable form of belief. It is propagated by a group [whose] best-known evangelists are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, though there are many others too.¹⁵

    C.S. Lewis wouldn’t have been at all surprised by the rise of ‘the new atheism’. In a 1946 paper entitled ‘The Decline of Religion’ he declared:

    The present Christian movement may, or may not, have a long run ahead of it. But sooner or later it must lose the public ear . . . This mutability is the fate of all movements, fashions, intellectual climates and the like. But a Christian movement is also up against something sterner than the mere fickleness of taste. We have not yet had (at least in junior Oxford) any really bitter opposition. But if we have many more successes, this will certainly appear. The enemy has not yet thought it worth while to fling his whole weight against us. But he soon will. This happens in the history of every Christian movement, beginning with the Ministry of Christ Himself. At first it is welcome to all who have no special reason for opposing it: at this stage he who is not against it is for it. What men notice is its difference from those aspects of the World which they already dislike. But later on, as the real meaning of the Christian claim becomes apparent, its demand for total surrender, the sheer chasm between Nature and Supernature, men are increasingly ‘offended’. Dislike, terror, and finally hatred succeed: none who will not give it what it asks (and it asks all) can endure it: all who are not with it are against it. This is why we must cherish no picture of the present intellectual movement simply growing and spreading and finally reclaiming millions by sweet reasonableness. Long before it became as important as that the real opposition would have begun . . .¹⁶

    An Oxford-Centric Debate

    As Christopher Jervis (recipient of a Senior Farmington Fellowship at Oxford University) observes:

    Oxford has . . . been the focus for huge debates and controversies, often of a theological and religious nature . . . From 1942–1954 [C.S.] Lewis . . . was President of the Oxford Socratic Club. There, each Monday evening of the term time, he would defend the Christian faith in the midst of those challenges presented by agnostics and atheists. Recently, those with a more atheistic agenda, quite overt – people like the chemist Professor Peter Atkins, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins – have been very successful and vigorous in their campaign to support the creed of atheism. Equally, there are many leading academics here in Oxford who do believe in God, people who have argued persuasively and passionately for God’s existence and the truth of the Christian faith.¹⁷

    Oxford sits at the heart of contemporary debates about religion and irreligion because it is the academic powerhouse of the new atheism:

    • Professor Peter Atkins is a Fellow and Professor of Chemistry at Lincoln College.

    • Professor Richard Dawkins studied zoology at Balliol College and is an Emeritus Fellow of New College.

    • Professor Daniel C. Dennett received his DPhil from Hertford College (under Gilbert Ryle).

    • Professor A.C. Grayling received his DPhil from C.S. Lewis’s old college, Magdalen (under the supervision of P.F. Strawson and A.J. Ayer). He remains a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College.

    • Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) graduated from Balliol, where he obtained a third in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics),¹⁸ having ‘utterly neglected the studies I was being subsidized by the taxpayers to pursue . . .’¹⁹

    Indeed, among leading English-speaking neo-atheists, only American neuroscientist Sam Harris and American physicist Victor J. Stenger didn’t study at Oxford (although Stenger has held two visiting positions on the faculty). On the other hand, as Jervis observes, several contemporary Christian critics of neo-atheism are likewise Oxford academics:

    • Professor John C. Lennox – author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion, 2007); God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? (Lion, 2011) and Gunning for God: A Critique of the New Atheism (Lion, 2011) – is Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College. Lennox received his first doctorate from Cambridge, where he attended C.S. Lewis’s last lectures.

    • Professor Alister E. McGrath – author of Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell, 2005); The Dawkins Delusion (SPCK, 2007) and Why God Won’t Go Away: Engaging with the New Atheism (SPCK, 2011) – holds both a DPhil (in molecular biophysics) and a Doctor of Divinity degree from Oxford. A former president of Wycliffe Hall, McGrath is currently President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

    • Professor Richard Swinburne – author of books including The Existence of God (Clarendon, 2004) and Was Jesus God? (Oxford University Press, 2008) – is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College.

    • Professor Keith Ward – author of God, Chance and Necessity (OneWorld, 1996); Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Lion, 2008) and The God Conclusion: God and the Western Philosophical Tradition (Darton Longman and Todd, 2009) – holds a DD from Cambridge and a DD from Oxford (under Gilbert Ryle), where he was Regius Professor of Divinity (1991–2003).

    Keith Ward consequently refers to ‘the Oxford God debate.’²⁰

    Bitter Opposition

    Let’s consider another Oxford graduate, an atheist and one-time colleague of Professor Dawkins;²¹ a man of letters who published as Clive Hamilton,²² but whose friends knew him as ‘Jack’. In his autobiography Jack recalls that, as a child, he ‘was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it.’²³ However, despite (or perhaps in part due to) his Protestant roots during ‘the troubles’ in Ireland, one of Jack’s friends from prep school called him a ‘foul mouthed’ and ‘riotously amusing atheist.’²⁴ Indeed, Jack’s brother felt that they both suffered from ‘a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing – an illness that had its origins in our childhood, in the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political church-going of Ulster.’²⁵ Jack’s maternal grandfather, the Revd Thomas Hamilton, would use sermons to accuse Catholics of consorting with the devil!²⁶ Jack called the Anglican Church he was obliged to attend while at boarding school in England an abode of ‘Roman hypocrites and English liars.’²⁷

    Jack’s childhood experience of religion is summarized by the following passage from his first, semi-autographical novel (Jack was, like Richard Dawkins, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature):

    The Steward then took down from a peg a big card with small print all over it, and said, ‘Here is a list of all the things the Landlord says you must not do. You’d better look at it.’ So John took the card: but half the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing: and the number of rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all. ‘I hope,’ said the Steward, ‘that you have not already broken any of the rules?’ John’s heart began to thump, and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easiest for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh, no, sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because, you know, if you do break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it . . . He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.’²⁸

    Another nail in the coffin of his childhood faith was undoubtedly the death of his mother:

    There came a night when I was ill and crying both with a headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices, and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before. It was in fact cancer . . . My father never fully recovered from this loss . . . With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life . . . It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.²⁹

    Jack’s prayers for his mother went unanswered:

    When her case was pronounced helpless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by will-power a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it. When nevertheless she died I shifted my ground and worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle. The interesting thing is that my disappointment produced no results beyond itself. The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working, and I thought no more about it.³⁰

    Jack continued to struggle with prayer into his teens:

    I had been told as a child that one must not only say one’s prayers but think about what one was saying . . . I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience . . . came into play. One had no sooner reached ‘Amen’ than it whispered, ‘Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?’; then, more subtly, ‘Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?’ The answer . . . was nearly always No. ‘Very well,’ said the voice, ‘hadn’t you, then, better try it over again?’ And one obeyed it; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better.³¹

    Jack had set himself a standard whereby:

    No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by . . . a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will-power a phenomenon which will-power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred . . . This was a burden from which I longed with soul and body to escape. It had already brought me to such a pass that the nightly torment projected its gloom over the whole evening, and I dreaded bedtime.³²

    He would later observe: ‘the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.’³³

    Before going to Oxford, Jack spent three years under the tutelage of former school headmaster William T. Kirkpatrick, ‘a staunch rationalist and atheist’.³⁴ Jack recounts that ‘if ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist . . . he had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist . . . a rationalist of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type.’³⁵ Partly due to Kirk’s influence, Jack added additional reasons to his experiential motives for unbelief, noting to a religious friend: ‘You take too many things for granted. You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!’³⁶ As biographer David C. Downing reports:

    Jack’s adolescent atheism was further reinforced by his reading of the natural and social sciences. From the former he gained a sense that life on earth was just a random occurrence in a vast, empty universe, that all of human history is no more than a teardrop on the vast ocean of eternity. From the latter he concluded that all the world’s religions, including Christianity, could be best explained not as claims to truth, but as expressions of psychological needs and cultural values.³⁷

    Jack explained:

    my early reading . . . had lodged very firmly in my imagination the vastness and cold of space, the littleness of Man. It is not strange that I should feel the universe to be a menacing and unfriendly place. Several years before I read Lucretius I felt the force of his argument (and it is surely the strongest of all) for atheism . . .

    Had God designed the world, it would not be

    A world so frail and faulty as we see

    . . . And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief.³⁸

    Jack wrote in a letter to a friend:

    You ask me about my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are

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