Apparently I’m on a C.S. Lewis book reading kick. Actually, Jessa bought me The Great Divorce and The Problem of Pain at the same time the other day at Books-a-Million, so you can blame all this on her. As the title suggests, The Problem of Pain lays out Lewis’ thoughts on the age old question: “If God is good, how can he allow suffering? Either God is not good, or does not exist at all.” Unlike The Great Divorce,The Problem of Pain is not an allegorical story, but a philosophical treatise.

I was only able to get a few pages into it last night, but here are a few of the thoughts that are covered in the introductory chapter:

  • It is not logical to assume that human minds created the idea of God, or even a spiritual world, without an external revelation of such a being (or beings) because no hint of anything spiritual can be observed within nature. In other words, you can’t ascertain anything about the “spiritual world” by closely examining a rock, all you will find is a rock.
  • There are two basic types of fear. One is the fear of the physical world, and the other is a fear of the spiritual. How did man come to fear a spiritual world if one were not revealed to him?
  • The development of religion is not possible without some type of divine revelation.

Wow. All that in the introduction. As I get into the book further, I’ll try to explain his arguments a little better. I just wanted to give a quick overview of the intro chapter.