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"What is truth?" – Pontius Pilate

Archive: July 11, 2005

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Daily link icon Monday, July 11, 2005

  1. PySWT --- Python + SWT. Sweet.

       (0) Tags: [Programming]
  2. As soon as I get a chance to perfect my tag-based bookmark system I'm going to keep a running list of "books to buy" (which of course will generated from the combination of the 'books' and 'to-buy' tags). I was recently reminded of Higher Order Perl, and someone to me yesterday recommended The Heavenly Man.

       (1)

C.S. Lewis on the problem of evil, or, C.S. Lewis the presuppositionalist

I've been discussing C.S. Lewis with a few friends from work, and I've mentioned that the first half of Mere Christianity is very presuppositional in nature. I just picked up my copy of what's one of the greatest books ever written and found exactly the passage I'm thinking of when I say that his argument is presuppositional in nature:

And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years [when I was an atheist] I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all of your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? ... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

What he's talking about is typically called the problem of evil.

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