C. S. Lewis on the Defense of the Faith (part eleven)

In 1945, C. S. Lewis was invited to address a gathering of Welsh Anglican priests and youth workers on the subject of Christian apologetics. Here are his remarks, published in the book, God in the Dock, and, as needed, some commentary on them.

The two popular “difficulties” you will probably have to deal with are these. (1) “Now that we know how huge the universe is and how insignificant the earth, it is ridiculous to believe that the universal God should be especially interested in our concerns.” in answer to this you must first correct their error about fact. The insignificance of earth in relation to the universe is not a modern discovery: nearly two thousand years ago Ptolemy (Almagest, bk 1, ch. V) said that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars earth must be treated as a mathematical point without magnitude. Secondly, you should point out that Christianity says what God has done for man; it doesn’t say(because it doesn’t know) what he has or has not done in other parts of the universe. Thirdly, you might recall the parable of the one lost sheep. If earth has been specially sought by God (which we don’t know) that may not imply that it is the most important thing in the universe, but only that it has strayed. Finally, challenge the whole tendency to identify size and importance. Is an elephant more important than a man, or a man’s leg more important than his brains?

Lewis has written a trilogy that works on the fiction that there are civilizations on Mars and Venus. See my post on “Are we being visited by aliens.”

(2) “People believed in miracles in the old days because they didn’t then know that they were contrary to the Laws of Nature.” But they did. If St. Joseph didn’t know that a virgin birth was contrary to Nature (i.e. if he didn’t know the normal origin of babies), why, on discovering his wife’s pregnancy, was he “minded to put her away”? Obviously, no event would be recorded as a wonder unless the recorders knew the natural order and saw that this was an exception. If people didn’t yet know that the sun rose in the east, they wouldn’t be even interested in its once rising in the west. They would not record it as a miraculum–nor indeed record it at all. The very idea of “miracle” presupposes knowledge of the Laws of Nature; you can’t have the idea of an exception until you have the idea of a rule.

Modern people tend to believe that pre-scientific people would think non-miraculous things miraculous because they didn’t understand the science behind them, but Lewis completely blows this out of the water. Besides, science isn’t or can’t be against miracles, since science studies normal phenomena. Science could, however, endorse or possibly refute a claimed miracle. It could endorse a healing, for example, without explaining how it happened, or refute that healing has actually happened.