The Problem of Pain
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Product Description
Why Must Humanity Suffer?
C.S. Lewis, the master apologist, tackles the question that has plagued humanity for centuries. If God is both omnipotent and excellent, how can we clarify the pain and suffering that people experience daily? And what of the suffering of animals, who neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it? With compassion and insight, C.S. Lewis proposes reasonable answers to these critical theological problems, sharing his wisdom with persons who seek right understanding.Amazon.com Review
The Problem of Pain answers the universal question, “Why would an all-loving, all-knowing God allow people to experience pain and suffering?” Master Christian apologist C.S. Lewis asserts that pain is a problem because our restricted, human minds selfishly judge that pain-free lives would prove that God likes us. In truth, by asking for this, we want God to like us less, not more than he does. “Like, in its own scenery, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere ‘kindness’ which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect at the opposite pole from Like.” In addressing “Divine Omnipotence,” “Human Wickedness,” “Human Pain,” and “Heaven,” Lewis succeeds in lifting the reader from his frame of reference by cunningly capitulating these topics into a chatty tone, which makes his assertions simple to swallow and even simpler to digest. Lewis is straightforward in aim as well as honest about his impediments, adage, “I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. I am only trying to show that the ancient Christian doctrine that being made perfect through suffering is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.” The mind is expanded, God is magnified, and the reader is reminded that he is not the center of the universe as Lewis carefully rolls through the dissertation that suffering is God’s will in preparing the believer for heaven and for the full weight of glory that awaits him there. While many of us naively wish that God had designed a “less glorious and less arduous destiny” for his children, the chance lies in Lewis’s inclination to set us straight with his charming wit and pious mind. –Jill Heatherly
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Since God is Infinite Goodness, we must conclude that the appearance of reckless divine cruelty is a delusion. When we are comfortable, we are too shallow-minded to realize that we need God. Since God knows that He is the only thing that we really need, He inflicts pain upon us to wake us up to this fact. So pain is God’s megaphone. If some people, such as the Jews, try to like God lacking going through Christ, it is not yet God – merely the best approximation their fantasy can attain. Hence poor God is forced to keep screeching at them through His megaphone. But even people who try their toughest to like the right God, such as Job, or C. S. Lewis for that matter, cannot adore God as much as He wants to be adored, so He uses pain over and over again to “plant the flag of truth within their rebellious souls.”
Where does this notion of an Infinitely Excellent God come from? Agreed mankind’s painful being, “an inference from the course of events in this world to the Goodness and Wisdom of the Creator would be preposterous.” God had to reveal Himself to mankind by Revelation; thus it is in the likes of Abraham and Moses, who identified God as righteous, that all peoples are blessed. Lewis informs us that God expostulated with His own creatures on the basis of their own ethical conceptions – “What iniquity have your fathers establish in me, that they are gone far from me?” One has to marvel if Lewis has ever really read the Bible. Can anyone really deny that if a leader of today did exactly the sorts of things that Abraham and Moses did that they would be decried by all of sane mankind as monsters? I have never understood why, or how, I am supposed to pretend that this is not right. Of course, God is wiser than me, so if I could only see it from God’s viewpoint, I would see that the butchery of whole populations, including babies and animals, was really an act of like. In MERE CHRISTIANITY Lewis condemns this line of reasoning in eastern religions as “damn nonsense.” Undoubtedly, we get the impression of a just and loving God through the teachings of Christ, but the conviction that God is Infinite Goodness, Omniscience, and Omnipotence did not come from biblical revelation; it was developed by medieval Christian philosophers by reasoning through extrapolation — a process that Lewis, rather inexplicably, deems impossible.
Lewis’s insistence that people have free will needs to be examined. Even as he describes it, since we are born in sin, we cannot use free will to avoid sin, and most people are blind to their sin. Hence, it logically follows that there can be no free will lacking the ability of self-perception. The evidence suggests that incessant pain, especially when inflicted upon children, destroys this ability. Abused children typically grow up to be abusers. In my own case, I adamantly insist it was the drug, marijuana, which first gave me introspective ability, at the age of 23. Prior to that moment, God knows that I had no free will. Free will is not a realized trait that we are born with, but a potential ability that requires a fantastic deal of effort to renovate. In most people it remains largely dormant. Since free will is dependent on self-knowledge, the role of religion needs to be the development of introspective ability. Dogmatic devotion can only hinder this.
Lewis is at least honest enough to acknowledge evolution. Sorry to say, it is hardly possible to reconcile the notion of evolution of man from animals with his fairy-tale notion that animals only exist by destroying each additional because they were corrupted by Satan before man’s appearance on Planet. Somehow, the perfectly excellent “Paradisal Man” descended from animals already corrupted by Satan. Lewis can be abominably silly sometimes.
Lewis is agreed to disjunctive, either/or, logic. Either the common human experience of supernatural awe is a mere twist in the mind with no biological purpose, or it is direct experience of the supernatural – a Revelation. I would once have scoffed at this, but a Numinous vision of Christ was the major turning point of my life. The problem is that this Revelation was not at all consistent with Mere Christianity. According to Lewis, the purpose of pain is to break our will, since it is our tarnished wills that keep us from God. I had only recently come to realize that I had not had free will until my sense of self was awakened by an illegal drug. I veteran Christ in the very moment that I was cursing Christ for demanding that I beg forgiveness for that which He was reliable. Albeit, at the time I was an atheist, and was only cursing at what I had been taught about Christ. I veteran Christ as the core of my being, not as an entity completely separate from myself, and as an awakening of will, not a surrender. Lewis assures me that the feeling of being one with God, rather than a creature of God, is Satan’s essential deception. But I have also veteran Satan within myself. If Christ were not the core of my being, I would never have survived Satan. I know the difference. I do not acknowledge that Christianity has the power tell me what my experience of God must be.
I am a scientist by training, not agreed to superstitious credulity, but much like it what I have written above must sound. In my attempt to make sense of my experience of Christ and Satan battling within my mind, I have come up with the following myth: It is, at least, not completely unreasonable to assume that consciousness is an inherent quality of being. This consciousness would first be in a primordial state, probably in some way reliable for evolution, though not by anything like intelligent design by direct control. There could be no honor between excellent and evil; in fact the terms could have no meaning, until consciousness evolved to a complexity capable of self-awareness. As self-awareness developed, so did awareness of pain and terror, and a uprising against achieving a level of awareness capable of experiencing pain. The human mind, as the vessel of consciousness experiences these antagonistic trends and, for whatever reason, tends to personify them as God and Satan, or their various cultural equivalents. What makes the Christian God so detestable is His perfect refusal to accept responsibility for anything. Satan can therefore be described as “God’s self-ignorance.” Buddhists are rumor has it that able to place themselves into the conscious state of inanimate matter, hence there insistence that excellent and evil are identical. C. S. Lewis tells us that “it is not God’s purpose that we should go back into that ancient identity.” I reflect I agree with him on this point. Mankind’s goal must be to attain free will be apt conscious of what we really are.
(Peter Payne, leader of CAPTAIN CALIFORNIA: A YOUNG MAN’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE EVIL WITHIN HIMSELF)
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I read this book some time before I abandoned Christianity. I was looking for answers to some of the serious questions and doubts that are bound to come in any thinking Christian’s life. My result to Lewis’s opinion in this book were, “Is this really the best we can do?” I was deeply disappointed. I’d expected something a lot better and I was astonished at the poverty of Lewis’s theodicy. If this is top-shelf apologetics, then apologetics is a poor meadow.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Lewis’s preface to his “Problem of Pain” is a train-wreck and it place me off him forever.
Only palatable once rendered a game of rhetorical and scientific whack-a-mole, you will find a steady precession of sloppy thinking from page one:
*Opening quote supports the opposing position, made by a thinker known for theological sophistry.
*Appeal to power of dubious honesty. It is doubtful C.S. Lewis was ever more than agnostic, and not a very thoughtful one at that, in fact he seems to have been made out of straw.
*He claims he thought the universe was completely dark. This is certainly fake.
*He claims he thought that the universe is “unimaginably cold”. The universe is 3K. That is a very easily comprehensible number, especially when compared to absolute hot (Planck temperature).
*Claims that celestial bodies are ‘few’. This is mind numbingly stupid. He seems stunned that things might have a small space in between them.
*Claims that few places support life, perhaps only Planet. We have learned hundreds of planets and even by cautious estimates the Universe is boiling with life, some of it sentient.
*Thinks in terms of millions of years. Cute.
*States consciousness is necessary to feel pain. This is not obvious, and he does not try to justify himself.
At this point I threw the book down in disgust and did not return to it. He’s not worth your time.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Lewis spends much time discussing the redemptive role of pain; problems of goodness, free will, and evil; and hell. He even includes a chapter on the suffering of animals. There is, but, no chapter on the suffering of children. Predictable of Christian apologists, Lewis focuses on why God would make rational creatures capable of evil and allow them, and others affected by them, to suffer from the consequences of their evil choices. The problem he ignores is why his God, supposedly lacking whom nothing could exist, underwrites, for example, the very being of the cancer cells that ravage the body of a child. Such an omission renders the book useless.
[Update: As an aftereffect of replying to comments on the original review, I'd like to make the following clarification: Lewis would seem to deal with the issue of why moral innocents suffer by declaring that there are no moral innocents, in that even children daily commit a sin due to their "choosing" of self over God. Only an apologist desperate to pull together the incompatible strands of his theology could aver that infants are capable of building that sort of freely willed moral choice.]
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
“The Problem of Pain,” by C.S. Lewis, is a non-fiction work that looks at the title phenomenon in a Christian theological context. The chapters in the book look at human pain, animal pain, divine omnipotence, human wickedness, and additional theological/philosophical concepts.
I establish “Problem” to be a curious book. Some parts are well-written and thought-provoking, some parts are dull. Some parts just seem self-indulgent and even silly; at its worst the book reads like an eggheaded parody of theology. The chapter on hell is particularly unsatisfying; I establish it to sound patronizing and frustratingly vague at times. But the book as a whole is thankfully enlivened by delightful flashes of wit.
Theologically, Lewis seems to be at odds with strict biblical literalism; in chapter 5 he appears to endorse the thought of biological evolution, for example. Despite my reservations, I feel that this is a worthwhile book for both Christians and persons of additional belief traditions.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5