Over the break, I asked Carol to get me a book to read from the library. I think I was home with a sleeping Emmett, while she took the girls. I didn't really give her a lot of direction, so she thought, "He wanted to read the Screwtape Letters, I will see if they have that." Well, they didn't have the Screwtape Letters, but they had another book by C.S. Lewis entitled Miracles. So she picked that up for me. I will admit when she showed it to me I was excited. A book by C.S. Lewis I had never heard of on Miracles. I thought it would be full of interesting stories describing the manner in which God had interceded on his earth. I was grossly off. However, my error did not equate to disappointment. The book only talks about one (depending on how you define one) miracle. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Here are a few interesting points he made in no particular order:
The current trend of thinking in the scientific community (which is not to say in any one scientists personal life) concerning the "Big Bang Theory", and evolutionary propositions for the rise of our species is and must be paradoxically inconceivable. The basis of the idea which Lewis is able to so eloquently state (and which I will utterly mutilate) is that if you ask someone who quite literally believes in this explanation as the basis for our current state if they are capable of logical reasonable thought and they answer yes, then you have created the paradox. The reasoning behind his assertion is that order cannot be derived from chaos. They are diametrically opposed, and thus you are a result of a chaotic happenstance that leaves you standing there with what you may believe to be purposeful and logical thought but are in actuality the result of chaos and thus by definition cannot be logical (I think that was a run on sentence, but I digress).
The second point that stuck with me was his examination of scientific exploration, which is probably of more interest to me than most. The simple statement that is derived from his argument (which is lengthy) is that the reason we began scientific exploration in the first place (and this again counters the chaos based theories) was due to a belief in a law giver. Scientific exploration has at its core the attempt to discover laws, and as such the primary assumption is that there are laws to be discovered.
He also discusses at some depth (without the explicit statement as such) the nature of his conversion to Christianity. Having studied so much history, he found it at first redundant, the Jewish/Christian tradition of a God dying and rising again. He said it is a theme that continues in all cultures in some form, the sun god, corn god, harvest god, or earth god. Dying through winter to be resurrected in Spring. The nuances of Jewish/Christian belief is the complete absence of the obvious symbolism. He couldn't come to understand how they missed such an obvious similitude in the course of nature and never introduced into any religious text. He then discusses that the reason is because we do not believe a God who exists in or a part of nature, but in the God of nature. As such the God of nature is free to command nature and is not subject to her as so many myths and philosophers try to demonstrate.
Anyway, thought you might be interested if you have a few days to kill, but I warn you it is not the lightest of reading materials, and may take some time to fully digest. I actually think I need to reread it to more fully understand the depth of his argument. I was thoroughly amazed with his mind the entire time and hold him in even greater esteem after reading it. I recognized long ago in reading the Chronicles of Narnia that he certainly understood more about true religion than do most churches today, and after reading miracles I was amazed at the truths he was able to derive from the Bible. I can only imagine what he would have done had he had the Book of Mormon.
`Josh
