Discipleship, Bible, Christian, Studies – C.S. Lewis Institute

John C Lennox MA MA(Bioethics) PhD DPhil DSc
Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science
Green College, Oxford University

When I arrived in Cambridge to read Mathematics in 1962 a fellow-student suggested to me that my faith in God was purely culturally dependent - merely a product of my Irish heritage and of no more significance beyond that. This presented me, an intending scientist interested in the truth about the universe, with an immediate intellectual challenge.

But there was another of my fellow-countrymen at Cambridge, Professor C. S. Lewis, who had given careful thought to this very question. In his brilliant book "Mere Christianity" he pointed out that the moral behaviour of human beings from whatever culture pointed towards the existence of a moral code that transcended culture. What is more, he showed that this is exactly what one would expect on the basis of the biblical account of the status of human life as created in the image of God.

For me Lewis has been and is a destroyer of popular myths that lay behind many of the objections made against my faith in God and Christ. For instance, Lewis showed that, far from involving an irrational leap in the dark, the Christian faith was a commitment based on hard evidence that was accessible to all. Not only that but he also rapidly disposed of the false notion that science does not involve faith by observing that no science could be done without prior faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe. Furthermore, he pointed out that belief in the rational intelligibility of the universe made perfect sense if the Christian world-view with its central belief in a Creator were true. On the other hand, he argued that belief in rationality itself was destroyed by the reductionist atheistic materialist view which held that the universe and life were in the end nothing but the end product of unguided forces operating on matter.

Lewis' book "Miracles" helped me to see the flaws in David Hume's oft cited arguments against miracles in general and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in particular. Against the prevalent notion that miracles "break the laws of nature" Lewis argues that the laws of nature are not causes but are our descriptions of what normally happens, so that the Creator who is ultimately responsible for the regularities in the cosmos is not a prisoner of those regularities but is perfectly free to feed something new into the system. It is therefore absurd to suggest that science has shown that God could not encode himself into human life ("The Word became flesh". John 1.12).

These books helped me to perceive the deep harmony between science and theology, a harmony that the advance of science in my lifetime has done nothing but confirm.

However, there is more to life than science. Lewis' book "The Problem of Pain" helped me to begin to come to grips with what is the hardest problem of all for a thinking Christian. Lewis did not offer simplistic answers but, with both intellectual fearlessness and remarkable emotional sensitivity, he drew attention to the fact that the Cross that stands at the very heart of the Christian message showed that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. The solutions to the problem of pain and to the problem of sin are related.

C.S Lewis helped me to become an intellectually fulfilled Christian. I owe him a great debt.

©2005 John C Lennox