Faith as Belief—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Faith+Reason VS. Emotion+Imagination

C.S. Lewis devotes two chapters to faith in Mere Christianity. Here's why: "The word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses.... In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.... I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements?.... I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my mind is perfectly convinced by good evidence that ... properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But ... I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under.... The battle is between faith and reason on the one side and emotion and imagination on the other.... Faith is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your moods.... Unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro....

"One must train the habit of Faith.... Some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

"Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense.... You may remember I said ... the first step toward humility was to realize that one is proud.... The next step is to make some serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try 6 weeks. By that time ... one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.... Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to talk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after 5 minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

"Very well, then. The main thing we learn ... is that we fail.... God has been waiting for the moment ... you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in [an] exam or putting Him in your debt. Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.... It is after this that real life begins." Here is Lewis's second chapter on faith: faith as trust in addition to belief.

Highlights from chapter 11: Faith, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

What Lies Behind the Law—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

There Have Always Been 2 Views: The Religious and The Materialist

"Ever since men were able to think," begins C. S. Lewis,  "they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be here.... Two views have been held. First the materialist view.... The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind ... than anything else we know.... It is conscious ... has purposes, and prefers one thing to another.... Please do not think one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men, both views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science....

Useful and Necessary

"Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part in the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is ... and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind', then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science ... who go in for them....

"Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing ... in the whole universe that we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We ... have ... inside information.... If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than an architect could actually be a wall or staircase.... We could expect it to show itself ... as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?   In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes ... [to] a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide. I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.

"Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something that is directing the universe, and that appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind ... because ... the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.... In the next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out."

Who or What Is Operating Inside?

Highlights from chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.