Through the Lens with C.S. LewisNovember 2012

Well? “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the

really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

What Christians Believe

Book Two

Rival Conceptions of God• What is the defining

difference in regards to religion between Christians and Atheists? (29)

• Is God beyond good and evil? (29)

• What is a pantheist? (29)

• Why is the Christian POV superior to the Pantheist?

• How did you respond to the idea that “…Christianity is a fighting religion”? (30)

• How should that fight be waged?

• How well is the Church fighting that fight?

• What can YOU do about it?

• Is the universe cruel and unjust?

• How do you know?

• How does this line of logic lead to the idea that atheism is too simple?

• What gives words meaning?

The InvasionReconstructing the Tree of Life• One key issue in reconstructing the Tree of Life is the development of algorithms and

computational infrastructure to allow scientists around the world to apply the same methods.

• A common approach is to identify the simplest hypothesis of relationships that explains as much different evidence as possible. Increasingly, however, scientists prefer the tree that renders the observed species data the most likely, given an underlying model of the evolutionary process.

• But finding the simplest or the most likely hypothesis can be very challenging. As phylogenetic datasets grow larger, it becomes more difficult to analyze them properly. With more and more species under study, the number of alternative phylogenetic hypotheses that must be considered to select the best tree increases dramatically.

• For example, for 3 species there are just 3 possible phylogenetic trees, and for 5 species there are 105. From there the number of possible trees grows amazingly quickly. For 50 species there are more possible trees than the number of atoms in the universe. For 100 species there are more trees than the volume of the entire universe measured in the smallest possible units, assuming expansion at the speed of light since the “big bang” 20 billion years ago.

• No computer, no matter how powerful, can examine every possible tree for even a moderate number of species. Therefore, computer scientists have had to devise clever strategies to avoid examining every possible tree; so-called heuristic search algorithms.

• One method quickly builds a starting tree and then rapidly swaps branches around to find better trees.

• Another strategy breaks large problems down into smaller ones, solves these, and then puts them back together again.

• Much remains to be done to improve the performance of phylogenetic methods.

That’s all one number.Science agrees with Christianity on this point:

Real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not.

Need another example?

The Three Types Of TearsBasal, the tears that keeps the eyes moist. Without them, blinking would feel like sandpaper scratching our eyes. We produce between five and 10 ounces a day.

Reflex, the tears that come from cutting onions or a finger in the eye.

Emotional, they are the only tears that dispel toxins.

Women produce 60 percent more prolactin – the same hormone used for breast-feeding – in their tears than men.

Crying is hard in space – gravity issues.

British psychologist John Siaboda concluded that the most tear-inducing musical passage of all time is the beginning of the third movement in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

Humans are the only animals known to cry, not counting Walt Disney cartoons.

Tear contains mucus, water and oil.

• What does Lewis mean when he talks about “Christianity and water”? (31)

• God did not invent religion. What exactly IS religion anyway? (31)

• Why are things in nature not perfectly symmetrical?

• How can that be evidence (circumstantial) of Christianity’s validity?

• What is the fatal flaw of dualism? (32)

• Can there be two equally powerful opposing forces?

Is wickedness a twisted pursuit of something good?

Can one be bad for the mere sake of badness? (32)How is “badness” only spoiled “goodness”?

“To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence, and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must get them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel?” (33)

Lucifer“…evil is a parasite, not an original thing.”

Civil War:We live in enemy occupied territory. (33)

How does Lewis’s description of the spiritual war we are in encourage you to go to church—even when you aren’t in the mood?

The Shocking Alternative

• How does the will of an authority give “subjects” the freedom to disobey it? (34)

• Why was God willing to grant his higher creatures (that’s us) the ability to rebel against His will?

• What is the difficulty in disagreeing with God?

• How do you know that God intended you to be the highest of His creation? (35)

• Why do we persist in trying to find happiness for ourselves outside God and apart from

God?

• Why will we never succeed? (35)

• What has been the result over the millennia?

This page brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Foundation

According to Lewis, God’s rescue plan for humanity took the form of four things (the Moral Law, good dreams of a dying god, the revelation given to the Jews, and finally the coming of Jesus).

• Is “good dreams” a strange inclusion in this list?

• Can you think of any examples of good dreams in pagan/heathen cultures?

• Why was the Judaic revelation so important?

• Are there any other ways in which God could be said to have revealed himself to humanity?

So what do we do with Jesus?(36)

• What made Jesus do shocking?

• What makes Him different from other religious icons?

• What makes the claim to forgive sins unique?

• What did the first century religious leaders get right?

If Jesus claimed to forgive sin as

though HE were the one offended, what are the only two possibilities to

His doing so?

So what do we do with Jesus?(36)

• What made Jesus do shocking?

• What makes Him different from other religious icons?

• What makes the claim to forgive sins unique?

• What did the first century religious leaders get right?

If Jesus claimed to forgive sin as

though HE were the one offended, what are the only two possibilities to

His doing so?

Arroganceor

Actuality

The Perfect Penitent• Lunatic, fiend, or ?

(37)

• What did Jesus come to do? (37)

• What is the central Christian belief? (37)

• How is that different from many perceptions?

• Why do redemption theories matter? Or do they? (37)

“The thing itself cannot be pictured…” (38)

• What is the hardest thing about believing Jesus, especially for the rational materialist?

• What is the most important thing, according to Lewis?

Those bubble tracks from cern, above are showing

the exact resistance of EM packets to the ETHER. 

The Ether Constant

What makes repentance so hard?

What makes it possible?Is there another way? (38-39)

The Practical Conclusion• How did you acquire your life? (40)

• How is the “new life” acquired?

• Should anyone expect it to be free from the usual pains of birth and growth?

• Why do people think that Christianity should be all rainbows and unicorns?

• Why does Lewis choose baptism, belief, and communion as three essential elements to growing the Christ-life?

• Why does he believe these three are fundamental? (40)

Authority

How much of what you believe is based on authority? (41)

Why do we put so much emphasis on questioning authority now?

What is the difference between a person trying to be good (based on the Moral Law) and the Christian? (41)

The Choice“When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see a whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side…That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.” (42)

HomeworkRead Book Three (Mere Christianity) Sections 1,2,3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12Write a response to the section of your choice.Create an image that symbolizes your responsePrepare a presentation of your response and image