This morning I've found a couple of CS Lewis quotes which are worth posting. I'd seen both of them before, but they both make you stop and do some serious thinking so I'll post them here.
Firstly, from Victor Reppert's Dangerous Idea , he quotes CS Lewis on comparative religions. I won't paste the whole thing here, but I recommend you check it out. Basically Lewis argues that Christianity and Hinduism are the only two religions worth considering, more or less on the basis that they are the only ones which are all encompassing. I'm not sure what I think of the quote, but I always find it interesting hearing about how different people compare religions. The famous Mortimer J Adler, who converted to Catholicism after being somewhat of an agnostic for most of his life, argued for monotheism- he narrowed the field of play down to the three Abrahamic religions, putting them ahead of the Eastern ones. Unlike Lewis, he wrote Hinduism off alongside Buddhism. Sociologist Rodney Stark wrote a book called Discovering God where he argued for Christianity on the basis that it's the most complex revelation. I haven't read any of those books- Adler or Stark- but I've heard about their approaches and find it all very fascinating.
The Lewis quote came from a book titled God in the Dock, so I found that book and started skimming through on Google Books. It's a collection of essays and letters written by Lewis, mostly very short ones of a few pages each. Looks like it'll have to go on my ever increasing list of books to read. As I was scrolling through it and skimming the various essays I came across this quote, which I've seen quoted a multitude of times on various blogs (perhaps that's because a couple of the blogs I visit are written by CS Lewis affectionado's, and scholars of the Argument from Reason. Or perhaps it's just because Lewis seems to get quoted anywhere and everywhere. Nonetheless I digress....). Here it is:
If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts -- i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy -- are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.
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