News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
PORTLAND, OR—Local atheist Marcus Blaine has been wavering in his atheism recently, wondering why good things happen at all. Marcus has found himself asking why he has it so good in what should be a cold, meaningless world that doesn’t care whether he suffers or not.
“How could there be no God if so many good things keep happening?” asked Marcus Blaine. “Oh, Science forgive me as I wrestle and doubt. Forgive me for seeing beauty and wonder in a world as if it were designed by a Creator!”
Sources say that Marcus often says that he’s just a random collection of atoms and chemical reactions—that he’s just ‘dancing to his DNA’—but recently he just can’t seem to shake the idea that there’s more to his existence.
“What if it’s all a lie? What if atheism is just made up to make people feel smart and have a false sense of superiority?” Marcus cried out. “I mean obviously we’re just here by random chance, with no benevolent Being watching over us. But then again, why has a single good thing happened in anyone’s life—much less on a daily basis?”
Many of Marcus’s friends have started to worry about him. They claim that he’s not wearing his fedora anymore and he’s started to say things like ‘there’s just way too much good in this world.’ Several have said that it’s hard to watch such a strong nonbeliever backslide like that, and even start attending church again.
Go here to read the rest.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch.
The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning”, the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic”. He is now safe in Our Father’s house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable “real life”. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is “the results of modem investigation”. Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
