Reading: Logic and the Christian Faith

Logic and Christian faith

Logic maintains that one can move from premise a to premise b and draw conclusion c. Is that possible with the content of our faith as Christians? So far this week, nothing we have looked at is specifically Christian. But we need to determine if faith is a logical thing to pursue, or is it readily objected to? Does the presentation of any objection simply nullify the truth of a statement of faith which has been drawn out of our faith experience?

For example, a person I know is very ill. The doctors have done all they know how to do in order to bring about healing, but to no avail. Then a fellow Christian comes alongside the person I know and prays for him. In a few days, he begins to show improvement and later he has recovered completely.  The ill person attributes this to the hand of God which his fellow Christian prayed might touch his life. Is that logical? Or does logic automatically exclude any reference to God since God is outside of our common experience? 

In the following, you will find several quotes from one of the 20^th Century’s best apologists for the Christian faith. As such, C.S. Lewis embodied the very character of a Christian deeply committed to logic and its meaning for life in general and Christianity in particular. I thought I would simply present this to you as a written document rather than presenting it in a PowerPoint presentation. These are wonderful thoughts to let ramble around in your mind from time to time. You will find Lewis to be a significant tutor in how to think logically as a Christian.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

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