I read this very brief but lovely essay by C.S. Lewis this evening: “On Obstinacy in Belief.” (I found it in a collection of Lewis’ essays which includes “The World’s Last Night”). In about fifteen pages, Lewis answers the same questions Dawkins keeps asking today about Christian belief. What people like Dawkins miss is that faith is relational, not merely rational, and that it is a particular relationship with this God, not with “god” as a concept. A snippet from the conclusion:
Our opponents, then, have a perfect right to dispute with us about the grounds of our original assent [to the Christian faith]. But they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the assent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evidence. They cannot of course be expected to know on what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is always rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to see how the quality of the object which we think we are beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view that if this were a delusion then we should have to say that the universe had produced no real thing of comparable value and that all explanations of the delusion seemed somehow less important than the thing explained. That is knowledge we cannot comunicate. But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations. What would, up till then, have been variations simple of opinion become variations of conduct by a person to a Person. Credere Deum esse turns into Credre in Deum. And Deum here is this God, the increasingly knowable Lord.