Sterling Terrell

The Problem of Pain
By: C.S. Lewis
HarperOne; Revised ed. edition (May 28, 2009)
181 pages

The Problem Of Pain should be read, I think, as a prequel to Why Suffering. In his characteristic academic-English tone, Lewis begins by addressing pain in a philosophical sense. How do we know what we know? And why is that important anyway? Eventually he ties human suffering back to theism and creation. The core of it is that, from determinism, why should care about suffering anyway?

Two of my favorite quotes:

‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’, and perhaps also the term ‘happy’, are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable.

All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’. These experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the man who undergoes them.

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