Is "Why?" The Wrong Question?

No. 94

I was again listening to another episode of Samuel Marusca’s Practical Wisdom podcast where this time he was chatting with theologian Allister McGrath of Oxford who is a leading biographer of C. S. Lewis. I was particularly struck by a question Marusca asked about the push back one often hears around belief in God. If there is a God, why does He permit evil in the world? Or further, why does He permit pain and suffering? I was intrigued by McGrath’s answer, which I hadn’t anticipated.

Marusca began the conversation by asking a question about pride and quoting from C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. Lewis wrote that “the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride … it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” This fit the conversation as McGrath had already spoken about how pride had nearly been Lewis’s undoing. Lewis had become quite famous with the publication of Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. What accompanied that fame was enormous pride, which McGrath said Lewis struggled with enormously. Lewis did develop ways to deal with this fame and stop himself from being prideful. McGrath said, “It saved him.” Lewis never really explained how he came to grips with this fame induced pride. McGrath described how Lewis called pride as something you can’t control that takes over you “like a constant appetite you can’t satisfy and it destroys you.” Lewis said you have to fight this off and McGrath added that unfortunately Lewis didn’t leave the details on how he did it. Some of hints of how he did come through in some of the letters he left behind. One of those hints that McGrath identified was to refuse to see yourself as successful saying, “I don’t care. I’m just me.” McGrath added that Lewis took the position that you either break the cycle of addiction to fame or it will overwhelm you.