Mere Christianity Cs Lewis Analysis

An Unfortunate Position In the first chapter of his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes two points: “Firstly, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave a certain way, and cannot get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave that way” (Lewis 8). Before Lewis makes this statement, he defines the certain way humans should behave as the Law of Nature, which is the Law of Right and Wrong. So Lewis is stating that all humans know they should do good instead of evil, but they still break the law telling them to do good. When one examines these two terms, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, one finds out that most sources agree that ‘evil’ is, when put into simplest terms without the fancy words that are

Some people believe that if humans work hard enough they can create a future society that solves all problems: war, hunger, crime, etc. In all recorded history, no society has ever been problem free. All have moral issues associated with them. In Crime and Punishment, Raskólnikov attests, “I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long . . . Afterwords I understood that that would never come to pass, that men won’t change and nobody can alter it” (Dostoevsky 351-352). Dostoevsky emphasizes the fact that there will never be a utopian society. Society is not the solution to human evil because society is comprised of, and made by, humans. Golding’s book, Lord of the Flies, reiterates this fact. The officer who saved the boys came off a cruiser that was in of the current war civilization was involved with (Golding 202). A main theme of Lord of the Flies is that unconstrained, human savagery takes over. Through the warship that comes to pick the boys up, Golding concedes that although out of society humans are evil, even in society they aren’t much better. Through Dostoevsky’s and Golding’s works, one can see that while society is flawed, it is neither the instigator of the issue of evil nor the solution to the problem of evil. When one concedes this fact is true, one has a problem, but no solution to root out the natural inclinations of