Like my other C.S. Lewis book on theology God in the Dock, I was given The Problem of Pain by my aunt and uncle when they were getting rid of some of their old books. As with God in the Dock, I had very little desire to read it but decided to just get it over with.
In general, I had fewer objections to The Problem of Pain than I did to God in the Dock, largely because while the latter was billed as a book designed to provide arguments in favour of the existence of God to the unbeliever and failed to do so, the former was seemingly designed to provide believers with an argument on why pain exists in the world if God is good. As the arguments in The Problem of Pain are therefore not directed at me, most of my objections are with the lack of consistency that is present in Lewis' arguments. For example, he argues that God is omnipotent in the sense that he created everything, including free will, and therefore does not interfere with humanity's choices except in select circumstances, which are rare and wondrous enough to be called miracles. This clashes somewhat with his arguments in later chapters. In one, Lewis claims that "whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want." If this claim is true, then does this not mean that far from allowing us our own choices, God is in fact interfering with our lives at every turn? In a similar vein in a later chapter, Lewis argues that God wants us to be happy in him, and that he therefore strips away our false happiness (which is when we experience pain) until we turn to him, which is the only way to be truly happy. As with the last argument, if this is true, then how can it be said that God interferes only in select circumstances? If he is in fact stripping away all "false" happiness, then it would seem to me that he is interfering with our free will down to the minutiae of our lives.
Although most of the book was aimed at doubting or questioning believers, there were a number of arguments towards the beginning of the book that were seemingly aimed at atheists. His first argument is that it is implausible that humanity would have imagined a just and good creator when surrounded by the horrors of a harsh and unjust world. The major problem with this is of course that for the most part religion did not begin with people imagining a just and good god. Instead, it began with people believing in the power of nature (with the sun, moon, wind, rain, etc all existing as deities). Even once early forms of Judaism emerged there was still not a belief in a just and good god. Instead, there was a god who was incredibly jealous ("Thou shalt have no other god before me"), who demanded that his followers obey a seemingly random assortment of laws (no shellfish, no contact with menstruating women, etc), and who commanded his followers to fall upon their enemies and slaughter all those living within towns who opposed them. The idea of a loving god who wanted his people to know joy through him was a much later development.
Lewis' second argument against atheism follows the same pattern as his arguments in God in the Dock by constructing straw men. In particular, Lewis claims that there are only two alternatives concerning Jesus. Either he was an "abominable raving lunatic" or he was who he said he was, but that there is no middle ground. According to Lewis, since the records bear out that Jesus was not a raving lunatic, he must logically be who he said he was. Ignoring the fact that the only "record" that can be consulted on this matter has a rather vested interest in proving that Jesus was not in fact a lunatic, there are still several alternatives that Lewis conveniently ignores. First, there is the possibility that Jesus never existed, and is instead the product of the human propensity for inventing myths that justify their own actions. Second (and what I tend to believe), there is the possibility that a man named Jesus did live roughly 2,000 years ago, taught a large number of followers to believe what he had to say without it necessarily being the truth, and was executed as a disturber of the peace, and that after his death his followers exploited and expanded his legacy in order to gain their own followers and increase their own influence. For those Christians who argue that the spread of Christianity on such a scale would have been impossible without it being a divinely inspired and aided truth, I would point out that if you are Christian and therefore believe that other religions are false, how can you explain their spread to large numbers of people without divine assistance? The truth is that many people are eager to believe in something larger than themselves, and are therefore easily led to believe what they want to believe.
I did not particularly enjoy The Problem of Pain, but I did not really expect to. Lewis' arguments have a number of logical holes which he does not bother to address, and I am not sure that even were I a Christian that I would accept them as they are.
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