I have a running discussion with a couple friends who love C.S Lewis. I usually refer to Lewis as a mad at God atheist. I haven't thoroughly read Lewis, but from The Problem of Pain and other excepts of Lewis' work, Lewis doesn't present the best atheist ideas, maybe he does this intentionally.
For my friends, below is an except from a Christian who has an excellent understanding of atheism. This except is from Book 5, Chapter 1, of War and Peace. Pierre, one of the wealthiest people in Russia in the story, has recently separated with his wife after shooting her suspected lover in a duel.
Pierre's atheism at the moment is one of depression, desperation, and despair. I don't mean to suggest that this is what atheism is. Atheist are as diverse ideological as any other group. In fact atheists as a group are probably more diverse because you have atheist coming from all religions and beliefs, and atheists do not have any texts that are essential to their disbelief in a God.
Pierre is waiting at a poststation in Torzhok:
The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling Torzhók embroidery came into the room offering their services. Without changing his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his spectacles unable to understand what they wanted or how they could go on living without having solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had been engrossed by the same thoughts ever since the day he returned from Sokólniki after the duel and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night. But now, in the solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.
The stripped screw metaphor is perfect. There is a deep philosophical idea, and the idea keeps one stuck in place. Always coming back to these same questions. Unable to accept or deny them, just stripped. Tolstoy continues:
The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to get more money from the traveler.
“Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me, bad for another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because he needs money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing for letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,” continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”
Pierre isn't confident in his atheism. Tolstoy is setting up Pierre for a conversion. It's as if Tolstoy is begging the question with Pierre. Tolstoy continues:
There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.
Here is where Tolstoy shines. The narrator steps in with an objective look. There are two options: something or nothing. Tolstoy continues:
The Torzhók peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of rubles I don’t know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered cloak looking timidly at me,” he thought. “And what does she want the money for? As if that money could add a hair’s breadth to happiness or peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me less a prey to evil and death?—death which ends all and must come today or tomorrow—at any rate, in an instant as compared with eternity.” And again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, and again it turned uselessly in the same place.
His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by Madame de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous struggles of a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. “And why did she resist her seducer when she loved him?” he thought. “God could not have put into her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife—as she once was—did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found out, nothing discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.
This isn't the best conclusion for atheism, but it feels more authentic than Lewis. The problem I had was Lewis using atheism to make arguments for Christianity. That's all good and well for Christians, but not for atheists. Tolstoy, although a devout Christian, is more concerned with capturing the psychology and complexity of his characters. Tolstoy's characters convert, like Lewis: the atheist become Christians. But I believe Tolstoy's characters! Lewis seems like a teenager who was mad at God and left his faith for a while.
Maybe this is my bias. Tolstoy captures my ideas about humanity, and I dislike Lewis'. If one was going to change my perspectives they'd need to have a Tolstoy approach, not a Lewis approach.
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