INTRODUCTION

According to Lewis, “a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad.” This statement encapsulates Lewis's approach to religion: Follow the evidence. The overarching project of Lewis's Christian writings is to make the case that the evidence leads to Christianity. In the previous chapter, we examined Lewis's attempt to show that the suffering we find in the universe does not constitute decisive evidence against the existence of God. In this chapter and the next, we turn our attention to Lewis's positive case for the truth of Christianity.

It is helpful to view this case as having two main components. The first component consists of arguments for the claim that there is, in addition to the natural, physical universe that we perceive with our senses, some transcendent being, a Higher Power that created the natural universe and is “more like a mind than it is like anything else we know.” Lewis's writings suggest three main arguments for this conclusion or something like it. As Lewis is well aware, establishing such a conclusion does not establish the truth of Christianity, which adds to this claim a particular conception of the nature of this Higher Power as well as a host of additional theological and historical claims.