XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net
On Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:39:57 -0700, Jerry Friedman
wrote:
>[alt.usage.english removed, I hope]
>
>On 2/16/15 10:10 PM, Catherine Jefferson wrote:
>> On 2/16/2015 8:15 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>>> C. S. Lewis was no determinist, fortunately. I missed the early part of
>>>> this thread. Are you a Lewis fan?
>>>
>>> I've had many happy hours reading and rereading the Narnia books and the
>>> Space Trilogy.
>>
>> :) My grandfather bought a set of the Chronicles of Narnia for me and
>> my younger sister and brothers (four of us) for Christmas when I was
>> fifteen. I loved them. At the time, I had no idea who Lewis was or
>> that he was a famous Christian writer: I was raised non-religious and
>> was newly Christian.
>
>I might add that I read the Narnia books when I was younger than that,
>and I didn't know the Christian story of sin and Jesus' atonement. When
>I learned it and put it together with TLTW&TW, I felt rather betrayed.
>Nothing I couldn't get over, though.
I only discovered them when I was 24.
>> It took me a bit longer to get into the Space trilogy, especially the
>> last book of it. I'd been reading science fiction (more than fantasy)
>> since I was eight and a school librarian had introduced me to Andre
>> Norton. A year later, another school librarian at a different school
>> shoved one of Ursula Le Guin's books in my hands. Lewis's Space Trilogy
>> was sold as SF, but it was too dated as SF for me at that time.
>>
>> Later, when I figured out that reading it as fantasy worked beautifully,
>> I became a fan.
>
>Interesting. That kind of distinction in reading a book never mattered
>to me.
The first book of his I read was "Beyond personality", when I was 18,
and I can't remember anything about it. Maybe I should look again.
The next month I read "Perelandra", and liked it better. I thought he
wrote better fiction than non-fiction. I followed that by "Out of the
silent planet", which I liked even more. I read it as SF. I didn't
know of fantasy as a separate category in those days. I've read it
several times since.
>>>> What about his books do you like best?
>>>
>>> The fantasy and the uncompromisingness, even though I disagree with a
>>> lot of his views, starting with Christianity. And I like his writing.
>>> Especially in his non-fiction, he writes so clearly that you can see
>>> just where the fallacies are.
>>
>> There are some, but not that many, I find. Just disagreements with
>> David Hume, for the most part.
>...
>
>One was that he said that if our reasoning ability came about from
>natural processes such as evolution, rather than as a gift from God, we
>had no reason to trust it.
It depends on what you trust it for.
>But we'd expect reasoning ability that evolved to be reliable enough to
>be useful for survival. Also, God might not have given us reliable
>reasoning ability either. In fact, we know our intelligence isn't
>perfect, and most Christians say there are things in Christianity that
>we're incapable of understanding. So the argument is pointless; both
>evolution and creation can explain why our reasoning ability is the way
>it is, with evolution being the one that can give a better explanation
>than "Because God happened to want it that way."
Have you read this one:
Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire's bastards: the dictatorship
of reason in the West. New York: The Free Press.
ISBN: 0-02-927725-6
Dewey: 909.09821
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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