Last edited on Sat May 17th, 2008 06:15 pm by Steven Barrett

Last edited on Mon May 19th, 2008 05:29 am by Steven Barrett

Of course I pray for the dead. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him? I believe in purgatory. Our souls demand purgatory, don't they? My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn, a voice will say, 'Rinse your mouth out with this.' This will be purgatory.

(Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 107-109)

How can an unchanging system survive the continual increase of knowledge? . . . Change is not progress unless the core remains unchanged. A small oak grows into a big oak; if it became a beech, that would not be growth, but mere change . . . There is a great difference between counting apples and arriving at the mathematical formulae of modern physics. But the multiplication table is used in both and does not grow out of date. In other words, whenever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded. Indeed, the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element . . . I take it we should all agree to find this . . . in the simple rules of mathematics. I would also add to these the primary principles of morality. And I would also add the fundamental doctrines of Christianity . . . I claim that the positive historical statements made by Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which increasing knowledge puts into them . . . Like mathematics, religion can grow from within, or decay . . . But, like mathematics, it remains simply itself, capable of being applied to any new theory.


(God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 44-47. From "Dogma and the Universe," The Guardian, March 19, 1943, 96 / March 26, 1943, 104, 107)

As regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

(C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, New York: Macmillan, 1947, pp. 68-69)

Last edited on Mon May 19th, 2008 11:49 pm by Dave Armstrong

Last edited on Tue May 20th, 2008 05:38 pm by Steven Barrett

Last edited on Wed May 21st, 2008 02:31 pm by Steven Barrett