C.S. Lewis is such a pimp: Chapter Part II

So I am reading Lewis' The Problem of Pain and, well, I don't know what else to say except HOLY FRIGGIN CRAP!!!!! I can't even get through the introduction without feeling like an unlearned, uneducated goober! As I suspect most self-aware people do, when faced with such sweeping genius as Lewis possessed.

At the beginning of his first chapter, he addresses the "problem of pain" in this way, "If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This, as he puts it, is the problem of pain in its simplest form and the popular belief of most non Christians in the world and unfortunately a painful seeming paradox of the nature of God to even some of the most sincere Christians. He goes on to drop this amazing concept on us, or rather, to put into words exactly what most Christians wish we could say in response to this problem of pain, and yet find ourselves pitifully unable to do so. Later on in the chapter he makes this splendid assertion:

"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit on His power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it', you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can'. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."

Chew on that for a while! And then imagine the fact that that is one of the simpler pragraphs in the book. And then feel sorry for me that, dangit, I am getting through this book even if it kills me...and it very well might!