Design

God created humans who have free will. This means creatures who can go either wrong or right. If a thing is free to do good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him & to each other.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way; apparently He thought it worth the risk. The better stuff a creature is made of, the cleverer & stronger & freer it is – then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. And well, it did go wrong. Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors the idea that they could be “like gods” – could set up on their own as if they had created themselves – be their own masters – invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, prostitution, war, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us; invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline & it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness & peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.



Excerpted from: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Macmillan Publishing Co.,1952 pp. 37-39.