Mere Christianity

Lewis explains that the first big division within humanity is between the majority, who believe in some kind of god or gods, and the minority who do not. The next division involves the types of god(s) people believe in. Here, Lewis draws a distinction between the Abrahamic religions on the one side, and Pantheism on the other; the former view God as infinitely good, whereas the latter views good and evil as essentially human constructs irrelevant to any understanding of the divine. This is in part a function of Pantheism’s understanding of God as animating everything (good and bad) within the universe “so that the universe almost is God” (37) By contrast, the Christian (and more broadly Abrahamic) understanding of God is as the creator of the universe. Consequently, the Christian God would still exist even if the universe did not, and can in some sense be described as “separate from the world” (37) and, in particular, the bad things in it.

To Lewis, it’s therefore clear that Pantheism doesn’t take the problem of suffering or evil seriously enough: “Confronted with a cancer or a slum, the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine

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