07 We all believe in God but we refuse to believe.

Belief in God is part of our make-up, but most of us choose to reject it. How can I make such a statement?

We all have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong. Our conscience is indirect evidence for the existence of God because we cannot explain where our knowledge of good and evil comes from without accepting that it came from God.

C. S. Lewis explained this well. He was a very famous scholar and the author of many books, including the Narnia series.

Lewis was an atheist. In his book, “Mere Christianity”, Lewis explains his change to belief in God.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

Lewis realised he had a built-in moral framework, which did not come from the world of nature. We don’t blame a cat for killing a bird; it is in its nature. But we call a boy cruel if he starts killing birds for fun. Where does our sense of right and wrong, of justice, come from? There is no evidence to suggest that it somehow evolved.

“Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies”.

“Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple”.

Much against his will, Lewis had to admit that his moral sense came from outside of himself. The core of it was common to all of humanity but was not found in any other creatures. It had to come from the creator of humanity; it had to be God-given. So Lewis reluctantly believed that God was God, and he became a Christian.

We may not be able to think as clearly as Lewis but we can all think well enough to see that reason and conscience are consistent with a belief in God and cannot be explained without him.