Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 3 (“Time and beyond time”)
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. Some people struggle with the idea of prayer
(a) It relates to how God hears prayer
“A man put it to me by saying ‘I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.'”
(b) Specifically, how God can hear prayers at the same time
“Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time”
2. Our trouble stems from how we experience life in time
“Our life comes to us moment by moment One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like”
(a) They assume that God experiences things in the same way
We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the Theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now some of the scientists are doing the same.
(b) However, God is not in Time
“His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him”
As you may have guessed from the posts on this website in recent months, I’ve been doing a lot concerning C.S. Lewis. I recently came across this interview with his step son, Douglas, which I think really gives some insight into what the man was really like…