Abstract
Michael L. Peterson seeks to fill a ‘void’ in C. S. Lewis scholarship (p. 3). He contends that, while much has been written on Lewis, no work has systematically examined and reconstructed Lewis’s world view as a coherent whole; like Lewis’s own works, most secondary sources have focused on particular aspects of his beliefs. Peterson’s book, in contrast, considers the core philosophical and theological perspectives that underpin Lewis’s thought. By drawing consistently from Lewis’s own writings and keeping a general focus, Peterson offers a thorough but relatively conservative assessment of Lewis’s world view, refraining from putting words in the author’s mouth and speculating about what Lewis might have thought regarding specific issues.
Lewis sought to discern what is ‘rational to believe’, not to explicitly prove the truth of Christianity or any other belief system (p. 92). A reasonable world view must therefore explain the existence of given phenomena better than any alternatives. It should also provide coherence between intellectual conclusions and experienced reality. Peterson traces Lewis’s train of thought as he compared alternative world views, placing phenomena such as moral law, the existence of human reason and the problem of evil in the context of each view and ultimately concluding that orthodox Christianity provides the most consistent and reasonable answers to life’s largest questions. Peterson stresses that Lewis’s Christian world view should not be considered something of his own invention, but an existing view he came to accept. He therefore provides a critique of Lewis’s belief in the concept of God’s ‘timelessness’, contending that it poses more problems than it solves and should be removed from his world view to make it truly consistent (p. 160). However, readers should recall that, regardless of its position in Christian orthodoxy, timelessness nonetheless represents a noteworthy facet of Lewis’s own beliefs. It cannot be simply excised from the picture.
Peterson’s book is best suited to readers significantly familiar with Lewis’s own works. Those who have read Surprised by Joy will recognize the trajectory of Lewis’s philosophical development, but familiarity with his other non-fiction works is invaluable; Peterson examines the roots of Lewisian thought, but the reader would do well to supply knowledge of its branches for the most illuminating reading experience. Knowledge of philosophical terms also helps streamline the reading. For the less well-versed, however, Peterson provides a helpful glossary in the back of the book, rendering his work accessible to a wider range of lay readers.
In an interesting touch, Peterson includes symbolic representations of relative conditional probabilities throughout his text. Since much of Lewis’s intellectual journey towards adoption of orthodox Christianity hinged on comparing the likelihood of different world views – naturalism versus theism, for instance – being true, this mathematical treatment provides an efficient way to summarize Lewis’s progressing conclusions. For the non-mathematician, however, the shorthand employed might raise a small instance of confusion and detract from the flow of the writing. Nonetheless, Peterson’s book provides, on the whole, a well-considered, unpresumptuous systemization of Lewis’s Christian world view that should be largely comprehensible, informative and enjoyable for any well-read fan.