Much of the process of figuring out what is true and fake in this world is finding a constant to measure against. Without a basis, we really have no way to ever settle on fact. CS Lewis explores this idea in his essay: Religion: Reality or Substitute? His premise in the essay is that it is easy to become so placated by the substitute that you are no strive for what is real. He uses an story to illustrate this point:
When I was a boy, gramophone records were not nearly as good as they are now. In the old recordings of an orchestral piece you could hardly hear the separate instruments at all, but only a single undifferentiated sound. That was the sort of music I grew up on. And when, at a somewhat later age, I began to hear real orchestras, I was actually disappointed with them just because you didn’t get to hear that single sound. What one got in a concert room seemed to me to lack the unity I had grown to expect, to be not an orchestra but merely a number of individual musicians on the same platform. In fact, I felt it ‘wasn’t the Real Thing’… a gramophone is precisely a substitute, and an orchestra the reality. But owing to my musical miseducation, the reality appeared to be a substitute and the substitute a reality.’
This means that human beings, in all of our emotions and experiences, build an idea of true that may be entirely wrong. Using ourselves as a basis for discovery is a fool’s errand. Lewis draws two conclusions from this:
- Introspection is of no use at all in deciding which of the two experiences is a substitute.
- If immediate feeling has shown itself quite worthless n this matter, then let us never listen to an immediate feeling again. If our criterion between a real, and a substituted, satisfaction must be sought somewhere else, then in God’s name, seek it somewhere else.
When a witness has been proved unreliable, we throw him out. We must be willing to do the same with ourselves: we make a horrible standard for truth. Where does this leave us? It leaves us with FAITH: putting our trust and hope in something we believe over something we feel. Or, as Lewis defines it:
I define Faith as the power of continuing to believe what we once honestly thought to be true until cogent reasons for honestly changing our minds are brought before us.
In other words: contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3b). Faith is to believe the truth that was given by God, confirmed by Jesus, and lived out by faithful saints through time; to trust in this truth until something better or more true comes to take its place. Lewis wants to recapture the Biblical view of faith as a virtue, as soon as faith is seen as weakness and foolishness, people will abandon it because it is trendy, not because any better truth comes along. The fact that the Bible IS the truth of God, means that you will never have a ‘truth’ that discredits it. As Lewis states:
You will have no rational grounds for disbelieving. It is your senses and your imagination that are going to attack belief. Here, as in the New Testament, the conflict is not between faith and reason but between faith and sight. We can face things which we know to be dangerous if they don’t look or sound too dangerous; our real trouble is often with things we know to be safe but which look dreadful. Our faith in Christ wavers not so much when real arguments come against it as when it looks improbable—when the whole world takes on that desolate look which really tells us much more about the state of our passions and even our digestion than about reality.
The battle that we have in this world is to not allow the substitutions to convince you that they are more real than reality. The difficulty of Christianity is holding on to what God says when we don’t feel it, when those around us mock us, and when we don’t want to believe what God says is true. The answer to this is not to be careful by believing less, but to actually go all in on faith. To trust what is real in the face of a multitude of fakes. To allow this truth to build in you the MERCY, PEACE and LOVE that God promises us. Lewis ends with this:
If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing, not just in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth. For I am not sure, after all, whether one of the causes of our weak faith is not a secret wish that our faith should not be strong. Is there some reservation in our minds? Some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real? I hope not. God help us all, and forgive us.
*It is worth reading the entire essay if you can find it!