The Shocking Alternative

Big idea

Summary

Lewis opens by confronting the puzzle of evil in a universe ruled by an all-powerful, good God. Using the image of a mother who lets her children learn responsibility by choice rather than constant supervision, he argues that God's will operates on two levels: what he directly wants, and what he permits by granting freedom. Free will is not a flaw in creation but the very condition that makes love, goodness, and joy possible, since a world of mechanical beings incapable of choice would hardly be worth making. Evil, on this view, is the cost God accepted for the possibility of real relationship.

He then turns to how evil first entered the picture, admitting we cannot know for certain but offering the traditional guess that the root sin was self-centeredness -- a desire to be one's own god rather than depend on the true source of life. Lewis traces most human misery, from war to greed to slavery, back to this same root: people trying to manufacture happiness independently of God, which he compares to a machine designed for one fuel being filled with the wrong kind. Civilizations rise and inevitably collapse because the underlying defect never changes.

Lewis describes God's response to this predicament in three stages: preserving conscience in every person, seeding "good dreams" of dying-and-rising gods across world religions, and painstakingly forming one nation, Israel, to grasp who he truly is. The chapter's climax is the arrival of a man among the Jews who spoke and acted as though he were God -- forgiving sins committed against other people, claiming eternal existence, and asserting authority to judge the world at history's end.

The chapter closes with Lewis's now-famous forced choice: given what Jesus claimed about himself, he must have been either exactly what he said, or a madman, or something monstrous -- but not simply a wise ethical teacher, since no merely human teacher could make such claims without being either deluded or malicious. This closes off the comfortable middle position of admiring Jesus's morals while quietly setting aside his identity.

Key points

• Free will explains how evil can exist without the state of the world being simply what God wanted.
• A world incapable of choosing wrongly would also be incapable of real love or goodness.
• Lewis identifies the root of sin as the desire to be self-sufficient and to displace God as the center.
• Human history's recurring miseries stem from trying to find fulfillment apart from God.
• God prepared the way through conscience, universal myths, and the specific formation of Israel.
• Jesus's own claims to deity leave no comfortable room for treating him as merely a great moral teacher.

Illustrations & analogies

• The mother who lets her children keep their own room tidy on their own illustrates how something can be against God's preference yet still permitted by his will.
• The picture of a car engineered to run only on gasoline pictures humanity as designed to be sustained by God alone, so that substitutes inevitably fail.
• Lewis's ladder of creatures -- a cow, a dog, a child, a genius, a superhuman spirit -- shows that greater capacity brings greater potential for both good and evil.
• Comparing Jesus's claim to forgive sins with an ordinary person absurdly claiming to forgive crimes committed against other people dramatizes how startling that claim actually is.

Notable lines

And free will is what has made evil possible.

C. S. Lewis Book II, Ch. 3 — The Shocking Alternative

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.

C. S. Lewis Book II, Ch. 3 — The Shocking Alternative

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.

C. S. Lewis Book II, Ch. 3 — The Shocking Alternative

Related Scripture

• Genesis 3

For reflection and discussion

1. Lewis argues that giving creatures freedom was worth the risk of evil entering the world. Do you find this an adequate response to the problem of evil, and why or why not?
2. How does Lewis's picture of humanity running on the wrong 'fuel' compare to your own experience of pursuing satisfaction apart from God?
3. What objections might someone raise to Lewis's forced choice about Jesus being either Lord, liar, or lunatic, and how might Lewis respond to them?