12). But what about the possibility of some humans equating their virtues with supernatural awes to better control other humans? These are possibilities that deserve more consideration than they are given.
The theodicy begins with Lewis stating that answering the problem of evil "depends on showing that the terms 'good' and 'almighty', and perhaps also the term 'happy', are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable" (p.16). This is a surprising statement considering that Lewis himself believes that human beings have an instinctive moral sense that tells them what is "good". Does this mean, by Lewis' own reasoning, that the problem of evil is "unanswerable" for a Christian? According to what Lewis is saying, there is only one major moral choice a person must make in life: "a single naked choice – of loving God more than the self or the self more than God" (p.20). So why not then, set up the world so that that is the only moral choice we need to make? Lewis goes from the conclusion which I do not disagree with, that distinctness and freedom of choice need the existence of an outside world of material, concluding that that world has to be set up in such a way that allows people to hurt each other. As soon as a physical world exists, we can recognize ourselves as separate from others, interact with them and connect with them. Why add the extra ability for evil people to use that world to unjustly harm innocent people, rather than making the world so that people who made bad choices could only harm themselves?.
"We can, perhaps conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon [but] the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that [miracles] should be extremely rare" (p.
