from The Problem of Pain
"...when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, 'Why do you not believe in God?' my reply would have run something like this: 'Look at the universe we live in . By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold....Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.
"There was one question which I never dreamed of raising. I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad,...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?....The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held." (pp.1-3)
"At every stage of religious development man may rebel, if not without violence to his own nature, yet without absurdity. He can close his spiritual eyes against the Numinous, if he is prepared to part company with half the great poets and prophets of his race, with his own childhood, with the richness and depth of uninhibited experience. he can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity. he can refuse to identify the Numinous with the righteous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping sexuality, or the dead, or the life-force, or the future. But the cost is heavy." (13)
