We Couldn’t Make It Up

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match—all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring. Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.—from Mere Christianity” —C. S. Lewis

Reality has a way of surprising us—it doesn’t always follow the patterns we expect or fit into tidy boxes. C. S. Lewis observed that the universe itself resists predictability: planets of wildly different sizes, scattered at irregular distances, orbiting a sun they never touch. This unpredictability, far from being chaotic, actually hints at something deeper—a Creator whose ways are not our ways. And so it is with the Christian faith. It’s not the religion anyone would invent. Who would dream up a God who dies to save His enemies? Who calls the weak blessed and the last first?

The unexpected shape of reality is one of the strongest arguments for a faith that transcends human imagination. Christianity doesn’t flatter our assumptions—it shatters them. It invites us into mystery, into grace we didn’t foresee and a redemption story more beautiful than logic alone could produce. Like the cosmos, it bears the signature of something real—wild, wonderful, and not quite what we would have written. And that, perhaps, is why we can trust it. —DH