Man or Rabbit

     In Man or Rabbit, Lewis discusses the question, "Can't you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?"  Lewis suggests that often what people really mean by this question is more like, "I don't care whether Christianity is in fact true or not.  All I'm interested in is leading a good life. I'm going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful."  This is the approach that many take toward religion these days; they don't bother figuring out why something they believe in is true, they just believe in it because it is convenient for them.  Lewis says that our desire to "find out what reality is" is on of the things that "distinguishes man from animal.," and when man doesn't quench that desire, he is not being "fully human."
    This reminds me of what Francis Collins (geneticist who lead one of the groups in the Human Genome Project) warns against in his book The Language of God.  He says that we have to be careful in only letting God exist in the aspects of realities that science can't explain.  Lewis was mainly talking in his paper about non-Christians being guilty of choosing to remain ignorant of Christianity because they don't want to deal with the hard questions.  But I think Christians are also guilty of not knowing why they believe what they believe and letting God take over when we don't have the answers to the same hard questions.  We need to be careful of this ignorance as well.  Yes, God is the answer, but we need to go beyond that and figure out why we believe in Him.
     Lewis says that the man asking this question is not really asking if he can lead a good life without believing in Christianity, but instead "Mayn't I just avoid the issue, let sleeping dogs lie, and get on with being 'good'?"  But how is a man to do good if he doesn't even know what good is?  For he cannot truly know what good is without investigating the possibilities-including Christian beliefs of good and evil.  Lewis says "He is like the man who won't look at his bank account because he's afraid of what he might find there."  This man is in the state of "dishonest error" and this dishonesty will "spread through all his thoughts and actions" and does not deserve God's grace.
     A good life will do us no good without Christ in our lives.  The man who remains ignorant and doesn't even bother to figure out anything about God is condemned to hell.  There's no nice way to put it.  This is a harsh reminder to us as Christians to reach out to our non-Christian friends and challenge them to find out for themselves what they believe to be true.  That is, if we want to see them in heaven.