CS Lewis on God and a Cruel Universe

The Rival Conceptions of God by CS Lewis

(from Mere Christianity)

If a good God made the world why has  it gone wrong? And for many years I simply  refused to listen to the Christian  answers  to  this  question,  because  I  kept on  feeling "whatever you say,  and however clever your  arguments are,  isn't  it  much simpler  and  easier to  say that the  world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't  all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to  avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument  against  God  was  that  the universe seemed so cruel  and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does  not call a  line  crooked  unless he  has  some  idea of a straight line.  What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If  the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so  to  speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against  it? A man feels  wet  when he falls into water,  because man is not a  water animal: a fish would not feel wet.

Of course I could have  given up my  idea of justice by  saying it  was nothing but  a  private idea of my own. But  if I did that, then my argument against  God collapsed too- for  the argument  depended on  saying that  the world  was really unjust, not simply  that  it  did not happen to  please my private fancies. Thus in the very act  of trying to  prove  that God did not exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I  found I was forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns  out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning,  we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no  creatures  with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.