Into the Wardrobe

Hi Stanley,

I've been lurking around the book study thread for a while, but hadn't worked up the courage to put in my two cents.

I also read the same thought about Copernicus and Galileo in a very lively book about the history of astronomy called "The Watershed" by Arthur Koestler (a very good book, by the way, and it reads like a novel).

I'm not sure I understood your last thought (or, rather, I'm sure I didn't) - but that's my fault, not yours. Another way of saying what I think you mean is that Lewis creates mythological images to express or account for psychological phenomena - a kind of pageant of walking Jungian archetypes. He thus creates a model of internal reality that works as long as the reader exercises a "willing suspension of disbelief" while, at the same time, realizing that the model really IS just a model. Is that it? If it is, I think it's very true, especially of "That Hideous Strength".

I see what you mean about Occam's razor. It would be fun to invent an alternative principle! By the way, I find Occam's razor the most unanswerable of all arguments against the existence of God - but that is a whole other discussion, I'm afraid.

(By the way, I'm glad for this discussion since it carries this thread out further. Without it, I probably should long ago have already gone onto the book's next section since this section has been sitting here for more than a week. But I've just been too busy to get to the next section. Of course my longish replies in other forum threads doesn't help either:-)

--Stanley