Living as If God Does Not Exist: Augustine and C.S. Lewis
This essay examines the philosophical and theological question of whether it is coherent to live as if God does not exist. Drawing on Augustine's Confessions and C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, the paper argues that while godless living offers the illusion of unlimited freedom, it ultimately leads to meaninglessness, moral blindness, and spiritual emptiness. The essay explores how Augustine's youthful sinfulness and Orual's angst serve as literary illustrations of humanity's fallen state, concluding that taking God's existence seriously transforms one's understanding of the self, redirects values away from materialism, and cultivates the kind of childlike faith that Kierkegaard associates with a genuine relationship with the divine.
- The Temptation to Live Without God: Why godless living feels like freedom
- Why Godless Living Ultimately Fails: Sin, meaninglessness, and Augustine's pear theft
- The Cost of Demanding Proof: Orual's Angst: Orual's demand for God's visible proof
- What It Means to Take God Seriously: Faith, conversion, and rejecting materialism
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses two complementary literary sources — Augustine's Confessions and C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces — and weaves them together throughout each section rather than treating them in isolation, creating a unified comparative argument.
- Concrete anecdotes, such as Augustine stealing pears and Orual demanding that God show his face, ground abstract theological claims in memorable narrative examples.
- The essay moves logically from temptation, to failure, to transformation — a clear three-part structure that mirrors the conversion arc found in Augustine himself.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates analogical reasoning: it consistently maps literary episodes (Augustine's pear theft, Psyche's trust, Orual's separation) onto broader theological concepts (the Fall, the limits of human judgment, faith over materialism). This technique allows the writer to argue from narrative evidence toward philosophical conclusions without requiring formal logical proofs.
Structure breakdown
The essay is organized into three numbered sections that correspond to a set of guiding questions: why godless living is tempting, why it is incoherent, and what genuine faith would change. Each section opens with a theological claim, supports it with at least one literary example, and closes with an implied normative judgment. The conclusion draws in Kierkegaard's concept of the suspension of disbelief as a capstone philosophical reference.
The Temptation to Live Without God
Human beings have always grappled with the question: "What is the meaning of life?" Religion has never merely been about superstition. Yet it is very tempting, in some ways, to live as if God does not exist, because doing so seems to grant us unlimited freedom. This can be seen in Augustine's Confessions, in which he portrays himself as a young, licentious man asking God to "make him good, but not yet." In C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, Psyche's disfigured sister Orual is portrayed as enduring terrible self-doubt and angst because of her sister Psyche's ability to be the lover of a God — symbolizing the sense of disconnect human beings feel from the divine in a fallen world.
Living as if God does not exist allows us to ignore our own fallen state, the imperfections of the world, and the responsibilities we bear as free beings to honor God as creator.
Why Godless Living Ultimately Fails
Without God, there is little sense of meaning or coherence in our lives. According to Augustine, without religion and moral formation, human beings inevitably fall into a pattern of sin and lust. This can be seen in the famous anecdote of Augustine stealing pears as a child, simply for the joy of thievery and spite — he admits he had no compelling need to do so out of hunger. This episode is analogous to the fall of humanity: Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge even though God was already providing everything they needed. When we live as if God did not exist, we are like the young Augustine before his conversion — casting the stolen pears to the swine without truly understanding the goodness present in the world.
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