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Theism and Humanism : The Book that Influenced C. S. Lewis

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It is another sign of deteriorating academic standards when recent bestselling books by celebrity atheists are praised for their cleverness by self-styled intellectuals of a generation which has very little grasp of intellectual rigour. Balfour was educated in a tradition which would never have tolerated the sloppiness or the ignorance of basic facts and principles which characterise the works of most of today's fashionable unbelievers. He was forced to be ruthlessly exact in his thinking by the fact that his opponents were men of the calibre of Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, who would have jumped on any weakness - and who probably would have been appalled by the lack of intellectual discipline in their successors today. With a clarity of mind that is all too rare these days, Balfour goes back to first principles, and, starting from a position of philosophic doubt, ends in firm belief. He does not set out to "prove" anything, but he exposes the logical inconsistencies of atheism without mercy. He was not writing for the general reader and some of what he says may be difficult to follow unless one happened to obtain an Oxbridge degree in philosophy, or the equivalent, in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries - but this particular edition makes him easily accessible to most educated modern readers. The book is the first half of a series of Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, delivered in 1914. The Lectures were interrupted by the First World War - in which Balfour was occupied elsewhere, serving in the War Cabinet and writing the Balfour Declaration, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel thirty years later. Balfour returned to Glasgow after the War and completed the second half of the Lectures, which was published separately as "Theism and Thought" - and which is also recommended.