. . . you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
Science and modernism are marvelous tools for discovering the truth because they see through things. They see through the poetic beauty of a crown and throne, and so they deliver us from archaic governments, producing the United States of America. But they also produced the Terror and Madame Guillotine. In seeing through beauty and romantic notions like nobility and honor, they created an ugly world of apes.
If one is seeing through something, he should make sure that he is not blinding himself by seeing through everything indiscriminately. For how powerful the scientific method is, it is not itself overly complex. It is based off of fundamental premises, its foundation being the rationality of the world, that we can, in fact, know the truth.
I not only believe in God—believe that ‘God exists’ is a true statement—but I believe that God is truth. It is no good trying to see through truth itself; you must either know it or reject it.
I am reminded of another quote by Lewis, one a bit more famous: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Tale Told 