"Taken in" or Let Out: Faith in "The Last Battle"

C.S. Lewis' finale to the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, is my favorite book in the entire world- and I like a lot of books. Somehow, Lewis managed to sneak a sense of inexpressible wonder and glory into the lines that gives me goosebumps every time I read it (or listen to the excellent radio dramatization done by Focus on the Family- but I'll save that for another time). If anyone needs proof that Lewis was a genius, they need merely note that he somehow managed to weave the End Times, Life after death, joy, his view of salvation as it relates to this life (namely, the one detailed in the Screwtape letters: that this life prepares one either for Heaven or for Hell), and many, many other ideas into a two-hundred page children's book. One of the most important of these ideas is faith. Lewis introduces two views of faith very effectively, and demonstrates the truth about them.

The two views that Lewis demonstrates are as follows: first, that faith is ignorance. In "The Last Battle," the dwarves hold this view. They have been tricked into believing something once, namely that Puzzle the donkey is Aslan, the Great Lion. Therefore, they refuse to believe in anything else. When asked to ally themselves with King Tirian and his friends in liberating Narnia, they refuse to believe that there actually is an Aslan, and form their own side. In their own words, "the dwarfs are for the dwarfs." They believe that if they avoid believing anything, they can stick to reality. They won't be "taken in" or tricked into believing something again.

Then there is a second view- that everyone believes something, and that the problem is simply believing what is true. You see, the dwarves are thrown through the stable door into the Real Narnia- the beautiful, eternal, true country that all true Narnians have been looking for their whole lives. It is Reality. But the dwarves refuse to believe it is real. They will see only a dark, dirty, musty stable. Even Aslan's roar and the magnificent feast he lays before them cannot persuade them that He and His World are real. As He explains to Lucy, they are so intent on not being taken in, that they cannot be taken out. They so truly believe that faith is dangerous, that they imprison themselves in their belief in unbelief.
The truth is that EVERYONE believes something. The question is not "who relies on faith?" but rather, "whose faith is the most reasonable?" An atheist, for example has to believe that something can come from nothing (contrary to the laws of science), that there is no such thing as a soul and no such thing as life after death (which they can never prove), and that there are absolutely no absolutes (which is contradictory in and of itself).
We should all bear in mind the lesson of the dwarfs. It is vain to attempt to believe in nothing. That is merely closing one's eyes in an attempt to avoid being blindfolded. In the end, there is nothing so blinding as intentional disillusionment.