Faith & Spirit Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is doing something sly here: he grants the human mind enormous reach while quietly yanking away its confidence. The first line sounds like a dare - can we stump God? - but he immediately reframes the premise. It is not that God is limited; it is that we are spectacularly capable of producing questions that don’t deserve answers. The pivot, “Quite easily, I should think,” carries the faintly amused, tutorial tone Lewis often uses when he wants to puncture modern self-seriousness without sounding cruel.

The subtext is an attack on a certain kind of “gotcha” theology and, more broadly, on intellectual vanity: questions designed to imply that reality must submit to our grammar. “All nonsense questions are unanswerable” sounds tautological, but that’s the point. Lewis is defending the idea that some problems are not profound mysteries; they’re category errors, like asking what color Tuesday is. In the mid-century climate Lewis wrote in - analytic philosophy, popular skepticism, and postwar disillusion all pushing people to treat religious belief as a courtroom cross-examination - he’s warning that cleverness can become a method of evasion.

The intent is pastoral as much as polemical. He isn’t telling readers to stop questioning; he’s telling them to question responsibly, to distinguish between a hard question and a malformed one. It’s also a subtle repositioning of power: if your doubt depends on a nonsense riddle, you haven’t humbled God; you’ve just revealed the limits of your own framing. Lewis’s wit lands because it makes the skeptic’s posture look less dangerous than childish - not wicked, just confused.