I've been listening to some lectures on apologetics by Alister McGrath. In them he explains how you can respond to the argument of Ludwig Feuerbach (and carried on by Marx, Freud and others) that 'when we think we are talking about God, we are in fact, just talking about ourselves... [that] just as a film projector throws images on to a blank screen, we project [our ideas] on to that ultimate reality and call them God' (p.5, Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son).
McGrath explains that we can easily show the logical incoherency of this, but there are other ways of showing up the argument for what it is, and one of those is by employing our imagination and telling a story. He quotes CS Lewis' The Silver Chair where Scrub and the Prince are being held captive in an underground kingdom and arguing with the witch that is holding them that there is an overground world. She mocks them in their 'faith'.
"What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?"
"Yes, we jolly well do," said Scrubb.
"Can you tell me what it's like?" asked the Witch (thrum, thrum, thrum, went the strings).
"Please it your Grace," said the Prince, very coldly and politely. "You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room, and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky."
"Hangeth from what, my lord?" asked the Witch; and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs: "You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children's story."
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