What C.S. Lewis Actually Said

Yesterday I paraphrased something I thought C.S. Lewis said. It turns out, he did say it, but much better than my paraphrase. Josh Burnett sent the quote to me, which is from Lewis' classic Mere Christianity. One of his points is that you can't honestly place on Christianity the claim of being man-made. It defies too many conventions for things we put our hands to. Here are Clive Staples' actual words:

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match—all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: HarperOne, 1952), 41–42