In the century and a half since Darwin published the Origin of the Species, no Christian theologian has given a more searching examination to the question of man's place in the cosmos than Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis.
His readers have naturally wondered what conclusion Lewis drew about evolutionary theory. A debate next week at Biola University, in La Mirada, California, confronts the question head-on: Was Lewis a Darwinian, a proponent of intelligent design, a theistic evolutionist, or something else altogether? The title of the debate is "Evolution and C.S. Lewis: What Did He Really Believe?" It is presented by Mike Peterson from Asbury Seminary and John West who helps direct the Center for Science & Culture at Biola.
The event is February 6 and it sounds like a great one. Learn more on the Biola website.
1.31.2012
Evolution and C.S. Lewis: What Did He Really Believe?
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Awww. I don't live anywhere near California or would be there. Will a video or transcript of it come online?
I wrote the article on Evolution for The C. S. Lewis Readers Encyclopedia and my conclusion was that the Lewis became increasing disenchanted and skeptical of evolution as he grew older, in part because of the uses to which some were putting Darwinian ideas.
Keep in mind, also, that the English Christians of Lewis' generation were heavily influenced by G. K. Chesterton, who mocked the pretensions of evolutionists to know the past and blasted how evolution was applied in eugenics.
Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils is one of the few book length criticisms of what the NY Times called in 1912 a "wonderful new science." Enthusiasm for eugenics was so great in Chesterton's day, that his book's title had to make clear that the author loathed the idea. Any neutral title would have been assumed as supporting eugenics, hence the "and other evils"--the primary other evil being a nanny state that tells people how to live their lives.
Lewis criticizes eugenics when he talks about birth control in The Abolition of Man. There he is 'spot on.' Eugenics and the birth control movement were closely linked, with upperclass women such as Margaret Sanger eager to squelch the birthrate of women they considered 'unfit' for motherhood.
But as a scholar, Lewis tended to punch softly and appeal primarily to reason. Chesterton made his living expressing his opinion and didn't hesitate to deliver a broadside when it seemed appropriate. He also had a marvelous knack for adding humor to even his most serious writings and sometimes humor can be very persuasive.
I would infer from what I've read of Lewis, that he thought that the theory of Evolution was a more accurate scientific description of how life developed on earth than a literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis.
That being said, I think the most important things to him were:
1. God was the Creator of the world and all life.
2. While Genesis might not be literal history, it was spiritual truth. That is, that God created a perfect world and that man through abuse of his free will was in rebellion against God, which explains the current miserable state of the world.
It was not uncommon for Anglicans of the late 1800's and early 1900's to accept Evolution as a Scientific theory and see no contradiction between it and their Christian faith.
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote, "Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.
This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."
Chesterton had no problem with Evolution as a Scientific Theory (though he was a little fuzzy on the specifics. Evolution does not say that humans evolved from apes, rather that humans and apes have common ancestors), however he did have problems with people who treated it like a philosophy.
Let us not forget Charles Gore.
He died in 1932, he was, unlike Chesterton, same confession as CSL and a bishop in it.
He was an evolutionist. He was even willing to ascribe parts of Torah to Ezraic times. And CSL admired him.
If you are right, Michael Perry, it would probably be writing The Magician's Nephew that put CSL back onto the right track, though that is otherwise unknown.
In Problem of Pain he says basically "we can no longer believe in Genesis as a literally true account of our first parents" and then goes on to describe what he believed instead.
I might be better to mention that his figurative sense of Genesis 1-3 is nowhere like the Patristic Spiritual senses.
In Magician's Nephew he tested the idea of a collective of non-rational beings getting endowed with reason after existing as mere animals.
It is just not bad, when you read again with some hindsight, but with a slightly other scenario, it would have been terrible.
Read Problem of Pain after it, and you will get things like:
- first men needed to be orphaned to have no memories of non-rational parent animals (talking animals had just popped out of earth little before)
- or they would have needed separating from still unrational parents (if you assume that "their" parents to had been given reason at same time, then "they" are no longer first), while talking animals were only selected from out of equals, similarily a few minutes to hours old
- and if they had, unlike Fledge, no already rational stepfather (Frank and Helen), the result would have been they would have been greater than their father and mother.
Not to mention, death is an evil, and on evolutionary scenario it would already have entered long before Adam sinned. And not recently itruding from another world, but as longstanding in this very one.
Lewis certainly had a Creation story in the Magicians Nephew with the creation of Narnia with similarities to the Biblical Creation and Aslan giving speech and intelligence to certain animals.
Mike M. http://www.murraycavanaugh.com/blog.php
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