Dear BroJoeK, who's quote is this? It doesn't "sound" like C. S. Lewis' language at all. [I do not see much use of strictly denotative language in his works: He is a great literary artist who typically employs symbolic language.] I thought, well, if a statement like this exists in C. S. Lewis' body of work, then I'd likely find it in The Abolition of Man. Having just skimmed that work, I could not find that statement or anything like it.
Plus there is this problem: Lewis was far too gracious a man to ever "mock" anyone or anything. That was definitely not his style.
This may simply be a case of someone attributing something to Lewis. If so, I'd like to know who, what, and in what context. I'd be glad to look into this matter further. Would you kindly give me the cite for the above statement?
But this quibble is about the authorship of a statement. I gather that's not really what you're interested in. So, "Indeed, let's look at that quote again."
Primarily, this is a statement about evolution. It doesn't directly specify Darwinian evolution, but seems to imply it. I can give you my analysis, but can only do so from my own point of view — which I suspect may be very close to C. S. Lewis' own.
For openers, speaking as an orthodox Christian, in no way do I find the idea of "evolution" objectionable in principle. From the cosmic perspective, it seems very clear to me that the Creation, or the universe as you may prefer to call it [hopefully we won't quibble about terms, at least not yet] is a process that unfolds in space and time, from a beginning, progressively developing its potentialities as it "evolves."
The Darwinian claim that Christians find objectionable is that evolution is fundamentally a random process. This is not to say Christians deny that there is a certain amount of randomness in nature. Certainly I don't. But the point is, randomness cannot serve as an organizational principle governing the evolutionary process. Undisciplined by law, randomness just continues to be random. The point is, randomness has no principle whereby it can produce its own organizational laws, such that it can cease to be "random," and actually evolve into "something."
But then it will be argued, Natural Selection is Darwin's organizational principle. A "natural" selection is one that is elicited by environmental pressure, acting on random mutations of already-existent organisms about which we know nothing apart from the fact that they already exist. That is to say, Darwin's theory is not a theory of the origin of biological beings (i.e., the origin of life); it is a theory about how existent beings change morphologically, or speciate, over time.
Thus we are left with the squishy proposition that the natural environment, which is itself ever changing, acts on a random flux of biological possibilities, for the purpose of — selecting for reproductive fitness. How banal a final cause could there be than that?
For make no mistake about it: "Survival of the fittest" is a final cause, though a rather puny, paltry one. I doubt many Darwinists would ever admit this, of course. Just as they reject out of hand the idea there could possibly be "design" in nature, even if it very much looks like there IS design in nature.
So they say this is just "apparent" design. Which is like saying that nature is engaged in a full-time job of fooling us; and yet Darwinists still place their faith in natural selection, even though nature itself has no lawful principle to stand on that Darwin's theory bothers to elucidate; and which seems to play the jokester in this "apparent design" business.
And at the apex of Darwin's evolutionary chain is Man — who Darwinian thinking easily justifies as "a vicious predatory animal."
Notwithstanding all of the above, a whole lot of people out there think Darwin's theory is the sine qua non biological theory! Worse than that, they believe it is a theory of man.
Contrast the characterization of man as a "vicious predatory animal" with the characterization of man conveyed in a couplet I found recently in a Roman Catholic missal:
Yet you have made us little less than gods,No wonder dogmatic, bitter-ender, materialist (and oftentimes atheist) Darwinists, and thoughtful Christians have such difficulty seeing eye-to-eye: They do not even stand on the same ground of Being. It is just on that point that I aver that Darwin's theory is a very great lie, in that it falsifies not only the order of nature, but the order of man and society.
With glory and honor you have crowned us
Gave us power over the work of your hands,
Dominion over all that you have made.
I do not "mock" Darwin's theory in saying any of this. I hold it too dangerous to the well-being of human persons and societies to dismiss it by such cheap means.
Generally, Christians do not believe the universe is a random development. They believe it is a consequence of God's Word in the Beginning, the Logos, which specifies the organizational principles of the universe that guide (but do not completely determine) its evolution in space and time.
What I find truly fascinating is that recent findings in scientific physical cosmology seem to corroborate God's statements in Genesis 1. In physical terms, we hear of the Singularity, or even (to my ear) of what David Bohm called the "implicate order" that was initiated "in the beginning" in the Big Bang/inflationary universe concept.
I could wish that modern-day biologists were so "open-minded."
Must close for now. Thank you so very much for writing, BroJoeK!
How banal a final cause could there be than that?
WoW what a concept... that..
natural selection is “a banal story and limp attempt at explaining original cause”...
At least thats what I got... from your screed above...
I have always “felt” that..... just didnt put it in those words..
Boiling original cause down to the level of the breeding of domestic dogs and cats..
which is not natural in any way..
The breeder being the Natural Selection God(god removed)...
Talk about Easter Bunnies and Santa Clauses.. even Tooth Fairy’s.. (invisible friend’s)..
The natural selection god did not make Chihuahua’s, Beagles or Siamese Cats...
BUT he may have made democrats.. the bastard...
betty: Dear BroJoeK, who’s quote is this? It doesn’t “sound” like C. S. Lewis’ language at all. [I do not see much use of strictly denotative language in his works: He is a great literary artist who typically employs symbolic language.] I thought, well, if a statement like this exists in C. S. Lewis’ body of work, then I’d likely find it in The Abolition of Man
Spirited: It’s my quote:
“In a letter to a friend, C.S. Lewis writes that he is right in “regarding (evolution) as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives...” However, said Lewis, “it is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.” (Letter to Bernard Acworth, Spt. 13, 1951)
In other remarks regarding the central lie, C.S. Lewis said,
“More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson’s defense. “Evolution itself,” he wrote, “is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or...can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?” (CS Lewis, The Oxford Socratic Club, 1944)
Darwinism is a lie:
“The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity – omnipotent chance....” (T. Rosazak, Unfinished Animal, pp. 101-102, 1975)
As for ‘modern’ evolutionary theory, anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, longtime director of the American Museum of Natural History reveals that Darwin is not its’ originator but rather ancient pagan conceptions of transmigration and reincarnation are. In the introduction to his history of evolutionism Osborn wrote:
“When I began the search for anticipations of the evolutionary theory....I was led back to the Greek natural philosophers and I was astonished to find how many of the pronounced and basic features of the Darwinian theory were anticipated even as far back as the seventh century B.C.” (Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, p. xi)
Evolution is a religion, said Michael Ruse. From the beginning it was a religion and this is true of evolution today. (Michael Ruse, former professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada, “How evolution became a religion: creationists correct?” National Post, pp. B1, B3, B7, May 13, 2000)
“(Darwinism is) nothing but a kind of cult, a cult religion....It has no scientific validity whatsoever. Darwin’s so-called theory of evolution is based on absurdly irrational propositions, which did not come from scientific observations, but were artificially introduced from the outside, for political-ideological reasons.” (Jonathan Tennenbaum, “Towards ‘A New Science of Life,’ Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 28, No. 34, Sept. 7, 2001)
If humans aren't vicious predators, then it's perfectly safe to grant a human absolute dictatorial power. Right?
America's Founding Fathers had a much more realistic view of Mankind than betty boop does.
Namely, a thing cannot be said to be random in a system when we don't know what the system "is."
For instance, a series of numbers extracted from the extension of pi may appear to be random but in fact the number series is highly determined by calculating the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter.
We do not know and cannot know the full number and types of dimensions, therefore it is a misappropriation of the term to say that something is "random" in nature. What is actually meant is that the thing is unpredictable - if we were able to see every where and every when all at once as God does, the thing may be highly determined.
Thank you oh so very much for your brilliant essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!
FRiend, I have no idea, merely quoted from the article above.
I share your admiration for CS Lewis, but have not by any means read all his works, and so assume he may have said some things I'm not familiar with.
So I would invite you to contemplate both sides of the question: first, what if the article's quote is more-or-less accurate and Lewis did intend to mean what it says?
And second, what if the quote is highly distortive of Lewis' real outlook on science in general and evolution theory in specific?
If the quote is accurate (which I rather doubt) then it means Lewis blamed science for problems which I think have other roots.
But if the quote is inaccurate, then what does that tell us about the article's author?
betty boop: "Would you kindly give me the cite for the above statement?"
I simply copied and pasted those words from the above article, 5th paragraph from the bottom.
betty boop: "The Darwinian claim that Christians find objectionable is that evolution is fundamentally a random process.
This is not to say Christians deny that there is a certain amount of randomness in nature."
Exactly, and I refer you to "chaos theory" with its "butterfly effects" and "strange attractors".
What these tell us is that even scientifically, what appear to be "random" events are in fact, not so "random" after all.
But that's all science itself can say.
Theologically of course, we believe that even in those cases where it seems that "G*d plays dice", G*d's "dice" are always loaded to produce the results He intends.
betty boop: "Darwin's theory is not a theory of the origin of biological beings (i.e., the origin of life); it is a theory about how existent beings change morphologically, or speciate, over time."
Darwin's book is titled, "Origin of Species", not "Origin of Life", and indeed, so far as I can tell, we are not really any closer to unraveling the origin of life today than was Darwin himself 150 years ago -- lots of interesting hypotheses, no confirmed theories.
betty boop: "Thus we are left with the squishy proposition that the natural environment, which is itself ever changing, acts on a random flux of biological possibilities, for the purpose of — selecting for reproductive fitness.
How banal a final cause could there be than that?"
But, really, that is all that science itself can tell us, because once you begin positing that G*d intends this or that, now you have left the lowly realm of science and climbed up to the upper reaches of theology.
And that's the point I've been hoping to make here all along: by definition of the term, "science" is restricted to natural causes for natural processes, period.
Once you climb above that, it's not "science" any more, but theology, philosophy or one of those other big words. ;-)
betty boop: " 'Survival of the fittest' is a final cause, though a rather puny, paltry one.
I doubt many Darwinists would ever admit this, of course.
Just as they reject out of hand the idea there could possibly be "design" in nature, even if it very much looks like there IS design in nature."
First, I'm sure you know that Darwin himself did not coin the term "survival of the fittest", and when he finally did use it, it was as a synonym for "natural selection".
Second, any scientist worth his or her salt should be both humble enough and informed enough to know precisely where the scientific enterprise ends, and theological (philosophical, religious, etc.) beliefs begin.
To see a purpose in nature is simply beyond the scope of science, and I have argued and will argue: that's the way it should be!
If you doubt me, then just imagine for a moment that somehow or other science comes up with "proof of G*d", but it's not our G*d, it's Thor or Zeus or Zarathustra!
Obviously, that cannot happen, it will not happen, and that's just one reason why science must stay the h*ck out of religion.
betty boop: "So they say this is just "apparent" design.
Which is like saying that nature is engaged in a full-time job of fooling us; and yet Darwinists still place their faith in natural selection, even though nature itself has no lawful principle to stand on that Darwin's theory bothers to elucidate; and which seems to play the jokester in this "apparent design" business."
Once again, you must imagine that there are strict boundaries to "science", and indeed picture a cage all around science, and now make it a small cage, and now imagine that cage ever day is getting smaller and smaller.
And the scientists cannot get out of it!
But you can, and I can, and really so can they, if and only if they abandon the word "science".
That's the deal.
betty boop: "Notwithstanding all of the above, a whole lot of people out there think Darwin's theory is the sine qua non biological theory!
Worse than that, they believe it is a theory of man."
Sorry, but the simple fact is that evolution theory is absolutely, positively essential to biology, and is confirmed by findings in virtually every other branch of science.
In short, if evolution (and all it implies scientifically) is wrong, then all of science is "junk science", and I doubt highly that is the case.
And sorry again, but I've never heard of a scientific "theory of man".
Yes, in history we have a "great man theory", but that's as close as I've ever seen.
betty boop: "Contrast the characterization of man as a "vicious predatory animal"
The fact is that our ancient ancestors were quite proud and sang long songs about their prowess in both hunting and warfare.
They needed no excuses beyond hunger to go hunting and very little more for war: Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.
Sure they could be tender and gentle, as wrathful Achilles doubtless was to his war-trophy Briseis -- he considered her his wife and she regarded Achilles as her husband, even though she had no doubt been originally abducted and raped.
betty boop: "It is just on that point that I aver that Darwin's theory is a very great lie, in that it falsifies not only the order of nature, but the order of man and society."
But that's the point you must grasp: it's not a "lie", but simply the working assumption of the scientific enterprise, which assumption strictly defines the dividing line between what is and what is not "science".
Of course, anyone including scientists are perfectly free to ask and answer questions beyond the limits of science, just don't pretend those are science.
betty boop: "Generally, Christians do not believe the universe is a random development."
"Generally?" No, no... absolutely.
If you cannot bring yourself to believe that G*d created the Universe, seriously, how can you call yourself "Christian".
I'd call that a first principle.
betty boop: "I could wish that modern-day biologists were so "open-minded."
As I've pointed out now many times, many scientists are also devout Christians, Jews or other religions which accept a Creator.
They don't have the problems you identify here.