Why C. S. Lewis’s ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ rejected the theory of evolution.

Howard Taylor.

The following quotation taken from one of Lewis’s letters shows that in the earlier part of his life, he did partly accept the theory of evolution but not the final part of the theory which alleges that the human soul could have its source in material processes.

Oddly enough, I like you, had pictured Adam as being physically the son of the anthropoids on whom God worked after birth the miracle which made him Man; said, in fact, `Come out.  Forget thine own people and thy father's house'.  The call of Abraham would be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing, and regeneration in each one of us would be an instance too though not a smaller one.[1]

However later, in an article ‘Is Theology Poetry’? he seems to be much more sceptical about the theory, which he says, he rejected, before he became a Christian believer. He realised it must be false because of its ‘fatal’ flaws.

He thinks the kind of arguments more commonly used against the Theory (today we talk about information theory; the fossil record; irreducible complexity etc), were powerful but his main points are different.

He uses two arguments which are not very familiar to most in the Evolution verses Intelligent Design debate.

1. How do we arrive at the Theory or any scientific theory? By inferences. But that implies the existence of human reason. He argues that human reason cannot be the result solely of material processes and thus evolution fails to explain the existence of reasoning beings.

2. All physical sciences make the assumption that nature is ordered. Because it is ordered, science is possible. But this rational structure of physical nature cannot be explained from within nature. Therefore any attempt to explain nature is bound to fail at this hurdle because nature’s rational structure must have a non-physical explanation. However evolution is an attempt to explain the development of life in materialist terms. But for the reason stated here, materialism must fail.

At this point I expand on argument 1.

Could a brain scientist of the future know what we are thinking about by examining our brains? This is not a question as to whether a brain scientist could deduce what I am thinking about (like my next holiday) but actually see the sunny and warm beach that is the content of the imagination in my mind. If not, my mind must be more than my brain. (This was Leibniz’s argument which the present President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy calls Leibniz’s ‘telling image’[2]).

All physical processes just exist. They are neither true nor false. This is true of combinations of physical processes. But thoughts (reasoning or inferences) have the extra property of being either true or false. Thus thoughts must be more than physical processes.

However thoughts affect physical processes. (I get on a plane and go for my holiday.)

Thus non-physical processes affect the physical world. (This was Karl Popper’s argument against materialism in his section in ‘The Self and Its Brain’).

If thoughts, or beliefs, were only physical processes, then how would I know whether your thought was truer than his thought? By thinking? But that too would be a physical process.

Thus naturalism cannot be true.

This was C. S. Lewis’s argument against naturalism – an argument which he expands on in his ‘Miracles’ in the chapter: ‘The Cardinal Difficulty with Naturalism.’

Of course these days we are told that reasoning ‘emerged’ from the complexity of the brain. However the word ‘emerge’ is just a word. It explains nothing.

Now I go on to Lewis's second point. Einstein made a similar point to this argument when he famously said: ‘The only thing incomprehensible about the universe is why it is comprehensible.’

Speaking of this `miracle' that the universe is ordered and therefore comprehensible he says:

"And here is the weak point of positivists and professional atheists, who feel happy because they think they have pre-empted not only the world of the divine but also of the miraculous. Curiously we have to be resigned to the miracle without any legitimate way of getting any further.[3]

This expresses his amazement that the laws of physics, which our minds are somehow attuned to understand, apply not just here on Earth but also in the remotest galaxy.

The non-religious science writer Edward Wilson makes a similar point. He speaks of: “the fortunate comprehensibility of the universe", and the world as "surprisingly well ordered".[4]

Thus physical science is built on a foundation which it cannot prove on its own terms.

David Hume used such an argument to attempt to show that we could never prove by observation of the physical world that there were such things as regular dependable laws of nature.

Intelligent Design is just taking this one step further. It is saying that the properties of the living world cannot be reduced to the properties (rational structure) of the non-living material world but it has a rational structure of its own.

The rational structure of the material world makes physics possible. Similarly the rational structure of the biological world (not reducible to physics?) makes biology possible. In neither case can this rational structure have a natural explanation. They both require mind. This corresponds to the Biblical view that God created in stages.

Of course many, but not all, Theistic Evolutionists would accept C. S. Lewis’s arguments expounded here. There is though a kind of Theistic Evolution which believes Creation is one, and any continuing work of God is merely that He ‘wills’ it to be as it is without involving Himself in any detectable creative act in its development. However, as mentioned briefly above, this is not the view of any reasonable interpretation of Genesis 1, nor of C. S. Lewis.

Genesis 1 would lead us to expect discontinuities in nature – the higher not reducible to the lower. Is this is what science is increasingly finding?

Howard Taylor.

(May 2006)