Lewis, C. S.
Novelist, critic, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast on November 29, served in France, and was wounded during World War I. He completed his undergraduate studies at University College, Oxford, in 1922, and from 1925 until 1954 was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and tutor in English. From 1954 until just before his death he was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.
Lewis once wrote that although he was a rationalist who had scientific impulses, he could have never been a scientist. He considered the role and direction of science for nearly three decades and mentioned and alluded to it in many of his works. He was aware of its limitations and methodology, and was respectful of its status as a type of knowledge that could be used for the benefit of humanity. Lewis praised genuine scientific accomplishment and said that scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, although it was not the only kind of reasoning. Truth, value, meaning, and other ideals were necessary presuppositions to the scientific method but were not themselves scientific phenomena.
Lewis was sometimes accused of being unscientific and discrediting, or even attacking, scientific thinking. In realityhecriticizedwhathecalled scientism, a reductionist outlook on the world that popularized the sciences. Scientism (science deified) occurred when a naturalistic worldview was linked to the empirical method of experimentation. Scientism as radical empiricism rejected the truth of a nonquantifiable reality such as God.
C. S. Lewis, 1898–1963. An author and scholar, Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature and for his Christian apologetics and fiction, especially The Chronicles of Narnia. (AP/Wide World Photos.)Lewis saw the Genesis creation accounts as non-literal folk tales or myths. In The Problem of Pain (1940), he presented a modified view of creation and the Fall because scientific evidence that "carnivorousness was older than humanity" had led him to believe that evil had manifested itself long before Adam (Lewis 1940, p. 121). He had a theistic view of evolution but resisted attempts to draw broad philosophical implications from various scientific theories of it. He was never directly opposed to science, but believed many scientific theories were tentative and dependent on changing presuppositions and climates of opinion. Early evidence from his letters indicate that he denied that biological evolution was incompatible with Christianity; in later letters he became increasingly pessimistic about evolutionism as a progressive philosophy. Earlier he felt that the theory of evolution was often held because of dogmatic, not scientific reasons, but he never gave up his long-held view that biological evolution was compatible with Christian accounts of creation. He opposed evolutionism as a philosophical theory, not evolution as a biological theory.
In many of his writings Lewis tried to redefine the role of science and its proper role in society. He believed that scientism was in error in that it reduced life to abstractions and denied the possibility that physical events and human experiences had God behind them. He observed that since scientism was only concerned with how things behave, it was not qualified or capable of looking behind things, particularly the power behind the universe.
In his much-praised defense of natural law, The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis discussed the possibility of a world that no longer believed in objective truth and value. He saw this as possibly leading to a power struggle in which societal elites tried to control and recondition society. "Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions and billions of men ... Each new power won by man is a power over man as well" (Lewis 1955, p. 70).
Many of Lewis's ideas in The Abolition of Man were expressed dramatically in his space novel That Hideous Strength (1945). In the story, the degeneration of humanity nearly occurs as a result of a gross scientific materialism controlled by bureaucrats that is devoid of all idealistic, ethical, and religious values. Lewis satirized materialistic scientists in That Hideous Strength by showing them as ignoring metaphysical reason and refusing to submit their claims to any kind of moral or religious authority.
He wrote his trilogy of space novels (the others being Out of the Silent Planet [1938], and Perelandra [1943]) as a result of reading Olaf Stapledon's (1886–1950) Last and First Men (1930) and the Cambridge biochemist J. B. S. Haldane's (1892–1964) essay "Man's Destiny" (1927), both of which took interplanetary travel seriously but contained an immoral outlook that denied God. He was openly critical of Stapledon's fictional universes, in which science represented the greatest good and Christian ideals played no essential role. After reading Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), Lewis said that the race Stapledon described was concerned primarily for the increase of its own power by technology, a technology that was indifferent to ethics, and a cancer in the universe.
Anglo-Catholic Cultural Criticism;; Christian Perspectives.
Bibliography
Aeschliman, Michael D. (1998). The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. A succinct examination of Lewis's role as spokesman for the classical Christian philosophical tradition that has opposed scientific materialism since the seventeenth century.
Lewis, C. S. (1940). The Problem of Pain. London: Geoffrey Bles.
Lewis, C. S. (1955). The Abolition of Man. New York: Collier Books.
Lewis, C. S. (1996). That Hideous Strength. New York: Scribner.
Philmus, Robert M. (1972). "C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of Scientism." Extrapolation 13(2)(May): 92–101.
Sammons, Martha D. (1976). "C. S. Lewis's View of Science." CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 7(10)(August): 1–6.
Schultz, Jeffrey D., and John G. West Jr., eds. (1998). The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. See particularly entries on M. D. Aeschliman, "science," Perry C. Bramlett, "the fall," Thomas Howard, "that hideous strength," Thomas T. Talbott, "the problem of pain," John G. West, Jr., and "the abolition of man."
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