C.S. Lewis on Scientism

I recently finished reading The Magician's Twin subtitled "C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism and Society".   The book is edited by John G West.  It is a good read and it was fun to reengage with Professor Lewis' ideas once again. 

A few internet articles have made a bit of a point about Lewis' views of Darwin or Intelligent Design, but the central theme of The Magician's Twin is really not Lewis' view of Darwinism.  At the heart of the book is Lewis' view of scientism, his distrust of an overconfidence in the value of natural science to lead us to ultimate truth about the universe.  And more to the point, Lewis feared the manipulation of science by those in power.  (More)


Biologos did a fairly misleading discussion of the book here.  I say misleading because the five part series (actually four?) did not really deal with the book at all, instead just presented a different series of arguments in keeping the overall agenda of Biologos and to suggest that Lewis would have been OK with theistic evolution. Only two chapters of the book deal directly with Darwin or Intelligent design, but one would know nothing of the book from the Biologos series, and in the end Lewis' views on naturalism, not Darwinism, probably would be fatally corrosive to the underlying assumptions of theistic evolution.

Back to the book.  The idea of the image of a "magician's twin" is the linking of "magic" and "science" as powerful means of dealing with matters a bit beyond the scope of what most folks deal with day by day.  The "magician" and the "scientist" in Lewis' fiction are sometimes indistinguishable for a reason.  In times of old the magician had the power of extraordinary knowledge beyond the reach of the rest of the common folk.  The "scientist" today has a similar role, having specialized knowledge and expertise that places the scientist above the common populace.  We dare not question the scientist because we don't have the same level of knowledge just as a peasant in a prior time would be loathe to question the magic that was beyond his understanding.

And that ability to hold a priveleged level of knowledge grants an elite status, a place of power.  Lewis was quite leery of the "ism" in "scientism", the notion that those with privileged elite knowledge should be the ones to make the decisions for the rest of us, whether that privileged knowledge was science or magic. That is the central theme of The Magician's Twin.

Much of the book deals with Lewis' sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength in which a secretive organization called N.I.C.E. worked behind the scenes to manipulate, shape public opinion, advance an elitist cause.   Those who served the grand purpose were useful, those who ceased to be useful were expendable.  And more importantly, those elites on the inside were portrayed as supremely confident in the certainty of their scientific and socio-political endeavor and the far-reaching and often blisteringly amoral and hideous actions they were willing to take based on that confidence.

Lewis was not, to be sure, opposed to either science or "magic" in the sense of pursuit of specialized knowledge.  What he feared was the power such elite status gave to fallen men whose specialized knowledge was still incomplete and often wrong.  And whatever Lewis may have been willing to grant for the sake of argument regarding what may or may not have happened before Genesis 3, there was no question Lewis understood men to be fallen, both morally and intellectually.

A second major theme of the book follows Lewis' argument in The Abolition of Man.  There Lewis devastatingly critiqued trends in education that severed scientific or empirical knowledge from judgments about value, beauty and moral truth.  One sees fulfillment of Lewis' fears in recent attempts to explain human morality and altruism in terms of evolutionary development and survival instincts - to reduce moral thinking to natural cause and effect.

C.S. Lewis did not spend much time dealing with the specifics of the science of origins, instead he dealt with the deeper questions of naturalism and rationalism.  If nature is all there is, then reason is a product of nature, and if reason is a product of nature, then on what basis do we see reason as a way of determining what is true?   If the chain of cause and effect from the dawn of time and space determine the content of our thoughts, then our thoughts are only an expression of prior causes that are unguided, and there is no reason to think any of our knowledge, even scientific knowledge is true.  The book more than once references a quote from Darwin himself which Lewis underlined: "But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of an value or at all trustworthy.   Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

In short, Lewis wasn't concerned with the details of particular discoveries in geology or paleontology or genetics, rather he was skeptical of the rationalist and naturalist foundations modern science had built itself upon, setting science up as the cathedral of the modern materialist religion which proposed to be the only source for all truth.  That foundation was made of sand - and the materialists often admitted it.

Which, again, is not to say Lewis was anti-science.  To the contrary, he was opposed to the abuse of science and the attempt by scientific rationalists to ask science to provide answers to questions that are beyond the scope of science. 

The book does devote one chapter to Lewis' views of Darwin. While in his public arguments for the reasonableness of Christianity Lewis deferred to the scientific consensus for the most part, perhaps more a matter of avoiding a rabbit trail than anything else, his private writings and his private library showed a strong skepticism toward Darwin's theory.  His fiction in both the space trilogy and the Narnia series simply assumed a world specially created with a first couple who rebelled - a straightforward reading of Genesis 1-3.  The Magician's Twin often references Lewis' last book "The Discarded Image" which shows through a crtitique of medieval literature that modern views of reality are likely full of holes.

John G West, in his chapter "Darwin in the Dock" notes that Lewis view of Darwinism was influenced by Bergson, who expressed significant doubt about the creative power of natural selection.  In other words, Darwinism as an agent of change in existing species seemed reasonable and no threat to Christianity, but Lewis in his private correspondence and notes in the margins of books in his library seemed fairly settled that Darwinism did not explain the origin of life nor the primary formation of the varieties of species.  (Reader understand, no one in the creationist of ID camp objects to natural selection thus described.)

Lewis' book MIracles argued strenuously against the idea that natural causes are necessarily the only causes and that single idea is a silent poison to the tap root of naturalism, for naturalism depends on the assumption that events in the distant past follow the same cause-effect patterns that we see today without exception.   Once one opens one's mind to the idea that natural law exists as part of a design that comes from outside of nature, one is free to understand cause and effect as reliable but not absolute, and thus the hand of God can work both within nature in its regularities and on occasion in ways that nature itself is not privy to.  In fact, Lewis would almost certainly agree that with a belief in a lawgiver, natural law itself is strengthened not weakened, for there then exists a basis for the regularities of the universe as well as the order, beauty, and seeming purpose.

In short, Lewis was neither a creationist nor an ID advocate, for he preceded both of those recent movements, but the totality of his writings show he was far closer to the ID and Creationist camps than to the theistic evolution camp.  Biologos did not engage with the substance of The Magician's Twin, in much the same way as it failed to really address the central ideas in Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. 

What Lewis was most opposed to was placing scientific knowledge in the position of Bishop, pronouncing metaphysical truths and/or monarch, making overreaching socio-political policy based on the confident assertions of scientific certainty.  Scientific knowledge has limits, limits which those in the scientific academy too often fail to acknowledge.   

I would recommend folks read the book and not assume the reviews give it an honest treatment.  See also the video companion.