Evolution

Miracles 3.4 "We infer Evolution from fossils: ..."


 * //__Lewisian Evolution__//**

In Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 11, titled "The New Men," Lewis touches again upon Evolution, but he does so with a twist. Here, if he is at all concerned about Darwinian evolution, it is only as a starting point, a launching pad, as it were, to what I would like to dub "Lewisian Evolution."

In a nutshell, Lewis flatly states that the theory of Evolution, as it pertains to the natural plane, can only take us so far. He points out that "(t)housands of centuries ago huge, very heavily armoured creatures were evolved. If anyone had at that time been watching the course of Evolution he would probably have expected that it was going to go on to heavier and heavier armour. But he would have been wrong. The future had a card up its sleeve which nothing at that time would have led him to expect. It was going to spring on him little, naked, unarmoured animals which had better brains: and with those brains they were going to master the whole planet." He goes on to say that not only will these new creatures have more power, they were going to have a new kind of power, not only would they be different, they would be different with a new kind of difference. "The stream of Evolution was not going to flow on in the direction in which he saw it flowing: it was in fact going to take a sharp bend."

As then, so now, says Lewis. Modern man thinks that humanity will evolve as the observer in prehistoric times thought dinosaurs would evolve. And like that hypothetical prehistoric observer, modern man would be mistaken. The Next Step, argues Lewis, will be really new. Then he drops the bomb: "...I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed it was happening."

Then he says that this Next Step has in fact already happened. In the Christian view "...it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction---a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God" and adds that "(t)he first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago."

The Lewisian Theory of Evolution goes on to state that whereas earlier creatures had little or no choice regarding the next step they would take in the evolutionary climb, we do. To choose to move from being creatures to sons is voluntary on our part, voluntary, he is quick to add, in the sense that "when it is offered to us, we can refuse it. We can, if we please, shrink back, we can dig in our heels and let the new Humanity go on without us."

This new Humanity has, of course, existed now for two thousand years, but, as Lewis says (quoted above) "very few people noticed it was happening." Few noticed then, and it seems that even fewer notice now. Considering that Lewis wrote Mere Christianity over half a century ago, and considering how much further the devolution into secularism, materialism and neo-paganism has progressed since his day, as he correctly prophesied it would (cf. The Abolition of Man) one is sometimes tempted to despair that the eyes of so many will finally be opened. Perhaps what is needed is something similar to what happened to St. Paul, that the millions who continue blindly on their way will be struck down as he was, so as to have the scales fall from their eyes. That, though severe, would be a mercy indeed.

As J.B.S. Haldane says, in evolution progress is the exception and degeneration is the rule. Popular Evolutionism ignores this. For it, `Evolution' simply means `improvement'. And it is not confined to organisms, but applied also to moral qualities, institutions, arts, intelligence and the like. There is thus lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law: a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve. There is no evidence that the mental and moral capacities of the human race have been increased since man became man. And there is certainly no tendency for the universe as a whole to move in any direction which we should call `good'. //De Futilitate//, paragraph 3

We must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a myth. //The Funeral of a Great Myth//, paragraph 6

The Myth has all these discreditable allies: but we should be far astray if we thought it had no others. As I have tried to show it has better allies too. It appeals to the same innocent and permanent needs in us which welcome Jack the Giant Killer. It gives us almost everything the imagination craves--irony, heroism, vastness, unity in multiplicity, and a tragic close. It appeals to every part of me except my reason. That is why those of us who feel that the Myth is already dead for us must not make the mistake of trying to 'debunk' it in the wrong way. We must not fancy that we are securing the modern world from something grim and dry, something that starves the soul. The contrary is the truth. It is our painful duty to wake the world from an enchantment. The real universe is probably in as many respects less poetical, certainly less tidy and unified, than they had supposed. Man's role in it is less heroic. The danger that really hangs over him is perhaps entirely lacking in true tragic dignity. It is only in the last resort, and after all lesser poetries have been renounced and imagination sternly subjected to intellect, that we shall be able to offer them any compensation for what we intend to take away from them. That is why in the meantime we must treat the Myth with respect. It was all (on a certain level) nonsense: but a man would be a dull dog if he could not feel the thrill and charm of it. For my own part, though I believe it no longer I shall always enjoy it as I enjoy other myths. I shall keep my Cave-Man where I keep Balder and Helen and the Argonauts: and there often re-visit him. //The Funeral of a Great Myth//, last paragraph

Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory--in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. //Is Theology Poetry//? 4th paragraph from the end

[Universal evolutionism of modern thought] is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely unplausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. //Is Theology Poetry?// 3rd paragraph from the end

on any view man is in one sense clearly made "out of" something else. He is an animal; but an animal called to be, or raised to be, or (if you like) doomed to be, something more than an animal. On the ordinary biological view (what difficulties I have about evolution are not religious) one of the primates is changed so that he becomes man; but he remains still a primate and an animal. He is taken up into a new life without relinquishing the old. In the same way, all organic life takes up and uses processes merely chemical. //Reflections on the Psalms//, chapter 11, paragraph 11

Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance--what tragic irony--the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama--just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself: from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the horrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next Act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet--and perhaps more than the planet--for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and Psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool--all suns will cool--the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and "universal darkness covers all". The pattern of the myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist's career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin. //Is Theology Poetry//? paragraph 17

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset. //God in the Dock,// Part 1 Chapter 4, Answers to Questions on Christianity, Answer 6

It is not Christianity which need fear the giant universe. It is those systems which place the whole meaning of existence in biological or social evolution on our own planet. It is the creative evolutionist...who should tremble when he looks up at the night sky. For he really is committed to a sinking ship. He really is attempting to ignore the discovered nature of things, as though by concentrating on the possibly upward trend in a single planet he could make himself forget the inevitable downward trend in the universe as a whole, the trend to low temperatures and irrevocable disorganization. For entrophy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it." //God in the Dock//, Part I, chapter 3, Dogma & the Universe, paragraph 11

I have read nearly the whole of //Evolution// and am glad you sent it. I must confess it has shaken me: not in my belief in evolution, which was of the vaguest and most intermittent kind, but in my belief that the question was wholly unimportant. I wish I was younger. What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as //the// central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives, is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. //Collected Let//ters, to Bernard Acworth, 13 September 1951

Perhaps a modern man can understand the Christian idea best if he takes it in connection with Evolution. Everyone now knows about Evolution (though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it): everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder "What is the next step? When is the thing beyond man going to appear?" …. supposing the next step was to be something even more different from the earlier steps than they ever dreamed of? And is it not very likely it would be? Thousands of centuries ago huge, very heavily armoured creatures were evolved. If anyone had at that time been watching the course of Evolution he would probably have expected that it was going to go on to heavier and heavier armour. But he would have been wrong. The future had a card up its sleeve which nothing at that time would have led him to expect. It was going to spring on him little, naked, unarmoured animals which had better brains: and with those brains they were going to master the whole planet. They were not merely going to have more power than the prehistoric monsters, they were going to have a new kind of power. The next step was not only going to be different, but different with a new kind of difference. The stream of Evolution was not going to flow on in the direction in which he saw it flowing: it was in fact going to take a sharp bend…. I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did. I should expect not merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change but a new method of producing the change…..I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: I should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change, will be superseded. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening.

Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction--a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago. In a sense, the change is not "Evolution" at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events but something coming into nature from outside. But that is what I should expect. ... I have called Christ the "first instance" of the new man. But of course He is something much more than that. He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the species, but //the// new man. He is the origin and centre and life of all the new men. //Mere Christianity//, chapter 11, paragraph 2 & 3

EVOLUTIONARY HYMN

Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future's endless stair: Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us. For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice in the present, Joy or sorrow, what are they While there's always jam to-morrow, While we tread the onward way? Never knowing where we're going, We can never go astray.

To whatever variation Our posterity may turn Hairy, squashy, or crustacean, Bulbous-eyed or square of stern, Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless, Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it's god or devil, Brethren, lest your words imply Static norms of good and evil (As in Plato) throned on high; Such scholastic, inelastic, Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly Glossed great Nature's simple text; He who runs can read it plainly, Goodness = what comes next.' By evolving, Life is solving All the questions we perplexed.

On then! Value means survival- Value. If our progeny Spreads and spawns and licks each rival, That will prove its deity (Far from pleasant, by our present Standards, though it well may be).

//Poems//, Part 2, The Backward Glance