C.S. Lewis on Evolution: Who was Right - Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer? by C.S. Lewis Doodle
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- Опубліковано 7 лип 2023
- Development or descent? Imperfect & crude origins or perfect & complex origins? C.S. Lewis attends a lecture on Evolutionism, and then goes home and has a curious dream. Lewis' conclusion: "Is it not reasonable to look for the real origin of nature somewhere outside the sequence of natural events altogether?" Notes below:
This is C.S. Lewis' ‘take away’ version of his talk on evolution, or rather ‘evolutionism’. If you would like to see Lewis' 'banquet version' or full critique of popular evolution in doodle form you can find it in the essay 'The Funeral of a Great Myth' (of Popular Evolution): • The Funeral of a Great...
C.S. Lewis looks to have attended the lecture on Evolution and had the revelatory dream around October 1944. The dream affected two other academic essays written in November 1944 - ‘Is Theology Poetry’ and 'The Funeral of the Great Myth’ as well as the article shown above submitted in February 1945.
This article is in a series of five fantastic newspaper articles written for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from January to May 1945 that closed out the final months of the European war for Britain and addressed typical atheist arguments:
‘Religion and Science’ (3 January 1945);
’Who was Right? Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer’ (21 Feb. 1945 - • C.S. Lewis on Evolutio... );
‘The Laws of Nature’ (4 April 1945 - • The Laws of Nature by ... );
‘Work and Prayer’ (28 May 1945 - • Work and Prayer by C.S... ); and
‘Meditation in a Toolshed’ (17 July 1945).
(0:21) “Inchoate” - just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
(5:27) The original article had italics on “ HISTORICAL past” (or "recorded history") as opposed to the PRE-HISTORIC past. See more on the subject in 'The Funeral of the Great Myth', and the quote below:
“I find that the uneducated Englishman is an almost total sceptic about History. I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles: but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened 2000 years ago. He would disbelieve equally in the battle of Actium [Note 1] if he heard of it. To those who have had our kind of education, his state of mind is very difficult to realise. To us the Present has always appeared as one section in a huge continuous process. In his mind the Present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called 'The Old Days' - a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armour etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond The Old Days comes a picture of 'Primitive Man'. He is 'Science', not 'history', and is therefore felt to be much more real than the Old Days. In other words, the Pre-historic is much more believed in than the Historic…” (Christian Apologetics).
[Note 1 The battle of Actium was a naval engagement between Octavian (Roman Emperor Augustus) and the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, on 2 September 31 B.C.]
(6:47) "Prima facie" means “at first view”, accepted as correct until proved otherwise. In common law jurisdictions, prima facie denotes evidence that, unless rebutted, would be sufficient to prove a
particular proposition or fact.
Music: The Main theme from 'The Bible - In the Beginning' by Toshiro Mayuzumi ( • The Bible: In the Begi... ).
Wow, I can't say I ever had a dream as deeply philosophical as that! The man was such a great thinker that even in his dreams he was analysing!
Another great one. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for making these. These wonderful videos are brilliant and engaging, and they make it possible for more people to experience the greatness of Lewis in such a unique and compelling way. So in my estimation, in these doodles you are performing a great work for mankind that will-like Lewis’s work itself-benefit countless souls for generations to come.
Amazing! I love C.S. Lewis' logical thought process.
Another awesome video! Thanks for doing these ❤️
Wow! Thanks for posting this. I have been reading C.S. Lewis for some time but this is the best version of the argument from contingent beings since St. Thomas Aquinas.
C. S. Lewis, my favorite writer (not counting Paul the Apostle)!
Check out James Tour's youtube channel for the "origin of life" debate: absolutely fascinating. We know so much more about the cell than they did in Lewis's time, so that it is even less explicable now that organic life arose spontaneously from inorganic chemicals.
Amazingly it appears here that Lewis intuited the present roadblocks nearly 80 years ago.
Your presentations based on C.S.Lewis are very helpful for getting into the mind of this man and how he approaches that which becomes a conundrum at one point yet resolves into a brilliant insight.
Thank you for what you do! And may God bless you for doing it!
Thank you for sharing this. C.S. Lewis is an amazing man, and his writings are inspired.
A great thinker who always finds a way to point us to the truth. This was a well presented and delivered presentation of his argument, thanks.
Somehow, C.S. Lewis appears to have been… UNDERrated.
MY FAVORITE ONE!!!! You could not have chosen a better one to do next! THANK YOU!
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his UA-cam. ;)
It seems to me that Lewis' point is a hint and may have even been drawn from St. Paul's canticle in Philippians 2:6-11 (which itself may have been pointing to Jacob's ladder dream) where Jesus, God made man descends from the perfect so that he may return to the perfect.
Nice line drawing of an LBSCR Billinton L class at 0:41. Not sure that it qualifies as a 'modern' express locomotive, though...
It's the Flying Scotsman.
@8:54
"You have to go outside the realms of engines into the minds of men, to find the true originator of the Rocket." 🚂
At 4:20 you mistake the English use of Corn for maize. The English actually think of grains, subsumed by the term, "corn": barley, rye, wheat, spelt & the like.
Yes, but now yes and no. dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/corn-on-the-cob
Another funny thing is that the "corn" developed from what we now call a "horn". All those corns you mentioned comply with this (having a sharp tip), but the maize, which we Europeans "discovered" much later, ends nicely rounded. 😊
"Corn" is also influenced by the Germanic or Norse I think - meaning 'a grain of sand or other small hard substance'. A Kernal (Corn-el) was a seed of grain. ‘Sweet Corn’ or ‘Indian Corn’ used to be the name for ‘Corn on the Cob’, grown from the seedlings that were brought from the New World and the American Indians, but it lost these titles eventually and has become ‘Corn’ too.
With the Norman Conquest, English words changed meanings and became more general. ‘Corn’ now meant raw grain, not ground ‘flour’ (French). And as we can’t buy (and generally wouldn’t want to buy) ‘Corn’ as in grain seed at the store, but rather ‘Corn-on-the Cob’ or the frozen vegetable ‘Sweet Corn’, Sweet Corn’s takeover of the word ‘corn’ seems to be in progress among my English friends.
It is very good to know this difference in the meaning of corn and cornfield 🌾 if you are reading English authors (see ‘The Grand Miracle by C.S. Lewis - “You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn [grain]: you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread [from grain], in His hand, and saying, 'This is My Body' ”).
What happened to the humanitarian theory of punishment? I cannot find it anymore
The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by C.S. Lewis Doodle (HT Part 1 of 2) - ua-cam.com/video/vJYU0RPVbVc/v-deo.html
@@CSLewisDoodle thank you so much!!
biologist here. i don't really know anyone who claims that the original abiogenesis event(s) weren't something outside of the scope of "traditional darwinian evolution". but i think there's extrapolations from evolution by natural selection that can help give us insight into what/how abiogenesis may have looked/happened. but it does require you to understand the propositions and mechanisms of neo-darwinian evolutionary theory and accept them as true, i won't gloss over that point. but, considering methodological naturalism, i don't really see how the base assumptions i'm making when I do this are any more spurious or ungrounded than, say, the base assumptions of theistic young earth creationists.
Hi Danny. C.S. Lewis again: “...Each new [scientific] discovery, even every new [scientific] theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Christianity; it is often, and more embarrassingly, seized by injudicious believers as the basis for a new defence. But usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before. So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical Criticism, with the new psychology. So, I cannot help expecting, it will be with the discovery of "life on other planets" - if that discovery is ever made..." ('Religion and Rocketry').
Have you read any Gelernter? claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/
"The engine that powers Neo-Darwinian evolution is pure chance and lots of time. By filling in the details of cellular life, molecular biology makes it possible to estimate the power of that simple mechanism. But what does generating new forms of life entail? Many biologists agree that generating a new shape of protein is the essence of it. Only if Neo-Darwinian evolution is creative enough to do that is it capable of creating new life-forms and pushing evolution forward..."
Adam S. Wilkins, the editor of the well-regarded journal BioEssays, highlights the primarily ideological role played by evolutionary theory, writing in 2000:
"The subject of evolution occupies a special, and paradoxical, place within biology as a whole. While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution', most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. 'Evolution' would appear to be the indispensible unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one".
I'll use my generation's vernacular - Ma boi Clive is the GOAT. But in all seriousness, you don't have to agree with him but you have to recognize his brilliance. If not, you're being dishonest
The real lecturer did a poor job of explaining evolution. It isn’t progress towards perfection. It’s continuation of the traits of those which survive and reproduce.
Check out the other discussion in the comments section below or above this thread (usually it's the last one). Also see Lewis' academic essay on the difference between change vs improvement: ua-cam.com/video/NgoEKnuCuJE/v-deo.html
Unfortunately, plenty of such real lecturers do treat Evolution as a deity (or sufficiently deity-like being) with a conscious will and end-goal in mind, and then have the audacity to ask us why we don't accept their poor theology as "science".
Continuation of what? Yes, ‘better traits’ you said the same thing
If a person by chance has a beneficial mutation that advances that person then every person around him must die for that mutation to advance. Otherwise the beneficial mutation is diluted in the gene pool. All i have ever observed is people give birth to people, life begets life. It is easier to accept that "In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth"...
I'd say the dream lecturer was right. God gave us common sense, after all, didn't He?
Entropy argues against evolution & for devolution.
Indeed it does, from dust to dust. 3rd law of thermodynamics matches God's Laws. Entropy: from order to chaos or disorder.
You would make it sound like he did not believe in evolution...
An interesting take on Biological Evolution from the atheist and microbiology aficionado Kas Thomas:
“It always amazes me that Creationists do so little research on Darwinism before attacking it. Darwin's theory is subject to some very legitimate scientific criticisms. Biologists are, by and large, painfully aware of the theory's shortcomings.
Darwin's landmark work was called *The Origin of Species* , yet it doesn't actually explain in detail how speciation [the evolution of distinct species] happens (and in fact, no one has seen it happen in the laboratory, unless you want to count plant hybridization or certain breeding anomalies in fruit flies). Almost everything in evolutionary theory is based on "survival of the fittest," a tautology [the same thing said twice in different words] that explains nothing. ("Fittest" means most able to survive. Survival of the fittest means survival of those who survive.) The means by which new survival skills emerge is, at best, murky. Of course, we can't expect Darwin himself to have proposed detailed genetic or epigenetic [other than genetic] causes for speciation, given that he was unaware of the work of Mendel [Mendel discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance], but the fact is, even today we have a hard time figuring out how things like a bacterial flagellum first appeared.
When I was in school, we were taught that mutations in DNA are the driving force behind evolution, an idea that is now thoroughly discredited. The overwhelming majority of non-neutral mutations are deleterious (reducing, not increasing, survival). This is easily demonstrated in the lab. Most mutations lead to loss of function, not gain of function. Evolutionary theory, it turns out, is great at explaining things like the loss of eyesight, over time, by cave-dwelling creatures. It's terrible at explaining gain of function. It's also terrible at explaining the *speed* at which speciation occurs. (Of course, The Origin of Species is entirely silent on the subject of how life arose from abiotic conditions in the first place.) It doesn't explain the Cambrian Explosion, for example, or the sudden appearance of intelligence in hominids, or the rapid recovery (and net expansion) of the biosphere in the wake of at least five super-massive extinction events in the most recent 15% of Earth's existence.
Of course, the fact that classical evolutionary theory doesn't explain these sorts of things doesn't mean we should abandon the entire theory. There's a difference between a theory being wrong and being incomplete. In science, we cling to incomplete theories all the time…”
And more also from C.S. Lewis on the biological theory:
“...The Bergsonian critique of [the lack of creative power of] orthodox Darwinism is not easy to answer. More disquieting still is Professor D. M. S. Watson's defence. "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? ('Is Theology Poetry?').
More notes in video description above.
Why should he "believe in" evolution? What C.S. Lewis pointed out is that the endless circle of egg-bird cannot explain the origin of the bird itself. We must look outside of this process to find it's origins.
@@CSLewisDoodle Ironically, Thomas makes a compelling case for why evolution is bad science, but then hand-waves the entire thing at the end by claiming we shouldn't reject it because, "In science, we cling to incomplete theories all the time..." ignoring that the incomplete theories he is referring to, like gravity, _can at least be observed in action in real time._
It's the biggest hurdle that evolution faces and cannot overcome: It has never been observed in action, either in nature or a laboratory.
He certainly thought evolutionism as a philosophical worldview (i.e. everything is working its way onwards and upwards from chaos to order) had its shortcomings. *shrugs*
"Those are questions which I propose to leave untouched" could sum up Lewis' view on Darwinian speciation in biology. Here is as close as we get to a hint:
Lewis: "I am not in the least concerned to refute Darwinism as a theorem in biology. There may be flaws in that theorem, but I have here nothing to do with them.
There may be signs that biologists are already contemplating a withdrawal from the whole Darwinian position, but I claim to be no judge of such signs.
It can even be argued that what Darwin really accounted for was not the origin, but the elimination, of species, but I will not pursue that argument" ('The World's Last Night').