Discovery Institute idolising CS Lewis

 A recent post by the Discovery Institute continues the creationist idolisatin of CS Lewis

Lewis was undoubtedly a great author, but despite how creationists might portray him, he was not a world authority on science. I guess they have no one better.

They quote Lewis from a letter in 1943:

I don’t of course think that at any moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston’s is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star Gazer [sic] ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Waddington’s Science & Ethics. I agree Technology is not per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of it[s] own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.2

Note that Lewis's argument is very much founded on a book, Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon. A book of fiction. Further, the book end not with "sheer devil worship" but with the realisation Christianity is true - to Lewis anything that is not Christian is devil worship. I appreciate that is a common Christian view, but it seriously undermines his position as an authority on science.

It is also worth noting that this was written in the middle of World War 2, and I think it not unreasonable to suppose that that influenced his views. While it might have seemed the world was going to hell in a handbag back then, the fact is that we are still here nearly eighty years later, and many things are better now than they were back then - and a lot of those improves are in thinks to science.

They go one to say:

According to Lewis, the greatest threat to public attitudes was the mistaken view, often implicit in science fiction, that moral absolutes could be discovered within the scientific enterprise itself. ...

I do not know what people were saying back in the forties, but is there anyone in 2020 with this view? I have never found such a person - but I have found Christians who think as Lewis does.

This may have been a threat back then, but not today. No one today is promoting the idea that moral absolutes can be discovered within the scientific enterprise.

I read a lot of science fiction, and I have yet to come across the idea there either.

They go on:

Lewis’s treatment of the moral devolution of science is carefully nuanced. The impulse to preserve and propagate the human race is not itself evil, but morally insufficient, an enduring fragment from a fractured memory of the Tao. In Out of the Silent Planet the Oyarsa or governing angel of Malacandra tells Weston that the one component of the Tao the devil — or Bent One — has allowed him to revere “is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one.”3 Extending the presence and influence of the human race without regard for other complementary and restraining moral precepts is the catastrophic error of the scientist Weston, and of the Western scientism he represents.  

This too seems... well, detached from reality. In fairness to Lewis, the world is a very different place now. Today it is scientists saying we need to protect the planet, we need to stop climate change. It is scientists saying the influence of the human race must be controlled and limited.

It is, ironically, often creationists - including the Discovery Institute - who are climate change deniers; these are the people like Weston, making an error about the impact mankind is having on the planet, an error that potentially spells catastrophe.

They go on with their attack on science (with a useful remind of who Lewis is, in case you had forgotten):

But Lewis, author of The Screwtape Letters (1942), discerned deeper and more sinister springs of human evil. As already noted, he stated in a letter to Clarke that Stapledon’s Star Maker ends in “devil worship.” Demonic influence is associated with science or scientists in all three of Lewis’s works of science fiction. If, as he claims, the phrase “devil worship” does not usually mean that someone “knowingly worship[s] the devil,” then to what is Lewis referring with his repeated references to devilry? And, what does this allegation have to do with science? When a group comes to venerate “as God” an idealized state of affairs whose perfect instantiation would result in evil — disregard for the individual, the violation of nature, destruction of the Tao — then the accusation of devil worship is warranted. Lewis refers to this eventuality as worshipping one’s own vices. “It is clearly in that sense, and that sense only, that my Frost [in That Hideous Strength] worships devils.” For Lewis, the scientist Frost symbolizes “the point at which certain lines of tendency already observable will meet if produced.”

Apparently science is the equivalent of devil worship to the Discovery Institute.

Both they and Lewis admit they are not really worshipping the devil, but in their world of absol;utes anyone who is not a Christian is a devil worshipper.

Remember that their stated objective is the over-throw of materialism. They intend to do that by lying about science - using a medium only available thanks to science.

By the way, there is a reply to Lewis from his contempory, J. B. S. Haldane, here.