On Creationism

This is the name of a paper presented by CS Lewis in 1955, and can be found here: https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/on-obstinacy-and-belief It is a curious paper. What exactly is Lewis trying to argue here? As far as I can tell he is admitting that Christian's believe with a certainty the evidence does not warrant, but that is fine because he, as a Christian, is certain his belief is right. He starts by comparing Christian thinking and scientific thinking, but quickly shifts to a scientist and a Christian. This is important to his argument because then he can point out that some scientists are Christians, so therefore they must be the same. Some scientists have bad judgement outside of science or hold to beliefs with a certainty that is not proportionate to the evidence. To me, the issue is religious thinking against scientific thinking. One man can be both Christian, believing absolutely the resurrection with scant evidence, and at the same time a scientist, thinking string th...

 CS Lewis book, Mere Christianity , can be found here . This is about book 1 of the work, five chapters across about 20 pages. Lewis spends a long time saying there are moral laws that exist as abstract concepts in the same way as mathematics. It is debatable, but I tend to agree, so will not address it further. Then, at the end of page 20, we get: I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity—that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide. Thus, his argument is that if the is a law of gravity or a moral law, then there must be a law maker. It is an old argument, but that alone does not make it wrong. Maths What he does not say is whether he thinks the laws of mathematics requires a law maker. And significa...

This is a response to an article in Mind Matters News, by Michael Egnor. It is not a million miles from CS Lewis' argument. The article is here: https://mindmatters.ai/2022/02/faith-in-god-is-the-only-coherent-basis-for-reason/ He starts: Atheists commonly assert that there is a profound dichotomy between faith and reason. This is exemplified by atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne ’s book Faith vs. Fact. He implies that we can have faith in the truth of something or we can have factual knowledge of the truth but we cannot have both. Faith and fact are, in his view, mutually exclusive. But that is not true. Faith can have several meanings. I would suggest that Coyne is saying that if we have reason to believe something then faith is superfluous. Therefore, you either believe a claim is true because you have reason to think it is true, or you believe despite having no reason, and that is faith. In this sense the two are mutually exclusive. One may ask: how do we know that what...

This post is partly in response to a blog post on Evolution News from a couple of years ago, recently recycled here (and prompted by a recent post at the Sensuous Curmudgeon). Self-appointed spokesmen for science often use the enormous size of the cosmos, with its billions of galaxies, as a club to beat up on Christianity. They say people in the Western tradition had to wait for modern science to grasp that the universe was huge, and had to shed historic Judeo-Christian views to do so. Not true. The author, self-appointed spokesmen for ID, Mike Keas, cites an essay that CS Lewis wrote in 1943. CS Lewis is something of a hero to a lot of Christians, and it is interesting to note he utter rejected creationism! However, this essay is on another subject. Keas says: C.S. Lewis in his 1943 essay “Dogma and the Universe” demolished Nye’s way of thinking. Lewis begins with an analogy. Lewis' essay can be found here (it looks like it was scanned, and contains some errors that I will try ...

 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 b...

I came across this recently (linked from The Sensuous Curmudgeon). It is an interview with John Lennox, whom I posted about a year or so ago. For all his credentials, Lennox seems a pretty poor thinker (but I suspect that is his religion clouding his brain specificall;y when it comes to thinking about religion). When atheists ask him how it is possible for him to be both a scientist and a Christian he inquires of them: "What do you do science with?" and he points to his head to make it obvious. Most of them reply that they do science with their brains. Lennox then lets them simmer on that thought and then asks them to tell them about their brains with which they do science. "What do you really believe about it? Give me a short history of the brain," he presses them. They often say something like "that's relatively easy because the brain is the end product of the mindless unguided process," he said. "And I look at them and I sometimes smile and...

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. -C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity, p 32. 1. Argument from ignorance We can formalise Lewis' argument like this: Lewis cannot imagine how we can reason unless we were designed by God We can reason Therefore w...

I do occasionally go to church, and Easter was one such time. The sermon had a couple of mentions of the old Lunatic, Liar, or Lord idea. This is an idea that was popularised by CS Lewis, who said: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He ...