Learning from C.S. Lewis’s view on evolution

Abstract

“In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the Myth, it is a fact about improvements” is what Lewis wrote in The Funeral of a Great Myth in the 1940’s, demonstrating both an acceptance of, and a scepticism towards the explanatory power of biological evolution.

There seems to be an ambiguity in reading Lewis, as Peterson in 2010 called him a theistic evolutionist, or an evolutionary theist, while West in 2012 said that Lewis does not fit in with mainstream theistic evolution.

This ambiguity more than anything else demonstrates the lack of precision in the label ‘theistic evolution’ as Lewis cannot possibly both be supportive of it and against it at the same time. This label covers such a wide range of views as to border on the meaningless.

Also, one cannot understand Lewis’ scepticism towards explanations for improvements in evolution without considering his reading of Haldane, one of the founders of Neo-Darwinism, and an atheist. Nearly a century later, biologists still state that why the major evolutionary transitions happened defy explanation (Szathmáry, Smith, Nature 1995). These transitions are different from the term macroevolution, as they occur at an even higher level, e.g., from primates to human societies with natural language. Biologists seem to deal with this lack of explanation by either 1) accepting it, 2) by a more or less justified trust in a future resolution, or 3) by denying that there is progress at all, often leading to a low view of humans.

I argue here that Lewis’s view can still guide us today in expressing awe and wonder over the process of evolution as well as scepticism to the claims of evolutionism that everything has been explained, what Lewis liked to call the Myth.