Something that C.S. Lewis and Charles Darwin Agreed On

This excerpt is an excerpt within an excerpt. The author is James Sire, and he quotes both Charles Darwin and C.S. Lewis.

For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God...there is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers.They 'arose,' but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

Charles Darwin himself once said, 'The horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my own origin is to be trusted. 

Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or a set of propositions to be true.

C.S. Lewis puts the case this way:

'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us--like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that Nature is uniform.'"

--James Sire, The Universe Next Door

C.S. Lewis

James Sire

Charles Darwin

 

 

 

Aslan, Nature, and Uncle Andrew the Atheist

“We must now go back a bit and explain what the whole scene has looked like from Uncle Andrew’s point of view. It had not made at all the same impression on him as on the Cabby and the children. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing, and on what sort of person you are.

Ever since the animals had first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket. He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him. Like the Witch, he was dreadfully practical. He simply didn’t notice that Aslan was choosing one pair out of every kind of beasts. All he saw, or thought he saw, was a lot of dangerous wild animals walking vaguely about. And he kept on wondering why the other animals didn’t run away from the big Lion.  

When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the whole point; for a rather interesting reason. When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that it was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion in a zoo might in our own world. ‘Of course it can’t really have been singing,’ he thought, ‘I must have imagined it. I've been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?’ And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew (1955 A.D.)