ent that the state of the world shows that it is not governed by a good God. In October 1916 he wrote to one who was to be his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves: ‘I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention, Christ as much as Loki.’10
Lewis was more philosophical than scientific in his outlook, and so he rarely referred to the evolutionary hypothesis in his rejection of Christianity. One of the few references comes in 1925 when Lewis recorded that Mrs Moore’s daughter, Maureen, had asked him about the theory of evolution. Lewis’s response was straightforward: ‘I explained that the Biblical and scientific accounts were alternatives. She asked me which I believed. I said the scientific. She said “I suppose if one believes in it then, one doesn’t believe in God.” I said one could believe in God without believing in all the things said about him in the Old Testament. Here the matter ended.’11
C.S. Lewis’ early attitude to evolution as a Christian
When Lewis became a Christian, he felt no immediate need to renounce any belief in evolution. In the meantime, Bernard Acworth (a retired Royal Navy captain), Douglas Dewar, and Sir Ambrose Fleming launched the Evolution Protest Movement. Acworth came to seek to enlist the pen of Lewis on the side of the anti-evolutionary creationists. Lewis, however, was reluctant to come on board. On 9 December 1944 he wrote to Acworth: ‘I can’t have made my position clear. I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true. This is where you and I differ. Thinking as I do, I can’t help regarding your advice (that I henceforth include arguments against Evolution in all my Christian apologetics) as a temptation to fight the battle on what is really a false issue: and also on terrain very unsuitable for the only weapon I have.’12
At this time, Lewis was not convinced that it was wise for Christians to declare war on evolution, and in any case he did not possess enough biological knowledge to make any contribution to the cause of creationism. In The Problem of Pain, written in 1940, Lewis showed his willingness to accept virtually any view of evolution provided the biblical doctrine of the Fall was retained.13
C.S. Lewis’s growing questioning of evolution
However, by 1951 that tone was changing, and Lewis wrote to the same Captain Acworth: ‘What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.’14 Lewis rarely intruded into the area of science as such but he was impressed by Acworth’s arguments, and wrote: ‘The point that the whole economy of nature demands simultaneity of at least a v[ery] great many species is a v[ery] sticky one.’14
For all that, Lewis refused to write a preface for an anti-evolutionary work on the grounds that he was known to be no scientist. He argued that ‘When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him.’14 He was somewhat gleeful that Piltdown Man had been proved to be a hoax in 1953, but warned that Christians had been guilty too of forged decretals and faked miracles. He had no time for the rhapsodies of Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, which he regarded as ‘evolution run mad’.14
It was sometime in this period when, at a dinner party where the guests included Helen Gardner, the topic was raised as to whom one would like to meet in heaven. One guest suggested Shakespeare while another suggested the apostle Paul, but Lewis said that he would like to meet Adam. He gave as his reasons:
Adam was, from the first, a man in knowledge as well as in stature. He alone of all men ‘had been in Eden, in the garden of God, he