 had walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire’. He was endowed, says Athanasius, with ‘a vision of God so far-reaching that he could contemplate the eternity of the Divine Essence and the coming operation of His Word’. He was ‘a heavenly being’ according to St. Ambrose, who breathed the aether and was accustomed to converse with God ‘face to face’.
Helen Gardner, a church-goer with a deep interest in the seventeenth century English metaphysical poets, ventured to suggest that Adam, if he existed, would be a Neanderthal ape-like figure whose conversation would hardly be interesting. Apparently, Lewis responded in a gruff voice: ‘I see we have a Darwinian in our midst.’15
In a letter to Dorothy Sayers on 4 March 1954 Lewis penned a satirical poem entitled Evolutionary Hymn. Christians with no sense of mockery have sometime asked whether it was meant to be serious, and to be dated from his unbelieving days. Lewis, however, had a well developed sense of satire, and this effort is particularly biting. Its opening stanza is:
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.
Significantly, this attacks the claims of evolution as a philosophy rather than as a science.
As early as Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis had mocked creative evolution as espoused by George Bernard Shaw and Henri Bergson: ‘The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.’16 Lewis’s interests were more philosophical than scientific, although that should not be interpreted to mean that he espoused a brand of Idealism. Lewis’s views on evolution provide an interesting insight into his questing intellect. Ultimately, they stop short of the full-orbed Christian view, but we can be thankful that he came to see that the evolutionary hypothesis made for bad philosophy, and increasingly came to view its scientific underpinning, in so far as he understood it, as equally as flawed. One wonders what he might have said had his vague acceptance of evolution been shaken earlier. There is a wealth of suggestive possibilities in his 1951 lament: ‘I wish I were younger.’14
C.S. Lewis on materialistic thoughts
‘If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.’
C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), The Business of Heaven, Fount Paperbacks, U.K., p. 97, 1984.
- C.S. Lewis and the Great Myth: They love the Myth so take care how you expose it
- G.K. Chesterton: Darwinism is ‘An attack upon thought itself’
- C.S. Lewis: creationist and anti-evolutionist
- J. I. Packer, ‘Still Surprised by Lewis’ in Christianity Today, vol. 42, 7 September 1998. Return to Text
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Glasgow: Fontana, 1975, p.6. Return to Text
- Ref. 2, p.173. Return to Text
- C.S. Lewis, ‘Answers to Questions on Christianity’, in God in the Dock, ed. by Walter Hooper, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970, pp.57–58. Return to Text
- C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, London and Glasgow: Collins, 1974, p.22. Return to Text
- Ref. 2, p.54. Return to Text
- C.S. Lewis, ‘Fern-seeds and Elephants’ in Christian Reflections, ed. by Walter Hooper, Glasgow: Collins, 1983. Return to Text
- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London and Glasgow: Fontana, 