Featured Article
C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
by Kathryn Applegate
The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, the major think tank of the intelligent design movement, aims to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies,” and to “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God” (CSC 1999). Intelligent design advocates have sought to accomplish these goals by attempting to prove that modern evolutionary theory is wrong because it does not explicitly account for the creative action of a “Designer.” The intelligent design movement has achieved widespread support among fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who believe God’s special creation of Adam and Eve was physical as well as spiritual. The vast majority of scientists and a United States federal court of law, however, have rejected intelligent design and declared it to be religiously motivated pseudoscience (Forrest and Gross 2005).
How should Christians think about intelligent design? What of its conclusion-that evolutionary theory is wrong? Is mainstream science too restrictive in insisting on naturalistic explanations for observed phenomena? Because the intelligent design movement began almost 30 years after Christian writer C. S. Lewis’s death, we cannot definitively say what he would have thought about it. Lewis did, however, write frequently about the nature of science, including evolution. His views on this topic have been appreciated by believers and unbelievers alike. I will suggest that Lewis would have rejected intelligent design for two reasons: (1) its practitioners fail to recognize the established limitations of inferential science, which Lewis frequently defended, and (2) intelligent design exchanges the glory of the Christian God-which believers see so clearly in nature-for evidence of a potential but unknowable Intelligence.
In the past 150 years since Darwin first announced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the human body has become increasingly de-spiritualized. This de-spiritualization is not only the result of evolutionary theory, but of all modern biology which seeks to uncover the structure and inner workings of our physical bodies. The fact that, at basest level, our genes are essentially interchangeable with those of bacteria seems to reduce the Imago Dei to a groundless myth in the eyes of modern materialists. Christians too often accept this logic and either reject the Bible or retreat to antiscience. continue reading… »
Previously Featured Article
Beauty Will Save the World - But Which Beauty?
by Andrew Cuneo
There are some quotations so arresting, so perfect in simplicity, that they never leave the memory. They are honeyed phrases for the mind: “Beauty will save the world,” says a prince in Dostoevsky’s unfortunately-titled The Idiot.[1] The prince speaks as one having authority: beauty will save the world. Or there is Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.[2] Or St. Augustine saying to God in his Confessions, “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”.[3] It is yet more surprising to find Genesis in league with each of the above, for in Genesis’s opening chapter the refrain so quietly insistent, “And God saw that it was good,” contains a Hebrew word which may be translated either as good or as beautiful.[4] The feel of the whole chapter changes if one hears God proclaim that the light, the sun, the greenery, the animals are all beautiful, and mankind very beautiful.
Other Articles
The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis’s Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics
by David Horner
C. S. Lewis begins his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” with these justly-famous words:
If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not thik this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.
