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August 1, 2010 |
| CS Lewis – Dogma and the Universe | ||
The secular world has its great thinkers and their names, Plato, Socrates, and in more modern times Nietzsche, are known, even to many Christians. But many Christians do not know that Christianity has its great thinkers as well. Christian thinkers don't get as much or as positive coverage as the others, for obvious reasons.
One of the great Christian thinkers of modern times was C.S. Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963). He is better known for his series of books The Chronicles of Narnia and the movies made from them, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and now Prince Caspian: Return to Narnia.
"Lewis was a close friend of J.R.R Tolkien [Lord of the Rings], and both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University […]. Lewis […] fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to Christianity"1
In this lesson we will be studying C.S. Lewis through one of his many essays. His essays have been collected together for publishing. This essay, called Dogma and the Universe, comes from a collection called God in the Dock. Lewis was from the UK and occasionally uses words we don't know or which have meanings we don't know. The Dock, as it is used in the title, means "the area in a law court where the accused person stands during a trial"2
Quotes from the essay are indented for clarity. Lewis hits his theme right away and it is one that is as true in our day as in his.
It is a common reproach against Christianity that its dogmas are unchanging, while human knowledge is in continual growth. Hence, to unbelievers, we seem to be always engaged in the hopeless task of trying to force the new knowledge into [molds] which it has outgrown. […] For it seems to him clear that, if our ancestors had known what we know about the universe, Christianity would never have existed at all: and, however we patch and mend, no system of thought which claims to be immutable can, in the long run, adjust itself to our growing knowledge.
We commonly hear how Christianity is so rigidly dogmatic and how it would be so much better if it were more adaptable and able to incorporate new knowledge. To unbelievers it seems Christianity is always trying to fit the newest scientific knowledge into the old unchangeable shell that it has always had. 2000 years ago it may have been acceptable to answer the question "who made the world" with "God did it", but in our modern times that is just not an acceptable answer. Science has shown us so much more about the universe we live in but Christianity still has the same old answer. Or so "they" say.
In one respect […] contemporary science has recently come into line with Christian doctrine, and parted company with the classical forms of materialism. If anything emerges clearly from modern physics, it is that nature is not everlasting. The universe had a beginning, and will have an end. But the great materialistic systems of the past all believed in the eternity, and thence in the self-existence of matter. […] This fundamental ground for materialism has now been withdrawn [and] it appears that the burden of proof rests […] on those who deny that nature has some cause beyond herself.
This is a very good point for Christians to understand. Throughout man's history until the past few centuries the main argument against Judaism and Christianity was "the earth is the same now as it has ever been. It always was and always will be. It had no creator". But then science started to show that the earth, the solar system, and even the universe had a beginning. This left unbelievers with the same "who created that" problem that they had challenged Christians with when they asked, "If God created everything, who created God". Now we ask "who created the Big Bang?".
No longer having the argument that the steady state of the universe shows there is no God, critics have found new arguments. One argument is this: the universe is so huge, 20 billion light years across by current measure, that it is far larger than necessary only to support man. Therefore this new knowledge causes problems for Christianity. Lewis begins at the foundation of the argument.
In popular thought, […] the immense size [of space] and its apparent indifference, if not hostility, to human life, very often […] impresses people. [And it impresses people] all the more because it is supposed to be a modern discovery – an excellent example of those things which our ancestors did not know and which, if they had known them, would have prevented the very beginnings of Christianity. Here there is a simple historical falsehood. Ptolemy knew just as well as Eddington that the earth was infinitesimal in comparison with the whole content of space. There is no question here of knowledge having grown until the frame of archaic thought is no longer able to contain it.
Lewis shows that the premise – new knowledge about the size of space conflicts with Christianity – is false because the knowledge is not new. At the start of Christianity man knew the universe was far larger than necessary for man. At that time they didn't fully understand how large it was but once man understood it was larger than necessary the rest is pointless piling on.
Having shown there is no new knowledge here that would be a problem for Christianity to incorporate, Lewis goes on to attack the claim itself - the size of space conflicts with Christianity.
It is certain that the whole argument from size rests on the assumption that differences of size ought to coincide with differences of value: for unless they do, there is, of course, no reason why the minute earth and the yet smaller human creatures upon it should not be the most important things in a universe that contains the [Milky Way galaxy].
Lewis explains that the claim is based on the idea that large things are more important or valuable than small things. Without that belief there is no reason that man could not be as important or more than the Milky Way.
Now, is this assumption rational or emotional? I feel, as well as anyone else, the absurdity of supposing that the galaxy could be of less [importance] in God's eyes than such an atom as a human being. But I notice that I feel no similar absurdity in supposing that a man of five-feet high may be more important than another man who is five-feet three and a half – nor that a man may matter more than a tree, or a brain more than a leg. In other words, the feeling of absurdity arises only if the differences of size are very great.
If you've had the opportunity to look into the night sky from the highest point around, you also may have felt like an insignificant bug. Lewis explains that we do not feel that size matters about everything. We do not believe that the height of a person makes him more or less valuable than another.
But where a relation is perceived by reason it holds good universally. If size and value had any real [connection], small differences in size would accompany small differences in value as surely as large differences in size accompany large differences in value. But no sane man could suppose that this is so. I don't think the taller man slightly more valuable than the shorter one. I don't allow a slight superiority to trees over men, and then neglect it because it is too small to bother about. I perceive, as long as I am dealing with the small differences of size, that they have no [connection] with value whatsoever. I therefore conclude that the importance attached to the great differences of size is an affair, not of reason but of emotion.
Now Lewis moves on to a new point, would the existence of intelligent life on other planets prove Christianity wrong. Recently science has been finding planets circling other stars. Currently these planets are huge and not capable of supporting life as we know it. But it's possible that an earth-like planet will be found someday.
While science has believed for some time that there must be other planets capable of life and that life would naturally evolve on them, finding those planets and potentially life on them would bring this question to a head.
As far as I understand the matter, Christianity is not wedded to an anthropocentric [man-centered] view of the universe as a whole. […] It is, of course, the essence of Christianity that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. But that does not prove that man is the sole end of nature. […] The doctrine of the Incarnation would conflict with what we know of this vast universe only if we knew also that there were other rational species in it who had, like us, fallen, and who needed redemption in the same mode, and that they had not been [promised] it. But we know none of these things. It may be full of life that needs no redemption. It may be full of life that has been redeemed. It may be full of things quite other than life which satisfy the Divine Wisdom in fashions one cannot conceive. We are in no position to draw up maps of God's psychology, and prescribe limits to His interests. […] We know only that He must be more than we can conceive. It is to be expected that His creation should be, in the main, unintelligible to us.
Lewis is making the point that nothing in the Bible says that man was God's only created life or that we are the entire point of the universe. He says that the only way the existence of life on other planets would conflict with Christianity would be if those life-forms were:
So, his argument is that, if there is a God, and he made other life forms to be in communion with him, and they had fallen away from him, God would provide a path of redemption for them, as he did for us. Thus if we find a species that needs redemption but has no path to it, then there may be a conflict with Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Lewis goes on to say that we don't know any of these things to be true. I would add that we could not take that life form's word about it. If the first man to meet the alien life-form was an atheist, he would certainly claim that there was no God and man needed no redemption. If that man was instead a Hindu, he would claim poly-theism. In fact there may be no way to meet Lewis's criteria to show a conflict with Judeo-Christian beliefs. If you had searched the Earth just prior to Abraham, the closest thing you could find to a promise of redemption was "the seed of the woman will crush Satan's head", which doesn't clearly show redemption. Therefore finding an alien life-form without a promise of redemption may only mean that the promise has not yet come.
No. It is not Christianity which need fear the giant universe. It is those systems which place the whole meaning of existence in biological or social evolution on our own planet. It is the creative evolutionist, the [Atheist], or the Communist, who should tremble when he looks up at the night sky. For he really is committed to a sinking ship. He really is attempting to ignore the discovered nature of things, as though by concentrating on the possibly upward trend in a single planet he could make himself forget the inevitable downward trend in the universe as a whole, the trend to low temperatures and irrevocable disorganization. For entropy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it.
In the latter half of this paragraph Lewis makes a point based on Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Simply stated that law says that energy conversion will always result in some of the energy being wasted, resulting in the disorder of the universe increasing. The universe was created with very low disorder and thus great potential for work. It is constantly moving toward maximum disorder and no potential for work.
So Lewis' point is that those on the sinking ship are taking the whole meaning of existence from the small evolution wave that runs counter to the huge Entropy wave that must eventually win.
C.S. Lewis was a brilliant Christian thinker and apologist. He took on many of the important topics of the church and of his time. Despite the "progress" in our society and thinking since his time, the issues don't seem to have changed much and Lewis' words are still teaching us.
This study presents only a few points from this essay. I encourage you to read the whole essay and his other works.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.s._lewis
2 Encarta Dictionary