A Kind of Trick (C. S. Lewis)

[John Bauer]

A member of this community has persistently quoted C. S. Lewis as saying, “‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick” (by which that member is referring to evolutionism). Conspicuously missing, however, is a fuller quote or any context—or even a citation! Where did Lewis say this? What was the context of the statement? We are never told.

But I have a large personal library that contains a lot of books by Lewis, so over the past few days I have been pouring over some of the probable sources of this quote, including The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001), which I thought was the most likely source. (It was not.)

As it turns out, the source was God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), and specifically the 1,200-word essay called “Two Lectures” (pp. 208–211). In that essay Lewis staged a contrast between something a real lecturer had said and something said by a lecturer in a dream Lewis had later that night. The dream lecturer reversed the real lecturer’s examples, which uncovered and dramatized an argument that exposed a suppressed premise. Lewis uses this to explain how origin-stories are often carefully and deliberately crafted to be persuasive.

His target is not evolutionary biology as such, but the rhetorical strategy of using familiar developmental processes within nature—like an egg developing into a bird—to explain “absolute beginnings.” Lewis observed that these presenters habitually attend to the fact that eggs develop into birds while neglecting the reciprocal fact that eggs come from birds—the ole chicken-and-egg problem. When this selective attention is carried over to accounts of life arising from purely inorganic beginnings, the resulting narrative feels “natural” only because it suppresses the radical discontinuity that any first beginning would entail. The problem is that, when it comes to absolute beginnings, we have neither an egg nor a bird but something more rudimentary.

His point is that, on any view, the origin of a sequence cannot belong to the sequence itself; the appeal to development gains plausibility by a conceptual sleight of hand—“a kind of trick”—that illicitly extends ordinary processes to account for what is, by definition, extraordinary. The egg–bird example is deliberately mundane so the audience can see the logical move in a familiar case before realizing how much worse it becomes when scaled up to absolute origins.

His claim is this: When we move to a case where the discontinuity is orders of magnitude greater—from inorganic matter to life—the explanatory gap widens dramatically. His point isn’t that development cannot occur, but that “absolute beginnings” cannot be explained by appealing to processes that presuppose what they are meant to explain.

That was a point in favor of the Real Lecturer. He at least had a theory about the absolute beginning, whereas the Dream Lecturer had slurred it over. But hadn’t the Real Lecturer done a little slurring too? He had not given us a hint that his theory of the ultimate origins involved us in believing that nature’s habits have, since those days, altered completely. Her present habits show us an endless cycle—the bird coming from the egg and the egg from the bird. But he asked us to believe that the whole thing started with an egg which had been preceded by no bird. Perhaps it did. But the whole prima facie plausibility of his view—the ease with which the audience accepted it as something natural and obvious—depended on his slurring over the immense difference between this and the processes we actually observe. He put it over by drawing our attention to the fact that eggs develop into birds and making us forget that birds lay eggs; indeed, we have been trained to do this all our lives: trained to look at the universe with one eye shut. ‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick. [1]

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 210. Emphasis added.

 

[QVQ]

Lewis grew increasingly skeptical, especially of unguided Darwinian mechanisms (random variation and natural selection) creating complex life, reason, or morality. Private letters (e.g., to anti-evolutionist Bernard Acworth in 1951) show him calling evolution the "central and radical lie" underlying modern falsehoods, though he declined public anti-evolution advocacy to avoid alienating readers.

 

[John Bauer]

Lewis grew increasingly skeptical, especially of unguided Darwinian mechanisms (random variation and natural selection) creating complex life, reason, or morality. Private letters (e.g., to anti-evolutionist Bernard Acworth in 1951) show him calling evolution the "central and radical lie" underlying modern falsehoods, though he declined public anti-evolution advocacy to avoid alienating readers.

There is some truth to this—but it is also fairly misleading. For example, it was Acworth who regarded evolution as “the central and radical lie,” not Lewis. In one of his letters to Acworth, dated September 13, 1951, he wrote after reading a manuscript Acworth had sent him, “I must confess it has shaken me, not in my belief in evolution (which was of the vaguest and most intermittent kind) but in my belief that the question was wholly unimportant.”

I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it 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.” [1]

Notice that it was Acworth who regarded evolution as “the central and radical lie.” And it was not his anti-evolution arguments that moved Lewis but rather “the fanatical and twisted attitudes of [evolution’s] defenders.” That is what shook his belief not in evolution but in its unimportance.

So how did Lewis feel about evolution as a scientific theory?

Ferngren and Numbers said that Lewis seemed to accept “a theistic version of organic evolution, but he resisted attempts to draw broad philosophical implications from scientific theories.” In other words, “Lewis accepted evolution while rejecting evolutionism.” [2] Kathryn Applegate described his view as aligning most closely with the sort of theistic evolution

espoused by B. B. Warfield in the late 19th century, which holds that “Adam’s body was the product of evolutionary development (secondary causes working alone under divine providence), and that his special creation involved the imparting of a rational soul to a highly-developed hominid” (PCA Creation Committee Report 2000). [3]

Therefore, what Lewis objected to was evolutionism—that is, evolution as world-view, functioning as a totalizing explanatory story, which Tim Keller characterized as a “Grand Theory of Everything,” where evolution is thought to explain “not only all human behavior but even to give the only answers to the great philosophical questions, such as why we exist, what life is about, and why human nature is what it is.” [4] As Frengren and Numbers noted, “[Lewis] always carefully indicated that he opposed evolutionism as a philosophy, not evolution as a biological theory.” [5]

Lewis had serious misgivings about evolution being pressed into service to explain reason, consciousness, morality, and value. He repeatedly allowed that evolution might describe the earth’s biodiversity while denying that unguided processes could ground rationality or moral normativity. This skepticism is evident in his books Miracles, The Funeral of a Great Myth, and The Abolition of Man, as well as other essays.

---

Footenotes:

[1] Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, expanded ed. (Harvard University Press, 2006), 175. Emphasis added. Lewis quotations cited by Numbers are reproduced from C. S. Lewis’s letters to Captain Bernard Acworth by permission of C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., through Curtis Brown Ltd., London. A fuller quotation can be found in Gary B. Ferngren and Ronald L. Numbers, “C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944–1960,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 28–33.

[2] Ferngren and Numbers, “C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution,” 31.

[3] Kathryn Applegate, “C. S. Lewis on Intelligent Design,” In Pursuit of Truth (online journal), July 29, 2009.

[4] Timothy Keller, “Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople,” BioLogos, February 23, 2012. Originally presented as a paper at the first BioLogos Theology of Celebration Workshop, October 2009.

[5] Ferngren and Numbers, “C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution,” 32.

 

[QVQ]

Lewis objected because:
It undermined reason
It undermined morality
It replaced God with Progress
It rejected the concept of sin

Note the date on the letters to Acworth. Lewis went through the war. Europe has always been worshipful of geneology, governed by hereditary rulers and accepted the heirarchy of "whose your daddy." Darwin legitimitized many of the baser instincts of the time as scientific, superceding the Christian ethics that were the foundation of the civilization for centuries.

Evolution as the "grand theory of everything" has been the fashion for while. There is now a restriction of the definition of evolution basically confined to genetics, at least in serious and credible scientific circles.
No, we are not evolving (progressing and evolving morally) from Adam to Jesus, in fact, we may be devolving.
It is hard to say whether the amount of evil in the world is increasing or whether the ubiquitousness of cameras and everything being instantly posted on the internet merely makes it seem that way.

 

[EarlyActs]

A member of this community has persistently quoted C. S. Lewis as saying, “‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick” (by which that member is referring to evolutionism). Conspicuously missing, however, is a fuller quote or any context—or even a citation! Where did Lewis say this? What was the context of the statement? We are never told.

But I have a large personal library that contains a lot of books by Lewis, so over the past few days I have been pouring over some of the probable sources of this quote, including The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001), which I thought was the most likely source. (It was not.)

As it turns out, the source was God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), and specifically the 1,200-word essay called “Two Lectures” (pp. 208–211). In that essay Lewis staged a contrast between something a real lecturer had said and something said by a lecturer in a dream Lewis had later that night. The dream lecturer reversed the real lecturer’s examples, which uncovered and dramatized an argument that exposed a suppressed premise. Lewis uses this to explain how origin-stories are often carefully and deliberately crafted to be persuasive.

His target is not evolutionary biology as such, but the rhetorical strategy of using familiar developmental processes within nature—like an egg developing into a bird—to explain “absolute beginnings.” Lewis observed that these presenters habitually attend to the fact that eggs develop into birds while neglecting the reciprocal fact that eggs come from birds—the ole chicken-and-egg problem. When this selective attention is carried over to accounts of life arising from purely inorganic beginnings, the resulting narrative feels “natural” only because it suppresses the radical discontinuity that any first beginning would entail. The problem is that, when it comes to absolute beginnings, we have neither an egg nor a bird but something more rudimentary.

His point is that, on any view, the origin of a sequence cannot belong to the sequence itself; the appeal to development gains plausibility by a conceptual sleight of hand—“a kind of trick”—that illicitly extends ordinary processes to account for what is, by definition, extraordinary. The egg–bird example is deliberately mundane so the audience can see the logical move in a familiar case before realizing how much worse it becomes when scaled up to absolute origins.

His claim is this: When we move to a case where the discontinuity is orders of magnitude greater—from inorganic matter to life—the explanatory gap widens dramatically. His point isn’t that development cannot occur, but that “absolute beginnings” cannot be explained by appealing to processes that presuppose what they are meant to explain.

That was a point in favor of the Real Lecturer. He at least had a theory about the absolute beginning, whereas the Dream Lecturer had slurred it over. But hadn’t the Real Lecturer done a little slurring too? He had not given us a hint that his theory of the ultimate origins involved us in believing that nature’s habits have, since those days, altered completely. Her present habits show us an endless cycle—the bird coming from the egg and the egg from the bird. But he asked us to believe that the whole thing started with an egg which had been preceded by no bird. Perhaps it did. But the whole prima facie plausibility of his view—the ease with which the audience accepted it as something natural and obvious—depended on his slurring over the immense difference between this and the processes we actually observe. He put it over by drawing our attention to the fact that eggs develop into birds and making us forget that birds lay eggs; indeed, we have been trained to do this all our lives: trained to look at the universe with one eye shut. ‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick. [1]

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 210. Emphasis added.

No he mentions evolution in the opening.

It is the same issue as creation interrupting nature, which God did. The problem, as usual, seems to be your conception of things . To use a term in its British sense, you presuppose , meaning, you don’t know or see that you do this.

Conventional science blurs the fact that something outside acted. “Is it not reasonable to look for the real origin outside the sequence (of egg-bird-egg) somewhere?” (Last paragraph)

 

[EarlyActs]

A member of this community has persistently quoted C. S. Lewis as saying, “‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick” (by which that member is referring to evolutionism). Conspicuously missing, however, is a fuller quote or any context—or even a citation! Where did Lewis say this? What was the context of the statement? We are never told.

But I have a large personal library that contains a lot of books by Lewis, so over the past few days I have been pouring over some of the probable sources of this quote, including The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001), which I thought was the most likely source. (It was not.)

As it turns out, the source was God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), and specifically the 1,200-word essay called “Two Lectures” (pp. 208–211). In that essay Lewis staged a contrast between something a real lecturer had said and something said by a lecturer in a dream Lewis had later that night. The dream lecturer reversed the real lecturer’s examples, which uncovered and dramatized an argument that exposed a suppressed premise. Lewis uses this to explain how origin-stories are often carefully and deliberately crafted to be persuasive.

His target is not evolutionary biology as such, but the rhetorical strategy of using familiar developmental processes within nature—like an egg developing into a bird—to explain “absolute beginnings.” Lewis observed that these presenters habitually attend to the fact that eggs develop into birds while neglecting the reciprocal fact that eggs come from birds—the ole chicken-and-egg problem. When this selective attention is carried over to accounts of life arising from purely inorganic beginnings, the resulting narrative feels “natural” only because it suppresses the radical discontinuity that any first beginning would entail. The problem is that, when it comes to absolute beginnings, we have neither an egg nor a bird but something more rudimentary.

His point is that, on any view, the origin of a sequence cannot belong to the sequence itself; the appeal to development gains plausibility by a conceptual sleight of hand—“a kind of trick”—that illicitly extends ordinary processes to account for what is, by definition, extraordinary. The egg–bird example is deliberately mundane so the audience can see the logical move in a familiar case before realizing how much worse it becomes when scaled up to absolute origins.

His claim is this: When we move to a case where the discontinuity is orders of magnitude greater—from inorganic matter to life—the explanatory gap widens dramatically. His point isn’t that development cannot occur, but that “absolute beginnings” cannot be explained by appealing to processes that presuppose what they are meant to explain.

That was a point in favor of the Real Lecturer. He at least had a theory about the absolute beginning, whereas the Dream Lecturer had slurred it over. But hadn’t the Real Lecturer done a little slurring too? He had not given us a hint that his theory of the ultimate origins involved us in believing that nature’s habits have, since those days, altered completely. Her present habits show us an endless cycle—the bird coming from the egg and the egg from the bird. But he asked us to believe that the whole thing started with an egg which had been preceded by no bird. Perhaps it did. But the whole prima facie plausibility of his view—the ease with which the audience accepted it as something natural and obvious—depended on his slurring over the immense difference between this and the processes we actually observe. He put it over by drawing our attention to the fact that eggs develop into birds and making us forget that birds lay eggs; indeed, we have been trained to do this all our lives: trained to look at the universe with one eye shut. ‘Developmentalism’ is made to look plausible by a kind of trick. [1]

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 210. Emphasis added.

Re “we are never told”. A simple search will show that it is always said to be in “Two Lectures” in God In The Dock. My copy is in a collection of three books and the page number would be no use.

You often put in a cheap hit that has no basis. Please step down from being a moderator. {Mod Hat: Way out of line}

 

[Arial]

I almost always identified it as being in GOD IN THE DOCK. Please remove your remark that 'we are never told.' It is way out of line.

Members are not to act as moderators Rule #4.9.