Book Review
The Central Lie
C. S. Lewis: Anti-Darwinist: A Careful Examination of the Development of His Views on Darwinism
by Jerry Bergman
Wipf & Stock, 2016
(160 pages, $21.00, paperback)
reviewed by Louis Markos
Let's face it: most Christian writers and academics today who accept the Nicene Creed, who are passionate about evangelism, and who believe that the Christian worldview has implications for all that we study and write owe a conscious debt to C. S. Lewis. That is a good thing, but it can often lead to turf wars, with various factions seeking to appropriate Lewis for their side. Thus, while those on the theological right try to claim Lewis as a biblical inerrantist or a TULIP Calvinist, those on the theological left try to claim him as a proponent of egalitarian, as opposed to complementarian, marriage or of universal salvation. Lewis neither held, nor "matured" into, any of these positions.
But what about science? What position would Lewis attest to were he alive today? If one reads only chapter five of The Problem of Pain, in which Lewis weaves a myth of the Fall that blends aspects of evolution with Genesis 1–3, it appears that Lewis would have been a theistic evolutionist happy to work alongside Darwinian science. Not so, argues Jerry Bergman in C. S. Lewis: Anti-Darwinist.
In his brief but convincing book, Bergman, who teaches biology, chemistry, and anatomy at Northwest State College (Archbold, Ohio) and is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Toledo Medical School, demonstrates, through careful quotations from Lewis's letters, essays, and books, that Lewis grew increasingly disillusioned with Darwinism and saw it as both untenable and a threat to civilization.
Bergman notes that a few years before he became a believer, "Lewis wrote a letter to his father saying that the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer were both built 'on a foundation of sand'" (50). Throughout his Christian writings, Lewis took a hard stand against naturalism, affirming creation ex nihilo and arguing that the blind, unguided, mechanical forces of Darwinism could not have created our super-natural capacity for reason—the very capacity Darwinists rely upon to "prove" their naturalistic theories.
Literary Traces
Lewis, however, also rejected attempts by such writers as Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, and Teilhard de Chardin to spiritualize evolution. (Bergman helpfully references a letter (50) in which Lewis asserts that the Catholic Church was right to silence Teilhard!) In a note he appended to Book I, Chapter 4 of Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that the kind of theistic evolution propounded by Bergson—in which Darwinian mechanisms are propelled forward by an amorphous, non-personal life force (élan vital)—was not really a valid third option between naturalism and Christianity. Rather, it was a cop-out that allowed its proponents to praise and thank someone when the world was bright but dismiss that same someone as removed and impersonal when they wanted to do something they knew they
shouldn't.
Lewis's deep-seated opposition to Darwinism can also be seen in two of the ten books that he claimed had influenced him the most. One of these, G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, Bergman correctly points out, was written in great part to refute the Darwinian-evolutionary account of history that underlies H. G. Wells's influential Outline of History. The other, far less known today, was written by Arthur Balfour, "a Christian apologist and outspoken anti-Darwinist whose ideas . . . permeate the first five chapters of Lewis's book Miracles" (33). Bergman offers a helpful overview of Balfour's book, Theism and Humanism, that includes this incisive quote from Balfour:
I take it as certain that, had no such theory as Natural Selection been devised, nothing would have persuaded mankind that the organic world came into being unguided by intelligence. Chance, whatever chance may mean, would never have been accepted as a solution. Agnosticism would have been scouted as stupidity. (34)
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives
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31.2—March/April 2018
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Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error by James M. Kushiner
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