Acts 16:16-40
Acts 19:11-20
One commentator on this topic of C.S. Lewis wrote:
“Lewis intuitively recognized that if science could somehow be ‘emotionalized and mythologized,’ then the result could be a materialist skeptic who ultimately gave worshipful devotion to their belief in ‘science.’ In essence, they would be ‘worshipping’ a false system and it would have the same effect of believing and worshipping demons;
This being the idolatrous road to destruction. The first objective of Screwtape is to emotionalize science and this has continued to come to pass in modern times. For example, various forms of ‘emotionalizing’ have become quite evident in the past few years in the debate concerning intelligent design. One aim of intelligent design is not to teach any specific religious doctrine or dogma, but to simply address the scientific evidence that precludes evolution to have occurred solely through unguided natural processes. However, during various discussions and debates, those from the evolutionary side are passionately, emotionally, and sometimes hysterically adamant that there is no other viable option to their particular theory of origins.
They are unyielding in their opposition to any form of communicating the multitude of weaknesses in the theory of evolution in the public arena (schools, universities, public television, etc.).
What Lewis describes is the emotionally blind commitment and reverence evolutionists have to their version of ‘science’ and/or their theories masquerading as science; science being defined as empirical (experimental, testable, observable, repeatable, quantifiable).
Lewis is certainly not anti-science, but he is alluding to the ways in which their particular devotion or interpretation of science is idolized and emotionally defended. Lewis saw these first hand in conflicts that raged between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists in his time.
Interestingly, Lewis saw the defenders of popular evolutionary thinking as fanatics and twisted in their emotionally charged attitudes.”
Understanding the Classic Book by C.S. Lewis
In his book “Weight of Glory”
“The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower-strip of beach while the incoming tide of ‘science’ mounts higher and higher corresponds to nothing in my own experience. That grand myth of evolutionism which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true, I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false…..the obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination. On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry, but because I thought it could not keep afloat.”
Lewis speaks through the character WESTON who describes the Life-Force as:
“The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purpose thrusting its way upward and ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements towards an ever-increasing complexity of organization, towards spontaneity and spirituality, swept away all my old conception of duty to Man as such. Man, in himself, is nothing. The forward movement of Life – the growing spirituality – is everything.”
Mere Christianity
“I mentioned only the Materialists view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to mention the In-between view called LIFE-FORCE philosophy or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance, but to the ‘striving’ or ‘purposiveness’ of a LIFE-FORCE. When people say this, we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then ‘a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection ‘is really God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind ‘strives’ or has ‘purpose’?”
‘Sexual Morality in MERE CHRISTIANITY
“In the first place, our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and
all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combined to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘ healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor. Now this association is a lie.”
Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs
“Today, psychology is promoting the activity of spirits under a non-threatening psychological language. For example, we now have past-life therapy, inner-counselor therapy, transpersonal psychology, transcultural psychiatry, meta-psychiatry, and shamanistic counseling, all of which may verse on or involve spiritism.”
In an essay titled: “Slip of the Tongue” C.S. Lewis writes:
“For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves. For each of us John the Baptist’s words are true; ‘He must increase, and I decrease’.
He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise…..
When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There is no bargaining with Him.”