C.S. Lewis on Evolution: Who was Right – Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer? by C.S. Lewis Doodle

C.S. Lewis on Evolution: Who was Right – Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer? by C.S. Lewis Doodle

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Development or descent? Imperfect & crude origins or perfect & complex origins? C.S. Lewis attends a lecture on Evolutionism, and then goes home and has a curious dream. Lewis' conclusion: "Is it not reasonable to look for the real origin of nature somewhere outside the sequence of natural events altogether?" Notes below: This is C.S. Lewis' 'take away' version of his talk on evolution, or rather 'evolutionism'. If you would like to see Lewis' 'banquet version' or full critique of popular evolution in doodle form you can find it in the essay 'The Funeral of a Great Myth' (of Popular Evolution). C.S. Lewis looks to have attended the lecture on Evolution and had the revelatory dream around October 1944. The dream affected two other academic essays written in November 1944 - 'Is Theology Poetry' and 'The Funeral of the Great Myth' as well as the article shown above submitted in February 1945. This article is in a series of five fantastic newspaper articles written for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from January to May 1945 that closed out the final months of the European war for Britain and addressed typical (& many times hostile) atheist arguments: 'Religion and Science' (3 January 1945); 'Who was Right? Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer' (21 February 1945 - http://youtu.be/rUV2A5G7QEs ); 'The Laws of Nature' (4 April 1945 - https://youtu.be/ahskyQCRmZo ); 'Meditation in a Toolshed' (17 July 1945); and 'Work and Prayer' (28 May 1945). (0:21) 'Inchoate' means 'just begun' and so not fully formed or developed, or rudimentary. (2:44) "The first prehistoric drawings come...from the hand and brain of human beings whose hand and brain cannot be shown to have been in any way inferior to our own." The drawings were sometimes superior. Analysis of cave paintings has shown the correct depiction of the gait of four-legged animals much more frequently than modern artists, even artists such as Leonardo da Vinci. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cavemen-were-much-better-at-illustrating-animals-than-artists-today-153292919/ . Clever (and artistically refined) fellows these "cave-thugs". (5:27) The original article had italics on ' *HISTORICAL* past' (or "recorded history") as opposed to the PRE-HISTORIC past. See more on the subject in 'The Funeral of the Great Myth' and the quote below: 'I find that the uneducated Englishman is an almost total sceptic about History. I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles: but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened 2000 years ago. He would disbelieve equally in the battle of Actium [Note 1] if he heard of it. To those who have had our kind of education, his state of mind is very difficult to realise. To us the Present has always appeared as one section in a huge continuous process. In his mind the Present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called 'The Old Days' - a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armour etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond The Old Days comes a picture of 'Primitive Man'. He is 'Science', not 'history', and is therefore felt to be much more real than the Old Days. In other words, the Pre-historic is much more believed in than the Historic…' (Christian Apologetics). [Note 1 The battle of Actium was a naval engagement between Octavian (Roman Emperor Augustus) and the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, on 2 September 31 B.C.] (6:47) "Prima facie" means 'at first view', accepted as correct until proved otherwise. In common law jurisdictions, prima facie denotes evidence that, unless rebutted, would be sufficient to prove a particular proposition or fact. Music: The Main theme from 'The Bible - In the Beginning' by Toshiro Mayuzumi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDrSn0wrJTU ).

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@Mason58654 Says:
@8:54 "You have to go outside the realms of engines into the minds of men, to find the true originator of the Rocket." 🚂
@MalumbaBono Says:
Check out James Tour's youtube channel for the "origin of life" debate: absolutely fascinating. We know so much more about the cell than they did in Lewis's time, so that it is even less explicable now that organic life arose spontaneously from inorganic chemicals. Amazingly it appears here that Lewis intuited the present roadblocks nearly 80 years ago.
@goodolearkygal5746 Says:
What happened to the humanitarian theory of punishment? I cannot find it anymore
@simongrace8098 Says:
A great thinker who always finds a way to point us to the truth. This was a well presented and delivered presentation of his argument, thanks.
@WadeWeigle Says:
Thank you for sharing this. C.S. Lewis is an amazing man, and his writings are inspired.
@andytay5507 Says:
C. S. Lewis, my favorite writer (not counting Paul the Apostle)!
@kristiannaline6067 Says:
Amazing! I love C.S. Lewis' logical thought process. Another awesome video! Thanks for doing these ❤️
@KevinMakins Says:
Somehow, C.S. Lewis appears to have been… UNDERrated.
@kingdavidapple Says:
At 4:20 you mistake the English use of Corn for maize. The English actually think of grains, subsumed by the term, "corn": barley, rye, wheat, spelt & the like.
@dannyferguson1427 Says:
biologist here. i don't really know anyone who claims that the original abiogenesis event(s) weren't something outside of the scope of "traditional darwinian evolution". but i think there's extrapolations from evolution by natural selection that can help give us insight into what/how abiogenesis may have looked/happened. but it does require you to understand the propositions and mechanisms of neo-darwinian evolutionary theory and accept them as true, i won't gloss over that point. but, considering methodological naturalism, i don't really see how the base assumptions i'm making when I do this are any more spurious or ungrounded than, say, the base assumptions of theistic young earth creationists.
@kenwebster5053 Says:
Entropy argues against evolution & for devolution.
@johncunningham6928 Says:
Nice line drawing of an LBSCR Billinton L class at 0:41. Not sure that it qualifies as a 'modern' express locomotive, though...
@warrenpope749 Says:
I'd say the dream lecturer was right. God gave us common sense, after all, didn't He?
@allred6505 Says:
The real lecturer did a poor job of explaining evolution. It isn’t progress towards perfection. It’s continuation of the traits of those which survive and reproduce.
@georgem5589 Says:
Science today disproves evolution. Top scientists have been whispering about this amongst themselves for decades. Yet they still teach lies lest they lose their funding.
@dpainter1526 Says:
Wow, I can't say I ever had a dream as deeply philosophical as that! The man was such a great thinker that even in his dreams he was analysing!
@adriancaso3811 Says:
I'll use my generation's vernacular - Ma boi Clive is the GOAT. But in all seriousness, you don't have to agree with him but you have to recognize his brilliance. If not, you're being dishonest
@stevenward3856 Says:
Your presentations based on C.S.Lewis are very helpful for getting into the mind of this man and how he approaches that which becomes a conundrum at one point yet resolves into a brilliant insight. Thank you for what you do! And may God bless you for doing it!
@toddtyoung Says:
Another great one. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for making these. These wonderful videos are brilliant and engaging, and they make it possible for more people to experience the greatness of Lewis in such a unique and compelling way. So in my estimation, in these doodles you are performing a great work for mankind that will—like Lewis’s work itself—benefit countless souls for generations to come.
@arcyllisanaspergersgamer2367 Says:
MY FAVORITE ONE!!!! You could not have chosen a better one to do next! THANK YOU!
@dsc4178 Says:
True, natural selection is a hypothesis, as it has no testable parameters and cannot be examined in its parts.
@jeffreyportis9388 Says:
It seems to me that Lewis' point is a hint and may have even been drawn from St. Paul's canticle in Philippians 2:6-11 (which itself may have been pointing to Jacob's ladder dream) where Jesus, God made man descends from the perfect so that he may return to the perfect.
@lalumierehuguenote Says:
You would make it sound like he did not believe in evolution...
@andrewcamden Says:
Wow! Thanks for posting this. I have been reading C.S. Lewis for some time but this is the best version of the argument from contingent beings since St. Thomas Aquinas.
@LonelyMountainBand Says:
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his YouTube. ;)

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