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 ).
