C. S. Lewis
The rise of “scientism,” in which science is uncritically treated as a religion, holding the power to decide ethical questions, was predicted by famous 20th century Christian author C.S. Lewis, scholar John West explained at Southern Evangelical Seminary’s 2014 National Conference on Christian Apologetics.
Neither he nor Lewis are anti-science, West said, recalling that science produced the cure for his father’s cancer. Rather, they are opposed to scientism, which West defined as “the wrong-headed belief that modern science supplies the only reliable method of knowledge about the world, and its corollary that scientists should be the ones to dictate public policy and even our moral and religious beliefs simply because of their scientific expertise.”
West is vice president and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a think tank that researches issues related to intelligent design and the role of science and technology in culture and public policy. He previously served as an associate professor of political science at Seattle Pacific University. He has authored or edited 12 books and numerous articles on the intersection of science, culture and public policy.
His Saturday talk, “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis’s Prophetic Critique of Scientism,” is based upon his edited book and documentary of the same title, which you can watch below.
The title comes from a combination of one of Lewis’s children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia called The Magician’s Nephew (1955) and this quote from The Abolition of Man (1944): “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins.”
In addition to The Abolition of Man, the Lewis works most often cited by West were The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (1958), and his science fiction works, The Space Trilogy, which were written during the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II.
The third Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is about a conspiracy to turn England into a scientific utopia through a government bureacracy called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, which goes by the acronym NICE.
That Hideous Strength was Lewis’s most popular adult novel. It resonated with the public, West argued, because after two world wars in which science brought eugenics and new ways of killing large numbers of people, such as poison gas, rockets and atomic bombs, there was little appetite for a scientific utopia.
“To many people, the new age ushered in by science looked more and more like a nightmare than a paradise,” West said.
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SOURCE: The Christian Post
Napp Nazworth
