On Theology, Poetry and Popular Science

lewis & keats
Originally uploaded by mincaye.

This entry is for Shern Ren.


Just yesterday, I managed to finish Lewis' essay 'Is Theology Poetry?', one of the nine essays in the collection The Weight of Glory, and the only one I had not entirely read.

Towards the end of the essay, he gives a response to the 'popular scientific picture' of his time. As it turns out, little has changed since then. To quote some parts of his lengthy argument, which I loosely paragraph:

The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory--in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins.

Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.

That alone should be sufficient to knock atheistic evolutionism off its feet. But Lewis goes further by probing into the motives for accepting evolutionism, which he holds was
'devised not to get in facts but to keep out God':

More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson's defence. "Evolution itself," he wrote, "is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible."

He also cites the puzzle of the chicken and the egg; which came first? And he gives parallel examples of trees growing from seeds, humans from embryoes and the modern express engine from the 'Rocket.'

What we often forget, he contends, is that the seed fell from a tree, the embryo came from two adult human beings, and the 'Rocket' from the mind of a genius.

At the end of it, he paints a reductio ad absurdum picture of the argument:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

And in conclusion, I find that I very much agree with Lewis, in that the Theological position is like being awake, while the merely Scientific one is like a dream: only one has room enough for the other.

Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.


Now what's with the picture of Keats' collection of poems above?

Yen gave it to me for STPM English Literature. Lewis writes in that essay, that the modern scientific worldview is just a variation on the themes/ideas of Keats' Hyperion and the Nibelung's Ring (I forgot by whom).

As I looked through Hyperion just now, I am more certain than before that I will more likely be doing Thomas Hardy rather than John Keats, for Hardy's poems have a more reflective nature and are less graphic/epic than Keats'.