I’ve previously mentioned C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) as an example of a notable Christian with an evolutionary view of life’s history. I find it interesting that his name is so often evoked by critics of evolution. The Discovery Institute, the think tank which leads the Intelligent Design movement, loves Lewis and publishes a quarterly journal all about him. I listened to a series of podcasts from the C.S. Lewis Society which featured guests arguing against Darwinian evolution in every episode. What’s the deal? Wasn’t Lewis an evolutionist? Perhaps they know something I don’t know.
I learned about Lewis’s views from his own words in The Problem of Pain (recommended reading for Christians, in my opinion) and a line or two from the classic Mere Christianity (also a must-read). He had made enough statements supporting evolution that no one can deny he had generally accepted it while he was a leading Christian apologist and theologian. He also wrote an essay called “The Funeral of a Great Myth” about the myth of what he called “Evolutionism” and expressed come doubts about evolution in correspondence with a creationist friend. Some overexcited critics of Darwin have declared that Lewis would have become a full-blown creationist if he had lived longer and had been able to read some of their recent books. Who knows?
If you’re interested, here are some links to check out. Most include more footnotes and links so the fun can go on and on until you’re all Lewised out. Then you can join the party and guess what Lewis would think about the evolution/creation debate if he were around today.
- Correspondence between Lewis and creationist Bernard Acworth
- Creation Ministries International on Lewis
- Creationist Gleanings from C.S. Lewis
- Critique of Intelligent Design using C.S. Lewis
- Examples of both sides using Lewis to make opposing points regarding evolution
- Theistic evolutionist’s blog post using quote from Lewis
- Article about Lewis and his continued influence
- “Is Theology Poetry?” An essay by C.S. Lewis
- Review of Funeral of a Great Myth
This is a great review that compares the idealist views of naturalistic human development that Lewis sought to deflate during his time with today’s more bleak and less “grand” mindset. I agree with this writer’s understanding of Lewis’s views.
After you’ve read Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, you may want to check out The Question of God which compares and contrasts Lewis’s views on God with those of atheist Sigmund Freud.
mod synthesis 
Darlene Harper
August 7, 2011
Tony, I definately want to check these out when I have a few minutes 🙂 Thanks for the info.
modsynth
August 7, 2011
I know you’re already a bit of a C.S. Lewis expert, Darlene 😉
Vielsa Harding
September 15, 2013
I have read C.S. Lewis Toni, I love the guy, he was a genius. He was an atheist but after age 34 or so, he was no more, I am positive he does not believe in evolution. Though as genius and philosophers scientists go he went around, he never did say flat out: No I do not believe in evolution..but trust me he ‘did not’ believed in evolution.
“ … universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the [chicken’s] emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of to-day is the descendant of the ‘Rocket’; we do not equally remember that the ‘Rocket’ springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself—namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination.”25
“ … since the egg-bird-egg sequence leads us to no plausible beginning, is it not reasonable to look for the real origin somewhere outside [the] sequence altogether? You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural order?”27
tony-c
September 15, 2013
I have to trust C.S. Lewis on this issue. Have you read “The Problem of Pain” and “Mere Christianity”?
If you want other sources, here’s a Young Earth Creationist who acknowledges that Lewis meant what he said about evolution and calls out other creationists for misrepresenting Lewis’s views. It even has a quote from Lewis’s adopted son dealing with the issue.
“Did Jack (C.S. Lewis) believe in creation? Yes of course. Did he believe in “Creationism”? No.
Did Jack believe in evolution as a possible tool of ongoing creation? Yes, naturally. Did he believe in “Evolutionism”? No.
One of Satan’s favourite ploys (and he has many of them) is to persuade those who call themselves Christians to concentrate on the trivial at the expense of the essential, and this piece seems to me to be a classic example of someone doing just that.”