The core contradiction which turned C.S. Lewis from atheism to belief in God
The recent movie about C.S. Lewis, The Most Reluctant Convert,
narrates Lewis’ conversion from his denial of the existence of God to
conceding that the innate orderliness of the cosmos demands that there be a Creator.
That two-stage intellectual journey – since
indeed it was a process – firstly led him in 1929 to unhappily concede that
nothing short of a supernatural force[1]
could account for the existence of the universe.[2] The second stage occurred in 1931 when he accepted
that Jesus is God by having been persuaded from rational historical analysis that
the Gospels are reliable testimonies to His identity. For the purpose of this paper however, it is important
to note that documented interactions with other scholars indicate the arguments
driving his turnabout did not focus on scientific facts, but philosophical
reasons. The scientific data at
that time, for example, which suggested that the universe had a begin-ning out
of nothing from what came later to be called the “Big Bang” (BB), was
mostly speculative. The clear reason is
that, though the initial evidence supporting the BB came to light 10-15
years prior to Lewis’ conversion, the result of that research (by Georges Lemaitre,
Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble)[3]
was at that time only a live possibility which competed with two other more
popular theories (“steady-state” and “oscillating universe”).[4] It was only decades later, in 1970, that
further evidence came to light which was sufficiently strong to defeat the
other hypotheses, that the BB was elevated to the scientific[5]
status that it holds today.[6] Ironically it is this very category of evidence
(scientific),[7]
which nevertheless shifted the causal implications of cosmology away
from science to the religious proposition that Spirit (as in a transcendent
God) is more fundamental to reality than is physicality. For example, not only does the BB posit that
the cosmos came into being out of absolutely nothing material (consistent with
Genesis 1:1), it also suggests that prior to that beginning, neither matter/energy
nor space/time existed out of/from which scientific processes could even conceivably
have occurred. In short, the
cosmological history of the universe indicates that, apart from God, no matter
would exist at all. Significantly, in
1943, even C.S. Lewis foresaw both this reality and its implications as he
states:
“If anything emerges clearly from modern physics, it is that nature is not everlasting. The universe had a beginning and will have an end. But the great materialistic systems of the past all believed in the eternity, and thence in the self-existence of matter…This fundamental ground for materialism has now been withdrawn.”[8]
To be continued...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis
[2] Even by this time serious questions were raised as to
whether certain “nebula” visible through Edwin Hubble’s Mount Wilson telescope,
might lie outside our Milky Way Galaxy, thereby hinting the existence of other
galaxies.
[3] See my paper, “Was the Big Bang the Big Beginning?” at
my website: www.christianityontheoffense.com ** also,
Fred Heeren. “The Big Bang Theory.” Show Me God: What the Message from Space
Shows Us about God, revised ed. (Day Star, 2004), ch. six.
[4] Since the latter two more easily evaded the potential
intervention by a deity.
[5] Although prominent voices are seeking to undermine confidence
that a BB happened by appealing to their own advance-degree, their driving
impetus relies NOT on scientific data, but instead theoretical speculations
which cannot be tested by the hard scientific data. See my paper on the BB
beginning, Ibid.
[6] With the advancement of scientific knowledge over the
course of Lewis’ lifetime, his allegiance to the relevance of that body of
insight becomes obvious and plain. See his essay from barely a decade and a
half later, “God and the Universe,” in his collected essays, God in the Dock
(March 19, 1943) at https://stertin.word.press.com/2016/09/27/dogma-and-the-universe-by-c-s-lewis-from-god-in-the-dock/
[7] See my paper, “God’s Prints are Everywhere,” p. 2 at
my website. Op.cit. (3).
[8] Op.cit. (6). Boldface mine.
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