C.S. Lewis on Evolution: Who was Right – Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer? by C.S. Lewis Doodle

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:

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 atheist arguments:

‘Religion and Science’ (3 January 1945);

(0:21) “Inchoate” - just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.

(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.

[dpainter]

Wow, I can't say I ever had a dream as deeply philosophical as that! The man was such a great thinker that even in his dreams he was analysing!

[toddtyoung]

Another great one. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for making these. These wonderful videos are brilliant and engaging, and they make it possible for more people to experience the greatness of Lewis in such a unique and compelling way. So in my estimation, in these doodles you are performing a great work for mankind that will—like Lewis’s work itself—benefit countless souls for generations to come.

[kristiannaline]

Amazing! I love C.S. Lewis' logical thought process.
Another awesome video! Thanks for doing these ❤️

[LonelyMountainBand]

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his YouTube. ;)

[andrewcamden]

Wow! Thanks for posting this. I have been reading C.S. Lewis for some time but this is the best version of the argument from contingent beings since St. Thomas Aquinas.

[stevenward]

Your presentations based on C.S.Lewis are very helpful for getting into the mind of this man and how he approaches that which becomes a conundrum at one point yet resolves into a brilliant insight.
Thank you for what you do! And may God bless you for doing it!

[MalumbaBono]

Check out James Tour's youtube channel for the "origin of life" debate: absolutely fascinating. We know so much more about the cell than they did in Lewis's time, so that it is even less explicable now that organic life arose spontaneously from inorganic chemicals.
Amazingly it appears here that Lewis intuited the present roadblocks nearly 80 years ago.

[andytay]

C. S. Lewis, my favorite writer (not counting Paul the Apostle)!

[simongrace]

A great thinker who always finds a way to point us to the truth. This was a well presented and delivered presentation of his argument, thanks.

[WadeWeigle]

Thank you for sharing this. C.S. Lewis is an amazing man, and his writings are inspired.

[KevinMakins]

Somehow, C.S. Lewis appears to have been… UNDERrated.

[arcyllisanaspergersgamer]

MY FAVORITE ONE!!!! You could not have chosen a better one to do next! THANK YOU!

[jeffreyportis]

It seems to me that Lewis' point is a hint and may have even been drawn from St. Paul's canticle in Philippians 2:6-11 (which itself may have been pointing to Jacob's ladder dream) where Jesus, God made man descends from the perfect so that he may return to the perfect.

[kingdavidapple]

At 4:20 you mistake the English use of Corn for maize. The English actually think of grains, subsumed by the term, "corn": barley, rye, wheat, spelt & the like.

[Mason]

@8:54
"You have to go outside the realms of engines into the minds of men, to find the true originator of the Rocket." 🚂

[johncunningham]

Nice line drawing of an LBSCR Billinton L class at 0:41. Not sure that it qualifies as a 'modern' express locomotive, though...

[dannyferguson]

biologist here. i don't really know anyone who claims that the original abiogenesis event(s) weren't something outside of the scope of "traditional darwinian evolution". but i think there's extrapolations from evolution by natural selection that can help give us insight into what/how abiogenesis may have looked/happened. but it does require you to understand the propositions and mechanisms of neo-darwinian evolutionary theory and accept them as true, i won't gloss over that point. but, considering methodological naturalism, i don't really see how the base assumptions i'm making when I do this are any more spurious or ungrounded than, say, the base assumptions of theistic young earth creationists.

[allred]

The real lecturer did a poor job of explaining evolution. It isn’t progress towards perfection. It’s continuation of the traits of those which survive and reproduce.

[goodolearkygal]

What happened to the humanitarian theory of punishment? I cannot find it anymore

[adriancaso]

I'll use my generation's vernacular - Ma boi Clive is the GOAT. But in all seriousness, you don't have to agree with him but you have to recognize his brilliance. If not, you're being dishonest