Prior to Plantinga’s notorious argument C.S. Lewis, much to my astonishment, articulated the self-same idea. I say ‘much to my astonishment’ because I’ve always maintained that Lewis is way overrated. I remember during my first few years at Biola rolling my eyes in annoyance at the constant ‘Well C.S. Lewis says this’, or ‘The Abolition of Man is sooooo awessoooooooooome, dude’. Suffice to say, amongst all of this C.S. Lewis worship, I felt entirely vindicated when I read Craig (William Lane) saying that ‘Dostoevsky was a far greater writer’ than Lewis. Take that Clive Staples! But now I’m not so impressed by Craig’s comment, for Dostoevsky and Lewis are hardly comparable authors; the genres of Dostoevsky and Lewis are not comparable. Anyway, I was delighted when I came across this, and I wonder why I haven’t come across people giving credit to Lewis for this. The following excerpt is from Lewis’ The Funeral of a Great Myth. ‘The Great Myth’ is Lewis’ term for the theory of evolution:
What makes it impossible that [evolution] should be true is not so much the lack
of evidence for this or that scene in the drama or the fatal self-contradiction
which runs right through it. The Myth cannot even get going without
accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot
be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science
claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by
such inferences that can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and
sub-men and cave-men at all. Unless you start by believing that reality in
the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you
can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any
paleontology, any archeology. To reach the positions held by the real
scientists- which are then taken over by the Myth- you must- in fact, treat
reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe
that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless
process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of
the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly
believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is the product of the
irrational- if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a
creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel- how shall I trust my mind when it
tells me about Evolution? They say in effect ‘I will prove that what you
call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity
which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.’ But this is the
same as saying: ‘I will prove that proofs are irrational’: more
succinctly, ‘I will prove that there are no proofs’: The fact that some
people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the
difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in
their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to
reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it
has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it
simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it
can’t be like that.
That’s basically Plantinga’s argument in a nut-shell; without the symbolic notation of course, but just as powerful.
On a related note: Assuming that some-ultra sophisticated evolutionist can answer this objection cogently, I have another related but distinct complaint. If evolution, broadly construed, is true, then the reason I would instinctively react in fear if a black widow spider were crawling on my foot is because, somewhere in the evolutionary story of my heredity, a freak mutation occurred in the human (whatever that is) genome that caused people to react in such a way to spiders. The ‘people’ who didn’t have such a mutation got killed by spiders, the ones who did survived and passed the instinct on. This story is dramatically opposed to how we normally consider the phenomenon. If I were to see a black widow crawl on my foot it seems to me that I would react in fear in virtue of the fact that black widow spiders look scary and are dangerous. But the evolutionary story says that they only look scary and seem dangerous because a mutation in my genome made me think that way, and it just so happened to keep my species surviving. That’s the queerest thing I’ve ever heard: that I think that spiders are dangerous because of a freak mutation, not because I see a spider that is dangerous.
The point is subtle, I suppose, but hopefully it’s starring you in the face.
Anyway, kudos to Clive, may his memory be Eternal.
