scientism

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CS Lewis from Wikipedia Commons

C.S. Lewis and the Religion of Science

In the previous century, the language wars were fought over adverbs; at issue was discipline of thought and speech. How many thousands of readers of The Elements of Style felt that mixture of shame and delight when they read what Strunk and White had to say about “hopefully”? “This once-useful adverb meaning ‘with hope’ has been distorted and is now widely used to mean ‘I hope.’ Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly.”

Oh, for the good old days.

To be sure, Orwell was there to remind us about the dangers of newspeak. But as the century ground to its weary end, the Communists were in worldwide retreat, and it seemed as though words were returning to their proper meanings.

How shocking these last few years have been. Suddenly, pronouns and possessive adjectives are on everyone’s minds. “To each their own” is ubiquitous. Today one takes a stand by using the constructions we found so cumbersome in the 1980s, “he or she” and “his or her.” Whence this strife over words? What are its deep roots? How is sanity to be defended amid these battles?

Michael D. Aeschliman’s The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism, an updated edition of a work first published in 1983, has the answers.

There is a double surprise in store for Aeschliman’s readers. It is alarming to learn how the rise and growth of a scientific culture has been linked with the most blatant subjectivism. It is a joy to be introduced to the “great central tradition” of witnesses to the true meaning of words and defenders of human reason, a tradition culminating in a man here fittingly characterized as its “trustee,” the redoubtable “Jack” Lewis.

As to the first, in The Restoration of Man, Aeschliman ably chronicles how the culture associated with the new science of the 17th century began poorly and became worse. It was four long centuries ago, after all, that Francis Bacon declared, “There is nothing sound in the notions of logic and physics: neither substance, nor quality, nor action and passion, nor being itself are good notions; much less heavy, lightdenserarewet, dry, generationcorruptionattraction, repulsionelementmatterform, and so on; all fanciful and ill defined.” And just three years later, Galileo followed up with “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness.” The new science began with an assault on the human race’s immemorial habit of expressing its experience of the world in ordinary language. On Bacon’s and Galileo’s principle, even a statement as simple as “The brown horse ate the red apple” would need to be called into question.

In the intervening centuries, the rejection of what we know to be the case through seeing and touching has become more and more troubling and perplexing. Darwin, for one, mused in his notebooks that thought might best be understood to be a “secretion of the brain,” without stopping to ask himself who then would be doing the understanding. Badly do we need witnesses such as Lewis and the philosopher Thomas Nagel to remind us that “scientific materialism is,” in Aeschliman’s words, “internally inconsistent and false.”

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The Restoration of Man

C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia tales and Christian apologetics, works that have sold more than 100 million copies. But Lewis was also a trained philosopher and a professor at Cambridge and Oxford. An intellectual giant, he fiercely and extensively critiqued the fashionable dogma known as scientism — the idea that science is the only path to Read More ›

Scientism in the Age of Obama and Beyond

Is technocracy about to supplant democracy in the US? Is America entering an era of “totalitarian science”? Join us as political scientist John G. West discusses the expanded paperback edition of his book Darwin Day in America, describing the growing misuse of science during the Obama years to curtail basic freedoms, erode time-honored ethics, and circumvent democratic accountability. The abuse Read More ›

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C.S. Lewis and Intelligent Design

“C.S. Lewis and Intelligent Design” is the third of three short documentaries inspired by the book The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. Lewis is best known for his magical stories about Narnia, but a new documentary explores his life-long struggle to find intelligent design in a world filled with pain.

The Magician's Twin
Screen capture of books, candles, and skull from The Magician's Twin

The Magician’s Twin

More than a half century ago, famed writer C.S. Lewis warned about how science (a good thing) could be twisted in order to attack religion, undermine ethics, and limit human freedom. In this documentary "The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism," leading scholars explore Lewis's prophetic warnings about the abuse of science and how Lewis's concerns are increasingly relevant for us today. Read More ›
The Magicians Twin cover

The Magician’s Twin

Beloved for his Narnian tales for children and his books of Christian apologetics for adults, best-selling author C.S. Lewis also was a prophetic critic of the growing power of scientism in modern society, the misguided effort to apply science to areas outside its proper bounds. In this wide-ranging book of essays edited by John G. West, contemporary writers probe Lewis’s Read More ›

Photo by Nathan Duck

Sci-Fact or Sci-Fi?

George Orwell once quipped that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” Orwell, who penned the classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was undoubtedly aware that the best stories — especially science fiction — are those that contain just enough truth to have the air of plausibility. If one were to believe the news media, 2010 was a banner Read More ›

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The Devil’s Delusion

Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community. “The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks Read More ›