2. Materialism, Determinism, and Objective Value
Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.
Miracles, ch. 13
Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so’, or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so’. Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. . . . Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?
Mere Christianity, bk 1, ch. 4
John was silent for a few minutes. Then he began again:
‘But how do you know there is no Landlord?’
‘Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!’ exclaimed Mr Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied.
The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 2, ch. 1
By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate: the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely unplausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe.
‘Is Theology Poetry?’, The Weight of Glory
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
Mere Christianity, bk 1, ch. 4
There is lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law: a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve. There is no evidence that the mental and moral capacities of the human race have been increased since man became man. And there is certainly no tendency for the universe as a whole to move in any direction which we should call ‘good’.
‘De Futilitate’, Christian Reflections
Evolution is not only not a doctrine of moral improvement, but of biological changes, some improvements, some deteriorations.
Letters (1 August 1949)
There is no general law of progress in biological history. . . .
No one looking at world history without some preconception in favour of progress could find it in a steady up gradient. . . . The idea which here shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalisation from experience.
The World’s Last Night, ch. 7
What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. . . . We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilisation, may at any time slip through men’s fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, bk 1, ch. 1
Experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive.
Introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
The demand for a developing world . . . grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest. There is no question here of the old Model’s being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.
The Discarded Image, Epilogue
In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in [medieval thought] he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.
The Discarded Image, ch. 4, sec. C
One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilisation is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilisation is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of our planet is salt water. . . . Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualises that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative.
‘Our English Syllabus’, Image and Imagination
One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love; every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want.
A Grief Observed, ch. 1
We are told to ‘get things out into the open’, not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the ground that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. But unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one. . . . In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit. . . . The ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity.
The Problem of Pain, ch. 4
But there is also a merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one’s self—the slop-over from modern psychology—which surely does no good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis doesn’t cure that. We all know people who have undergone it and seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research ever since.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 6
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to ‘cure’ it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. Often they have never given the question any serious thought.
Letters (c. October 1947)
The presence which we voluntarily evade is often, and we know it, His presence in wrath.
And out of this evil comes a good. If I never fled from His presence, then I should suspect those moments when I seemed to delight in it of being wish-fulfilment dreams. That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those water versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 14
Mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists are often religious, even mystical; biologists much less often; economists and psychologists very seldom indeed. It is as their subject matter comes nearer to man himself that their anti-religious bias hardens.
‘Religion Without Dogma?’, God in the Dock
In our age I think it would be fair to say that the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual’s scientific education.
The Discarded Image, ch. 2
In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
Miracles, ch. 14