Creationism in Literature
The British writer C. S. Lewis makes it clear that we ought not to view the animals as our ancestors: “If my own mind is a 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 the 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.” (C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, Glasgow: Collins/Fount, 1985, p. 118) In effect, Lewis seems to imply that if we descend from irrational and random goo, then it would be contradictory for us to then turn around and claim that our best reasonings could produce anything other than more random and irrational proto-musings. In other words, irrational and random goo should produce irrational and random entities; only rational and precision-designed creatures should have any expectation of reasoning clearly and arriving at clear proofs and sound opinions. Of course, Lewis’s notion is simple enough and well-articulated. In the tradition of apologetics, or defending the faith (Jude 3), Lewis’s statement implies that we are separate from monkeys, that indeed Darwinian evolution is a misleading farce, a “radical disease” in a person’s “whole style of thought.”
I’m not a zoologist, but I can see in the horse a creature that is wonderfully made and complex beyond human understanding. I can see in the eyes of a man (or woman) the imbuing of God-given intelligence and nuance and personality. It’s also telling that horses tend to act like horses. If they were truly random they would have haphazard behavior and be doing all kinds of un-horselike things. But all the horses I’ve known have been very horselike, and I believe that’s evidence of God-given design and purpose. Have you ever known a horse that thought it was a peacock trapped in a horse’s body? Probably not. If all the animals were just randomly at their present state of development, and would be at another state soon, then why would each animal act the same as the other members of its kind? It may sound trite, but in seriousness, Why would horses all act like horses if they were not designed to be in the likeness and manner of horses?
CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS by C.S. Lewis [copyright symbol] copyright C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1967, 1980. Extract reprinted by permission.