3 Comments

Ray Ingles
September 25th, 2012 | 11:57 am

Interesting that Bethell’s piece allows no comments. It’s wrong in so many ways. Even if it represents Lewis accurately, it makes other mistakes. When he’s so wrong about things I know something about, it makes me doubt his veracity in other areas.

For example, he claims – without citation – that Darwin “Darwin became uncomfortable later in life because he believed that social reformers in England were undermining natural selection (the “survival of the fittest”) by introducing what we would call welfare programs.” But in Darwin’s own words: ““Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil.” – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Then there’s the claim that “In fact, since Lewis’s death in 1963, the new findings of molecular biology have made [evolution] look a good deal less plausible than it did 50 years ago.”

This is, quite simply, preposterous. Indeed, molecular biology has dramatically and incontrovertibly proven common descent and its consequents.

And then there’s “How did we ever acquire the information that is essential for an organism to develop in stages from amoeba to Man? No such progression has ever been observed, experimentally, and the question raised by the advocates of intelligent design has never been answered.”

Leaving aside the timescales involved for replication, and the other methods to investigate the question… what’s the definition of “information” being used there? It’s certainly not the definition of information used in science.

Bret Lythgoe
September 27th, 2012 | 6:49 am

I have to agree with Ray Ingles. The evidence in favor of evolution is so emormous that no informed, honest person can deny it. What we call “evolution”, is simply God’s way of allowing life to emerge. There’s no conflict between believing in God and evolution, unless one chooses to accept the nonsense espoused by creationists and evolutionary reductionists (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne) that evolution is a notion that cannot be made compatible with Christianity. Why do we keep bringing this up? It’s solved: evolution and theistic beliefs (whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, etc.) are entirely compatible, just as theistic beliefs are entire compatible with atomic theory, for example.

Dave Eden
September 30th, 2012 | 12:36 am

The part that really bothers me is the leap of logic from Lewis’ supposed discomfort with evolution, to Lewis’ criticism of scientism and materialism. There is no necessary connection between accepting common descent and naturalistic mechanisms for evolution, and acceptance of scientism and horrors like transhumanism. Bethel’s piece is misleading, in that it tries to take positions common among orthodox Christians (Lewis = good, materialism = bad) and imply that such positions reinforce Bethel’s creationist postion (evolution = bad). I hope that readers see through this fallacy.