Lewis believed in evolution, and in The Magician’s Nephew, I think he indicated how it could come about, namely that Christ breathed a soul into a wild animal to make it a conscious being. I think this is also the position of the Catholic Church, i.e. that a human being could evolve from a wild animal through God’s intercession. But from what I’ve read, evolution has been confirmed within species, but not between species, which, of course, contradicts the whole “big” picture of Evolution.
Dimitry
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)
Well, yes, it is a theory, but so are Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which are the basis of modern Physics, as the theory of evolution is the basis of modern biology.
According to Karl Popper, no scientific theory can be said to be “totally true,” they all should be considered approximations to reality. The litmus to consider a theory scientific is the fact that it can be proved wrong. If it can’t, then it’s not scientific. Any scientific theory can be proved wrong (or inaccurate) by the discovery of new data. This happened to Newton’s theory of gravitation.
Additionally, a scientific theory can be considered validated when it has made one or more surprising accurate predictions. The two physical theories mentioned above have been validated this way.
The origin of life is thought to have happened around 4 billion years ago (the Solar System was formed 4.6 billion years ago). But plants, animals and fungi appeared much later (around 600 to 800 million years ago). Before that, there were only unicellular beings (microbes).
For a species to change, several hundred thousand years (perhaps one million years) may be needed.
According to my copy of the C.S. Lewis Index, most of Lewis’ comments on the subject of evolution or evolutionism seem to be found in Christian Reflections, which I don’t own. Goffar quotes The Problem of Pain as “[i]f by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no objection,” appearing to endorse “Big E” evolution. Goffar also cites Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms as saying that whatever issues he has with evolution are not theological.
Mine, however, are. Evolution inherently depends on (many) successive generations, with the corresponding deaths of previous generations. Scripture, to the contrary, teaches that death entered the world as a result of Adam’s sin (Rom. 5:12).
Of course there was death before the first man. Or do you think that God created the Earth with faked fossil skeletons, just to mislead human scientists?
You must find another interpretation for Paul’s words.
No, Elaine. Assume every species produced just two descendant species in one million years. In 600 million years there would be 2^600 new species (2 to the power 600). That is about 4 followed by 180 zeros species, far more than the number of atoms in the visible Universe.
Remember the legend about the inventor of chess and the reward he requested. This is a very similar case of exponential growth.
I don’t recall it being tied to the inventor of chess as such, but the reward was to be one cent for the first square on the board, two for the second, four for the third, and so forth. It would have bankrupted the king of whom it was requested.
Species change may occur when two populations of the same species are separated by a geographical barrier that makes inter-reproduction impossible. Both populations evolve separately with different mutations, and in a million years their genomes are far enough to give rise to two different species. So, if we start with just one species, after one million years we’d have two. After two million years we’d have 4. After three million years we’d have 8… and so on. The number of species would double every million years, so in 10 million years we’d have more than 1000 species. After 20 million years, one million species… and so on, up to a huge number, much greater than the total number of species in the whole history of the Earth (calculated as about 100 million). So 600 million years is enough time to generate all the species that there have been.
The chess legend tells about an Indian king who promised the inventor of chess to give him whatever he wanted as reward for his invention. He asked this: For the first square of the chessboard, give me one grain of wheat. For the second, give me two. For the third, give me four. And so on, duplicating the number of grains for each square. The king said all right, and called his treasurer, who told him the total number of wheat grains was many times larger than the total number of grains in the whole Earth. The legend does not say whether the king beheaded the inventor.
