[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today, I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast dr. John west to discuss British writer C. S. Lewis's prophetic legacy for today. Regarding science. S dr. West is vice president and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he serves as managing director of the Institute's Center for Science and Culture. His current research examines the impact of science and scientism on public policy and culture. Dr. West has written or edited twelve books, including most recently the expanded edition of Darwin Day in America how our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science. The magician's twin c. S. Lewis on science, scientism and society and Walt Disney and live action. Dr. West has also directed and written several documentaries, including two on C. S. Lewis the Magician's Twin, c. S. Lewis, and The Case Against Scientism and The Magician's Twin, c. S. Lewis and Intelligent Design. Dr. West. Welcome to ID the future.
[00:01:15] Speaker C: Andrew, great to join you.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Well, November 22 is an important date in world history and in the history of C. S. Lewis, what happened on that date?
[00:01:24] Speaker C: It is indeed in Dallas, Texas. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in his home dying of cancer. Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, and an author in his own right of one of the great dystopian novels of the 20th century, Brave New World, died. And then in his home outside Oxford, c. S. Lewis died after a long illness. And, in fact, this year is the 60th anniversary of those deaths. And those were three towering figures of the 20th century. And I'd say at least some of them, especially Lewis, are still towering figures in the 21st century. And other people have noted sort of that they all died on the same day. And so philosopher Peter Creeft of Boston College actually wrote a book several years ago, a dialogue called Between Heaven and Hell, which sort of acts as its susposition, that of Kennedy and Lewis and Huxley meeting beyond the grave, sort of, before going to where they're going to go to have this Socratic dialogue about the great issues. And so I do think it's notable that they all died on that day. And it's notable that at that time, say, someone like President Kennedy or even Aldous Huxley probably were considered the greater figures. But if you talk today about the sheer number of people, the tens of millions of people who have been influenced by Lewis and who are still influenced by Lewis, I think you could argue that Lewis is one of the three that maintains his importance for us today in the 21st century.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And Lewis is probably best well known for his children's stories and works of theology like mere Christianity. But you focused on a different area, lewis's view of science and what might be called scientism. What is scientism for those who are new to that word? And how does it figure into Lewis's writings?
[00:03:19] Speaker C: Yeah, scientism basically is the idea that modern science, particularly modern physical science, things like chemistry, physics, I mean, some would argue whether physics is still just about physical things because the new physics but physics, chemistry, biology, that that is really the only way that we know truth, and that science is the only aspect of truth. And that really means everything else religion, morality, you name it, aesthetics, literature, philosophy doesn't get you access to truth. It's sort of like a fairy story or subjective. And so, really, the all truth comes from science. I'd actually say that there's a corollary to that. If all truth comes from science, then you have a question which maybe we'll discuss a little later. Well, who has the right to rule society? But in any case, Lewis occasionally used the word scientism, but didn't use that term a huge amount. But since his time, certainly since the 1960s and 70s, it's become really prominent to talk about this idea of the overwhelming claim that science can explain everything. And that point, whether Lewis called it scientism or not, on occasion, that point was something that Lewis wrote a lot about. And I think people don't really quite realize how much Lewis wrote about science and the abuse of science, what we'd call scientism. I think you need to sort of set the stage as to why he would even be concerned about that. Lewis was born, I think, in 1898. The 19th century was really huge for the rise of claims made in the name of science. You had Darwin. You had Freud. By the time Lewis came around, you had Friedrich Nietzsche, who was sort of in the light of this sort of scientistic ways of thinking and trying to salvage meaning in the light of that. And so a lot of people who Lewis was growing up with, people like H. G. Wells, who told this story that the universe was this blind, cold and uncaring place that started with sort of just matter in motion, blind motion with no ultimate purpose, and then someday we'd basically self destruct. And that it was kind of a bleak vision, but it was a powerful imaginative vision that actually Lewis was caught up with. And then you had the rise of what I would call the scientific totalitarians, both in Russia, Marxist Russia, Soviet Union, and of course, Hitler. And the rise of totalitarianism, the modern totalitarians really claimed to be governing in the name of science and rationality. And so Lewis was growing up in that and coming of age in that. And so it's quite appropriate that that would be a subject of interest.
I would also say that after he was in World War I, while he was still not a Christian, he began to see that these scientistic claims that science explained everything wasn't true. And it certainly wasn't satisfying. And so he started to search on this even before he was a Christian. And many people don't know about this book, which is why I usually talk about it. It fell into the public domain. In this year, for the first time, he wrote a long narrative poem called Daimer. And have you ever read Dimer?
[00:06:40] Speaker B: I haven't.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: So many people who know about Lewis do know about his later book, like Pilgrim's Regress, where he sort of plays on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. But this pilgrim goes through all the modern philosophical maladies, including scientific reductionism, materialism, totalitarianism, you name it, in sort of fictional form as a pilgrim going through these various lands that was written after Lewis became a Christian. Daimer is pretty much the same story of a mixed up young guy who is seeking for freedom and meaning, who escapes a totalitarian scientifically planned society where everything is run by eugenics, where sex and mating is decreed by the experts, where everyone is up to date in their vaccinations and everything else. So it's this scientific state that is just staltifying, and he escapes from it and then goes on this journey. Now, I think people really should read this book because virtually everything that Lewis wrote later, I would argue, is already there. Things from his Chronicles of Narnia, you will find them in Dimer. For example, some people think that the term shadowlands well, Lewis used that for the first time in the last battle in the Chronicles of Narnia. No, he didn't. He used it in 1926 in Dimer, the end of Prince Caspian where, for those people who've read the Narnian Chronicles where there's this child stuck in school and with a really sort of nasty teacher and then Aslan comes along and then the child sort of leads everyone out to this glorious sense of freedom and purpose in you. Actually, that's how Dimer begins. There's no Aslan figure in Daimer, and where it ends up is anti materialist, but there isn't really a personal God at the end of he's still, Lewis wrote Daimer in the phase where he had abandoned scientific materialism and had embraced a sort of impersonal idealism. And so it's interesting on his intellectual journey, but it's also interesting because you find some of his critiques of scientism way back there in 1926, shortly after World War I. And then you find it in the pilgrim's regress. You find it in his Space trilogy, which I'm sure we'll talk about continuing right up to his death in 1963, where his last book, his final book that he authored, was called The Discarded Image. And technically it's about the medieval worldview. What does that have to do with science? Certainly modern science? Well, if you read the ending part of it, the ending section of it, he has a really brilliant description of the nature of scientific revolutions, how Darwinism came to rise, and one of the most insightful things I think you'll ever read about science and the blinders of how your wrong view of science can give you a wrong view of everything else. That he says that nature answers the questions we ask her. And I think that's really profound. So if you have a materialistic understanding of science, it's not so much that you're going to get fake or untrue answers, but you're going to get very partial answers and that's going to be dictated by the questions you ask. And we can unpack that. But anyway, I've gone on speaking too much, but my main point is that Lewis wasn't just interested in Christian theology. He wasn't just interested in his academic writings about the Middle Ages. He was very profoundly interested in the impact of science and the abuse of science on our culture. And that was from his time as a young man to the time of his death.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Very interesting. Yeah. I'll have to read his last book because I didn't know it contained part of his views on science. Well, I'd like to focus briefly on an article he wrote for the observer newspaper in 1958, responding to questions posed by the newspaper, is man progressing today? Is progress even possible? And in his response, titled Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, lewis pushes back on progress as this inevitable, always positive force. He's more concerned, he says, with how we live than how long we live. He's concerned with two things in this essay. First, the application and advancement of science, and second, the changing relations between governments and subjects as governments become more technocratic and beholden to the scientific experts. Can you unpack what he's trying to communicate in this article?
[00:11:16] Speaker C: I'd love to. In fact, I first want to say that if people want to know about Lewis's thoughts on the abuse of science, especially through political power, this is the essay they need to read. He wrote about its ideas in various forms. But if you want it crystallized, this essay, Willing Slaves of the Welfare State. I think everyone today in the world, certainly in the Western world, needs to read it. It's short, it's profound. So what it deals with is what in this article he calls technocracy. But in another letter, I actually think it was a letter to someone from Chicago, he called it scientocracy. And I actually like that term a little bit better. I think it's a more evocative and scientocracy is the natural result of scientism. Again, if you think that modern science is the only way you have truth about the world, therefore scientists have a monopoly on truth, well therefore who should have the right to rule? Who should be appointed to rule you? Well, it should be the scientists. So government by people in the name of science. And Lewis thought that that leads to tyranny and he pointed out know in past ages. Well, we could talk about this a little bit later, but basically if you give power to any group of people. But in our age, those who claim to speak for science, who think that they are the only ones who have a monopoly on the truth, that's a recipe for tyranny. And his critique is multifaceted. One part of the critique is, well, obviously this leads to corruption, and we can unpack that. But the really profound thing is, even if it doesn't lead to corruption or abuse of power, public policy decisions about what's good for society are inherently about reconciling competing goods. There's not just one good thing that you need for society. You have a multiplicity of good things. And so politics I'm speaking as a former political science professor, recovering political science professor, even though it's been years since I've been one, politics is about negotiating, compromising, prioritizing what good you can have. And then that also means saying no to, well, then maybe you can't do something else. And you have to set up priorities of which is more important. And how do you reconcile these competing demands? The way Lewis put it is what things are worth having at what price? Well, his point on this no matter, let's say you have the perfect scientist who's not corrupt, who may know really what they're talking about, about what they're talking about. Well, they don't have a monopoly on reconciling competing goods because public policy isn't just about one good. It's not just about, say, saving the environment. That's a good example. A scientist might be able to tell you, well, what you need to do to save the environment or to reduce pollution. Well, but what if your policy to reduce pollution, or to end global warming for that matter, ends up in the deaths of a million people because they can't have heating fuel? Why is it that the scientist gets to decide that? In other words, there's another goal. There are competing goals saving the environment, but also making sure that people can live in their houses and the poor can heat themselves, they don't die from that or that they have enough food and things. So there are all these competing goods. What gives a scientist the right to determine which of those three or four or five or ten goals are most important? And that was Lewis's point. Sciences. Even if they help you tell you about the mechanics of a particular science, of, say, what you need to do to end global warming, that doesn't answer the question of how costly it's going to be. What cost are we willing to have imposed on us? What other things or freedoms are we willing to give up? And his point was everyone should have a place at the table for that. And a scientist has no right to. When they say government in the name of science, it's really government by some people in the name of science who are exerting their claims that because they're experts, you can't question them and he just thought that was nonsense.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: And in the last few years we've had a great example that stands out that maybe we can mention know in his article, Lewis said that material human needs like hunger, sickness and the dread of war are great for technocracy as they give an ideal opportunity for enslavement. And we saw this play out a little bit in the COVID Pandemic when governments, including our own, exercised emergency powers to monopolize the communication of truth, enforce draconian restrictions, erode our privacy, enrich corporate interests and more. So in what ways did you see a wrong view of science making things worse during and after COVID?
[00:16:03] Speaker C: I think our government officials and scientists should have all read Willing Slaves of the Welfare Estate. It was a really frighteningly clear example of precisely what Lewis was talking about. So let's take the COVID Pandemic, which I think was horrific. Millions died across the world and it was a serious public health emergency, no question about that. Having said that, we had this simplistic view that if you were a scientific expert that meant we should simply defer to you on whether it be lockdowns or ending schools or cutting down people's free speech and freedom of worship concerns and this is precisely what Lewis was talking about, that you have competing goals? Yes, one of the goals was to end the pandemic as quickly as you can. And what do you need to do that? Whether it be vaccines or lockdowns or whatever. Okay, so that's one question but even if you assume that the scientists or the people claiming to speak for science know what they're talking about which is a big assumption, but let's assume that for the sake of argument, why do they get to determine so you engage in a lockdown. Say you lock everyone down. I mean, the United States had mild lockdowns compared to part of Europe and part of Asia. Well, so who is to say that the deaths that may have been prevented from that were less important than the deaths to people's livelihoods, to the increased depression, increased untreated cancers? I mean, there are a lot of other things going on there or if you're shutting down schools, we're now finding out the examples of just how far back some of our students are now because they didn't have in person schooling. Well, where does, say, Anthony Fauci get off being the one person to determine that? In other words, there are these competing goods freedom of speech, freedom of worship? What does Fauci have to say, or Francis Collins for that matter, to be able to say that, well, this one goal cancels out everything else, that is a goal in a free society for everyone to be part of that conversation. So the COVID Pandemic and the policies that were adopted unthinkingly during that is a really frightening but true example of what Lewis is talking about. But let me go one step further I've just been assuming that the scientists know what they're talking about. The other problem here that Lewis doesn't bring out as much in that essay, but he certainly does in some of the other things he wrote, is that if you have a group of people who claim to be speaking for science with a capital S that breeds a type of closed mindedness and intolerance, particularly towards well, if you're not a scientist, if you're not Anthony Fauci, or if I'm Francis Collins, if you're not me, you're not the head of the NIH. You're stupid and you don't have a right to say anything and I don't have to listen to you.
That breeds really pseudoscientific things. So I mean, I think the other thing that we found out with COVID without getting into too much detail, is there are a lot of questions of whether the lockdowns even worked or whether some of the policies that they did actually did much of anything. There's lots of debates about masking, for example, and you don't need to take one side or another to realize now, in retrospect, that certain dogmatic claims made when you appoint people and say thus, that's science, and that just a few group of few people can speak for science and you can't debate what they're saying. Even other scientists aren't allowed to debate what they're saying then that's another recipe for really totalitarian type of actions.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah, and Fauci was getting so comfortable with the idea of him speaking for science that he was even quoted as saying something like, I am science. If you disregard this, you disregard science my words. So he was really equating himself with Thus says the science.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Yeah, he went on TV where he said that if you're criticizing me, these attacks are actually criticism on science sort of with a capital S. Yeah.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Well, in this essay Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, lewis writes that the more completely we are planned, the more powerful they will be. So what did he mean by that? Can you unpack that?
[00:20:25] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's just pretty basic is that if you live in a planned society, planned scientifically, someone has to be the planner. So the more you lived in a planned society, the more things are planned, the more someone has to plan you and the less freedom you're going to have.
In one sense, it could be comforting, I guess, if you want everything taken care of. But then that means your choices get less and less. And if there are any case that you disagree with, you'll suddenly find out, well, you don't have the right to disagree anymore.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: Yeah, and I've also been researching a little bit on Utopias, and this kind of plays into know one person's Utopia is another person's Dystopia and who gets to decide which is which.
That was Dr. John west discussing C. S. Lewis's views on science and scientism as we mark the 60th anniversary of lewis's death. But the conversation isn't over. In part two of this discussion, Dr. West explains how Scientism harms scientific progress. He also reveals how Lewis refutes the idea of scientific materialism, how Scientism leads to moral relativism, and how we can bring science back into alignment with older, deeper human truths. Don't miss the conclusion to my interview with Dr. John west, illuminating C. S. Lewis's prophetic legacy about science and Scientism get show notes and more
[email protected]. Until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott for Idthefuture. Thanks for listening.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
