Modernity and the Magician’s Bargain:
Why C. S. Lewis Believed Science Must Repent
by Ken Myers
PDF of this article: ken-myers_repentant-science
In the past few years, we have witnessed the publication of a number of books by very angry atheists. The tone of these books has been remarkably intemperate; “Jeremiad” is a term that comes to mind, but it’s not an apt term to describe these books, since it suggests some higher cause being served; intoning prophets were channeling divine wrath, not simply their own, and the last thing authors like Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg want is to identify their complaints with some transcendent cause.
But I can’t escape the irony of the tone of righteous indignation in these books. Rarely has the case for the superiority of cool rationality been made with such irrational heat. Commenting on Richard Dawkins and on a number of hysterical op-ed pieces published when the film version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe came out, sociologist Frank Furedi observed that “the vitriolic invective hurled at Christian believers today is symptomatic of the passions normally associated with a fanatical Inquisitor.”1 Such violent rhetoric gives one little confidence in the premise that religious belief is the main source of violence in our world, and that eliminating religion would leave room for intrinsic human niceness to flourish.
Some of the anger is clearly related to the fear of religious extremism in a post-9/11 world. Many complacent secularists can’t imagine that anyone in the twenty-first century would suffer a minor inconvenience in the name of religion, let alone give one’s life and take a few thousand other lives along with them. Suddenly, people who had been superficially celebrating diversity and tolerance and the rational manageability of human life came face-to-face with a diversity they couldn’t fathom, let alone tolerate or manage, and some of them seem to have come unhinged. But I believe there is a deeper fear evident in the rhetorical style of many of the antireligious screeds in the past several years. While these writers insist that belief in God is irrational, they believe firmly in the modern liberal assumption that the hope of human progress could be realized through two principal mechanisms: scientific advancement and, in sociologist Craig Gay’s summary phrase, “the liberation of individuals from the repressive constraints of religion and tradition.”2 It’s bad enough that religions continue to inform the private lives of individuals, but when religion questions science, especially the science of evolution, then all hopes of human progress are threatened. Continue reading “Modernity and the Magician’s Bargain”