C. S. Lewis’ ”De Futilitate,” Part 1

Lewis begins his essay "On Futility" with the common misconception, derivable directly from Hegelian philosophy, that "Evolution simply means improvement.... There is thus lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law." This, he declares, is "a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve. There is no evidence that the mental and moral capacities of the human race have been increased since man became man."

Next, Lewis properly collapses the distinction between scientific and non-scientific reasoning:

"The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels 'science' to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken. Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought..., if logic is discredited science must go down along with it."

Reason, then, can not be thought of as merely human:

"Where thought is strictly rational it must be ... not ours, but cosmic or super-cosmic. It must be something not shut up inside our heads but already 'out there' - in the universe or behind the universe.... Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated."

And the objectivity of reason implies the objectivity of Value:

"The prima facie case for denying a sense of values to the cosmic or super-cosmic mind has really collapsed the moment we see that we have to attribute reason to it. When we are forced to admit that reason cannot be merely human, there is no longer any compulsive inducement  to say that virtue is purely human."

"In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it. The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative.... The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still."

The problem of futility, or Value, "is really the same sort of problem that meets us in science. The pell-mell of phenomena, as we first observe them, seems to be full of anomalies and irregularities; but being assured that reality is logical we go on framing and trying out hypotheses to show that the apparent irregularities are not irregular at all. The history of science is the history of that progress. The corresponding process whereby, having admitted that reality in the last resort  must be moral, we attempt to explain evil, is the history of theology."

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