Alister McGrath | CS Lewis & Science

McGrath:

In Lewis’s own way of thinking, the imagination is in fact, opening up a deeper vision of things, giving you a sense of how things are interconnected. And so, if you like, the imagination is saying, “here’s one way of looking, here’s a picture that results. Let’s check it out and see if it works.” So Lewis, in prizing the role of the imagination, is not diminishing the role of the empirical method or the role of reason. He’s saying that actually, whether you like it or not, when we do science, we are asking what is the best way of imagining things, and then checking it out against the empirical evidence. 

I’m Alister McGrath, and I’m a senior research fellow at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God.

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Alister McGrath. If you’re counting, this makes the third time we’ve welcomed him to the podcast. Given how prolific an author he is on topics of interest to us, there will probably always be another reason to have him back. Though that might be surprising given his announcement on one of our previous episodes that he was done writing books. It turns out that resolution didn’t stick, and we get the story from him about that here.

This interview was especially memorable because it took place in Alister’s flat in Oxford. Colin and I were on a work trip to the UK and had spent the previous evening on a guided tour through The Kilns, C.S. Lewis’s home, where his biography comes to life. Sitting down with Alister the next morning made the conversation feel like a continuation of that visit.

C.S. Lewis has been an influential voice for generations of Christians, including BioLogos founder Francis Collins, who has often described Lewis’s Mere Christianity as playing an important role in his journey from atheism to Christian faith. Lewis is usually remembered as a novelist, literary scholar, and apologist. Less often appreciated are his reflections on science itself.

That is the focus of McGrath’s newest book, Science and Religion in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Rather than treating imagination as the opposite of reason, Lewis argued that it is an essential part of how discovery happens—not only in literature and faith, but in science as well. Those ideas continue to shape conversations about science, faith, and the search for truth today.

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Alister McGrath, welcome to the podcast, or I should say welcome back to the podcast, as you’ve been on with us twice before. And the last time we talked to you, you had sounded pretty definitive that you were done writing books, but here we are again talking about another new one. So I wondered if that was just a failed New Year’s resolution of some sort or what’s the story?

McGrath:

Well, the story is at that time I thought I’ve done this. I want to stop and do something else. I felt quite good about that decision, but other people did not. And many of my friends and colleagues said, “Look, there are more books in you. You’re going to be writing some more books. Please!” And so eventually I thought, okay, if I come up with some good ideas for books, I will write them. And unfortunately we came up with some good ideas for books.

Stump:

They just keep coming, I guess.

McGrath:

They keep coming.

Stump:

Well, I was searching for a kind of definitive list of all the books you’ve published and couldn’t quite find one. And so I wondered if that’s the sort of thing that ChatGPT would be good at finding. And so when I asked it responded with, “Exhaustive is tricky here because McGrath has been extraordinarily prolific and the boundaries get fuzzy with multiple editions and co-authored works, et cetera.” And I was glad it didn’t just make up a list. But I wondered if you actually do have such a list or a shelf somewhere that has all of your works that you’ve ever published.

McGrath:

I do keep a list of things I publish, but I’ve forgotten how many things I have published.

Stump:

You couldn’t rehearse that.

McGrath:

It’s quite a lot. But hey, listen, I like writing. It’s just great.

Stump:

Evidently. I wondered if writing and publishing is actually a way for you to work out some of the ideas that you have.

McGrath:

I think that’s very perceptive because very often people will say to me, “Alister, we need a book on this. It’ll help you sort out your own thoughts.” And they’re right. When you actually are forced to think something through, then really it helps you to clarify your own ideas. And also I think to really, if I can put it like this, get rid of some of the loose ends, make things coherent. And so it’s a good idea.

Stump:

All right. Well, very good. Well, we are here to talk about your newest book, Science and Religion and the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. And you’ve always been something of a Lewis buff, I would say, and science and religion has obviously always been one of your central concerns, but how did the two of these come together for a book length treatment of C.S. Lewis’ views on science?

McGrath:

Well, the book happened because a colleague of mine, my successor as the Idreos Chair of Science and Religion at Oxford, told me I should write a book on C.S. Lewis on science and religion. So here we go again. There’s somebody else saying write this book. And I thought about it and I thought, actually it’s quite a good idea. And I began to read Lewis again with this specific agenda in mind. And there was loads there. It was really, really interesting. So actually it proved to be a really exciting book to write. And actually my appreciation of Lewis increased considerably through being forced to write this book, which is great, I think.

Stump:

So we’ll get into some of the specifics here of his take on science, but why do you think it is that Lewis has not been widely recognized as a scholar of science and religion, or included in many of the contemporary debates about science and religion?

McGrath:

Well, I think there are two main reasons. One is that scientists tend to look at Lewis and say, this man has a humanities view of science. In other words, he’s an outsider who really has a kind of slightly misguided reading of science. So whatever he says isn’t going to be all that helpful. And secondly, I think there’s this general feeling that Lewis writes at a popular level and therefore that, in fact, in engaging science and religion, he will be, in a kind of way, pitching low and therefore not really engaging the big questions. When I began to read Lewis with this specific agenda in mind, I was surprised by actually how good he was, I have to say. I expected to have to apologize for him, but actually hardly ever did I need to do that.

Stump:

Interesting. So yes, he’s a humanities scholar, a scholar of medieval literature even. And there you start with some of the engagement in this worldview even with astrology and magic and alchemy. Why is this a sort of fitting background for exploring what one thinks about science today?

McGrath:

Because it is very, very clear in saying science has changed over time. What we think of science today is not what was being considered science in the Middle Ages. And we need to recognize our understanding of science has changed over the ages. One of the reasons why Lewis is so interesting to engage is that he’s clearly an expert on what people thought was science in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But he’s also engaged with some of the big debates about science and culture in the 1940s and 1950s.

So in many ways, Lewis is a very, very interesting person to engage because he has this historical perspective on the changing understanding of what science actually is. And yes, astrology was once a science. Yes, alchemy was once a science as well. And then what we would now regard as chemistry and astronomy emerged from these. And very often we ignore the roots in simply looking at where we are today.

Stump:

That’s a helpful corrective for some of the contemporary views that seem to think that there’s some sort of essence or abiding nature of what science is and always has been, as though there’s a demarcation line on either side that this channels.

McGrath:

Well, that’s right. That’s a kind of Steven Weinberg line, which is basically, look, science is brilliant and it’s this. But the historian will say, “Well, look, it hasn’t always been this. It’s actually changed over time and it will change in the future as well.” And it’s a reminder that science actually is discovering what it is as a journey.

Stump:

And do you think that will continue to change or have we somehow arrived at the proper objects of science or the proper methods of science?

McGrath:

I think we’re at a good resting place at the moment, but I wouldn’t want to say the journey has ended. I think it will continue.

Stump:

All right, good. So another one of the things that Lewis brings, particularly from this background in literature that’s too often missing in science is an emphasis on the imagination. So what role does imagination play, in his view, could it or should it play in science?

McGrath:

Well, it plays a very, very big role in Lewis’ own thought. And for Lewis, it was very, very clear it should. And in reality, it does play a significant role in science. It’s just often unacknowledged. So let me just begin to unpack that.

Stump:

Please.

McGrath:

In Lewis’ own way of thinking, the imagination is in fact opening up a deeper vision of things, giving you a sense of how things are interconnected. And it’s not about the imagination kind of making stuff up. It’s in effect making those connections, seeing things which are not given by reason, but the imagination is able to go a bit further, and say, look, here’s how they might connect together.

And so if you like, the imagination is saying, here’s one way of looking at this. Here’s a picture that results. Let’s check it out and see if it works. So Lewis, in prizing the role of the imagination, is not diminishing the role of the empirical method or the role of reason. He’s saying that actually, whether you like it or not, when we do science, we are asking what is the best way of imagining things and then checking it out against the empirical evidence. It’s very much about imagining how things might be and then asking what experiments can we undertake to find out whether it’s really like that.

And interestingly, one of Lewis’ colleagues at Magdalen College Oxford was Sir Peter Medawar, an Oxford physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine. And Medawar published several papers making exactly that same point that, in effect, science often presented as an incorrigibly rationalist approach to stuff. It’s not. You have to imagine how things might be, and then with that imagined reality in mind, see whether actually it corresponds with the way things are. You do experiments to check this out. A theory is an act of imagination. Here’s how it might be. Let’s check that out.

Stump:

And perhaps another figure you’ve treated at book length, Albert Einstein, would’ve agreed with this too.

McGrath:

Well, Einstein was a great advocate of mental experiments. Using your imagination to say, let’s just try and imagine this, and try and work out what questions we might ask. And certainly for Einstein, the imagination allows you to see things which a purely rationalist perspective would not. It’s not saying they’re right. It’s giving you a sense of what might be the case, and then you check that out empirically.

Stump:

Okay. So related to imagination might be this sense of a model that I’m constructing of the way things are that ends up being tested. And I think this is important for Lewis’ take on science as well. But one feature of models is that perhaps, like a map even, another metaphor we sometimes use, is that that pulls out some or at least prioritizes some aspects, some elements of reality, maybe ignoring others sometimes depending on that. And I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about that aspect, and in his view of whether other models of scientific understanding ignored some of the important aspects of reality or at least didn’t prioritize some aspects of reality the way his preferred model might.

McGrath:

Well, I think that’s right. I mean, Lewis used this phrase, “a mental model of the universe”. What he means by that is a kind of mindset in which we visualize the universe in certain ways. And Lewis was, in his late book, The Discarded Image, looking at mental models that were current in the Middle Ages. And in no way is he saying we’re going back to those. Let’s just pick them up and use them all over again. He’s saying, let’s try to understand what they thought these things did. What was their function?

And they have two functions really for Lewis. One is to help us understand what’s actually going on in our world. And that’s very, very important. You check out a mental model in terms of how well it accounts for the way the world actually behaves. But then Lewis makes another point, which is that these mental models are not simply about understanding. They’re about the way we feel about our presence in the universe. They’re the way we understand our place in that universe.

And for Lewis, a good mental model enables us to see ourselves not simply as passive spectators of our universe, but active participants within it. So Lewis is very much advocating this idea of finding the best model. And by ”best”, he really means one that, first of all, is able to accommodate observations, but secondly is able to answer the deep questions we have about, well, who are we really? What is our point in this universe? These models deal with existential, not simply physical questions. And so if you like, one of Lewis’ concerns is that the word theory, which in classic Greek means a broad vision of beholding reality, has become limited to a rationalization of nature. And Lewis is saying, can we please recover this older way of thinking because actually it has a lot of mileage left in it?

Stump:

Interesting. Another aspect of that that you touch on there is his view of our role as participants, not just some objective observer. And I think the metaphor used there was something about a dance. Can you unpack that a little bit and what he meant by that?

McGrath:

Well, this is Lewis’ image of the great dance or the cosmic dance, which he found in many writings of the Renaissance. So John Davies’ orchestra, which is very much about the universe as being like a great dance of participants. But Lewis’ point is that we diminish our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe if we simply see ourselves as people who look at the universe. For Lewis, we are part of the universe. We are participants, and we’re trying to figure out how we fit into this bigger scheme of things.

And so Lewis uses this image of a dance, and he’s really picking up on Renaissance dance imagery at the great courts of Europe, whereby you would have all these courtiers who are hanging around the walls of these great halls, watching other people dance. And every now and then, they would stop being spectators, they would step in and become part of the dance.

And that’s Lewis’ model for the way as human beings we engage with the universe. Sometimes we spectate, sometimes we participate, we switch roles if you like. But we have to have both of these trying to figure out what’s really there and what’s going on, but then also how we fit into this so we can actually do it. We can actually be participants, not just spectators.

Stump:

Maybe this question isn’t so much interpreting Lewis, but I’m curious of your views on this, and how that perspective of us being participants in nature in the created order, how does that change our scientific work, or how ought it change our scientific work? What kind of different perspective does it give when a scientist understands himself or herself as a participant in what is being studied?

McGrath:

If I’m a scientist who sees myself simply as a spectator, there’s this thing called the universe. It’s outside me. I’m the observer. And what I’m discovering about the universe doesn’t really affect me. I’m just trying to figure this out and develop rationalizations of what I’m investigating. Lewis is saying that you can’t do that. We are actually part of this universe. In investigating the universe, we are also investigating who we are and what our role in things is.

And so in many ways what Lewis is saying is, let’s be honest about this. Whether we like it or not, we are participants in the universe. And scientific investigation helps us to uncover a very important aspect of our engagement with and participation in the universe. But there are other levels of engagement as well, including philosophy and art, and of course religious belief. And so what Lewis is saying is that to really inhabit and engage this universe properly, we need a rich range of toolkits to work out what’s going on and how we fit into this.

Stump:

And each of those tools a perspective, not necessarily giving the whole truth.

McGrath:

Exactly. It’s a partial perspective. And you got to find a way of weaving all of these together so you see the bigger picture rather than just some threads or some brushstrokes.

Stump:

Nice. Yeah. Well, one more aspect of his career in the humanities, and perhaps one of these reasons he wasn’t always taken seriously, is his use of stories to explain and to unpack some of his views. So much of his work came in the form of stories, whether it’s Narnia or the Space Trilogy, Screwtape, even Till We Have Faces and the Great Divorce, these rich metaphors that have so much going on in them. What do we learn, first just at the high level here, what do we learn about Lewis’ views on science from his stories?

McGrath:

Well, Lewis thinks that stories are a natural human way of exploring complex realities, which emphasize that we are part of the process of investigation, and are actually affected by it. And so for Lewis, the narrative captures the imagination and makes you receptive to ideas that otherwise you might not really be engaged with.

And again, I was talking to many scientists and I ask them what they do in their spare time. And most of them say, “We read novels.” And I ask them why. And they say, “Well, it helps us to think things through.” And I think that’s something that Lewis has recognized, that actually narratives give you a framework for engaging big questions.

And Lewis wrote a book in 1943 called The Abolition of Man. And it’s a very difficult book. And Lewis was aware people found it difficult. And I think in writing That Hideous Strength, which is a novel, which actually converts into stories the ideas of The Abolition of Man, Lewis reckoned I’ll be able to reach a wider readership by telling a story that makes all the points in this very difficult book, and it will gain me a wider readership, which of course it did.

And so I think what Lewis really recognized is that telling stories engages the imagination and makes people interested towards hearing you. They suspend disbelief to see where the storyline goes. And of course, Lewis has a very distinguished background in the history of literature. And he would’ve read H.G. Wells’ books like The Time Machine, First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds.

And in many ways, I think for Lewis, H.G. Wells was both a model and also something to be avoided. A model because he saw how you could use stories to explore science. And something to be avoided because he had this evolutionary optimism, which meant his stories reflected his worldview. And Lewis’ idea was really to say, look, H.G. Wells has seen how stories can in effect develop worldviews. Why don’t I use his chosen tool, telling stories, to develop a very different worldview, i.e., Christianity? So in many ways, what Lewis was doing was taking Wells, using his technique, but radically inverting its approach and using it to explore and commend Christianity.

Stump:

Okay. So I want you to dive in a little more into the Space Trilogy in particular. And I’ll preface it by saying this. This is a mea culpa in many, many respects. I read the Space Trilogy probably, I’m trying to remember when, but I think it was before graduate school even, and haven’t ever come back to it the way I have to many of Lewis’ other works. And Colin had even asked me about the Space Trilogy and I was like, “No, I don’t remember much from that that was important or relevant.”

And then last week when I was in the midst of reading your book on C.S. Lewis and Science, I sent Colin a note saying, “I think this book has convinced me that I need to go back to the Space Trilogy, particularly to tease out more of these views on science.” So give us a little historical context of where this trilogy came from, and where you see it in Lewis’ total work and the kind of points that he’s trying to make here about science in particular.

McGrath:

Well, I think what Lewis is doing in this trilogy is to use narrative as a way of beginning to engage deep cultural questions about what science is all about and where it is taking us. And what Lewis is very worried about is that what we would now call scientism. That is, science is able to answer all of our ultimate questions. Lewis is worried scientism actually is leading us astray and it needs to be challenged. So what Lewis is doing in the science fiction trilogy is begin to explore some theological questions, but also this deeper question of what is the place of science in human culture? What is good about it and where can it go wrong?

Now, Lewis, in my view, is doing something very similar to what Shakespeare does in The Tempest. In effect, it’s all about this magus, this magician who’s using science for his own purposes. And what Lewis is really trying to do in this trilogy is to raise questions about what for Lewis is a rather uncritical acceptance of science as a unifying and a purely positive entity in modern Western culture.

And Lewis is saying I think two things very, very clearly. One is science is very important, but as part of a greater range of approaches to the natural world. And secondly, I think this is the really important point, that there is a danger with science. In fact, we take certain steps with science, and once we’ve taken them, we can’t step back. If we make a mistake, we can’t undo it. We can’t press the delete button. We’re stuck with it. And that is the key theme of parts of That Hideous Strength. Now That Hideous Strength was published here in England in August, I think it was 4th of August 1945, which is just-

Stump:

End of the war.

McGrath:

End of the war. Just before the atomic bombs in Japan. And Lewis’ book sold rather well. And many feel that it’s possibly because people suddenly realize these new bombs, this is a new world we’re entering into. We don’t like it.

Stump:

We can’t delete that.

McGrath:

We are frightened. We are not able to do something which changes everything. Are we actually able to cope with this or is this something dreadful, something new, uncontrollable that we’re stuck with? And Lewis in fact was asking those questions in That Hideous Strength. And if you like, what Lewis was really doing was raising deep questions about whether science might lead us into a place where we do not feel we belong before it’s too late to change things.

Stump:

Sure sounds like there’s a modern or contemporary parallel there with artificial intelligence. Would he have had anything to say about that, you think?

McGrath:

Well, again, I think you can see what Lewis is saying. We now have AI. We can’t undo that. And AI is very, very good at imitating us. And it’s also very, very good about moving on from us and leaving us behind. So the big question everybody’s asking is, will this in effect produce human beings with much greater intelligences than we have? And what happens to us as a result? So I think Lewis’ concern to us would be, look, are you ready for this? Have you really thought this through? Is it too late to begin preparing for this new phase in our history? Or do we just stumble blindly into a new landscape and discover we can’t cope with it?

Stump:

Is there anything there? So that’s I think an important and insightful diagnosis of the problem. Is there anything on the treatment of once we have stumbled into this, what do we do now?

McGrath:

Lewis tends to provide what I would describe as slightly apocalyptic solutions, which is, look, maybe we need to start again, which is just not possible. But I think nevertheless, he’s a prophet. He’s saying, look, look what’s happening. Can you see where it’s taking you? What are we going to do about this? He’s not proposing solutions. He’s raising the questions and saying we are going into uncharted territory and we just have no idea where this is going to take us.

[musical interlude]

Stump:

Okay. One of the other topics of discussion has to be C.S. Lewis and evolution, what he actually thought about it. The intelligent design community has often taken a few lines from things that he has written as evidence that he would’ve been on their side on this. But given that he came of age, and at least his early career was in a very different stage of the development of the theory of evolution, his views might need a little untangling from what he saw as a more, maybe, encompassing philosophy of evolution, evolutionism. Can you do some of that untangling for us?

McGrath:

Well, you need to bear in mind that Lewis’ main writings on evolution date from the ’30s and ’40s. So he is not really engaging modern scientific understandings of evolution, but he certainly is engaging with two things. One is the popular understanding of scientific theory of evolution. And secondly, where this kind of thinking takes us.

So let’s go back to the 1920s. Because we need to remember that in the 1920s, Darwinism was seen as a dead duck. In effect, there was this widespread assumption inside the academic biological community that this was simply unsustainable and something better had to be found. Eventually it was, of course, in the extended evolution synthesis. But for quite some time there was this feeling that evolution, or rather Darwinian accounts of evolution, were going nowhere.

And Lewis does pick up on that. So he’s very, very cautious about not over-interpreting what scientists are saying. This is a provisional way of looking at things. But Lewis, I think, really is focusing on a deep concern, which is that a purely scientific theory very often is hijacked by philosophers or politicians. And if you like, moral values, religious values kind of way get brought into discussion where they don’t really belong.

And Lewis I think is trying to make the point that, in his day, evolution could be understood in two different ways. Number one, as a provisional scientific theory, which has no place in generating a worldview or anything more than that. It’s simply a scientific theory. And then secondly, as a Darwinian worldview, which in effect develops moral values, political ideas, and so on, which are based on the assumption that this is true and definitive for all things. And it’s very similar in many ways to what Richard Dawkins today would call universal Darwinism.

And Lewis in effect says there’s nothing wrong with Darwinism as a provisional scientific theory. He has difficulties understanding the points, but he doesn’t see a problem. His concern is with those who hijack evolution and make it into a metaphysical statement about reality. And Lewis is saying you can’t do that and you shouldn’t do that.

Stump:

Is there something in between those then of a provisional scientific theory versus all the way to a full-blown philosophical system that uses that, that he might recognize as the state of the science of evolution today? Does it get beyond provisional to established or maybe not uncontrovertible, but at least-

McGrath:

I think most evolutionary biologists I’ve talked to would say something like this: look, we realize that there’s still more discussion needed. It looks to us that this is pretty much a done deal. This does seem to work. But Richard Dawkins in an essay once made the point, actually you have to recognize that maybe Darwinian theory in a century’s time will change so much so we won’t recognize it because that’s the way science is.

And again, Lewis is very much aware that science is on a journey. You cannot say where it is at the moment is its endpoint. It’s simply a pausing point. And you will move on and you do not know what you’re moving on to. So Lewis would be very concerned about in fact extrapolating on the basis of linear uniform progress. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. There can be a paradigm shift, a phrase Lewis doesn’t use, but which actually expresses quite well what he’s thinking here.

So I think we have to be careful here. And Lewis’ concern is that science is science, and it doesn’t do things like moral values, metaphysical meaning. Those have to come from somewhere else. And therefore, for Lewis, any evolutionary attempt to make sense of the meaning of life, or what is right and what is wrong, is simply using the wrong tool to look at a very important issue.

Stump:

Okay. I keep asking you to speculate perhaps, or maybe I’ll ask it as though whether there’s anything in his corpus of work that would indicate how he might think about the development of human evolution as we know it now as opposed to what he did then that was though to perhaps be a much more just linear progression where now we understand multiple species within our genus of homo that were alive at the same time, and now even interbreeding with Neanderthals that has happened. Any idea of how he would’ve reconciled that and his understanding of humanity with this science that has become—

McGrath:

I think this would be very speculative because Lewis, first of all, did not actually know very much about biology. That’s a problem. But also I think it has moved so fast that actually it’s very, very difficult to work out quite how what we now know would fit into his way of thinking. I think the best way of answering, I think say that Lewis rarely engages that question. Though actually does touch on it, interestingly, in The Problem of Pain, where he begins to talk about how God might have made a different kind of world. And there’s a very interesting evolutionary line of argument there, but it’s underdeveloped and it’s very frustrating. You can see where this might go, but it didn’t go.

So what we have to do is to say that Lewis is very, very frustrating in one sense in that he does not go where we would like him to go. And in trying to construct where he might have gone, we are using so many risky assumptions that I wouldn’t like us to go there. What I will say is that Lewis will often say that evolution he finds very, very difficult to understand. Well, listen, I believe in evolution and so do I [laughs]. The key point is that Lewis is simply saying for us layman like him, it’s very difficult to take this in, but that doesn’t mean he thinks it’s wrong. He’s just saying I don’t really quite get this.

Stump:

So let me ask you personally then, as someone who’s very influenced by Lewis, does this contemporary understanding of human evolution and these multiple species that were quite like us, not exactly homo sapiens, but quite like us, does that challenge or add any interesting ideas into how you would answer the question what does it mean to be human from the perspective of the sciences, but as well as from your Christian theology?

McGrath:

Well, I think it does raise many interesting questions for me. And I haven’t really thought these through properly. But Lewis might make a response which is based on his knowledge of medieval literature. Which is the way in which, in medieval literature, there’s a kind of feeling there are in the animal kingdom certain things that are approximations of humanity and where they fit into this greater scheme of things. So I do find myself wondering how Lewis would use the great medieval bestiaries. There’s this kind of a rich and complex biological realm to begin to engage those questions. But sadly he doesn’t. And therefore I think it’s very, very speculative to try and work out where he’d be going here?

Stump:

All right. Okay. One more topic then, which is to go from this science to his work as an apologist, for a couple of generations, Lewis has been heralded as one of the foremost apologists for Christianity. And I think lots of people hear that and understand it as though he had an argument with premises and the conclusion of those arguments was, “and therefore Christianity is true.” And I think you’ve been instrumental in reworking some of that understanding and seeing that he brought his Christianity in many ways to—and this comes back to our discussion about models—he brought his Christianity and then tried to work out the implications of that. That’s a much more sort of nuanced view of his work as an apologist. Can you explain that or unpack that a little bit more?

McGrath:

Yeah. So when I was writing this book, one of the things I noticed was how Lewis’ approach to figuring out how things work and what they mean actually is deeply rooted in science, but actually is taken in a new direction. And what Lewis has clearly understood is that if you’re a scientist, you’re looking at multiple sets of observations, and you’re asking, what’s the bigger picture that makes the most sense of this? And he’s very, very clear there are several possible explanations. Your job is to figure out which of them is the best.

And we find this line of thinking throughout Lewis’ works. He’s not saying you begin from ground zero and you build up a detailed argument for the existence of God. It’s much more you see this world and you say, “how on Earth do I make sense of it?” Let’s look at the options. Well, there’s atheism, there’s Christianity, and so on. And then he judges each of these against the evidence. And what Lewis is really trying to do is to find out which of these is the best explanation.

Now, if you look at Lewis’ Mere Christianity, there’s a chapter on hope. And in that chapter, what Lewis is doing is saying, look, all of us have this deep sense that there’s something really worth possessing. We long to have it, but we don’t find it. Where is it? And Lewis is saying, what is the best explanation for that sense of longing within humanity? And Lewis says, there are three explanations he can think of. And he lists each of them. One of them is Christianity. And he says, look, first one doesn’t really work very well because of this, the second one doesn’t really work well because of that. The Christian one I think is the best answer. Namely that if we find this deep feeling of longing within us, and nothing in this world that can satisfy, then we’ve been made to live in another world, in heaven. It’s a very interesting argument.

But the key point is that Lewis is saying a scientist doesn’t begin at ground zero saying, let’s just start with the evidence and then propose one little thing at a time. It’s much more you have a set of possible theoretical explanations, and you judge each of them by their ability to accommodate the available evidence. And the one that seems to come out best is likely to be true.

And I find that very interesting because that is philosophically respectable. You find it, for example, in William Whewell here in England, you find also in Charles Peirce in the United States. But of course, when Gilbert Harman wrote that very famous paper, The Inference to the Best Explanation, which is published after Lewis’ death, he makes it absolutely clear that, by his title, Inference to the Best Explanation, he’s including approaches like Whewell’s and Peirce’s. And also in my view, exactly what Lewis is doing as well. And in effect, it’s saying that, whether scientists like it or not, Lewis is using a very similar form of reasoning to them.

The big question is whether you say you assemble a worldview one element at a time or whether like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis who say, no, you take the worldviews you have and say, which of these is the best in terms of its ability to explain the evidence? And Lewis goes for that totalizing approach. You judge a worldview by how well it’s able to take in the evidence at our disposal.

Stump:

So you use often then this metaphor that Lewis uses that I take he got from Chesterton about the sun and why I believe in the sun. Not just because I see it, but because, by its light, I see everything else. You can give me the quote.

McGrath:

Well, that’s right. It’s a quote from his very interesting lecture, Is Theology Poetry, given here at Oxford in 1945. And towards the end of this, he begins to say, “Look, here’s why I think Christianity’s right. I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

And his point is that, if you like, the sun illuminates reality. You can see everything, you can see how everything fits together. So the quality of a theory is judged by the quality of the illumination of reality. Now that’s a very interesting idea. And I think Lewis makes a lot of it. And he really picks up on here a theme which goes back to antiquity, which is that truth is illuminating. And the more luminous its account of reality, the more likely it is to be true. And Lewis is weaving that into his understanding of Christianity and I think doing quite a good job of it.

Stump:

But it’s also interesting that the quote is not just that I believe in the rising of the sun because “by it”, it’s because “not only do I see it”. So give a little bit on that element of his apologetic. I do see it itself, but then it also becomes the illuminating source.

McGrath:

Exactly. Well, this is a very good point, and it’s so often overlooked when people quote that sentence. Lewis is saying that Christianity is evidenced and evidencing. Evidenced. Here are good reasons for saying this might be true. Historical, metaphysical, and so on. But then evidencing in the sense that, if this is right, it is able to make sense of things and the quality of its account of reality then becomes an indication of its truth.

So it’s not just the reasons why we might say Christianity is right. It’s when you look at the reality through Christianity, using Christianity as a lens, it’s the quality of vision it enables. Now what Lewis is saying, there are reasons for arguing Christianity’s right. And if you then flip the charts, so to speak, and Lewis on the other side, and Christianity gives you this lens, you look through it and hey, it gives you a much better quality of rendition than other worldviews. So both those ideas are there. And Lewis’ genius is to bring them both together in a very simple sentence.

Stump:

I was going to ask, is it in some sense artificial to even try to separate those two aspects of this? In the way that he has brought them together, it makes it seem much more of a coherent worldview as opposed to thinking we could do just one or the other.

McGrath:

Lewis is saying they’re both there. It helps to distinguish them. You can’t separate them.

Stump:

You can’t separate them. All right. Well, this is all very interesting. We’re about at the end of our time. If I might put it in the way you Brits say, a little bit cheeky, you’ve been a kind of apologist for the apologist, C.S. Lewis, in many ways. Is there any aspect of his thinking on science that you would want to gently push back a little bit and say, no, I don’t think you’ve gotten this part quite right.

McGrath:

I think we must bear in mind that Lewis died quite a long time ago, and science has moved on a long way since then. And every now and then I say, oh dear, I just wish you had lived to see this because I’d love to know what you think. And it might make you rethink certain things. But I think my basic feeling is that, although Lewis I think has a very good sense of science as it was, I think there are points at which it’s clear he doesn’t know enough to make connections he could have made. And so what I’m saying is if I were to critique him, it’s not so much you got this wrong. It’s rather you didn’t make enough of this particular point.

And for me, I mean, and this is going to sound a very, very picky thing, but I’d like to know why on earth Lewis didn’t talk to more scientists. Because in Magdalen, during Lewis’ time there, they had four Nobel laureates. And as far as I can see, Lewis didn’t really talk to any of them. So Peter Medawar who was there during Lewis’ time, they did talk occasionally, but not very much. And I just wonder, supposing Lewis had asked him, “Tell me about how scientists think about the imagination.” Medawar knew and his answer would’ve pleased Lewis, but I don’t think Lewis had that conversation. So if you like, what did Lewis get wrong? I would just wish he talked to more scientists, but that’s a rather picky criticism.

Stump:

Wow, very good. What’s next for you now? Any more books that people have twisted your arm to write?

McGrath:

Yes, unfortunately. They’ve twisted my arm quite a lot. I have a book coming out in October, which is very much about looking at why so many younger people are beginning to rethink Christianity. And I’ve talked to an awful lot of them and it’s really exploring, first of all, why this is happening and where this takes us.

But one of the things I’ve noticed is that one of the things that they constantly talk to me about is our culture is changing so quickly that what is fashionable today is out in a year’s time. Where do we find something that is endurable, that actually you can transfer from one generation to a next, and they’re rethinking Christianity because they see this as in effect giving them a rock of stability in a changing cultural moment. So that’s coming out in October. It’s basically rethinking Christianity. So that’s the title of the book. And it’s all about why there’s this new interest in Christianity and how Christians can begin to engage with this and move it ahead.

Stump:

Well, very good. We look forward to that. But the current book, Science and Religion in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, I recommend everybody give it a read. Thank you so much for talking to us and for hosting us in Oxford. This has been lovely.

McGrath:

Jim, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you very much indeed.

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