A Regenerate Science? C.S. Lewis’ Age of Scientocracy has Arrived

More than a half century ago, famed writer C.S. Lewis warned about how science (a good thing) could be twisted in order to attack religion, undermine ethics, and limit human freedom. Honoring the upcoming 50th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, November 22, we are pleased to present excerpts from Center for Science & Culture associate director Dr. John West's book The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. At the end of The Abolition of Man, Lewis issued a call for a "regenerate science" that would seek to understand human beings and other living things as they really are, not try to reduce them to automatons. "When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation." Lewis was not quite sure what he was asking for, and he was even less sure that it could come to pass. Yet in recent decades we have begun to see glimmers. New developments in biology, physics, and cognitive science are raising serious doubts about the most fundamental tenets of scientific materialism. In physics, our understanding of matter itself is becoming increasingly non-material. In biology, scientists are discovering how irreducibly complex biological systems and information encoded in DNA are pointing to the reality of intelligent design in nature. In cognitive science, efforts to reduce mind to the physical processes of the brain continue to fail, and new research is providing evidence that the mind is a non-reducible reality that must be accepted on its own terms. What George Gilder has called "the materialist superstition" is being challenged as never before. Fifty years after C.S. Lewis's death, we are facing the possibility that science can become something more than the magician's twin. Even in the face of surging scientism in the public arena, an opportunity has opened to challenge scientism on the basis of science itself, fulfilling Lewis's own desire that "from science herself the cure might come." Let us hope we find the clarity and courage to make the most of the opportunity.