What are memes? Why do we Internet? What is enlightenment? Is honesty relevant to evolution? What is openness really? Is willingness available like a virus of sorts to alter our genes and expand our awareness? What is learning? Is there divine knowledge en-coded into every atom?
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EVOLUTION: THE MIND’S BIG BANG
NOVA – Discovery/Science/History (documentary)
NOTE:
A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Memes:
Graham, Gordon (2002),
Genes: a philosophical inquiry, New York: Routledge, p. 196,
ISBN 0-415-25257-1
“C.S. Lewis and Evolution” is the second of three short documentaries inspired by the book The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. It examines the evolution of Lewis’s views on orthodox Darwinian theory from his time as a college undergraduate to his death in 1963.
Lewis’s first exception to human evolution was his insistence on an actual Fall of Man from an original state of innocence. The creation story (orcosmogonical myths) is similar in ancient cultures. In these, it is suggested that there was a finished creation from which we were fallen into sin, and therefore, we needed a divine presence to restore us to what God had originally created us to be. Lewis emphasized that man prior to the Fall had unimpeded fellowship with God.
At his time, archaeological discoveries could not tell us whether prehistoric peoples were kind, or courageous, or noble, or just. Nor do they tell us about their capacity for poetry or song. We know today that there was a great deal of evidence of advances that are impossible to explain if evolution of mankind were to have originated from lower animals. I may delve more into the ancient evidence; probably not though since it is a huge mystery.
Lewis foresaw that science could be twisted by greed and self-aggrandizement in order to attack religion, undermine ethics, and limit human freedom. The description of Transhumanism (the human enhancement movement) is written in Lewis’s predictions in The Abolition of Man and is seemingly frighteningly accurate as today, technology advances rapidly while moral knowledge declines.
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C.S. Lewis and Evolution examines Lewis’s growing doubts about parts of Darwinian evolution, beginning with his views while still an atheist. NOTE: Lewis believed in the common descent of all human beings from one non-human ancestor, although he was skeptical of unguided natural selection.
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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. Throughout his life, C.S. Lewis struggled with what he called the “argument from undesign,” the reality that nature exhibits cruelty and imperfection as well as purpose and beauty. In this documentary “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism,” leading scholars explore Lewis’s prophetic warnings about the abuse of science and how Lewis’s concerns are increasingly relevant for us today.
The Discovery Institute released the book The Magician’s Twin, edited by John G. West in 2012. West was a senior Fellow of the Institute and one of the editors of the highly C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. The Magician’s Twin is actually a collection of essays written by contemporary writers about Lewis’s warnings of how dehumanizing scientism would take us in ethics, politics, education, faith, reason, and even in science itself.
The book explores Lewis’s views on bioethics, eugenics, evolution, intelligent design, and what he called “scientocracy.” The book is divided into four sections: Science and Scientism, Origins, Reason, and Society. I previously posted about the first section here.
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C. S. Lewis and Intelligent Design explores Lewis’s personal struggle to find evidence of intelligent design in a world filled with cruelty, imperfection, and injustice.
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In That Hideous Strength, Lewis observes, “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already… begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”
A study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, recently published online in the Journal Psychological Science, is the first to investigate whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.
Eric
Is science always the winner? Must religion denounce the Big Bang or evolution? I don’t think so.