The Funeral of a Great Myth (of Popular Evolution) by C.S. Lewis Doodle

The Funeral of a Great Myth (of Popular Evolution) by C.S. Lewis Doodle
C.S. Lewis on Evolution: This is his academic banquet - a 6 course argument. If you want an enjoyable, but take-away version, see: https://youtu.be/8t0UDoKImBs Notes: (1:17) Lewis echoes a famous Shakespearean phrase “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” The speech curiously, brilliantly does the opposite and enrages the Roman crowd against Caesar's conspirators. (3:43) There was a drought on one of the Galapagos Islands, it is thought that due to this event the average finch beak size became larger. However, this proved not to be the end of the story. When the drought stopped, average finch beak size became smaller again. (8:03) Wagner's myth: see Lewis’ essay 'The World’s Last Night' for more on this aspect. (9:48) Did atheists search all of creation to find some part of God’s creation where change could be considered "self-improving" & then attribute the whole creation to this process in order to remove God from His own creation? This would be like attributing the iphone not to Steve Jobs or Apple, but to the self-improving AI technology embedded within the iphone's camera function or saying that the process that makes your cousins' family tall or short, is the same process that made humanity. Darwin found one such aspect in animal breeding. Humans have long known (Genesis 31.5-12,38-41) that man can breed certain traits in herds to increase height, fat quantity, or milk capacity & remove defects by slaughtering weak or deformed offspring. He does this by breeding strong animals with the strong, and healthy with the healthy. And this was seen in human reproduction as well. Obvious if you remove the shepherd from breeding, you get a lot more weak animals in the population. Darwin found if you remove man, only a remnant of the animal population will be strong, & the weak and defective will not so easily survive so long or out run predators etc. Here, Darwin found a part of God's creation may result in minor “self-improvement”, & which, he theorised, if expanded exponentially, could explain, not just minor change, but CREATIVE change and brand new function. (12:26) The actual theorem of evolution makes no metaphysical statements, i.e. statements about whether there is a God beyond Nature. (13:56) “Sidereal”(from Latin: ‘stars’) i.e. the distant stars (the constellations or fixed stars, not the sun or planets). (15:05) Molecular Biology has progressed since 1944, they show evolution of even one useful individual DNA protein is so unlikely as to be impossible: “It’s easy to see that the total number of possible sequences is immense. It’s easy to believe (although non-chemists must take their colleagues’ word for it) that the subset of USEFUL sequences—sequences that create real, usable proteins—is, in comparison, tiny. But we must know how immense and how tiny. The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20 to the power of 150. In other words, many. 20 to the power of 150 roughly equals 10 to the power of 195, & there are only 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the universe” (Giving up Darwin, David Gelernter). (23:30) New Humanist Paul More’s insight into the "enormous error" of secular humanists was that when the religious impulse is replaced by "mere 'brotherhood of man,' fratricide is not far distant." (24:01) "How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation', with all its malodorous & malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'? Why does the word 'primitive' at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity?" ('De Descriptione Temporum'). See also the 'Poison of Subjectivism' on the use of the word "stagnation". (29:33) For "the nation", I’ve shown a communist board, which is essentially a violent mob which took undemocratic control of the whole Russian nation, but I could have shown a violent mob of any sort. The contrast in the doodle is between a lawless ‘Minority Violent mob’ & a 'Majority Rule Democracy’ & rule of law. (33:33) "For I take it there are two things the imagination loves to do. It loves to embrace its object completely, to take it in at a single glance & see it as something harmonious, symmetrical & self-explanatory. That is the classical imagination: the Parthenon was built for it. It also loves to lose itself in a labyrinth, to surrender to the inextricable [impossible to disentangle]. That is the romantic imagination: the Orlando Furioso was written for it. But Christian Theology does not cater very well for either" ('Is theology Poetry?').
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GCWGyWCLTo