The Thodicy of C.S. Lewis was: Re: [asa] Greg Boyd's Theodicy of Natural Evil

I was curious about the comments about CS Lewis Sci Fi trilogy (havent read that in many years.) So I am going to quote from The Problem of Pain. In order to save time I am focusing on the specific question David had about if anyone had seen views such as Boyd's before, and specifically what is the source of "evil" in sub-human creation.

All of these quotes are from Chapter 9. The words of Lewis are bolded and in quotes.

First he implores us to not make the problem of animal suffering the centre of problem of pain because "...it is outside the range of our knowledge. God has given us data which enable us, in some degree, to understand our own suffereing: He has given us no such data about beasts. We know neither why there were made nor what they are, and everything we say about them is speculative. From the doctrine that God is good we may comfidently deduce that the appearance of reckless divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is an illusion, and the fact that the only suffereing we know at first hand (our own) turns out not be be a cruelty will make it easier to belive this, after that, everything else is guesswork."

In talking about plant species that are in a "ruthless" state of competition that is is not a moral issue because "Life in the biological sense has nothing to do with good and evil until sentience appears."

Regarding the appearence of suffering: "The origin of animal suffereing could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man-the whole world was infected by the uncreating rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before men. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember a certain sacred story which, though never included in the creeds, has been widely believed in the Church and seems to be implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannine uttereances-I mean the story that mans was not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since became apostate and is now the emporor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this world."

So even at this point, Mr Lewis is even admitting that he is speculating, and that there is not universal support for this idea, at least not enough to put it into the creeds. But why should this stop him from putting it into a science fiction novel? But I dont mean to sound so harsh (I actually like his fiction) and up to this point I am not in disagreement.
 

He goes on: "It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general "explanation of evil": it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other."

And there is the rub. He already had mentioned that plants destroying each other is not evil, but it is only evil when it inolves sentient beings. And "How far up the scale such unconscious sentience may extend, I will not even guess. it is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the elephant, and the higher domestic animals, have not, in some degree, a self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality. But at the least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have invented the "sufferers" by the "pathetic fallacy" of reading into the beast a self for which there is no real evidence."

This leads him to an interesting conclusion: "It is, of course, true that the immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced in nature, by an immense birth-rate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought of it as a response to carnivorousness-a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture."

So sex is evil according to CS Lewis, it is just a device of the Devil to keep the universe perpetually in pain.

There is a lot of speculation here as you can see. And some of the conclusions that can be drawn make this idea of Satan as the corruptor of creation a "pathetic fallacy" in my opinion.
 

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Wed Jul 18 08:04:57 2007