For his part, Lewis warned against the bondage imposed upon humanity when, under the guise of scientific progress, men and women are regarded as “patients.” In Perelandra, the second in his Space Trilogy, we meet Professor Weston, a famous physicist and devotee of the new science. Weston is an advocate of “emergent evolution,” a process by which the human species is “thrusting its way upward and ever upward” toward new heights of achievement. He boasts that his new beliefs have swept away all his old conceptions of our moral obligations to others. “Man in himself is nothing,” he explains. “The
...more
