“Granted that Reason is prior to matter, I can understand how men should come to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology and for ‘scientific cosmology’ we might read ‘Darwinism’ as world view then not only can I not fit in religion, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”
Clive Staples Lewis
Lewis presupposes here by his use of “reason” the idea that there is a spiritual component to man that cannot be explained and accounted for by those who insist that man is nothing but matter in motion and that matter is all there is. The idea of materialism is the worldview of Scientific cosmology – Darwinism. In point of fact, the consistent Darwinist can not even account for “reason” in their materialistic worldview, as Lewis points out. If, ontologically speaking, man is composed of more than just matter than his rational explanations of the universe and of himself can possibly obtain since man’s reason has reason to believe in a universe that is objective to himself. Without this denial of materialism all of man’s thinking, like all of man’s living is just so much time + chance + circumstance. There is no objective reason for any of it.
Lewis cannot fit materialistic science into a materialistic “Scientific” cosmology because in that cosmology man does not have a mind but only has materialistic brain matter. That brain matter is merely a materialistic organ that secretes thought the way the liver secretes bile. A biochemical organ that merely secretes thought hardly gives one reason to think it is worthy of any serious consideration. One day it might secrete one kind of thought depending upon how the biochemistry of the body is running. The next day it might secrete the exact other types of thought. Brains that are only materialistic cannot give an account of their reality let alone accounts of the Universe.
Without Biblical notions of reason, man is a completely subjective being who is entirely trapped within himself. Without Biblical notions of reason (are there any other types of reasonable reason?) man is left to force in order to organize his world. If man is merely matter in motion and testifies and believes that the objective world cannot be accessed (Hello postmodernism and Critical Race Theory) then inevitably man, if he is consistent, will have to enter into the war of all against all as each man with his thought secreting brains seeks to dominate all other thought secreting brains.
One can see by this quote how we have ended up where we are with social constructs like the theory of “social constructs.” If matter is the whole explanation of man and if monistic man thus is shut up within himself then monistic man’s thought secreting brain can determine for himself whatever he wants himself to be and no one else’s thought secreting brain can deny him his own socially constructed reality.
We have come to the place where we can say along with Shakespeare;
Man’s life “is a tale as told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,. Signifying nothing. ”
