1) The Argument from Natural Beauty From early on, Lewis's pessimistic view of nature as "red in tooth and claw" was counterbalanced by the longings stirred within him by nature's beauty.
In Lewis's view, the longings provoked by earthly beauty could not be accounted for by a blind and mechanistic material universe.
They required a transcendent cause outside of nature. This cause was not necessarily personal, but it did go beyond blind matter and energy. As a consequence, it put an intelligent agent back on the table as one of the options for discussion.
2) The Argument from Morality Lewis eventually recognized that the argument from undesign suffered from a critical flaw: If the material universe is all there is, and if human beings are simply the products of that universe, then on what basis can they criticize the universe for being so bad? By judging the universe in this way, human beings are presupposing the existence of a moral standard outside of material nature that can judge nature. But where did this moral standard come from? The existence in every culture of a standard by which the current operations of nature are judged implies the existence of a transcendent moral cause outside of nature.
3) The Argument from Reason Lewis argued that reason cannot be accounted for by an undirected material process of chance and necessity such as natural selection acting on random mutations. If reason could be accounted for in this way, according to Lewis, we would have no reason to trust the conclusions of our minds, including the conclusion that our minds are the products of a material process of chance and necessity. The bottom line for Lewis is that the existence of reason within nature points to a need for reason outside of nature as a transcendent intelligent cause.
4) The Argument from Functional Complexity According to Lewis, "universal evolutionism" has schooled us to think that in nature complicated functional things naturally arise from cruder and less complicated things. Oak trees come from acorns, owls from eggs, and human beings from embryos. But for Lewis this "modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion" that defies the actual data of the natural world. In each of the aforementioned cases, complex living things arose from even more complex living things. Every acorn originally came from an oak tree. Every owl's egg came from an actual owl. Every human embryo required two full-grown adult human beings. by John G. West
In Lewis's view, the longings provoked by earthly beauty could not be accounted for by a blind and mechanistic material universe.
2) The Argument from Morality Lewis eventually recognized that the argument from undesign suffered from a critical flaw: If the material universe is all there is, and if human beings are simply the products of that universe, then on what basis can they criticize the universe for being so bad? By judging the universe in this way, human beings are presupposing the existence of a moral standard outside of material nature that can judge nature. But where did this moral standard come from? The existence in every culture of a standard by which the current operations of nature are judged implies the existence of a transcendent moral cause outside of nature.
3) The Argument from Reason Lewis argued that reason cannot be accounted for by an undirected material process of chance and necessity such as natural selection acting on random mutations. If reason could be accounted for in this way, according to Lewis, we would have no reason to trust the conclusions of our minds, including the conclusion that our minds are the products of a material process of chance and necessity. The bottom line for Lewis is that the existence of reason within nature points to a need for reason outside of nature as a transcendent intelligent cause.
4) The Argument from Functional Complexity According to Lewis, "universal evolutionism" has schooled us to think that in nature complicated functional things naturally arise from cruder and less complicated things. Oak trees come from acorns, owls from eggs, and human beings from embryos. But for Lewis this "modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion" that defies the actual data of the natural world. In each of the aforementioned cases, complex living things arose from even more complex living things. Every acorn originally came from an oak tree. Every owl's egg came from an actual owl. Every human embryo required two full-grown adult human beings. by John G. West
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
