The anti-modern imagination: C. S. Lewis and "The Cosmic Trilogy".

Abstract

This thesis examines how in his essays and fiction C. S. Lewis voiced opposition to a tendency to idolatry of science and scientific method in the modern world. Accused of being against science and scientists, Lewis was actually opposed to misguided thinking in any realm, most especially "thought about nothing," as he muses in "Meditation in a Toolshed". This thesis attempts a reading of the three science fiction texts of The Cosmic Trilogy, focusing on Lewis's arguments against a variety of fashionable "isms", including scientism, developed discursively in his popular and academic essays. Choosing to write in the science fiction genre, enriching the genre with the addition of a spiritual quest, Lewis highlights weaknesses in earlier examples of the genre, and points to the danger to human dignity that arises from unbalanced thinking that reduces human beings to mechanistic ghosts in machines.