You Tube Theology

Theology videos from YouTube

YouTube video thumbnail
Extra-Long (>70 mins)
Literature
Roman Catholic

Dr. Michael Ward: C.S. Lewis on Reason & Imagination in Science & Religion

Theologian

Michael Ward


Duration

97.37


Uploaded to YouTube

8 April 2013

Added to Database

19 November 2025


YouTube description

Although he was a literary historian, not a scientist or a theologian, C.S. Lewis has much to say of interest regarding the interface between science and religion because of his scholarly study of the sixteenth century and, in particular, of the imaginative effects of the Copernican revolution. He regards science, properly speaking, as a subset of religion. He believes science to be a fundamentally imaginative enterprise. He argues that scientific statements, because they tend to be univocal and strive to be verifiable, are actually rather small statements, all things considered. He argues that there is always a mythology that follows in the wake of science and that both scientists and non-scientists should take care not to put excessive weight on particular scientific metaphors. We should hold our scientific paradigms with a due provisionality, because new evidence may always turn up to overthrow those paradigms. Even the best and most long-lasting paradigm is merely a lens or linguistic stencil laid over reality, not reality itself. This humility in relation to the facts about the physical universe is a virtue similar to the one we should exercise before the mystery of God.