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C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
A fallen power and animal pain
Lewis's prose guess that a fallen spirit corrupted the animal world before man appeared. John Lennox quotes it in his book on Genesis 1.
Romans 8:19-22, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: if animals suffered and died long before humans existed, whose fault was it? Someone got into the workshop before the owner's son came home. Lewis guessed that the rot in nature was older than Adam because a rebel spirit had already been at work. He offered it as a supposition, and said so.
In The Problem of Pain Lewis says animals existed long before men, so carnivorousness is older than humanity. He calls it a reasonable supposition that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or at least the planet, before man came on the scene, and that if such a power exists, as he himself believed, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared.
Romans 8 says creation was subjected to futility and waits to be set free from bondage to decay. Scripture does not say a fallen angel corrupted the animal world. Lennox, quoting Lewis, treats it as one direction to look for the origin of animal pain without claiming to have solved it.
Lewis says it is a sacred story widely believed in the church though never included in the creeds. The application to animal suffering is his.
The text of Scripture gives no mechanism for pre-human animal suffering. Lewis supplies one and labels it a supposition, not doctrine.
Not Lewis claiming certainty. He calls it a supposition and a hypothesis, and says it is not a general explanation of evil.
- Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), ch. 9
- John C. Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World, 10th anniversary ed. (Zondervan Reflective, 2021), ch. 4, quoting Lewis
