We Belong Elsewhere

From a short essay by Lewis called 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' expressing a key theme of Lewis' engagement with Naturalism/Atheism/Evolutionism:

Really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable.

For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them.

There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is 'another world,' and that is where we come from.

And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we 'belonged here' we should feel at home here. All that we say about 'Nature red in tooth and claw,' about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic?

If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?

--C. S. Lewis, 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' in Present Concerns (London: Fount, 1986), 78-79 (italics original)