Page 1 of The Narnia Code

Anybody else catch this fascinating documentary on CS Lewis and the writing of The Chronicles of Narnia. I started off watching this thing thinking it was a late April Fool, but I really got into it.

I just wish I`d recorded it.

J Mark Oates

Watched a few minutes of it when flicking through the channels looked interesting but I dont ever stay with a programme if I have missed the first ten minutes so I will catch the repeat (there is bound to be one). Also I think people see a lot of hidden codes in anything from a book to a painting and in reality there is nothing hidden there, bit like making pictures from clouds :)

Mr Basbat

This item was edited on Friday, 17th April 2009, 14:12

Anyone want to sum up the theory so i dont have to watch it??



It matters not what happens in life, ive met the Mighty Bruce and my life is complete.

It`s all to do with the planets. 8)

Quote:
It`s all to do with the planets


...and Christianity? I didn`t see the documentary but CS Lewis was a highly religious sort. The allegories weren`t hard to spot! (Aslan getting sacrificed and then rising from the dead etc etc).

Apparently, Lewis included multiple layers in the story. Being a Professor of Medieval Literature, he was into stories that were far more intricate than they first appeared. On its most basic level, Narnia is a childrens` story. On its first layer of intricacy, it`s a Christian allegory - very interesting for a man who was until quite late in life a devout atheist. The programme detailed his idyllic childhood until the age of eight when his mother died of cancer and his father shipped him off to one of those Stalagluft style public schools. From there he moved on to a private tutor, a firebrand called The Great Knock who taught him the intricacies of debate. University followed, where he hooked up with fellow writers including Jack Tolkien. The second layer of intricacy comes from his interest in Medieval Cosmology - the view of a fixed, geocentric universe where the Sun and Moon are among the seven planets of the heavens. Each planet had qualities - more astrological than astronomical, and it is these qualities that Lewis used as the basis of each novel in the series (or if you prefer Hollywood-speak franchise).

The programme was mostly about the writing and publication of Michael Ward`s Oxford University Press tome "Planet Narnia", which puts forward the cosmological basis for the stories. It also included some fascinating bits of philosophy about the war between science and faith which really got me thinking. I`ve been sceptical about science for a number of years. I don`t think it has all of the answers, because it`s too narrow a viewpoint.

Frankly, I feel that science is getting as bogged down in dogma as Christianity was pre-Renaissance. There are already unbreakable articles of faith which cannot be overturned, even when they are proved to be insufficient, there are great prophets whose word is written in stone and there are heretics who are hounded out of the scientific community for daring to suggest the great prophets might have been wrong.

I`m always reminded of a line from Men In Black that`s actually based on an 18th Century falsehood, but it still works in spirit: "Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the world was flat. Yesterday, you knew we were alone on this planet. Think what you might know tomorrow." Our world view is based on the information we have today. Are we so arrogant to believe that that information is absolutely correct? The writers of the Old Testament had an oral tradition about the creation of the world as their source of information. Johannes Kepler believed in 1595 that the orbits of the six known planets were based on a progression of geometrical shapes. Writers of modern scientific texts have a theory that the universe was created by a Big Bang. How do we know the most recent theory has any more credence than the earlier ones, when we might find something out a hundred years down the line that will make the Big Bang theory sound like superstition and fantasy?

One of the speakers on the programme (I regret I can`t remember his name, other than he`s a prominent scientist but also a senior member of the Church of England) came up with a lovely line:

You have a kettle boiling. Science tells me that heat is being put into the kettle, which raises the temperature of the water, and when the water reaches a specific temperature, it changes its state from a liquid to a gaseous one. It doesn`t tell me that I`d love a cup of tea and would you like one too?

J Mark Oates

Mark its Posts like yours that make me want to check in to Reviewer every day...:) very interesting and ill make a point of sourcing the documentary....Well done sir

Excellent review of the documentary, Mark.

I`ve just been over to the Mausoleum Club where there`s a similar thread going on. The science brigade are in there, getting very hot under the collar about any ideas of God and it`s absolutely fascinating.

Who`d have thought that science would turn into a religion itself?

Adherents act just like proselytising converts - going out of their way to prove their viewpoint is more valid than anybody else`s and pouring scorn on adherents of other belief systems.

Science has its great prophets - Newton, Einstein etc. whose word cannot be questioned by mere mortals.

There are already heretics in the scientific community, being ostracised for questioning the letter of the faith. ISTR dear old Professor Eric Laithwaite being called a nutcase for asking a few simple physics questions about gyroscopes that got the Newton groupies up in arms and he wound up that nobody in the scientific community would take him seriously.

There`s a lot wrong with the organised religions of the world - which is why I don`t subscribe to any of them but have my own belief system I choose not to share with others. It would be a terrible shame for science, which claims to be above all that kind of nonsense, to become as dogmatised and intractable as the old-fashioned religions.

J Mark Oates