by Dr. U » January 14th, 2008, 4:33 am
I'll vote for Lewis thinking of separate Creations - hence, things can happen in Narnia that don't have to follow the physics of our universe. I.e, as the Dawntreader approaches the Edge of the World, the sun is getting larger, and firebirds fly out of it, to carry a fruit to renew an old star, in the form of an old man on an island!
After reading The Discarded Image, (the last book he himself worked on, published in 1964 shortly after his death), I was profoundly struck by how widely - I mean WIDELY - he read. Although not trained in the natural sciences, he wasn't ignorant of what was going on in them. For example, some of the praise passages of the Oyarsas and Tor and Tinidril and Ransom at the end of Perelandra, and the Sorn's explanation of the physics of the eldila in Out of the Silent Planet, seem to include ideas from physics post-Einstein. The idea of time being relative to Earth or Narnia certainly fits Einstein. At the same time, in his essay "On Science Fiction", in the book of essays On Stories, he stresses that his science fiction is mythopoeic - about the major issues of life - and whatever science and technology is there, is minimal, just enough to provide a credible vehicle to an appropriate setting to explore ideas.
Tom Shippey's great book about Tolkien, The Road to Middle Earth, suggests that Tolkien - and his lifelong friend Lewis - both pondered a lot about how God was working within pagan cultures before Jesus Christ came, sort of pre-Christian partial revelation. Lewis' book Til We Have Faces really explores that idea, but the Narnia Chronicles do, too, although in a more playful way, (which Tolkien did not appreciate, BTW). What if..... 20th Century kids could stumble into a world in which the myths were the physical reality, yet also a world made by the same God and Redeemer of our world?
In the world of the Greeks and Romans, because they understood parallax, they had calculated correctly that the stars were _extremely_ distant, and, as noted in the discussion, everyone who was educated knew that the world had been shown to be round sometime before Christ. However, they also believed the stars were magical, and the planets were special, because they moved among the stars, changing position night-by-night. So, Lewis imagines a God-created universe in which stars and planets are beings and not just space objects, but it doesn't really correspond to our astronomy, b/c it's not our universe at all. And just to REALLY make sure we know it's a different universe, and maybe to have some creative fun, too, he puts Narnia on a flat world!
We'll never know for sure, but I can imagine Lewis might have been thinking of Francis Bacon, the Renaissance author who popularized the birth of modern science. Bacon, a strong Christian believer, put down the old Greeks, stressing that God made the universe the way He thought best, not the way we might suppose He should have. Hence, we have to discover how He chose to create it but studying it directly. So, illustrating God's sovereignty, in the universe of Narnia, God chose to make a flat world and stars that are living beings; in the universe of Charn, all life can be eliminated with one magic word - a universe where magic words are sought the same way physicists in our universe seek to understand the atomic substructure.
I hope my thoughts here add more light than heat to the discussion...