An insightful, yet, perhaps satirical, commentary from C.S. Lewis on the theory of evolution:

“Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his [mankind] infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his fate… See him in the last act, thought not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rules the planet-and perhaps more than the planet-for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius.”

He continues:

“If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic [anti-climactic]. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool-all suns will cool-the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and ‘universal darkness covers all.’ The pattern of the myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the patter of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist’s career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin… Such a drama appeals to every part of us.”

                             -C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, (New York, Harper Collins: 2001), 124-5.