Our friend the materialist-reductionist-Darwinian apologist PZ Myers has a very brief and lighthearted post with a cute frog, photographed from below, showing that the little creature has see-through skin. Under the blog title “Circumstances under which I’d never wear any clothes,” PZ remarks, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have transparent skin?”
Interesting.
In the new Discovery Institute Press book Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, John West writes about Lewis’s take on precisely this hypothetical.
Shortly after Lewis had become a Christian, Freud made a cameo appearance in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Lewis’s autobiographical allegory of his intellectual and spiritual journey toward Christianity. In Lewis’s story, the main character John ends up being arrested and flung into a dungeon by a stand-in for Freud named Sigismund Enlightenment (Sigismund was Sigmund Freud’s full first name). The dungeon is overseen by a Giant known as the Spirit of the Age who makes people transparent just by looking at them. As a result, wherever John turns, he sees through his fellow prisoners into their insides. Looking at a woman, he sees through her skull and “into the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins: and lower down the lungs panting like sponges, and the liver, and the intestines like a coil of snakes.” Looking at an old man, John sees the man’s cancer growing inside him. And when John turns his head toward himself, he is horrified to observe the inner workings of his own body. After many days of such torment, John cries out in despair: “I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell for ever.”
The dungeon is the hell of materialistic reductionism, the attempt to reduce every human trait to an irrational basis, all in the name of modern science.
That sort of speaks for itself. No need of explication.