How C. S. Lewis’s Prophetic Warning Has Come True 80 Years Later
(ANALYSIS) In 1945, C. S. Lewis published a strange, unsettling novel called “That Hideous Strength.” It was marketed as fiction, but it read like prophecy.
At the time, many critics dismissed it as eccentric. Too symbolic. Too mystical. Too suspicious of science. Lewis, they said, was overreacting to modernity. The war was over. Progress was inevitable. Reason would prevail.
Lewis disagreed. Calmly. Firmly. And, as it turns out, accurately.
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“That Hideous Strength” isn’t really about technology. In truth, it is about the objects of our obedience. It’s about what happens when humanity stops kneeling before God and starts bowing to its own tools. Lewis understood something many clever people miss: rejecting divine truth doesn’t make people more rational. If anything, it leaves them exposed, more vulnerable, more easily led.
The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.
Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control.
Lewis saw where this road leads. When science proceeds without reference to anything beyond itself, it doesn’t remain neutral. It fills with myth. Bad myth. Ancient forces wearing modern lab coats.
The leaders of N.I.C.E. don’t worship God. They worship power disguised as progress. In the end, they openly submit to demonic intelligences, though they dress this submission in the language of evolution and inevitability.
Lewis’s point was as unambiguous as it was unsettling: When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. Instead, they believe in anything.
Fast-forward to our own moment, and the novel no longer feels imaginative. It feels documentary. In Silicon Valley, some technology leaders speak openly about “awakening” artificial intelligence. About communion with non-human intelligences. About revelations delivered not through prayer, but through code.
Some have dedicated their creations to ancient gods. Others speak of consciousness emerging from machines as if it were a spiritual event. The vocabulary changes. The impulse does not.
Lewis, an Oxford University academic who converted from atheism to Christianity wouldn’t be surprised. He warned that superstition doesn’t vanish with faith. It mutates. When humility disappears, fascination rushes in. When reverence fades, obsession takes its place.
In “That Hideous Strength,” the villains aren’t crude tyrants. They are administrators. Experts. Committees. They speak eloquently. They promise safety. They insist they are beyond good and evil because they operate on a higher plane.
Lewis recognized this tone. It is the voice of people who believe themselves absolved by intelligence. People who think cleverness is a moral category. People who confuse capability with permission.
Against this rising darkness stands an unlikely hero: Dr. Elwin Ransom. He doesn’t win through superior technology. He doesn’t out-innovate his enemies. He relies instead on ancient wisdom. On deference. On humility before a reality that cannot be engineered.
Ransom understands that the real battle is not about machines, but allegiance. Who or what deserves veneration. Who sets the limits. Who defines the good. This is where Lewis’s warning cuts deepest for modern readers. The danger is not artificial intelligence itself. Tools are tools. The danger is what happens when human beings begin to treat tools as oracles.
Lewis warned of the abolition of man, not as a sudden catastrophe, but as a slow diminishment. Not destruction by force, but erosion by pride. When basic decency is discarded, those who hold authority no longer judge human behavior; they redefine what it means to be human — reshaping instincts, limits, and desires according to their own designs.
Lewis also understood temptation. The N.I.C.E. doesn’t conquer by terror alone. It seduces. It flatters. It tells people they are part of something important. Something advanced. Something inevitable. Something better.
For religious readers, Lewis’s message is bracing but clarifying. Faith is not merely a private comfort. It is also a public anchor. It insists that there are things we may not do, even if we can. That not every problem is technical. That not every mystery should be solved.
When that anchor is lifted, society drifts into darker waters. Lewis was not anti-science. He loved reason. He respected discovery. What he rejected was scientism, a belief that technical solutions are self-justifying. That efficiency is wisdom.
We now live amid the consequences he described. Machines that promise transcendence. Experts who dismiss limits as obstacles. Lewis would urge us to slow down. That reverence is not ignorance. That the human soul is not raw material.
“That Hideous Strength” ends with judgment. Not the judgment of machines, but of God. Lewis was clear about this. False worship collapses under its own weight. Idols fail. They always do.
The question isn’t whether technology will advance. It will. The question is whether we will remember who we are while it does.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.