C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner

by Michael Ward

  And then, secondly, I love the fact that he described

  his works of fiction as works of “supposition”—they’re

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  supposals—and that you can think, “Well, what if? What

  if something happened? What if there was another planet

  with different species on it but they were in the same trouble

  as we were and they needed saving?” Or, “What if there are

  talking animals in a medieval forest and they also have a

  king, who’s one of the animals, who is like a dying and rising

  god and you can get to know him in that context?”

  So I love the idea of supposals or supposition, the

  “what if ” side of his stories. All writers are creating other

  worlds, and the “Other” with a capital “O” that he wants you

  to meet in his Other World really is God. I think he does

  that brilliantly in his works of supposition.

  And lastly, another word ending in “-tion.” You’ve had

  translation, supposition, and now imitation: because I think

  it’s Lewis the man that we love, as well as his works, isn’t it?

  We’ve even had films about his life. How many Oxford aca-

  demics have films made about their love lives? [ Laughter]

  It’s not usually that interesting!

  He himself did attempt to imitate Christ: the imitatio

  Christi. He attempted to live like Christ, and we all know that phrase, “What would Jesus do?” Well, I think you can

  often ask yourself, “What would Lewis do, or think, or say?”

  and often you’d be absolutely spot on. So, that’s the third

  “-tion.”

  That leads to my admiration, my inspiration, perhaps

  emulation as well, but can we expect another Lewis? I don’t

  know. Perhaps we will want to talk about that tonight. Per-

  haps it will be someone or something completely different

  to Lewis. Aslan did say to Lucy in Prince Caspian when she was wanting Aslan to come and save them with a big roar in

  exactly the way he had in the first story, he said to her, “Dear

  one, things never happen the same way twice.” So perhaps

  God’s got something very different for us.

  WARD:

  Peter Williams.

  WILLIAMS: Researching my book C. S. Lewis vs. the New Atheists, it struck me that Lewis had been the old-fashioned kind of

  atheist who takes philosophy seriously. As an atheist, Lewis

  rejected the scientism characteristic of modernity. One

  might say that the atheism of Lucretius saved Lewis from

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  part one—symposium

  the positivism of A. J. Ayer. Moreover, Lewis didn’t lurch

  from the mistakes of modernism to the mistakes of post-

  modernism. His love of philosophy produced neither a

  narrow rationalism nor a romantic anti-rationalism, but a

  pre-modern wisdom.

  Lewis knew that Reason requires faith in rational in-

  sight and he recognised the value of empirical facts without

  rejecting the transcendent facts of Truth, Goodness, and

  Beauty.

  Lewis attended to arguments against naturalism and

  for theism. In Mere Christianity he popularised the sort of moral argument for God developed in W. R. Sorley’s Gifford

  lectures on Moral Values and the Idea of God. However, it’s the reasons that Lewis gave for abandoning a naturalistic

  worldview that resonate most incessantly today. It’s not

  only in reading, say, Alvin Plantinga’s anti-naturalism argu-

  ment from evolution that one is reminded of Lewis’ anti-

  naturalistic apologetic in Miracles; it’s frequently in reading non-theistic scholars like Thomas Nagel, Anthony O’Hear,

  or Raymond Tallis.

  One can’t separate Lewis’s philosophy from his fiction.

  His philosophy often uses story to elicit rational insight.

  Consider his “Meditation in a Toolshed.” His fiction fleshes

  out a philosophical skeleton, allowing us to drink in the at-

  mosphere of a philosophy. I particularly enjoy The Abolition

  of Man through That Hideous Strength.

  Lewis teaches us the importance of being nourished

  by a community of scholarship, including voices of dissent

  jointly dedicated to following the argument wherever it

  leads.

  Finally, Lewis helps us transcend the “chronologi-

  cal snobbery” of our own age through the reading of old

  books—not least those by Lewis himself.

  WARD:

  And now, Judith Wolfe.

  WOLFE:

  Thank you. I was struck by something that Richard Dawkins

  said in a recent debate with Rowan Williams at the Sheldo-

  nian Theatre in Oxford. A member of the audience asked

  him what sense he could he make of the senseless tragedy

  of the violent death of a young child? And Richard Dawkins

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  stared at her and said: “I don’t see any problem or tragedy

  here. It might be sad for the mother, but it’s nothing other

  than the workings of evolution.”

  And I think Lewis came to the same conclusion that,

  for the purely evolutionary thinker, there is no problem

  of evil because there is nothing that qualifies as evil. The natural evolutionary order gives us no standards of justice

  or goodness and, therefore, also nothing that can count as

  violating them and therefore constituting evil. And so for

  the purely evolutionary thinker our very deeply human re-

  sponses of outrage or indignation at evil must be written off

  as pure illusions.

  So, when Lewis came to God I think it was not so

  much as a fool-proof answer to the problem of evil, or other

  problems like it, but rather as a reality that accommodated,

  made possible, our feelings in their full range of outrage and

  indignation and so forth; something that made the problem

  of evil, and others like it, possible in the first place.

  And I think that this approach to apologetics, of not

  starting from pre-packaged abstract, nicely arranged, ratio-

  nal arguments but rather from attentiveness to the full-range

  of what makes us human and seeing what view of the world

  can accommodate that, is something that we should emu-

  late as apologists and, indeed, as Christians more generally.

  WARD:

  Thank you all very much. Now to our questions: and the

  first question is one that Canon Vernon White, despite hav-

  ing lost his voice, managed to croak out to me during one

  of the breaks [ Laughter], and it relates to a very important aspect of Lewis’s thought. Perhaps his most serious work of

  apologetics was Miracles: A Preliminary Study, and Canon

  White was asking about what the panel thought of Lewis’s

  argument in Miracles as regards the apologetic value of Reason itself, and how Reason may be understood as relatively

  supernatural to our material organisms and therefore in-

  dicative, perhaps, of something which is fully supernatural.

  So, panel, what do you make of Miracles?

  WOLFE:

  Do the philosophers want to start?

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  part one—symposium

  WILLIAMS:

  It was something that I mentioned in my opening remarks:

  how very contemporary Lewis�
��s discussion of the problems

  of a naturalistic worldview in trying to account for the nature

  of human rationality is. It’s something that’s still very much

  being discussed in philosophical literature today. The most

  recent edition of the world’s biggest circulating philosophy

  of religion journal, Philosophia Christi, for example, had an article in it by a contemporary philosopher defending C. S.

  Lewis’s argument from Miracles and interacting with Alvin

  Plantinga’s similar argument—which he gave a number of

  years ago, in Warrant and Proper Function, where Alvin

  Plantinga specifically footnoted that his argument bore

  some similarities with the argument that Lewis had given.2

  So, it’s still very much alive and, as I say, it’s actually, I

  think, increasingly a point of tension that you can see atheist

  writers recognising within a naturalistic worldview. If you

  read Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos, there

  you see passages that read like, “Good grief! Am I reading

  Miracles by C. S. Lewis?” No, I’m reading a book by an atheist philosopher wrestling with how do I, how can you, put

  Reason into a naturalistic worldview?—and saying in the

  end, “We don’t know how to. I don’t see how to.”

  WOLFE:

  And then indeed he says, “I really hope that God is not the

  answer to this.”

  WILLIAMS:

  “But . . .”

  WOLFE:

  “But I don’t know what else is!”

  WILLIAMS:

  But he’s really struggling to try and find a way of doing it.

  WOLFE:

  Very much so, yes.

  RAMSDEN:

  I remember speaking in an Oxford University college about

  eighteen years ago and the Master of the college had started

  out life in that place as an undergraduate student, done his

  post-graduate degree there, became a lecturer there, went

  up through the ranks, ended up as Master of the college

  2. Cf. Goetz, “The Argument from Reason,” Philosophia Christi 15.1 (2013).

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  33

  and, um, I was speaking in chapel that Sunday evening and

  he happened to be there and it was full and at the end he

  said, “Could you come back to my study for a drink?” So I

  thought, either I’m going to be told off or asked a question.

  Thankfully, it was a question and as he handed me a

  glass of port he simply said, “You know, when I was a young

  academic here we all used to make fun of C. S. Lewis and we

  even had a debate in this college about shutting down the

  chapel because it was obsolete and we thought we should

  convert it into a second library. It would be useful to the

  students who were here.”

  In my sermon one of my points had been from Mir-

  acles and C. S. Lewis’s argument about Reason and how do

  we account for the process of Reason and how can we trust

  Reason itself?

  And then he said to me, “You know, we used to make

  fun of him. But today in the chapel it was filled. There wasn’t

  a single spare seat.” And he said, “If you went into the Senior

  Common Room of my college, every don I know is reading

  a C. S. Lewis book right now.”

  So I think this is one of the remarkable legacies of

  Lewis. We think of people as being “prophetic,” and we often

  use that term in the sense of telling the future. Any good

  Old Testament scholar will tell you, “That’s a minor use of

  the word ‘prophecy.’ Biblically, it’s not about telling the fu-

  ture, it’s about interpreting the times, and I think Lewis was

  able to interpret the times by revealing things as they really

  were and just show naturally where it would go. And I think

  that’s one of the reasons why he’s still so contemporary, and

  why almost any book on apologetics you pick up today is

  almost bound to have a Lewis quote. As a matter of fact,

  maybe someone should write a book on apologetics without

  a Lewis quote in it [ Laughter] and see what would happen.

  I remember to my shame on the Reason question that

  you raise, coming up with this myself one day as a post-

  graduate student with my professor of philosophy, who de-

  scribed himself as a “born again atheist.” We were at 2 a.m.

  and I came up with this argument from Reason and I was

  so impressed with myself and thought, “Wow, I could write

  this up!” And then I realised at about 3 a.m., having finished

  the conversation, that actually Lewis had already said that

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  part one—symposium

  and I just momentarily forgot where he’d put it [ Laughter].

  So, I think that just demonstrates how he gets into your

  mind and imagination, even when you’re not conscious that

  he’s necessarily with you.

  WARD:

  Thank you. Bill Craig?

  CRAIG:

  Well, I would just say that one thing that we need to keep in

  mind with respect to these arguments—and I think this is

  such a perfect illustration—is that contemporary Christian

  philosophy, which is experiencing a tremendous renais-

  sance, stands on Lewis’s shoulders and moves beyond him.

  It’s not as though we should simply read C. S. Lewis as the

  final thought on these arguments. Alvin Plantinga, in par-

  ticular, has developed this evolutionary argument against

  naturalism with a tremendous rigour and precision that

  Lewis didn’t have.

  What Lewis grasped in a kind of rough and ready way,

  Plantinga has developed in a very meticulous and rigorous

  way, to show that, if our cognitive faculties are the product

  of naturalistic evolutionary processes, then we cannot have

  any confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

  But if that’s true, it’s self-defeating, because you can’t have

  any confidence in the reliability of those faculties in telling

  you that naturalism is true or that this argument is correct.

  So, Plantinga says that naturalism has a built-in defeater

  and so cannot be rationally affirmed; and so I would just

  encourage all of us who are studying apologetics not to take

  Lewis as the final word, but to use him as a springboard for

  further reflection, further advancement, in developing these

  arguments.

  SEARS:

  And what I would like to add to that as well is that when

  I read Miracles in my teens, I was reading a book of really quite sophisticated philosophy as a teenager who normally

  would be reading about pop music or rock stars or whatev-

  er, and Lewis was such a brilliant communicator that I was

  absolutely riveted and it felt like the most exciting subject I’d

  ever read. It was great to know that, as a Christian, Reason

  was on my side somehow. Instead of it being “Reason ver-

  sus Faith,” I, as this young tiny Christian, as it were, could

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  actually have Reason on my side when I was relating with

  non-Christians. And so it was a tremendous encourage-

  ment on that level too.

  WARD:

/>   Thank you. All right: from the value of Reason we turn to

  the dangers of Imagination. This is a question from Sarah

  de Nordwall, who describes herself as a poet: “What do we

  have to do to ensure that our imaginations don’t lead us into

  spiritually dangerous places?” Who would like to come in

  on that?

  SEARS:

  Well, I think Lewis was a great believer in intellectual chas-

  tity. I think that’s probably how he would put it. Our minds

  have to be open to God and God’s Spirit, and I think it’s part

  of our daily spiritual discipline, you know, what we open

  our minds to is incredibly important. And I think Lewis

  was a very disciplined person and certainly took this very

  seriously, what he fed his mind on, and so I think he would

  place it in our daily spiritual disciplines, probably, wouldn’t

  he? Because the visual was so important to him: what we

  look at is incredibly important and, of course, it becomes

  part of our brains forever, so we have to be very careful what

  we look at, ensuring that it’s something in line with what

  God would want.

  WARD:

  Yes, in fact he talked about discipline—disciplining his

  imagination—even before he was a theist, let alone a Chris-

  tian. If I myself may make a brief comment on this point: I

  think one of Lewis’s own ways of answering this question

  would be to say that the Imagination needs to be operated

  in consort with the Reason. Imagination that just runs amok

  without any rational control over it is not true Imagination,

  as Lewis understands it; it’s merely the “imaginary.” It has

  no necessary value in itself. It’s just like the muddle of vi-

  sions that floods through our minds at night in our dreams.

  The “organ of meaning,” the Imagination, needs to submit

  its findings to the “natural organ of truth,” Reason, for an

  adjudication to be made about the value of those meanings.

  Are they true? Are they false?

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  part one—symposium

  WOLFE:

  And that, of course, is the substance of his “Great War”

  with Owen Barfield, his good friend, who believed that the

  Imagination could apprehend truth that Reason was not

  capable of reaching. C. S. Lewis made the very clear distinc-

  tion that we heard about earlier this afternoon, that Reason

  is the natural organ of truth, whereas the Imagination is the

  organ of meaning, but the Imagination has to submit to the