And then, secondly, I love the fact that he described
his works of fiction as works of “supposition”—they’re
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29
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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31
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).
panel discussion
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,
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
panel discussion
35
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