C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a literary scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Raised in Belfast, he abandoned childhood Anglicanism for atheism in adolescence, returning to theism in 1929 and to Christianity in 1931 under the influence of friends including J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. He became the twentieth century's most widely read English-language Christian apologist. His broadcast talks during the Second World War were collected as Mere Christianity (1952), which defends a non-denominational Christian theism via a moral argument from conscience and the famous trilemma concerning Christ's claims. The Problem of Pain (1940) offers a free-will and soul-making theodicy, while Miracles (1947) defends the possibility of supernatural events and includes an argument from reason against naturalism—an argument famously challenged by Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club in 1948, prompting Lewis to revise its third chapter. The Abolition of Man (1943) defends objective value (the "Tao") against subjectivist ethics. Critics including John Beversluis have questioned the rigor of his philosophical arguments and the consistency of his theodicy after the grief recorded in A Grief Observed (1961). Despite professional philosophers' reservations, Lewis remains influential within evangelical and Catholic apologetics, and his fiction—including the Narnia novels and the Ransom trilogy—dramatizes his theological vision.