Thursday, November 29, 2007

See I Told You So

In a post I redated from 2005 I wrote: Yeah, and I'll bet Pullman thinks C. S. Lewis went to his room after his exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe and spent three days in a fetal position planning the Chronicles of Narnia.

And in an another interview I hadn't read when I wrote that Pullman said:

But I must come back to what you were saying about Lewis. I don’t think he did set out to evangelise. How many children do we know who have read the Narnia books and didn’t realise they were about Christianity? If he was trying to evangelise, he would have made it jolly clear that Narnia was… He wrote those books at great speed and under great emotional pressure, and I’m inclined to think this began with that famous debate when the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe carved chunks out of him.


OK, nothing about the fetal position. But good heavens these guys are so predictable. Notice, there's nothing about the actual arguments, or the revised chapter, or anything like that. I'm out of author's copies, or I'd send Pullman a copy of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.

I really would like to make the Anscombe Legend "bloody deceased."

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad it is not so easy to find a copy of the Anscombe-Lewis debate. She really did smack him down good in it.
She graciously acknowledge later that Lewis made a serious effort to address her points in his revised argument, but even that effort she found wanting.

Maybe you could have that debate included in any future updates to your book?

Victor Reppert said...

Well, you need the original chapter of Miracles, the critique by Anscombe which is in her book, the reply by Lewis in the digest itself which answers the central points Anscombe makes (published in God in the Dock and in Anscombe's book Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind), the revised chapter and Anscombe's comments on the revision. This seems to have been a garden variety philosophical critique of the kind that happen every day at APA conventions. It looks to me as if Lewis didn't think of the main lines of response until after the debate, (which it really wasn't--there was a paper to which Lewis responded on the spot).

Typically at an APA meeting you get the commentator's comments in advance and have the chance to think over your reply, which is very often written. If Lewis had no idea what the arguments against him would be before he walked in, it is no wonder that Anscombe appeared to have won.

Jim Jordan said...

In ten more years the legend will be that Ms. Anscombe sent little Mr. Lewis crying from the campus to the nearest pub where he renounced God.

Mike Darus said...

In my experience and to my mind, the strength of Lewis' apologetics is strengthening the faith of Christians. I read his books as a Christian and found them very beneficial to strengthen my faith. Some time ago when I listened to the voice recording Victor has linked to, my impression again was that his primary audience was Christians. I don't think I am surprising anyone that Lewis has a significant impact on believers. To take it one more step, perhaps we do him an injustice when we test his apologetics against his its affects on skeptics or atheists. I suggest that this was not his audience. I suggest his primary audience was believers. Narnia does not need to be evaluated by whether it is sufficient to bring an unbeliever to faith in Christ. Narnia does fine as a alegory that is easily understood by the Christian reader.

Victor Reppert said...

Mike: You are falling into a dangerous trap here. It is the hard-line atheist position with respect to all Christian apologetics, Lewis’s included, that it only preaches to the choir, making the choir feel good about what they already believe, but has no cogency with anyone who doesn’t. You’d probably have seen some atheists crowing about what they will take to be a damaging admission by a Christian, or at least they would if I hadn’t spoken first.

Lewis sometimes works to edify believers, but he was also known as the Apostle to the Skeptics. It’s quite true that his arguments probably won’t float with the atheist hard-core, such as Richard Dawkins and the people who post on the Infidels discussion board. I don’t know if anything will have an effect on people like that. Though over time, who knows.

The Argument from Reason is an argument against naturalism, an anti-Christian world-view. If it is not at least true that is provides some reason to give up naturalism and accept some alternative world-view, such as theism or idealism, then it is a bad argument, period.

Anonymous said...

"Well, you need the original chapter of Miracles, the critique by Anscombe which is in her book, the reply by Lewis in the digest itself which answers the central points Anscombe makes (published in God in the Dock and in Anscombe's book Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind), the revised chapter and Anscombe's comments on the revision. This seems to have been a garden variety philosophical critique of the kind that happen every day at APA conventions. It looks to me as if Lewis didn't think of the main lines of response until after the debate, (which it really wasn't--there was a paper to which Lewis responded on the spot). "

It's not really that complicated. Anscombe's "Reply to C.S. Lewis's Argument that 'Naturalism" is Self-Refuting" along with the digest of the discussion and a note by C.S. Lewis can all be found in "Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind." That book also contains Anscombe's appraisal of Lewis' later reworking of the argument.
People really should have a chance to read that material for themselves. Having read it myself, I think Lewis was thoroughly trounced in the discussion. You, apparently, take a different view.

I believe Lewis' pre- and post-debate versions of Miracles are stil widely available. I's surprising that Lewis scholars don't take more effort to make available that selection from Anscombe's book - which is apparently out of print now.

IlĂ­on said...

"... It’s quite true that his arguments probably won’t float with the atheist hard-core, such as Richard Dawkins and the people who post on the Infidels discussion board. I don’t know if anything will have an effect on people like that. Though over time, who knows."

It seems to me that in this regard the best one can humanly hope for is to burst their little bubbles; to rub their noses in the fact that their positions, beliefs, and claims are not ipso facto the only logical and rational positions (or, as they frequently imagine, the very definition of rationality); to force upon them the knowledge that their positions are, in fact, highly illogical and worse than irrational, being anti-rational.

The above is, of course, no road to popularity.

And it doesn't matter how "nicely" one tries to do this; it doesn't matter if one is always deferential to their sensibilities at the one extreme, or blunt at the other. They will hate the message and they will hate the messenger.

Anonymous said...

"It’s quite true that his arguments probably won’t float with the atheist hard-core, such as Richard Dawkins and the people who post on the Infidels discussion board. I don’t know if anything will have an effect on people like that. Though over time, who knows. "

Let's not forget, Anscombe was a devout Catholic. She still thought Lewis' argument was flawed.

One need not ba a hard core atheist in order to reach the same conclusion.

Anonymous said...

If Anscombe is to be believed, the "myth" of Lewis' feeling devastated by the debate is to be laid squarely on his friends' shoulders:

"The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr. Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis' part. The paper that I read is as printed here. My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis' rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends - who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject matter - as an interesting example of the phenomenon called "projection"."