Argument From Reason - Criticisms

Criticisms

On 2 February 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe read a paper criticizing the third chapter of C.S Lewis's Miracles to the Oxford Socratic Club. Anscombe was a student of Wittgenstein, a student of philosophy but also a convert to Catholicism. At the Socratic Club debate, she argued against Lewis's position: she was not attacking his faith, but the philosophical validity of his argument. Lewis must have accepted the criticisms, since he later rewrote the chapter: changing the title from "Naturalism is Self-Refuting" to the less ambitious "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism."

According to George Sayer, Lewis's friend and biographer, Lewis regarded the debate as a defeat, and felt humiliated by it:

He told me that he had been proved wrong, and that his argument for the existence of God had been demolished. ...The debate had been a humiliating experience, but perhaps it was ultimately good for him. In the past, he had been too proud of his logical ability. Now he was humbled ....'I can never write another book of that sort' he said to me of Miracles. And he never did. He also never wrote another theological book. Reflections on the Psalms is really devotional and literary; Letters to Malcolm is also a devotional book, a series of reflections on prayer, without contentious arguments

Victor Reppert, an American philosopher and proponent of Lewis' argument, has made the case that Sayer misrepresented the events at Anscombe.

Additionally, the Socratic Club did not report such a dramatic and humiliating defeat, merely recording that:

"In general it appeared that Mr. Lewis would have to turn his argument into a rigorous analytic one, if his motion were to stand the test of all the questions put to him."

Anscombe herself did not remember "humiliating" or "defeating" Lewis. She wrote:

The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has those qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness. 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 Bennet remembered any such feelings on Lewis's part... My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis's rethinking and rewriting showed he thought was 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 of the subject-matter -- as an interesting example of the phenomenon called projection. —Elizabeth Anscombe