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C.S. LEWIS SET OUT TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
by
EUGENE FOSTER
BA Memorial University, 1978
M.Div. Atlantic School of Theology, 1981
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology, Acadia Divinity College,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Master of Arts (Theology)
Acadia Divinity College,
Faculty of Theology
Acadia University
Fall Graduation 2022
© EUGENE BASIL WAYNE FOSTER, 2022
ii
This thesis is dedicated to my wife, Judy, without whose encouragement this project would not
have been started or completed.
Thank you to the Acadia Divinity College professors who persevered with me in the process of
obtaining a degree and successfully defending a thesis.
iii
This thesis by Eugene Foster was defended successfully in an oral examination on 18 March
2022.
The examining committee for the thesis was:
Dr. H. Daniel Zacharias, Chair
Dr. Jonathan R. Wilson, External Examiner
Dr. Spencer Boersma, Internal Examiner
Dr. Christopher Killacky, Supervisor
This thesis is accepted in its present form by Acadia Divinity College, the Faculty of Theology
of Acadia University, as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
(Theology).
Signed documentation by the examination committee is retained by Acadia Divinity College.
iv
The Author retains copyright in this thesis.
Any substantial copying or any other actions that exceed fair dealing
or other exceptions in the Copyright Act
require the permission of the author.
v
Table of contents.
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………… page vi
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………. page 1
A. A brief biography of C.S. Lewis and his conversion……………………………… page 1
B. Methodology……………………………………………………………………… page 6
C. Outline of chapters………………………………………………………………… page 7
Chapter 1. An Overview of the Ontological and Occam’s Rule
in the context of Lewis…………………………………………………………………… page 9
A. Lewis’s argument from desire/Sehnsucht……………………. ………………… page 15
B. Lewis’s use and understanding of the word “probable” in
his argument……………………………………………………………………… page 29
Chapter 2. The Debate among scholars on Lewis’s argument
From desire/Sehnsucht…………………………………………………………………… page 39
A. Those who agree with Lewis……………………………………………………. page 42
B. Those who disagree with Lewis…………………………………………………. page 52
Chapter 3. Analysis of points made in chapter 2…………………………………………. page 58
Chapter 4. Conclusions and contemporary implications of Lewis’s
Argument from desire/Sehnsucht to the wider church community………………………. page 72
A. Is Lewis still relevant and capable of providing
a paradigm for sharing the gospel?........................................................................... page 77
B. Can we still use Lewis and his approach, to guide
People to a knowledge of the existence of God?..................................................... page 82
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. page 89
Questions for further study and research………………………………………………… page 91
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………. page 92
vi
Abstract
This thesis examines the question: Does C. S. Lewis’s argument from longing,
Sehnsucht, support the probable existence of God—an ontological reasoning rooted in Occam’s
rule? C. S. Lewis’s argument for the probable existence of God is presented in his fiction and
non-fiction. It is initiated in the context of his conversion as he expressed it using the word
“longing.” Furthermore, I scrutinized the argument by using the idea of desire in his writings.
In addition to looking at what Lewis stated regarding longing and God’s existence, the
thesis covers historical references to this point of the human quest for God. Subsequently, there
is space given to the ontological argument of St. Anselm and William of Occam’s razor as they
relate to whether God exists or not. In addition, I referred to other theologians who set out to
prove that God exists.
John Beversluis has formulated Lewis’s ideas on the desire for God as the Argument
from Desire. Therefore, a debate on the pros and cons of the Argument from Desire among those
who have written about Lewis.
The existence of God is a topic with a long history, and this thesis sets out to place Lewis
in it. This thesis summarizes a specific subject focusing on Lewis and his longing.
Lewis was evangelistic in his writings. But can Lewis’s arguments still be used to bring
someone to faith in God and a relationship with Jesus Christ?
1
Introduction
A. A brief biography of C. S. Lewis and his conversion
We can obtain C. S. Lewis’s beliefs and the details of his life from his writings. In his diary,
All My Roads Before Me, his letters to Arthur Greeves entitled, They Stand Together, and his
autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he tells the movement from faith in God as a child to atheism
and back to theism and belief in Christ.
His conversion to Christ is the hinge point in his life. Lewis, the atheist, becomes an
evangelist for Christ in addition to his academic responsibilities. In Lewis’ writings, his speaking
on the radio, and to the RAF camps during World War Two, he talked about Jesus, the revelation
of God.
Who was C. S. Lewis? Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898. When a
young boy, Lewis declared he would be called Jack, and friends and family used that name for the
duration of his life. Today the name C. S. Lewis is synonymous with apologetics.
1
Significant
events in Lewis’s life were the loss of his mother at age nine, followed by being shipped off to
boarding school in England. As Lewis relates in Surprised by Joy, boarding school was not a good
experience. By the time Lewis came under the tutelage of the atheist William Kirkpatrick, he had
drifted in his religious convictions. By the end of his teens, Lewis was a confirmed atheist. In a
letter to Arthur Greeves, he set out his position.
1
In apologetic works by authors such as McGrath and Kreeft, Lewis is named as one of the foremost in
the discipline of the 20th century. In Chapter 4 the relationship of apologetics and evangelism will be
explored. Apologists such as Francis Schaeffer and Ravi Zacharias and today Abu Murray see the value
of a credible argument for, for instance, the truth of the Bible. Lewis’s friends Tolkien and Dyson used
apologetics as an evangelism tool that convinced Lewis to believe in Jesus. In a letter to Arthur Greeves,
Lewis said: “…I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in
Christianity…My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.” Walter Hooper
ed, They Stand Together. The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (New York: MacMillan Publishing
Co., Inc. 1979), 425.
2
You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion.
There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint
Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies give them
their proper names are merely man's invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man
found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn't understand—thunder,
pestilence, snakes, etc. What more natural than to suppose that these were animated by
evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by singing songs and making sacrifices
etc. Gradually from being mere nature—spirits these supposed beings were elevated into
more elaborate ideas, such as gods: and when man became more refined, he pretended
that these spirits were good as well as powerful.
2
World War One and the loss of friends and colleagues furthered disillusion of religion and the
idea of God. The phrase “the idea of God” is used because for many years Lewis saw God as an
idea. For Lewis other deities were only human ideas. For several years Lewis was firm in his
atheistic position. Or was Lewis as firm as he thought in his spiritual convictions? In Surprised
by Joy, he makes this admission:
The other feature in Loki Bound (a Norse tragedy that Lewis liked) which may be
worth commenting on is the pessimism. I was at this time living, like so many atheists or
antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also
very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.
3
In addition, the adult Lewis's reading of Christian authors stirred him in ways other non-
Christian writers could not achieve. In referring to Christian authors, Lewis felt they had more
substance. In the Christian authors, he found the longing for joy.
In 1916, George MacDonald’s Phantastes baptized his imagination. Here is the first
mention of the transcendent when he speaks of the bright shadow. He says: “I did not know (and
I am learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of
2
Walter Hooper ed, They Stand Together the Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, (New
York MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc.1979), 135.
3
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Inspirational Press 1994), 64.
3
Andodes. I do now. It was Holiness.”
4
In 1926 he was unsettled when an atheist, Thomas
Weldon, whom he thought impenetrable, raised the question that maybe the gospels were
authentic.
5
Not long after that chat with Weldon, he mentions going up Headington Hill on a bus
and unbuckling the armor he wore in his mind as a defense against God. That day on the bus,
Lewis put God in perspective. His existence is a desire fulfilled, not one that can be met by a
drink, a meal, a sexual experience, or any that a human being meets by something physical or
emotional. Lewis recognizes that needs exist on one hand, and we do not question their
existence. But, on the other hand, since the beginning of human existence, we have been
fulfilling desires by what is available.
6
Without food, drink, or sex, people would have
disappeared long ago, and no one left to remember they were part of the creative picture! We
have needs built into our being. Just as we have physical and emotional needs, we also need the
spiritual. Lewis had a longing because, as a human being, the need for the spiritual is there
whether we recognize it or not. In time Lewis realized that his longing for joy was not just for
joy but for God. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis made this observation that expresses the human
in relation to God. Lewis says:
Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a
true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His
demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were,
a solecism against the grammar of being. I do not deny, of course, that on a certain level
we may speak of the soul’s search for God, and of God as receptive of the soul’s love:
but in the long run the soul’s search for God can only be a mode, or appearance
(Erscheinung) of His search for her since all comes from Him, since every possibility of
4
Ibid., 99.
5
Walter Hooper editor., C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol.1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins
Publishers 2004), 763. According to the footnote on this page Weldon was a Fellow and Tutor at
Magdalen.
6 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,1976), 120.
4
our loving is His gift to us, and since our freedom is only a freedom of better or worse
response.
7
Lewis’s position regarding desire is that God is the giver of the desire that creates the longing for
Him.
We see the same thought expressed in Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity. As a result of his
conversion experience, Lewis knew that spiritual need is real, and food, drink, or sex will not
meet it. In Mere Christianity, Lewis said: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this
world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of
my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that idea did not prove that the universe is a fraud.”
8
It is logical
to conclude that in saying he longed for heaven, he also longs for God in that we think of heaven
as God’s dwelling place. Lewis longed for joy even though he did not realize he was longing for
God. People may posit their theories of what they are longing for, but in the realm of the
transcendent, heaven and God are difficult to think of separately. In Surprised by Joy, he traces
what happened in his life that did not satisfy his desire. However, every time a piece of literature
is placed in his path, or something is said, it pushes him closer to the edge of the ledge described
in Pilgrim’s Regress, and he must dive into the pool and swim.
9
Everything is pushing and
pulling him away from his philosophy of life. To further his use of images, he described it as an
English hunt: “And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack; Plato, Dante,
MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined
7
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1978), 51.
8
Mere Christianity, 120.
9
C. S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
2014), 195.
5
the other side.”
10
The desire was building in him, and he opened to their ideas coming his way.
He felt bombarded, and eventually, as he described his experience on the Headington bus, he
“unbuckled his armor.”
11
And one night in Magdalen College, he knelt and prayed, in his words:
“the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
12
In looking back at what stirred the longing in him, there birthed an argument made by
Lewis in several of his books for desiring God. The argument from longing set in the context of
probable proof for God's existence has been named the Argument from Desire. John Beversluis
coined the term Argument from Desire.
13
The focus of this thesis is on Lewis. Can the Argument
from Desire be used as proof of the existence of God? There will be a study of how Lewis used
the word “probable” in his arguments. There will be an examination of how Lewis used terms
that initiated this idea in the mind of John Beversluis. Through his books, Lewis expressed desire
for God, and this will be shown in Chapter One.
10
Surprised by Joy, 123.
11
Ibid., 123.
12
Ibid., 125.
13
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis, and the Search for Rational Religion (Amherst, New York:
Promethus Books, 2007).
6
B. Methodology
I will analyze Lewis’s autobiography and other primary sources to show how he believed
in the Argument from Desire as probable proof of the existence of God. Lewis’s opinions will be
the initial study on God’s existence. Review of secondary sources: biographies of C. S. Lewis
and critical analysis of his writings have determined that there are scholarly viewpoints that
agree and disagree with his opinions on desire/Sehnsucht.
Consequently, this thesis will focus on Lewis’s Argument from Desire, the existence of
God, and the reception those ideas garnered in the scholarly world for and against them. As in
Occam's rule, I will scrutinize Lewis and his argument for their ontological worth. This historical
context will provide a paradigm to analyze the value of Lewis’s ideas.
I will examine Lewi’s thoughts on God’s existence in a historical context. Does Lewis
command attention because he is part of the historical quest to prove by some formula, theory, or
argument that God exists?
Furthermore, by examining Lewis’s statements on longing and desire/Sehnsucht, this
thesis will determine whether Lewis’s apologetic approach to the existence of God has
contemporary evangelistic applications.
7
C. Outline of chapters
The introduction will give background to Lewis’s perception that longing played a vital
part in his faith journey. It will portray the incidents that stand out in his life as signposts to joy.
14
Lewis felt that God was pursuing him. A short biography of Lewis will serve as a foundation for
his faith journey. He proclaimed desire as part of his personal history. Because desire gradually
awakened Lewis's belief in God, he postulates it as probable proof of God's existence. God’s
existence undergirds Christianity.
Chapter one will use the foundation analogy to give some tensile strength to the
following ideas. As we grasp the concepts of ontological and Occam's rule, we can better
understand how they relate to Lewis’s ideas. Also, it gives a place in the historical development
of philosophical concepts for Lewis. Lewis will not come across as one on a personal
philosophical tangent as he speaks about desire and a probable argument for the existence of
God. Those who promulgated the idea of God maintained, ontologically, that he must exist by
process of elimination of all that was lesser, leaving God as the only candidate for their beliefs.
Chapter two will show that Lewis’s ideas are not above reproach but debatable. Can we
use Lewis’s ideas for the existence of God or are there limitations? Lewis like any person is
limited to what his mind can facilitate in talking about God. This chapter will discuss that while
there is great respect for Lewis among scholars, there is room for debate over some of his well-
known statements. This debate will be in the shape of a round table discussion among those who
agree and disagree. It will also place Lewis’s thoughts on God’s existence in a historical context.
Chapter three begins with a critical evaluation of Lewis’s scholarly contributions looked
at in the previous chapter. I will then analyze the points in chapter two for authenticity. Finally, I
14
Surprised by Joy, 130.
8
will consider the argument for points of agreement and disagreement. The arguments for and
against Lewis’s ideas are put forth even by those who agree and disagree with him. It is a good
discussion on one well respected, but not above critical analysis. It will be like going into another
room and reflecting on the validity of claims about Lewis and the understanding of God’s
existence.
Chapter four will consider how Lewis’s ideas remain a means of effective witness about
God and his existence that can be useful to share with an unbeliever. I will examine his
apologetic method with reference to Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics. After reading Lewis’s
works and debating his ideas, one must reflect on the benefit of using his apologetic approach.
9
Chapter 1
An Overview of the Ontological Argument and Occam's Rule in the Context of C. S. Lewis
To grasp the importance of what C. S. Lewis was espousing in his references to the
existence of God, we will travel back in history and look at two writers who put forth positions
concerning God's existence. There are two basic arguments from history for the existence of God
that this thesis will examine in relation to Lewis. The Ontological argument and Occam’s rule
are background to the approach taken by Lewis about God’s existence. Lewis referred to the
ontological and there are at least two references later in the thesis. He did not refer to Occam.
First, St. Anslem’s ontological argument was one of the original proofs substantiating God’s
existence. St. Anselm was a Benedictine monk who lived from 1033 to 1109. He held various
positions in church life, including Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm made the concise
statement that “For God is that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought.”
15
God, in this
context, is the ultimate of what a person can think about at any time. Therefore, if we can
conclude that our ideas cannot conceive a more significant concept than God, we have arrived at
proof that God’s existence is a reality. According to Anselm’s ontological argument: “Whoever
understands this understands clearly that this same being so exists that not even in thought can it
not exist. Thus, whoever understands that God exists in such a way cannot think of Him not
existing.”
16
A summary of the ontological argument by William Lane Craig is helpful:
The ontological argument attempts to prove from the very concept of God that God
exists: if God is conceivable, then he must actually exist. This argument was formulated
15
Anselm of Canterbury, “Proslogion,” The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 89.
16
Ibid., 89.
10
by Anselm and defended by Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and in modern times,
Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and Alvin Plantinga, and others.
17
We see in this list of philosophers that Anslem’s idea has not been lost but repudiated by their
defense of it. Anselm did not have an idea that only he held as reasonable. Historically,
philosophers and theologians have seen value in what Anselm had proposed.
William Lane Craig set out to clarify Anselm in these words: “…if God existed only in
mind, then something greater than him could be conceived, namely, his existing not only in mind
but in reality, as well. But God is the greatest conceivable being. Hence, he must exist not merely
in mind but in reality, as well. Therefore, God exists.”
18
The ontological is an argument that not
everyone sees as substantial. Peter Kreeft, in a chapter entitled the “Twenty Arguments for the
Existence of God,” is emphatic: “Another (the ontological argument) we regard as fundamentally
flawed.”
19
Kreeft is not alone in his thought. Anthony Kenny made a sweeping statement about
how the greater theological body views the ontological argument: “Almost no one considers this
argument valid, but hardly two people agree exactly where it goes wrong, and the discussion of it
has frequently led to valuable philosophical insights.”
20
So, we are inheritors of the argument on
the existence of God. Despite the disagreement, the ontological is still part of the discussion on
17
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton: Crossway,
2008), 95.
18
Ibid., 95.
19
Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove: IVP
Academic, 1994), 49. Kreeft keeps the argument in his list like a gracious gesture that there is hope it may
with time and examination redeem itself.
20
Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (London:
Rutledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 3.
11
God's existence. We can see others, such as William R. O’ Connor using the ontological as proof
for God’s existence.
From Lewis’s point of view, God was the ultimate source of his longing, and that need
was fulfilled when he gave in to God's pursuit of him. Lewis gives the impression that he had no
other choice: but that he was up against the ultimate idea and so could go nowhere else and to no
one else. The word “idea” is used in the context of our mind thinking of the existence of
something or someone and in this case of God. The phrase “God as idea” is not used in the
remainder of the thesis because God exists and is not just an idea in someone’s mind. God is,
whether we believe it or not. For Lewis, God was God, and all other treasured ideas did not add
up to the same substantiality. Lewis had many ideas on myths and deities, but he had to conclude
that God was greater than all of them. God was not just an idea thought up to deal with our
spirituality. At that moment, the transcendent had taken over Lewis. He had reached the highest
possible thought.
Alister McGrath quotes Austin Farrer: “Lewis makes us think we are listening to an
argument, when in reality we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries
conviction.”
21
In that context, an abductive and deductive approach to reasoning led him to his
conversion. Abductive in that after his late-night chat with Dyson and Tolkien, he saw Jesus as
the true myth. Deductive in that God was the source of his longing and the only means of
satisfying it. In talking about God, Lewis presents his thoughts with conviction, coming from the
depth of his spiritual being. Lewis had, in his longing, found something awesome. Nothing of the
21
Alister McGrath, Mere Discipleship Growing in Wisdom and Hope (Grand Rapids: Baker
Books 2018), 89.
12
ordinary things of life, whether northern myths or the good feeling of an autumn day, could
compare with his relationship with God.
Lewis describes his conversion to theism in terms of surrender to one who had been
pursuing him. In fact, at one point, Lewis used the picture of the English hunt in which all the
Christian authors and all his Christian friends are hunting him down. He described His
conversion: “That which I had greatly feared had at last come upon me. Finally, in the Trinity
term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the
most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”
22
Lewis gives the impression he had no
other choice; he was up against what Anselm referred to as the greatest thought and could think
of going nowhere else or to no one else. For Lewis, God was God. Here the desire that had been
a focus of his life came to fulfillment when he entered a relationship with God. Lewis had been
taken over by one whom he described as out of this world. In Surprised by Joy, he conveys his
uplifted thoughts: “On the other hand, while it is true to say that God’s own nature is the real
sanction of His commands, yet to understand this must, in the end, lead us to the conclusion that
union with that Nature is bliss and separation from it horror. Thus, Heaven and Hell come in.”
23
“This is not a ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up of them all.”
24
Descartes
would concur with Lewis. Descartes said: “For it is not in my power to think of God without
existence (that is, a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection) though it is in my
power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.”
25
22
Surprised by Joy, 123, 125.
23
Ibid., 127.
24
Ibid., 129.
25
John Hick ed., The Existence of God (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1964), 35.
13
Second. Occam's rule/razor states that one shaves away all unnecessary baggage from an
idea until the core thought remains in what may seem the opposite of the ontological. “His
‘razor’ eliminated all hypotheses which were not essential.”
26
Robert Clouse wrote: “Involved in
his explanation of reality is his view that ‘What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in
vain with more.’”
27
William of Occam, who lived from 1280 to 1349, is credited with the razor
concept. A. Vos wrote: “Occam insists that only propositions in the mode of possibility can be
necessary.”
28
In Occam’s reasoning, the existence of God is a given if we consider His
transcendence over all else. Roger Olsen wrote: “Occam believed that only one truth about God
can be exclusively established by reason alone, and that is that God exists.”
29
With God’s
existence comes His will to do whatever He wants to. Olson says in reference to the thought of
Occam: “God does not command certain things because they are good. Certain things are good
simply because God commands them.”
30
Occam’s rule can appear as the reverse of the
ontological. The ontological about theology reflects on the greatest idea and settles on the
conclusion that it must be God. Ontology is used in any number of areas. In this thesis, ontology
is used in reference to theology. Occam reasoned toward the simplest: we shave away all lesser
26
Alister McGrath, Christian Theology an Introduction 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Ltd, 1997), 46.
27
Robert Clouse “William of Ockham (c.1280-c.1349) “In J.D. Douglas, The New International
Dictionary of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 1050.
28
Martin Davie, Tim Grass, Stephen R. Holmes, John McDowell and T.A. Noble eds, New
Dictionary of Theology. Historical and Systematic (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 961.
29
Roger Olsen, The Story of Christian Theology. Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 354.
30
Ibid., 354.
14
ideas until all we have left is the conclusion: God. Both ideas arrive at the same destination: the
existence of God.
I will explore the ontological argument and Occam’s rule in the context of Lewis and his
Argument from Desire. I will place Lewis at the historical round table of discussion on God’s
existence and ascertain whether Lewis’s ideas are relevant in the spectrum of historical and
current theology on God's existence.
15
A. Lewis’s Argument from Desire/Sehnsucht
The words “desire” and “longing” are unique when applied to the Christian faith. Lewis’s
writings reflect his faith and how he expressed belief in the same. In the context of Lewis's
conversion, desire and longing was described as a “hinge” point in his life: atheism to
Christianity. Lewis even used the image of a door to describe his conversion to theism.
31
There
is in the two terms a contrast because one is about not believing, or believing in not believing, to
believing in someone that before they didn't believe existed. William Griffiths quotes Lewis:
“Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, the element of truth in the old
beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly.” He continues by saying
Lewis used a phrase of Bunyan “…I did desire deliverance.”
32
Lewis was descriptive of his
experience as his old beliefs were dislodged from atheism. In Surprised by Joy, he talks of being
“…off once more into the land of longing, my heart broken and exulted as it had never been
since the days at Bookham.”
33
Lewis used desire/longing as an argument for belief in God. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis
relates how longing had been initiated in him from the time his brother, Warren, showed him the
biscuit tin garden.
34
Also, the quest for joy had been a desire that was only met in his conversion.
In Mere Christianity, when he talks of desire, it is in terms of the human longing being met apart
31
Surprised by Joy, 125. Lewis talks of being like the prodigal of Luke ch.15. Lewis, however,
differs from the prodigal who walked home in his own strength whereas Lewis felt he had to be pulled in
through the gates kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a way of escape.
32
William Griffen, Clive Staples Lewis a Dramatic Life (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986),
59.
33
Surprised by Joy, 119.
34
Often when longing is mentioned, in reference to C.S. Lewis, the toy garden of moss and twigs
is referenced. The biscuit tin garden touched a chord of joy in Lewis.
16
from our physical or emotional needs.
35
If we believe in God because we desire Him, and He in
all descriptions and revelations is the only one who will satisfy our desire, He exists. The desire
stems from the innate spiritual part of us, just as the physical and emotional must have a source
of fulfillment. In the case of God, the spiritual is not a cold stone statue, but a real living
personality as portrayed in the Bible. When we yield to the personality of God, there is a longing
fulfilled because we are affected in a way that we cannot be by any other human being. In Mere
Christianity, Lewis maintained that God was beyond personality. Lewis was stating that God
was beyond personality in the human sense. However, God is a living being and not just a
doctrine. Lewis endeavoured to point out that God is great enough to deal with us and our
spiritual needs. The longing was not a far-fetched idea to Lewis but defined how he argued for
God’s existence. In recognizing the source of the longing, Lewis concluded the probability of
God’s existence.
In a letter dated Feb. 15, 1946, Lewis mentions how Bishop George Berkeley’s
philosophy was influential in bringing him back to Christianity. In Berkeley’s thought,
something exists because I exist and can verify its existence.
36
C. S. Lewis maintained that since
there was a desire in us that only God can meet, the object of that desire exists. Berkeley and
Lewis are different: Berkeley gives the impression that it is all about the person and their
perceptions; Lewis, however, fields the idea that the desire does not come from within but has an
outside source. Berkeley believed that only what we perceive exists. We could understand, on
these terms, that a mountain was not there until we came around a turn in the road and saw it. Is
35
Mere Christianity, 120.
36
J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982), 69-70.
17
it enough to argue God exists because we are thinking of Him rather than He thinking of us?
Berkeley also argues that material objects continue to exist when not perceived by us because
they are the objects of the thought of God.
37
Therefore, Mackie reasoned: “None of Berkeley’s
arguments against materialism is conclusive. Materialism, then, is at least a rival hypothesis to
Berkeley’s theism, an alternative explanation to our basic situation of having experiences with
certain content.”
38
In looking further at materialism, we must consider that in Mere Christianity, Lewis said,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable
explanation is that I was made for another world.”
39
Desire is not an isolated word by Lewis but
a significant theme in his writings. Lewis works on the principle that desire, whether for food or
drink, is not our idea but built into us for survival. If we had not ascertained that food and drink
are a need for survival, would we have lasted long enough to figure it out? Hence, we can
ascertain that our desire for God is not something we developed as in the idea of the character in
a novel looking for the novelist. Lewis said: “If Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must
be Shakespeare’s doing.”
40
Lewis maintained this idea of desire concerning God’s existence. We
desire God but may not realize it as we look in every direction but to Him. Lewis reasoned the
pursuit of joy was the answer to his longing. However, in time, as he says at the end of Surprised
by Joy, he realized that joy was a signpost setting him in the right direction toward God. William
R. O’Connor commented:
37
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Vol.1, 703.
38
Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, 74.
39
Mere Christianity, 120.
40
Surprised by Joy, 124.
18
The presence of this natural desire whose point of departure is the knowledge that
God exists does not imply that it must be satisfied, nor does it mean that the vision of
God is the natural end of the created intellect. To have an inexhaustible craving for
knowledge and truth are natural; to have this craving satisfied completely and finally is
not natural but supernatural.
41
Lewis believed in the supernatural. Lewis eventually realized that God was transcendent to all
that we see as natural, and he concluded however:
And nothing in all literature was just like this. Myths were not like it in one way.
Histories were not like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was
like the person it depicted: as real, as recognisable, through all the depth of time…yet
also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god…then not a god, but God.
42
In a letter to his brother, Warren, he wrote: “… it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some
minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness
and beauty, beyond their resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God.”
43
In his sermon “The Weight of Glory”, Lewis continues the theme as he talks of the
desired basics of life, such as bread. Lewis reasons that if there is a means to satisfy the physical
side, there also must be ways to satisfy the spiritual side. Lewis concludes that his concept of
desire has a logical outworking in our minds. He keeps this idea moving through his message in
such statements as: “In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for
Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it is a pretty good indication that such a thing exists
41
William R. O’Connor, The Natural Desire for God (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1948), 75. O’Connor is maintaining that another human being cannot fulfill the longing that is created by
this desire. He would agree with Lewis that God is the end of the quest of which he has been the initiator.
42
Surprised by Joy, 129.
43
Walter Hooper editor., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Vol.11 Books, Broadcasts, and the
War 1931-1949 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2004), 7.
19
and that some men will.”
44
Earlier in his sermon, he pointed out that desire is not something we
invent or devise but an expectation God has on us. Therefore, God is not surprised by our desires
but could be disappointed that they are so small.
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the
staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels it would seem that our
Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures,
fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us,
like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because
he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea.
We are far too easily pleased.
45
Lewis, in that sermon, used many words to convey the sense of longing, such as: “the scent of a
flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have
not visited, the need to awaken from the evil enchantment of worldliness, lifelong nostalgia, to
be on the inside of the door.”
46
Lewis posits that desire is an act of God to draw us to Himself
because there are stirrings of thought and feeling in us that we cannot identify by our natural
state. God is trying to take us out of our tight enclosure of life and widen our perceptions. There
are other things to hear, smell, and experience. In this context, Lewis talks of this longing for
something more. He wants the transcendent in his life rather than just what he can touch, taste
and smell. It is like someone reading a travel brochure of another country and becoming so
stirred by customs that they want to go and experience them. We want to be somewhere else and
learn about something else. The brochure does not satisfy the longing to travel. The longing
would be satisfied if we took a trip.
44
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 32-33.
45
Ibid., 26.
46
Ibid., 31, 42.
20
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis portrays God as the creator of desires. God
is pursuing Lewis throughout his life, creating longing and desire in him for something more
than what he believes or feels. Lewis described how God pursued him and presented this
alternative to his life. He says:
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself
in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his
reading. There are traps everywhere — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as
Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
47
God creates in Lewis a discontent with life as presently lived and a desire for something more
from it. The idea of discontent with life is present in his diary, All My Roads Before Me, where
he writes: “It was a morning of bright sunlight and wind. The church between two cliffs is
certainly beautiful: though the glaring ugliness of the gravestone—crosses, the scrolls, and the
female angels—rather spoils it.”
48
Did he feel the morning spoiled by the crosses and angels that
reminded him of faith in God and the idea that we cannot escape it? Lewis wrote as if he couldn't
entirely escape the desire that pursued him. He felt that the good things in life, the moments that
moved him emotionally, were pointing to something more profound than their bare selves. The
feelings were awakening thought of the numinous, of something other and outer. Lewis could not
enjoy the weather or some book he was reading without feeling that they were part of a message
from another source outside themselves. Doug Gresham described Lewis: “He fought against the
slowly rising tide of awareness that finally reached up and filled him with the realization that
47
Surprised by Joy, 105-106.
48
C. S. Lewis, All My Roads Before Me the Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-1927 (New York: Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1992), 308.
21
God was God and that he, Jack, was a mere man.”
49
We could observe Lewis’s longing for God
and wanting to remain far from him simultaneously. God was necessary, but in being so, he was
the highest idea to deal with the longing.
That sense of longing carried Lewis through the First World War to Oxford University,
graduating with firsts in philosophy, history, and English. Yet, we read that he still yearned for
something more. He was hired as a lecturer and settled into the life of Magdalen College.
However, Lewis reports that through this time, all was not well with his soul. A desire for
something more stirred in Lewis and it could not be dismissed as a mere fantasy.
50
In C.S. Lewis
Images of His World, we read:
Once he had joked at the idea of Satan and hell; now, he came to a deep conviction of
their reality. At the same time, his conception of heaven was growing more real. He
concluded that man’s lifelong yearning is Joy and that all earthly joys are faint shadows
of the great Joy arising from the total confession of Jesus Christ as the lodestone of one’s
heart.
51
In The Pilgrims Regress, Lewis writes of pictures of an island that creates desire.
What is universal is not the particular picture, but the arrival of some
message, not perfectly intelligible, which wakes this desire and sets men
longing for something East or West of the world; something possessed, if
at all, only in the act of desiring it and lost so quickly that the craving itself
becomes craved; something that tends inevitably to be confused with common or
with vile satisfactions lying close to hand, yet which is able, if any man
faithfully live through the dialectic of successive births, to lead him at last where
true joys are to be found.
52
49
Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life (Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2005), 85.
50
Surprised by Joy, 125. Lewis wrote: “You must picture me alone in my room in Magdalen,
night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted for even one second from my work, the steady,
unrelenting approach of Him I so earnestly desired not to meet.”
51
Douglas Gilbert & Clyde S. Kirby, C. S. Lewis Images of His World (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 19.
52
The Pilgrim’s Regress, 177.
22
The statement above supports the idea that God has created a desire in us that only He can fulfill.
Therefore, we must have God, and if He creates the desire in us, the probability of his existence
is not a question. Lewis expressed this in his allegory now that he knew the source of his desire.
Clyde Kilby maintained: “More successfully than any other of Lewis's books, even
Surprised by Joy, it [Pilgrim's Regress] clarifies his meaning of Sehnsucht or the longing which
haunts every man and entices him toward God.”
53
Again, this further proves Lewis's
proclamation that God exists and that we can know Him. For Lewis, it was evident that the
longing is not isolated from the one who can satisfy it.
Sehnsucht was another term used by Lewis in describing this longing, a desire satisfied in
knowing God. In a letter to Corbin Scott, Lewis said:
First appearance of Sehnsucht? I don't know. I think it is there in bits of the
Odyssey, in Pindar, in some of the choruses of Euripides, in Lucretius’ bit about
the home of the gods. The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer Poets have said more
about it than philosophers.
54
To further grasp the significance of the term Sehnsucht, one can look back to how Lewis referred
to it in his life, as mentioned by Alan Jacobs in The Narnian. Jacobs says of Lewis that he is
thinking of the “Blue Flower,” from German Romantic writer Fredrich von Hardenberg. In his
novel, the protagonist is obsessed with a vision of a blue flower. He “yearns” or “longs” (sehn)
for the flower—and yet nothing that he grasps seems so desirable as that longing itself.
55
In the
53
Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964),
36.
54
Walter Hooper editor., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol.3, Narnia, Cambridge, and
Joy,1950-1963 (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2007), 995-996.
55
Alan Jacobs, The Narnian the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper
Collins, 2005), 41. Jacobs explains it in this way: “This is the paradox of Sehnsucht: that though it could
in one sense be described as a negative experience, in that it focuses on something one cannot possess and
23
novel, Till We Have Faces, Corbin Scott Carnell pointed out that there is the only incident when
Lewis refers to Sehnsucht as a person.
56
Otherwise, he associates it with longing and the pursuit
of joy.
Lewis’s biographers readily refer to the longing that existed in Lewis that so propelled
him toward God. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper knew Lewis personally and so, in
looking at that critical point in his life, observed that even joy, he now saw, was not an end but a
reminder or pointer to something else. “Alas—something far more desirable than the sensation
and images accompanying Joy. He went on to see that, in experiencing Joy, we yearn for that
Absolute—his name for God—besides which we are mere ‘appearances’.”
57
They point out that
longing propelled Lewis and kept him looking and thinking about God. Owen Barfield, a close
friend of Lewis, described longing as a primary element throughout Lewis’s life, forming the
link between his early poems and the matured Christian philosophy of his final years.
58
Lyle Dorset said that the Holy Spirit put a longing in his heart and pursued him until he
fully surrendered in the autumn of 1931.
59
The Holy Spirit created the longing much the same as
cannot reach, it is nevertheless intensely seductive. One cannot say it is exactly pleasurable—there is a
kind of ache in the sense of unattainability that always accompanies longing—and yet, as Lewis puts it,
the quality of the experience ‘is that of an unsatisfied desire which is more desirable than any other
satisfaction.’ Therefore, it is called Joy: because the word longing fails to convey the desirability of the
feeling itself. No one, presumably, wants to be in a state of longing, but anyone would want to experience
Joy.”
56
Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), 116.
57
Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis A Biography (Glasgow: Collins. Fount
paperback, 1979), 102.
58
Owen Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press,
1989), 56.
59
Lyle Dorset, Seeking the Secret Place. The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids:
Brazos Press, 2004), 36.
24
we would use the idea of conviction of sin in a person's life. There was an uneasiness in Lewis
that sought fulfillment. Lewis, in finding God, found what had been elusive in all the other
places he had looked. God had put the desire for Himself in Lewis. Lewis had to realize God was
the source of the desire and give in to Him. It was not so much Lewis finding God as giving in to
the one pursuing him. As a result, Lewis describes the steps leading to his conversion as a chess
game and, eventually, God does a checkmate! So much in his life had created the longing, but
nothing was satisfying it. Alan Jacobs sees the longing theme running through much of what
Lewis wrote that speaks to us of our wanting something in life whether we think we like it or not,
but like Lewis, we find that if we search long enough, it culminates in God.
60
More recent
biographers have focused on longing as pertinent to Lewis's conversion. Alister McGrath talks of
the longing, “…which is central to the Christian apologetic he would develop further in his
wartime broadcasts….”
61
Joel Heck writes much about longing as he describes moment by
moment, year by year, the progress of Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity.
62
In
reflecting on Lewis's longing, Corbin Scott Carnell called his effort the study of an attitude.
63
Lewis’s longing/desire was an attitude drawing him toward God. In reflecting on that
point, David Benner, in writing about Christian conversion, says:
The search for happiness is a spiritual search. It is a longing for all there
is to life, for the fullness of life and fullness of personhood. It is a longing born
in the deep call from within to live life on a higher plane. The call is a call to self
-transcendence. Happiness was never meant to be found in things. Ultimately,
60
Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 313.
61
Alister McGrath, Eccentric Genius. Reluctant Prophet. C. S. Lewis a Life (Carol Stream:
Tyndale, 2013), 173.
62
Joel Heck, From Atheism to Christianity (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2017),
118, 186, 193-194.
63
Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality, 13.
25
the call of happiness is a call to the joy of life found in an intimate relationship
with God.
64
The search for happiness is not just Benner’s idea. In other writers/theologians such as Gordon
Smith, the theme of longing is part of the process that leads to conversion.
65
It is not logical to expect to find the satisfaction of the spiritual in what is physical or
emotional. Therefore, the desire for some spiritual being must include the thought of God.
Therein is a necessity in the concept of the highest idea, but if no other ideas can come close to
it, the probability of God is real. Lewis argued where one would get such an idea if the idea did
not exist or the being behind the idea did not exist. We cannot conceive of God as being and not
being simultaneously. As much as God is, it is not logical to think there is no desire for Him. The
desire for God does not point to one who does not exist; therefore, there is a deduction factor in
the argument. The deduction factor would argue that we could not have a hunger for food if such
a thing did not exist. Therefore, if we had no desire for God, we could reason away his existence.
Nevertheless, God exists. In our unbelief as humans, we assert that for us, He does not
exist. However, our unbelief does not preclude God existing for us. However, Lewis reasoned:
“An ordinary simple Christian kneels to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God.
But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to
speak, inside him.”
66
“… God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach.
64
David Benner, Psychotherapy, and the Spiritual Quest (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989),
139.
65
Gordon Smith, Beginning Well Christian Conversion and Authentic Transformation (Downers
Grove: IV Press, 2001), 170. “Almost inevitably, if we fail to find our joy as satisfaction in God, we will
seek it elsewhere: in material or sensual pleasure, in the exercise pf power and control, or in the pursuit of
honor and recognition. This is what makes joy, as the reorientation of our deepest desires toward God, so
crucial to an authentic conversion.”
66
Mere Christianity, 142.
26
God is also the thing inside him that pushes him on—the motive power.”
67
The necessary and the
probable come together at that moment.
Necessity and probability were two sides of the argument for Lewis. The fact that there
was necessity pointed to the existence of want, as in food. However, the fact that we want food
means we are dealing with the probability of food’s existence. Probability for Lewis was not a
word used as one guessing something but a way to express certainty. We often use the word
theory as a way of saying what we think of as an actuality. Lewis’s probability was his reasoned
conclusion about food and God. Lewis had a desire for one who, even though transcendent in his
thoughts, as a mortal, had an existence, by reason of those thoughts occurring in the first place.
That doesn’t mean Lewis thought God into existence, instead it points back to Lewis’s
observation that the desire for God originates with Him.
God is more than a figment of a person’s imagination that must exist because whence
comes this desire for God if there is no such thing as God? Or, at a minimum, we can argue there
is no such thing as a spiritual side to us; therefore, we do not have spiritual desires. Nevertheless,
we have spiritual desires; consequently, it is logical to think God exists. Thus, J. L. Mackie
referred to Descartes’ idea that it is impossible to think of God, a supremely perfect being, as
lacking existence, just as it is impossible to conceive a mountain without a valley.
68
(As an
atheist, he inadvertently uses proof for the existence of God!) Just as a mountain cannot exist
without the valley, a desire does not logically follow if there is no means of fulfilling it.
Therefore, it is logical to think we will desire something if it exists in our thoughts.
67
Ibid., 143.
68
Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, 42.
27
There is a universal desire for the spiritual that Judeo-Christians distinguish as God.
Moreover, in the third dimension of the human psyche, there is in many other spiritual contexts,
a desire for gods. If that were not so, we could maintain that it is only a Judeo-Christian concept,
isolated from the mainstream of human ideas. Nevertheless, there is a need for the spiritual, and
desire is not limited to one group. Logic dictates that we must give credence to desire. Desire
points to what is obviously there, or it would not do so. In Lewis’s rationale the desire for God
was planted in us by God. We would not desire what is not. As a result, Lewis maintained that
God existed. As Lewis went up Headington Hill on the bus we hear of a change of thinking.
Lewis speaks of a surrender. Also, Lewis knows that God is pursuing him, and all his friends and
the writers he favors are like a pack of hounds with their faith and arguments for it. It is in the
interval before he describes himself as the most reluctant convert that Lewis realizes he is
desiring God and not just joy.
69
In our quest for the spiritual there is the satisfaction we hope to
achieve from it. The spiritual is a necessary part of us and therefore aids the proof of the
probable existence of God. There is a point when the necessary and probable meet at the
existence of God. The ontological argument of the highest possible thought points towards God’s
existence. In addition, the probability of God’s existence as desire implanted there by him is real.
We do not discount, as Lewis maintained, that desire for food is a figment of our imagination
because there is no such thing as food. Rather food is real and satisfies the need for it. Lewis
ascertained that the desire for God was a proof that our belief in God has credibility. The
evidence of this is the existence of religion(s) in every part of the world pointing to the spiritual
part of our being.
69
Surprised by Joy, 123-125.
28
Given the desire for the spiritual in God, ontologically, we can argue that there is not a
higher idea that we can attain with our finite minds. God in His transcendence has reached into
our world and, in return, desires us to follow Him. In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis wrote: “We
must, no doubt, distinguish this ontological (here we have a quote by Lewis using the word
“ontological”) continuity between Creator and creature which is, so to speak, ‘given’ by the
retention between them, from the union of wills which under Grace is reached by a life of
sanctity.”
70
Again, God acts in grace to bring the person into a relationship with Him. The one so
tremendous and transcendent who dwells in heaven by grace seeks out the creature. Lewis
continues: “Where there is prayer at all, we may suppose that there is some effort, however
feeble, towards the second condition, the union of wills.”
71
Prayer in that context is the human
response to the desire for God and is not imaginary but is a means of fulfillment. Lewis also used
a phrase in a poem in Letters to Malcolm: “Two talkers, thou art One forever, and I no dreamer,
but thy dream.”
72
Desire has an origin and must have a destination for its satisfaction. Lewis
maintained that God generated the desire. Lewis wrote: “When you come to God, the initiative
lies on His side.”
73
The God whom Lewis, in his atheism, ran from was the originator of the
desire that would draw Lewis to Him.
74
70
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (London: Collins, 1969), 72.
71
Ibid., 72.
72
Ibid., 70.
73
Mere Christianity, 144.
74
This was a predominant thought of Lewis all through his description of how he came back to
faith in God. Lewis does not put all the emphasis on the idea that our minds rationalize our way to faith.
Rather Lewis would keep it foremost that God plants in us what ultimately brings us to Him. Lewis was
not being Calvinistic in this idea as much as stating how he eliminated other explanations of coming to
29
B. Lewis’s Use and Understanding of the Word “Probable” in his Argument
It may appear to be indefinite to use a word such as “probable” in proving the existence
of God. It is a general term that may not be conclusive but affords ground for belief.
75
What did
Lewis mean by the word “probable?” In Miracles, Lewis devotes a chapter to his idea of
probability. There he says:
If all that exists in Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest
convictions are merely by-products of an irrational process; then, clearly, there is not the
slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in
uniformity tell us anything about reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply
a fact about us—like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to
trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. It can be trusted only if a different
Metaphysic is true. It is the deepest thing; in reality, the fact, which is the source of all
other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves—if it is a rational Spirit and we
derive our rational spirituality from it—then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our
repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature's Creator and ours. The disorderly world
that we cannot endure to believe in is the disorderly world He would not have endured to
create.
76
Using the word “probable,” Lewis states the obvious from the history of studying God’s
existence as a necessity in a person’s life.
Lewis’s Argument is more apparent because of the firm assertion when he used the word
“probable”. In Mere Christianity, Lewis says: “the most probable explanation,” and “probably
earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
77
faith based on this longing, desire for Joy that was only met in a relationship with God. Lewis would have
possibly agreed with Jurgen Moltman in Experiences in Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000),
316, where he says:” By virtue of his lowering himself, the infinite God is able to indwell the finite being
of his creation.”
75
Jess Stein editor, Random House College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1975), 1055.
76
C. S. Lewis, Miracles A Preliminary Study (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1947), 127.
77
Mere Christianity, 120. Lewis is stating what is logically an obvious idea to him.
30
God is the object of his reasoning, and the word “probable” gives the idea that the definite is not
out of reach. Lewis is suggesting that faith is founded on a “probable” assertion. Lewis argues
that we can stake our spiritual and eternal life on a probability. Writing to his brother Warren, he
mentioned Descartes and his proof for the existence of God. Lewis reflects:
On the other hand, it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does
contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception
of goodness and beauty, beyond their resources: and this not only
in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague
something’ which has been suggested to ones’ mind as desirable, all ones’ life,
in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious
forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, and which
rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy can be argued not to
be any product of our minds.
78
In this quote, we encounter the probable in Lewis’s reasoning that a desirable idea has been
occupying a person’s mind. It is not an idea that would naturally occur if there were no source of
fulfillment for it. After his conversion to Christianity, in Surprised by Joy, Lewis reflected: “But
what in conclusion, of Joy? ... it was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.”
79
We can conclude that the idea of the transcendence of God can enter our thoughts because it is
possible.
Lewis made a connection between the desire for paradise to a desire for God. The longing
for the transcendent, Lewis reasoned, is proof of God’s existence. In his essay, “Transposition,”
Lewis wrote:
We can hope only for what we can desire. And the trouble is that any adult and
philosophically respectable notion we can form of Heaven is forced to deny in that state
most of the things our nature desires….Hence our notion of Heaven involves perpetual
78
The Collected Letters Vol.2, 7-8. Morris refers to a story by the author, William Morris, “The
Earthly Paradise” (1868-70).
79
Surprised by Joy, 130.
31
negations : no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.
Against all these, to be sure, we set one positive: the vision and enjoyment of God.
80
Here in that quote by Lewis, we have an ontological statement. Anselm reasoned God is
the greatest idea. Lewis found in God his goal of joy met more completely than he had thought
possible. In reaching the goal of joy, even though different, the ontological and the Argument
from Desire, reach the same destination. In one instance, we cannot think of anything higher than
God. In the other, there is the probability that if we desired such a one as God, He must exist.
There is a necessity for God that nothing else can occupy in our thoughts and need for the
spiritual. Even though the two arguments may be different, they are both a way to the destination
of God. Lewis employed them both in that he used a deduction to arrive at his conclusion, but in
endeavouring to bring others to faith in God he used abductive reasoning in his pictures and
stories that fuel the imagination and initiate a person to a different way of thinking. Lewis in his
argument opens the probability that a person can have a relationship with God.
In his use of the word “probable”, Lewis placed himself in the flow of the history of
thinkers who postulated about God’s existence using their formulas. For example, John Hick, in
his introduction to the work, The Existence of God, made a couple of observations on the idea of
probability and God’s existence:
“Formulated as arguments directed to the nonbeliever, such inferences accordingly center
upon the notion of probability. Their general form is because of this or that characteristic
of the world it is more probable that there is a God than that there is not.”
81
[A few pages
further on in his book, he writes]. “A philosopher unacquainted with modern
developments in theology might well assume that theologians would ex officio, be
supporters of the theistic proofs and would regard as a fatal blow the conclusion that
80
C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast (Glasgow: William Collins & Co, 1978), 86-87.
81
Hick, The Existence of God, 7.
32
there can be neither a strict demonstration of God’s existence nor a valid probability
argument for it.”
82
This statement by John Hick illustrate that Lewis is not an isolated thinker on the use of the word
“probable”. Lewis concurs with historical scholars Augustine and Pascal when he claims there is
a void that only God can fill. In the Problem of Pain, Lewis wrote: “Your soul has a curious
shape because it is a hollow made to fit the infinite contours of divine substance or a key to
unlock one of the doors in the house of many mansions.”
83
In that statement, we have a quest for
God and heaven. It is also the ontological argument and Occam’s rule. The ontological
references to the infinite and Occam to the fact that only one key will fit. Yet where each
argument takes us is to the reality of God. Lewis wanted to convey to people the transcendence
but also narrow down the argument to one probability: God.
Also, Lewis used words like “probable”. In the sermon, The Weight of Glory, he says: “a
pretty good indication that such a thing exists…” when he continues the theme of satisfaction.
84
Lewis is using the term to explain what doesn’t make sense otherwise. Also in the Problem of
Pain, he says: “It is the secret signature of the soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want,
the thing we desired….”
85
Also, he uses phrases such as “hints of it,” “tantalizing glimpses,”
“promises never quite fulfilled,” and “echoes that died away….”
86
These words convey what we
heard about the longing that persisted through his life and the idea mentioned earlier that the soul
82
Ibid., 13.
83
The Problem of Pain, 147.
84
The Weight of Glory, 33.
85
Ibid., 146.
86
The Problem of Pain, 146.
33
is a hollow that God fills.
87
Discussion on the hollow in the soul is similar to thoughts from St.
Augustine and Blaise Pascal.
88
Lewis added to that discussion with profound depth and credible
reasoning. It is logical to presume that God fits the human need only God can fill. In the
Afterword to Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis wrote:
This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle—the chair in which
only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair
must exist. I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through
what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains
the corrective of all these errors …The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would
retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not only to
propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof. This lived dialectic, and the
merely argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seemed to have converged on one
goal; accordingly, I tried to put them both into my allegory, which thus became a defense
of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.
89
Only God can fit the place in us designed by Him for Him. Lewis is thinking of what is
higher than our basic thoughts of food and drink. He suggests that we consider higher thoughts,
especially when reflecting on our spiritual makeup. Lewis has used in Pilgrim’s Regress the
word “ontological” to prove his point. There is certainty and uncertainty mixed in our beliefs
about God. However, ontologically, we cannot rule out God because we cannot touch such a
reality as we would food or drink. Lewis’s illustration of the necessary food and drink points to
the subsequent need of God and supports the ontological argument. However, taking the logic to
its possible extent, his argument that God exists is a reasonable conclusion.
87
Ibid., 151.
88
Augustine said: “… you made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in
you.” Confessions (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 21. Pascal proposed: “…infinite abyss that can
only be filled by One who is infinite…” James M. Houston, The Mind on Fire. An Anthology of the
Writings of Blaise Pascal (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1989), 109.
89
Pilgrim’s Regress, 237.
34
Writing of God and the everlasting, Donald Viney maintains: “A minimal
characterization of a necessary being is a being who was not brought into existence and who
cannot be deprived of existence. Such a being would exist eternally, ‘from everlasting to
everlasting.’”
90
Lewis used words such as longing and yearning to communicate the existence of
God in a way that would be understandable to lay listeners. Lewis uses words that would make
more sense to lay listeners than a theological term such as ontological. So, we see him rarely use
the word that defines what he is trying to say about God’s existence. Lewis proved his point
about God’s existence but not in deep philosophical meaning.
Lewis’s longing and desire for the probable existence of God work in two directions.
Lewis realized in retrospect that his longing, as he thought for joy, was a longing for God. First,
a person has a longing or desire for something or someone that cannot be satisfied, as desires for
food, drink, and sex can be satisfied because the means are available in our earthly environment.
There is a difficulty in that if there is desire, there must be a means of satisfying it.
Consequently, a desire for some spiritual being must include the idea of God; otherwise, it is not
logical. If the idea exists, there must be a being behind that idea. In Mere Christianity, Lewis
states: “Now that I am a Christian, I have moods in which the whole thing looks very
improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly
probable.”
91
We may disagree with this tension he is proposing, but we cannot be dismissive
that it is part of being human. Peter Kreeft used the words: “strong probability” in writing about
90
Donald Viney, Charles Hartshorne, and the Existence of God (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1985), 9.
91
Mere Christianity, 123.
35
other arguments for the existence of God.
92
Consequently, we can assert that Lewis is not alone
in using the word “probable” to point his readers to the existence of God.
Second, in agreement with Occam’s razor, Lewis’s probable cause for the existence of
God is logical. Other possibilities for the origin of desire are not logical except when including
the idea of God. God is the simple explanation, or the most complex, but never non-existent. So,
Lewis would argue and be like Occam in arguing that it is the simpler argument. God is the
simplest explanation for the desire/longing of the human spirit. Lewis reiterated this in his
autobiographical description in Surprised by Joy.
93
Lewis portrays how desire and longing can be satisfied; therefore, the word probable is
used in reference to God. Lewis is ontological in his reasoning that desire points to God. Lewis is
maintaining that in the quests of life we have no greater one than to know God. That desire to
know God is posited in us by Him. At the same time, we cannot dismiss the application of
Occam’s razor in ruling out the non-essential surrounding an idea. In applying Occam’s razor,
we are left with God after we take away other possibilities of what can satisfy the spiritual desire.
According to Lewis we have a necessary being whose probable existence is evident by the desire
for Him. We may disagree with the conclusion, but, as seen in his books, it was clear in Lewis’s
thoughts. After taking away the peripheral we have no other satisfaction for desire but God.
92
Kreeft and Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 49.
93
Surprised by Joy, 129. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just
like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were
like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no Person like this Person it depicted; as real, as
recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so
than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a
god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time
the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’
It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”
36
Lewis dramatized the idea of longing for God and gave it a contemporary application
different from the classical rendering of Augustine or Anselm. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis refers
to the longing in the context of a chess game, the interaction of a cat and mouse, and a knight
taking off his armor. Lewis translates it into a picturesque language. Lewis’s rendering helps
those who find its standard theological form hard to grasp and possibly unreachable. Whether it
was fiction or non-fiction, Lewis put theology (knowledge of God) into the minds of those who
would not have read it if called by its actual name. Lewis made what may have seemed
inconceivable and unreachable conceivable and reachable to many who would not study the
discipline of theology. It was abductive in reaching into the reader’s mind.
In the discipline of theology, because of how Lewis uses the word “longing,” can we
deem his argument probable? To call his argument improbable would be to react negatively to
the history of the ontological argument. The word ontological can be used in talking about God.
History is on Lewis’s side in the ontological argument. However, not everyone would have put
that term in their reasoning regarding God's existence.
94
We can narrow God’s existence to the
greatest idea that can occupy human thought. When we strip all other ideas away, our conclusion
is God. God as conclusion, is not a contradiction, because the ontological is a statement of the
vastness of the subject being dealt with in the argument. Given the highest thought we can have
of God, then it is a necessity that He has existence. There is no other being that we deem worthy
of the highest thought. The highest thought in this context is also the simplest, as in Occam’s
razor.
In terms of the ontological and Occam’s razor, we can look at Descartes, who reasoned
that there were things outside a person from which these ideas came and to which they had a
94
St. Anselm did not use the expression “ontological argument.” Alvin Plantinga, editor, The
Ontological Argument (Garden City: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), viii.
37
perfect resemblance. He also maintained that the concept of God could only be put in him, the
finite, by the infinite.
95
Lewis is in that line of thought when he reasons that the human trying to
find God is like the mouse looking for the cat.
96
It seems improbable that we, the finite, look for
the infinite, but the infinite is engaged in finding us and drawing us to himself. The need to seek
God is posited in us by God, not due to our developing it on our own. However, since that need
is there, the probability is real that we have a need that only God can fill. God is the ontological
outcome of our thoughts and hence knowledge of him. Therefore, we are dealing with what
Donald Viney calls the ontological necessity.
97
Could we ascertain that ontological necessity
accounts for Lewis’s desire for God? Lewis identified a desire in his being and reasoned that
only God could satisfy it. Lewis came to this conclusion at the end of great academic
achievement and procuring the job of his hopes. Yet he finds that in God there is a desire met
that was not satisfied by anything else. God was the necessary means to satisfy his longing.
The argument for knowing God using Occam’s razor cuts away all statements until only
the core idea remains. When Christians talk of God, we are not discussing the multitude of gods
of the Old Testament that the Israelites were warned against as in, for instance, the Ten
Commandments in Exodus 20:3 “Do not have other gods besides me.” Other gods were part of
the spiritual landscape and expressed in Old Testament books where God wanted the Jewish
people to be monotheistic.
95
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, and the Meditations (Markham, Ontario: Penguin
Books, 1979), 114,123-4. Later in his book Descartes continued this idea. “And the whole force of the
argument I have used here to prove the existence of God consists in this, that I recognize that it would not
be possible for my nature to be as it is, that is to say, that I should have in me the idea of God, if God did
not really exist…”
96
Surprised by Joy, 124-125.
97
Viney, Charles Hartshorne, and the Existence of God, 9.
38
Spirituality is part of the human DNA. Ontologically we narrow it down to one God and
the idea that our minds cannot transcend the conceptualization of any god but God. Plantinga
puts it in these words:
Hence, if that, then which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to
exist, it is not that, then nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable
contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be
conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O
Lord, our God.
98
In the context of the above ontological reasoning from Plantinga, Lewis is not improbable
in his probable argument. We can reason that longing is proof of the probability that must have a
means of fulfillment. B.R. Reichenbach wrote: “…ontology raises fundamental questions about
reality: What is being? What is it to be or exist? What are the primary categories of being? What
laws govern these categories?”
99
Discussing the existence of God, we examine the largest idea
that our minds can conceive of. It is a reflection on transcendence, and in the process, we reason
that if thinking as such then God’s probable existence is not farfetched. We appeal to our reason
and that of others on a quest for God. Lewis, with his theological works and fiction, appealed by
means of abductive reasoning to those on a quest for God. Lewis’s argument is for what doesn’t
make sense other than in the context of God.
Lewis enters the discussion that has been ongoing for centuries. Lewis is like a later
addition to a family tree of thinkers and writers about the idea of the existence of God. Lewis
may express his ideas differently, but they place him in the flow of history on this subject. Lewis
adds to our store of knowledge on this subject, whether we believe him or not.
98
Plantinga, The Ontological Argument, 5.
99
Martine Davie, Tim Grass, Stephen R. Holmes, John McDowell, and T.A. Noble eds. New
Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016), 631.
39
Chapter 2
The Debate among Scholars on Lewis’s Argument from Desire/Sehnsucht
In 1985 John Beversluis wrote his book, C. S. Lewis, and the Search for Rational
Religion. Beversluis revised his thoughts in 2007. In his initial work, Beversluis departed from
the high opinion scholars about C. S. Lewis have maintained. In his introduction in 1985, he
throws a shadow over the image of Lewis:
We seldom encounter a mere fact about Lewis, accounts of his behavior,
attitudes, and personal relationships are instead reported in the wide-eyed
manner of the impressionable disciple. To describe him as a wonderful friend is
a lamentable understatement: we must be assured that no one ever was a better
friend. To praise him as brilliant in a debate is entirely too lukewarm a
compliment: we are told that C. S. Lewis could have matched wits with any
man, who ever lived. To endorse him as a Christian apologist of the first rank is
altogether inadequate; his apocalyptic vision of Christianity must be likened to
that of St. John on the Isle of Patmos. After a while, one longs for patches of
sunlight to dispel the reverential haze. One tires of enduring these excesses and of having
to plow through equally ecstatic testimonials in book after book.
100
After reading a few biographies about Lewis with their high opinions of him, Beversluis’s
statement gives one pause. He has not changed the above quote in his 2007 revised and updated
version of the original. He also says again that C. S. Lewis needs rescuing: “…not only from the
evils of excessive hostility but also–-and equally—from the evils of excessive loyalty.”
101
There
has been a debate on Lewis’s statement about desire since Beversluis formulated it. Beversluis
provides his argument formulation in these words:
Although he does not formulate and defend the Argument from Desire in
Surprised by Joy, and thereby explicitly argues for the truth of Christianity in the
process of telling the conversion story, he develops an implicit argument that he
does defend elsewhere: not for the existence of God in any explicitly
100
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis, and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985), xii.
101
Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, Revised and Updated (Amherst,
New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), 20. (This one is referred to in the remainder of the thesis).
40
Christian sense, but for the existence of some object—a “naked Other”—that
transcends the natural world and is Joy's true object.
102
With that statement, and his comments on Lewis, Beversluis has introduced this argument into
the study of Lewis. Beversluis had stated the Argument from Desire more concisely in these few
words: “The claim is not that every natural desire is satisfied, but that every natural desire is
satisfiable, that is, has an object that can satisfy it.”
103
Some agree with Lewis and his Argument
from Desire, and some do not. That milieu of a difference of opinion creates a provocative
discussion around one acclaimed as an apologist for the Christian faith. Beversluis disagreed
with this argument even though he was the one who formulated it. Beversluis says: “I conclude
that the Argument from Desire is shipwrecked not only on logical grounds but on theological
grounds as well.
104
Later in his book, he makes the point: “Since many seem to think this
argument embodies a profound insight, it is worth observing in passing that it is fallacious.”
105
Despite his objections to an argument that he gave a name to Beversluis contributed
positively to the study of Lewis because many scholars have paused and considered Lewis’s
convictions and his conversion. Beversluis’s questioning of his ideas resulted in an examination
of Lewis’s ideas that may otherwise have not occurred. Beversluis pushed scholars to be
convinced of their point of view. The discussion has not only revolved around Beversluis’s idea
but caused a look at Lewis in the overall idea of conversion and belief in the existence of God.
102
Ibid., 34.
103
Ibid., 42.
104
Ibid., 64.
105
Ibid., 65.
41
Does Christian experience play a part in believing in God's existence? Even though Beversluis
initiated the discussion, there is a debate between those for and against Lewis’s argument.
Beversluis coined the phrase Argument from Desire to describe Lewis’s reasoning. In
Mere Christianity and the sermon, The Weight of Glory, Lewis used the word “desire”. In
Surprised by Joy Lewis is referring to joy as the thing he thought he desired. However, as he says
in the last page of Surprised by Joy, joy was only a signpost pointing him in the direction he
needed to be going to believe in God. It is an Argument from Desire in that Lewis wanted joy,
but what he really found was God and that relationship gave him joy.
42
A. Those Who Agree with Lewis
To agree with Lewis puts some authors into a debate with Beversluis. Richard Harries
referred to Beversluis and countered the argument with these words:
It has been said, for example, that an unsatisfied desire shows only that you want more of
the same, not that you want something altogether different. If you are hungry, you want
food, and if you become hungry again, it is still food that you want. But this analogy with
hunger for food fails to convey the sensation to which Lewis was referring. The
experience of joy is both satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. It is not a question,
as with food, of being satisfied and then becoming hungry again, but rather the more
satisfied you are - as with some intense experience of beauty in nature or music - the
more unsatisfied you are at the same time, wanting something more or beyond what has
been given. The more intense the experience the more tantalizing it is. This is quite
widely documented.
106
Recently George Marsden wrote: “the many defenders of Lewis denounced them
(Beversluis’s arguments) as ‘facile,’ ‘shallow,’ ‘based on misunderstandings,’ ‘unfair,’
‘underhanded,’ ‘intellectually dishonest,’ and even despicable.’”
107
Joe Puckett Jr. makes a case
against Beversluis and draws on the opinions of others to enforce and inform his point. Again, it
shows that Beversluis was original in his views on Lewis. Puckett quotes Robert Hoyler and
Peter Kreeft and their doubts about Beversluis’ position. Referring to Hoyler, Puckett makes this
point:
Hoyler believes this argument is more successful in its inductive form. He suggests that
since most natural desires that we experience have objects that satisfy them, it is most
probable that the natural desire for God suggests that God exists too.
108
In quoting Peter Kreeft, he makes this point:
106
Richard Harries, C. S. Lewis: The Man and his God (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1987), 22.
107
George Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2016), 140.
108
Joe Puckett Jr., The Apologetics of Joy. A Case for the Existence of God from C. S. Lewis’s
Argument from Desire (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF & STOCK, 2012), 48.
43
Peter Kreeft summarizes this objection (by Beversluis: How can you know that Joy has
an object that can be satisfied if it has never been satisfied? And how can you say all
desires have satisfying objects if we have not found an object to satisfy Joy?) by saying
that, it asks, “How can anyone know the truth that every natural desire has a real object
without first knowing that this natural desire has a real object?” To put the objection
simply, how could you make such a bold claim that “all” innate objects have objects that
satisfy them when you claim that the innate desire that Lewis speaks of is never satisfied
(at least not in this world)? If even one desire does not have an object that satisfies the
desire, then does this not negate the universal term “all” in the premise, and thus, calling
into question the whole argument? (In his premise, the first point Beversluis had made
was that all natural desires have existing objects that they are desires for).
109
Apart from his disagreement with Beversluis, Joe Puckett comments about the
ontological value of what Lewis was saying. He maintains that Lewis was not just talking about
an emotional experience. Instead, desire indicates something or someone existing that our
rational minds can incorporate into our philosophy of life. Puckett states the cusp of the idea in
this way:
The Argument from Desire does not prove that God exists, let alone does it
prove that the God of Christian Theism exists. What it seeks to show is that it
is rational to believe that something must exist that is beyond this world, and that
gives us a sense of longing for it. Call it eternal life; call it heaven, or call it
God. The one thing that seems most certain is that we all have a longing that is
never satisfied in this world. And since all other innate desires have something
that satisfies those desires, there must be something or someone that exists to
satisfy this desire, too.
110
This line of reasoning is the argument from necessity. Puckett is saying that God is a necessity if
the desire is there for Him. Lewis had introduced his idea using words such as “probable”.
Using the word “probable”, Lewis had brought in the ontological, in that he is positing that God
is the highest ideal. In the area of our desires, the desire for the spiritual as in God is borne out in
109
Puckett, The Apologetics of Joy, 47 & 48.
110
Ibid., 141.
44
that we have natural desires that are satisfied. If natural desires are satisfied there is no reason to
think that He who has put a desire for God in us is non-existent. Puckett opposes Beversluis’s
thesis of Lewis’s argument. Earlier in his argument, Puckett, quoting Paul Copan, reveals the
weakness of Beversluis’s objection to Lewis: “In everyday life, we typically do—and should—
prefer explanations that are the more likely or probable, not whatever is merely logically
possible.”
111
Continuing this line of thought, Clifford Williams observed that in support of Lewis,
“Lewis’s argument is deceptively simple.”
112
To add to the argument, Minako Honda has
written:
The theological inconsistency that Beversluis finds in Lewis’s argument is the
confusion of Greek Philosophy with Christian Theology. However, historically
speaking, it is not only Lewis who, after pursuing true happiness for a long time,
shrinks from God when he finds that He is the only source of happiness. St.
Augustine, for example, finding his pursuit of happiness to have been a pursuit of God,
paradoxically recoiled from Him.
113
In the context of history, Lewis is not putting forth an original thought. Edward M. Cook writes
forcefully against Beversluis’s conclusions about Lewis. He disagrees with Beversluis asserting
that Lewis borrowed from Platonism for his idea of desire.
In summary: John Beversluis has misunderstood C. S. Lewis’s inductive
argument for the existence of Heaven as a deductive argument for the existence of God;
he has wrongly ascribed the origin of the argument to Greek philosophy and has wrongly
accused Lewis of holding together incompatible tendencies of thought. Instead of helping
us better understand Lewis, he has darkened counsel.
114
111
Ibid., Quoting Paul Copan, “Naturalists,” 51, 126.
112
Clifford Williams, Existential Reasons for Belief in God (Downers Grove: IVP Academic,
2011), 49.
113
Mineko Honda, The Imaginative World of C. S. Lewis. A Way to Participate in Reality
(Lanham: University Press of America, 2000), 51.
45
He continues with the declaration: “It is better to stand with Lewis in his Argument from Desire,
for we stand not only with him but with the significant part of our fellow Christians and of
religious men and women, who need no Plato to teach the soul that her good is God.”
115
Lewis gives a passing reference to Plato in his conversion story. In Surprised by Joy,
Lewis mentioned how Christian authors had spoken to a need he did not find in the non-
Christians. He said: “George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer,” …naming
religious and Christian writers such as Plato, Aeschylus, Spenser, Milton, Virgil, Samuel
Johnson, Langland, John Donne, Thomas Browne, Hooker, Pascal, and George Herbert.
116
Lewis
also says: “ On the other hand, most of the authors who might be claimed as precursors of
modern enlightenment seemed to me very small beer and bored me cruelly.”
117
In this statement,
we see that Beversluis’s assertion that Plato heavily influenced Lewis is incorrect. The List of
authors shows that Lewis was influenced, for the most part, by Christian authors.
David Horner, in terms of the debate with Beversluis, carries on with this thought:
Beversluis provides no good reason to reject Lewis’s “shocking alternative”
argument. He fails to show that Lewis’s is a false dilemma, and despite the
promise of “numerous alternative interpretations” of Jesus in the offing, he
provides none that satisfies the description. Granting Lewis's historical
and hermeneutical assumptions, the dilemma stands. Ajut Deus aut malus
Homo.
118
114
Edward M. Cook, “Does Joy Lead to God? Lewis, Beversluis, and the Argument from
Desire.” (2001), 7.
115
Ibid., 7.
116
Surprised By Joy, 118.
117
Ibid., 118.
118
David A. Horner, “Aut Deus aut malus Homo. A Defence of C. S. Lewis’s Shocking
Alternative.” David Braggett, Gary R. Habermas, Jerry C. Walls editors, C. S. Lewis Philosopher. Truth,
Goodness and Beauty (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), 84.
46
Not all those affirming Lewis’s viewpoint argue with Beversluis; some grasped the
significance of what Lewis was saying in his Argument from Desire and wrote their analysis of
it. Alister McGrath has written extensively on Lewis and, although not naming Beversluis,
speaks affirmatively for an Argument from Desire. McGrath lists the books by Lewis where this
argument is evident. In addition to the Chronicles of Narnia and Till We Have Faces, McGrath
lists The Pilgrim’s Regress, the sermon, The Weight of Glory, the talk, “Hope” from Broadcast
Talks, and Surprised by Joy.
119
McGrath gives weight to the discussion; he is writing thirty years
after Beversluis and still maintains the Argument from Desire.
The Argument from Desire is not an isolated theme one can glean from Lewis’s position,
particularly concerning his conversion. On the contrary, the Argument from Desire was a
formative part of what drew Lewis from his atheism and back to God. McGrath writes that Lewis
tends to treat Christianity as a “big picture,” whose ability to embrace or position our
observations of the external world and our internal experience of longings we can see as an
indication of its truth.
120
Several years previously, in another work in the context of reference to
C. S. Lewis, Alister McGrath put forth the premise:
Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points
beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire yet
eventually prove incapable of doing so) towards their real goal and fulfillment in God
Himself.
121
Brian Murphy endeavors to capture the exquisite importance of what Lewis achieved in
his argument:
119
Alister McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014),
108-109. All these books point to the argument from desire as not some isolated thought that is given too
much emphasis in Lewis’s works.
121
Ibid., 135.
47
If Camus had never written The Stranger or Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,
we could nevertheless easily, in intellectual history, reconstruct the importance
of the theme of the alienated man, the rebel, the outsider. But without Lewis, there
would have been a hole, an absence not only of a development of a kind of
religious psychology, a regenerative or restated Christianity, but a fiction
which treats of the relation between the soul and the self in a unique way.
122
John Randolph Willis said: “This unarticulated longing, this desire, this homesickness which
cannot be satisfied by anything on earth—not even human love—is one of his strongest proofs
for the existence of God.”
123
Erik J. Wielenberg devotes a portion of his book to Lewis’s Argument from Desire:
…it is clear that Joy is quite different from the other natural desires that Lewis mentions.
Those other desires share a number of features that Joy lacks. For instance, they are all
desires for things that are part of the natural world. Furthermore, they are all such that
their satisfaction never brings permanent contentment and fulfillment. In maintaining that
Joy is a desire for union with God, Lewis is committed to the view that Joy is not a desire
for something that is part of the natural world and that it is a desire whose satisfaction
brings (or would bring) eternal bliss.
124
Again, we find the support for Lewis and his proclamation that Joy is searching for something
that is not naturally available, such as food or drink. Furthermore, we have the process of
elimination that, without such thought, we would be arguing in a circle. The logic of this thought
keeps carrying us back to Lewis in that we are looking to satisfy a desire, and if such a desire,
then there must be satisfaction. Lewis was not trying to satisfy just any desire. Even though he
thought it was the desire for joy, he states at the end of Surprised by Joy, that it was only a
signpost to knowing God. That was a significant point in Lewis’s thinking in that the rest of his
122
Brian Murphy, C. S. Lewis (Mercer Island, Washington: Harvest House, 1983), 24.
123
John Randolph Willis, Pleasures Forevermore the Theology of C. S. Lewis (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1983), 38.
124
Erik J. Wielenberg, God and the Reach of Reason. C. S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand
Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113-114.
48
life was devoted to speaking and writing to help others realize that the desire in them, that was
not satisfied by anything else, was for God. Terry Glaspey carries the idea by saying that the
existence of this longing is evidence that there is more to life than we can see, touch, feel, smell,
or taste. No experience in this life completely fulfills the desire it awakens within us. All we get
are hints and guesses.
125
We want to know the source whence comes this desire. It is a desire that
transfixes us, yet we are bereft of satisfaction by anything short of God. If God is the object of
desire, only God will be sufficient to deal with the vacuum it creates in us. In Reflections on the
Psalms, Lewis writes of the idea of transcendence regarding the desire for God. Here Lewis
connects the idea of God and heaven. Heaven is portrayed as being God’s presence and
consequently praising Him.
The worthier the object, the more intense this delight would be. If it were possible for a
created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to
‘appreciate,’ that is, to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously
at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in
supreme beatitude. It is along these lines that I find it easiest to understand the Christian
doctrine that ‘Heaven’ is a state in which angels now and men hereafter, are perpetually
employed in praising God… To see that doctrine means, we must suppose ourselves to be
in perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned, dissolved by, that delight which far from
remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss,
flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more
separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself from the brightness a
mirror receives as separable from the brightness it sheds.
126
Simone Weil reasoned: “If I desire only to desire the good, then in desiring the good, my desire
is fulfilled to overflowing. It is no more difficult than that.”
127
Weil intimates that God is the
125
Terry Glaspey, C. S. Lewis His Life and Thought (Edison, New Jersey: Inspirational Press,
1996), 70.
126
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Harper Collins, 2002), 361.
127
Simone Weil, Gateway to God (Glasgow: Collins Fontana Books, 1974), 46. Earlier she had
reasoned the good to be God.
49
essence of our idea of good. This argument is also ontological, as in St. Anslem's “the greatest
idea I can think of.” We can turn to Pannenberg for a statement that reiterates Lewis’s ideas on
desire. Pannenberg frames his thought in these words:
Man’s chronic need, his infinite dependence, presupposes something outside himself that
is beyond every experience of this world. Man does not simply respond to the pressure of
his surplus of drives by creating for his longing and awe, an imaginary object beyond
every possible thing in the world. Rather, in his infinite dependence he presupposes with
every breath he takes a corresponding, infinite, never-ending, otherworldly being before
whom he stands, even if he does not know what to call it. That again lies in the nature of
his infinite drives. Man is infinitely dependent. Thus, in everything that he does in life, he
presupposes a being beyond everything finite, a vis a vis upon which he is dependent.
Only on this basis can his imagination form conceptions of this being. Our language has
the word “God” for this entity upon which man is dependent in his infinite striving.
128
Lewis knew that without the compelling of God, he would never have known God’s
grace. Because of grace, God liberated his life. Lewis affirms that the God who had pursued him
and terrified him had freed, more than bound him. Because of God, he can know the joy, and it is
in God that his joy is complete. His desire had carried him to a goal, and that goal was God. Will
Vaus is positive about Lewis’s line of reasoning in his assertion: “The argument from longing is
one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of the supernatural realm, and Lewis is
perhaps the best conveyor of this argument in modern fiction and non-fiction.”
129
Donald
Williams would concur with this line of thinking:
He did not so much conclude directly from the experience of having this desire that God
exists, and that Jesus is His Son; rather, it was what kept him from being comfortable in
atheism until other arguments, such as Chesterton’s and Tolkien’s, that Christ is the
fulfillment of human mythology, led to his conversion.
130
128
Wolfhart Pannenberg, what is man? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 10.
129
Will Vaus, Mere Theology A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 2004), 24.
130
Donald Williams, Deeper Magic the Theology Behind the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Baltimore:
Square Halo Books, 2016), 228.
50
Williams continues: “The argument is not deductive proof, but an argument of the best (‘most
probable’) explanation.”
131
Therefore, it is one argument that can be used for the existence of
God. In Lewis’s writings, there is also the Argument from Reason and the Christological
argument.
The ‘probable’ was Lewis’s point, and ‘desire’ had influenced it throughout the
Sehnsucht in his life. Corbin Scott Carnell has written pointedly about the influence of Sehnsucht
in Lewis's life. Near the end of his book, he observed that “Lewis retained his faith in the basic
validity of romantic literature because he believed it was compatible with a Christian ontology…
Sehnsucht has genuine meaning only in an ontology which has a place in it.”
132
He carried on this line of thought and said: “I find in C. S. Lewis’s understanding of
Sehnsucht a parallel to Anslem’s ontological argument, Lewis’s most significant contribution to
Christian apologetics, and an important clue for understanding literary history.”
133
Peter Kreeft
concurs: “next to Anslem’s famous ‘ontological argument’ I think [the Argument from Desire] is
the single most intriguing argument in the history of human thought.”
134
Many scholars accept that Lewis’s longing/desire was a dominant theme. Simply put,
the Argument from Desire explains a vital part of the process that leads a person to God. Lewis
wrote of what happened and what could happen in others’ lives!
131
Ibid., 229.
132
Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow, 158-159.
133
Ibid., 163.
134
Kreeft, Peter. “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire.” In G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis:
The Riddle of Joy, edited by M. H. MacDonald and A. A. Tadie, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 249.
51
Lewis maintained that after his conversion, his longing was fulfilled in a relationship with
God! We can reason the experience lasted a lifetime in that the most poignant recording of his
conversion is in Surprised by Joy, written in the last decade of his life. Even in the posthumous
Letters to Malcolm, Lewis is talking of desire.
135
135
Letters to Malcom Chiefly on Prayer, 78. “The soul that has once been waked, or stung, or
uplifted by the desire of God, will inevitably (I think) awake to the fear of losing Him.”
52
B. Those who Disagree with Lewis
As stated previously, John Beversluis initiated refuting the Argument from Desire.
Beversluis put a formula to Lewis’s Sehnsucht and gave it a place along with the other views
from Lewis’s writings. Beversluis opened the gate, and others have joined in raising a question
about Lewis's idea. Going back into history and dealing with the word “probable”, we would find
Kant adverse to Lewis. Kant did not adhere to the ontological formula since he disagreed with
Anselm’s predicate “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Donald Viney has
reasoned: “Since the time of Hume and Kant, philosophers and theologians have become
increasingly skeptical of the ability of a single argument to prove God's existence.”
136
Beversluis claimed that Plato influenced Lewis in the Argument from Desire. He
maintained that it is not the Old or New Testament that gives credence to God as the object of
desire.
137
He made a claim: “I conclude that the Argument from Desire is shipwrecked not only
on logical grounds but on theological grounds as well.”
138
Robert Smith weighs in on the argument and uses the same premise as Beversluis that
Plato influenced Lewis. Smith also says: “Lewis enfolded Platonism into his Christianity, not
simply as an intellectual system but as a satisfying window upon reality.”
139
Smith moves on by
saying: “Platonism, as the mature Lewis perceived it, was a philosophical embodiment of the
same absolute truth that was to be found in Christianity.”
140
So, can we maintain that his
136
Viney, Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God, 5.
137
Beversluis., 62.
138
Ibid., 64.
139
Robert Huston Smith, Patches of God Light. The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1981), 4-5.
140
Ibid., 5.
53
argument from desire has any validity if we pull into the discussion the thread of thought from
the philosophers? Beversluis and Smith are reasoning that Lewis is historical in his argument if
we look at the right source as Plato, not Augustine or Anselm. However, Beversluis, also, gives
the impression that Plato influenced Augustine.
141
In fairness, in his argument, Beversluis quotes
Anders Nygren, who maintains Augustine may have gotten his question from ancient
philosophy, but his answer from Christianity.
142
However, this engagement in discussing origins
does not negate what Beversluis was postulating. Beversluis maintains his point about Plato,
whether or not his readers agree, and his point generated debate.
The argument that Plato played too much of a part in Lewis’s formulation was also
pursued by Tim Keller when in endnotes to his book, The Reason for God, he refers to N. T.
Wright and his book Simply Christian. Wright puts forth the idea that our unfulfilled longings are
not just for a spiritual world, but this world put right, and made perfect. Wright says: “This is an
important point because C. S. Lewis’s famous argument from desire in his Mere Christianity
follows the Platonic model too closely.”
143
Beversluis maintained that Plato influenced Lewis.
However, Wright would maintain that even to have this world put right we need God. Our ideas
of what would be a perfect world are jaded by our finiteness.
144
In his book C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics, Gregory Bassham mentioned earlier that
those who agree with Lewis, in a counterargument to Peter Williams, also bring Beversluis into
141
John Beversluis., 33,59.
142
Ibid., 60.
143
Timothy Kellor, The Reason for God Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2009), 285.
144
Ibid., quoting Wright, 285.
54
the discussion and insert Platonism into his argument against Lewis. He wonders if, in desiring
transcendence, we do not necessarily need God: “Might not Nirvana or absorption in a
pantheistic One or even life in a Platonic realm of forms do the trick?”
145
Bassham says that if
we work on an assumption of joy, there is probable existence of God, as Lewis maintained.
However, if we take out the deduction and decide that any kind of transcendence will work as an
adequate replacement, God does not factor into the picture. We can substitute the transcendence
around gods or god-like beings for the Christian God. In addition to his mention of Beversluis,
Bassham, in his counterargument with Williams, writes the following:
In my responses to Williams in this volume, I argue that each of these five
versions (the five versions are listed in a previous paragraph as deductive,
inductive, a priori, abductive, and reductio) of the argument is faulty. Among
the issues I raise are: How clear is it that Joy is a form of desire? If Joy is a
desire, is it, in the relevant sense, a natural desire? Is it true that all (or even
most?) natural desires have objects that can satisfy them? Even if it is true that
most natural desires have objects that can satisfy them, there are special
reasons for doubting whether Joy can be satisfied.
146
Later as he has developed his argument and engaged with Williams, Bassham says: “Only if we
assume that Joy is a desire for perfect happiness with a perfect being (God) does the argument
yield a theistic conclusion.”
147
If it is an assumption, and even though he disagrees with Lewis,
the idea Lewis put forth is an argument for the probable existence of God.
Even though pro-Lewis, and one who has written extensively on him, Alister McGrath
made a couple of observations that Lewis’s ideas need to be reconsidered. In his book, If I Had
Lunch with C. S. Lewis, McGrath throws in this word of caution: “Lewis’s ideas are often wise
145
Gregory Bassham editor, C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics Pro and Con (Leiden: Brill
Rodopi, 2015), 51.
146
Ibid., 8.
147
Ibid.,51.
55
and worth listening to, but that doesn't mean we must agree with everything he says.” And later:
“That doesn’t mean he is right about everything. It just means he is someone worth listening
to.”
148
Finally, in a statement against the Argument from Desire, he asserts:
Lewis takes pains to make it clear that his conversion had nothing to do with
desire or longing. The God to whom he surrendered in Trinity Term 1930 was
“sheerly nonhuman.” He had no idea that “there ever had been or ever would
be any connection between God and joy.” Lewis’s conversion was essentially
rational, unrelated to his long-standing fascination with “Joy.”
149
That is an interesting statement coming from McGrath. However, it substantiates the premise
that Lewis can be agreed and disagreed with, as indicated by McGrath in The Intellectual World
of C. S. Lewis.
150
In addition, it should be stated that McGrath is emphasizing the obvious that
Lewis looks back from the perspective of time and consideration of his coming to faith and
reviews how it took place. Lewis did not know in his longing that it would lead to God, but in
retrospect, that was the destination.
Donald Williams, who writes positively about Lewis, has his doubts and shares them
along with affirmations on the Argument from Desire. Williams says:
How good is the argument? It has a couple of weaknesses. First, for people who deny
having had the relevant experience, it is simply beside the point. Many of them may have
had that experience and do not recognize it, or they may be in denial about the
impossibility of satisfying their deepest desires with temporal objects, but it would not be
possible to prove that this is true of all of them. And even for those really in denial, the
argument will have neither interest nor force. Second, from the existence of unsatisfied
148
Alister McGrath, If I had Lunch with C. S. Lewis (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2014), x, xi.
149
Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis A Life, 146.
150
In The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, McGrath had argued for the argument from desire. It
gives an interesting aspect to the argument, in that it is not easily reconciled, to what we may think of
Lewis, especially with being critical of his writing rather than accepting every word without question.
Obviously, this is something Beversluis would find admirable in a scholar.
56
desire, it does not strictly follow that the object which supposedly exists for it is a god of
any kind, much less the Christian God.
151
Williams postulates that you could spin the same arguments and make a case for Buddhism.
152
Bob Seidensticker lists eight reasons to Reject C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire.
153
Arend Smilde writing about Norbert Feinendegen, commented: “…I think we may go one little
step further than he (Feinendegen) does and decide that the concept of an ‘Argument from
Desire’ as part of Lewis’s intellectual legacy had best be abandoned altogether.”
154
We can make the case that the Argument from Desire is in the category of religious
experience because we want a spiritual need fulfilled. However, Robert Sloan Lee claims that
desire is not a religious experience. Lee puts forth his idea: “Lewis’s argument is not the claim
that God exists because one wants God to exist. Further, the argument is not an argument from
religious experience.”
155
151
Donald Williams, Deeper Magic the Theology of C. S. Lewis, 230.
152
Ibid., 230.
153
Bob Seidensticker, “8 Reasons to Reject C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” Cross
Examined (September 4, 2018). The 8 reasons are: (I have reworded some of them for clarification) 1.
Why fear death? 2. The puddle principle backwards in that we do not have a hole that fits us, but instead
we eat to survive. 3. The hunger for the supernatural doesn’t matter like food etc. because we do not need
it to survive. 4. This is just a deist argument. It doesn’t necessarily point to the Christian god. 5. This
belief is like belief in magic and all other things. 6. Just the ontological argument again. Thinking of
something doesn’t make it exist.7. What is innate? 8. Don’t let your desires run away with you.
154
Arend Smilde, “Horrid Red Herrings, C. S. Lewis and the ‘Argument from Desire’,” Journal
of Inklings Studies Vol.4, No.1 (April 2014), 37. Norbet Feinendegen is a German theologian and
Philosopher who wrote a doctoral desertion on C. S. Lewis. Smilde in his abstract: “this essay explores
and supports the case made by Feinendegen, in one brief section of his book, for abandoning the
widespread idea that Lewis accepted and promoted an explicit philosophical argument from the existence
of human ‘natural desire’ to the existence of God.” 33.
155
Robert Sloan Lee, “Non -Standard Arguments for God’s Existence,” Rebus Community
chapter 3 (2021), 9.
57
In his attempt to prove the non-existence of God, Richard Dawkins concurs with that line
of thought. Dawkins emphatically stated: “If you've had such an experience, you may well find
yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don't expect the rest of us to take your word for it,
especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.”
156
Nevertheless, when one reads Lewis, there is feeling and intellectual reasoning to explain his
conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Since Beversluis raised a question mark beside Lewis’s assertions about conversion and
God, I will finish this section with a quote by him. Beversluis concludes as follows:
However, if my criticisms of his arguments for the existence of God are sound, the
grounds of his initial assent are gone. The claim that human beings desire an object
beyond the natural world that is both good and good for them loses all plausibility if
"good "can equally describe the behavior and activities of a Cosmic Sadist. If God cannot
be called good in any sense conceivable to, or recognizable by, human beings, then the
moral law can no longer be cited as the means by which a Power beyond it urges human
beings in the direction of moral goodness.
157
Many would not go so far as calling God a Cosmic Sadist.
The Argument from Desire is debatable as one of the arguments for the existence of God
formulated by Lewis. After reflecting on those who agree and disagree with Lewis, we are left
with a decision.
156
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company,
2008), 117.
157
John Beversluis., 314.
58
Chapter 3
Analysis of Chapter Two
In analyzing those who agree and disagree with Lewis’s Argument from Desire, the crux
of the discussion centers around Beversluis’s logic against desire. Lewis aimed to evangelize, to
move people toward belief in God’s existence. He maintained that having a desire for God was
proof of His existence. Lewis put forth the premise of desire, and God is the probable cause for
him.
Is it enough that Beversluis is original in his ideas? To be critical of Lewis is easy, but are
there any gains in moving anyone toward God? These are all good questions in that even though
critics can dispute Lewis’s ideas they have been useful in apologetics and evangelism. The
relation between apologetics and evangelism will be emphasized in chapter four. Also, these
questions emphasize that there is debate around Lewis’s Argument from Desire. As described in
his writings, many would argue that Lewis’s faith in God combines experiential and rational.
158
The Argument from Desire looks principally at the experiential.
However, there is logic to Lewis’s assessment of desire because he maintains that desire
for the spiritual comes from God, who wants us to desire Him. A person does not imagine that
they desire the spiritual in their lives. Consequently, the desire for the spiritual is not the work of
imagination, as some, such as Richard Dawkins, would think a fair assessment. Imagination does
not fit. Coming to faith is not a fantasy that we dream up and Lewis has maintained that God is
real. It is a desire for what Lewis referred to as: “something other and outer.”
159
Lewis
recognized and submitted to God “as that than which nothing greater can be desired.” Lewis saw
158
The argument from reason is another topic and there are works devoted to Lewis and that
argument.
159
Surprised by Joy, 130.
59
the longing stirred in him from earliest childhood as leading to the point where he gave in to
God, as a reluctant convert, but also acknowledging the love of God.
160
The desire for Lewis was
a quest for the necessary transcendental. Lewis wrote: “Tomorrow we shall celebrate the glorious
Resurrection of Christ. I shall be remembering you in Holy Communion. Away with tears and
fears and troubles! United in wedlock with the eternal Godhead Itself, our nature ascends into the
Heaven of Heavens.”
161
Lewis has such a stature in apologetics that his ideas about God are much studied and
scrutinized. Consequently, his Argument from Desire cannot be ignored. Lewis is strong in
apologetics which is evident in looking at where he falls historically in his ontological argument
or, like Occam’s razor, gets to the essentials of the thought. Lewis was not giving some original
proposal in his ideas on desire. Nevertheless, scholars on both sides of the argument
acknowledge Lewis’s contribution to the historical debate.
Lewis is in the family tree of scholars who espoused a desire for God. Their thoughts
have been influential in Christianity. Augustine said, “…you made us for yourself, and our hearts
find no peace until they rest in you.”
162
Pascal proposed an “infinite abyss that can only be
fulfilled by One who is infinite….”
163
So, can we concede that Lewis is not original in this thought of desire for joy and,
subsequently, God? Scholars who disagree with Lewis must surrender to a history of thought on
the phenomenon of God needing a place in our lives and recognize that the void is real and that
160
Ibid., 125.
161
Collected Letters Vol.2, 844.
162
Augustine, Confessions (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1976), 21.
163
Blaise Pascal, The Mind on Fire (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1989), 131, 109
60
only God can fill it. God is a necessary aspect of life. Even though scholars disagree with Lewis,
they do not dismiss his ideas. Gregory Bassham observed: “…Lewis was able to communicate
different ideas in simple, direct language that people of all backgrounds could understand. As a
communicator, Lewis was arguably one of the giants of the twentieth century.”
164
Can foundation ideas of Christianity be dismissed if Lewis and his ideas are rejected?
As a foundation idea, the ontological argument has existed for centuries, as evidenced in the
writings of Augustine, Anselm, Descartes, and others. They and Lewis formulated their
expressions on how to reason about the existence of God. These ideas have a long history and are
foundational to much of Christianity.
Theologians and philosophers highly respect Lewis’s opinions. As stated in theological
writings, Lewis is not alone in his ideas on desire. Puckett supports Lewis’s viewpoint that God
is the one who can satisfy the desires for the spiritual. Authors like Puckett and Willis are critical
on the one hand but realize on the other that Lewis was stating the obvious: that God is the best
explanation for the transcendental. Without God we could not conceive of such an idea as
heaven. Lewis is not correct because a few people agree with him. However, some ideas have
remained as dominant threads throughout Christian history. One can read the Apostle’s creed to
see an ancient statement of faith still used in Christian worship services. We call ideas of faith
practice and belief, doctrines, and one that is first and foremost is God’s existence. Without God,
Christianity falls apart at the heart. Lewis is not purporting a new idea so much as taking an
abductive approach in that he says the same thing in different words as in “longing” and
“desire.” Lewis asks his readers to look at God’s existence differently as an aid to faith in Him.
164
Gregory Bassham ed., C. S. Lewis, 1.
61
Lewis’s idea that we cannot rid ourselves of God or the idea of the spiritual is
crystallized in the account of his conversion. Lewis had a longing that would not go away. In a
serious discussion on this point, Lewis is a force of thought because in telling his story, he relates
a loss of faith in God and a regaining of the same. Lewis describes his conversion as longing
fulfilled. Lewis's longing echoes what we hear from others. Copan calls it “probable” and
Williams “simple.”
165
Longing is not so complex as some would have it seem. The authors who
support Lewis note that we can muddy the water of what Lewis was saying by formulating what
we think he was trying to say rather than hearing his message about God.
It would not be a good precedent in theological or philosophical discussions to dismiss
the history of centuries-old thoughts. If there was no God, where could we get such an idea?
Why would we want to conceive of God, or how would we conceive of God if such an entity did
not exist? We could argue that there are ideas that are products of our imagination, for instance,
monsters in the closet. There are no real monsters in the closet, but they make imaginative stories
for some children. Children who live in houses without closets have no such ideas about the
inhabitants of closets but may have another place where monsters like to dwell from time to
time! Anselm, however, reasoned that no greater thought than God could exist and that it was not
a product of imagination. Anselm concluded that God was a reality because his mind could not
reach beyond the idea of God. That God was the essence of God is Anselm's reasoning for his
existence. We could not conceive of God as the Supreme being if we could think of something
greater than Him. However, Anslem's famous phrase remains: “For God is that-than-which-
nothing-greater-can-be thought.”
165
Puckett quoted Copan in, The Apologetics of Joy,126 and Williams, Existential Reasons for
the Existence of God, 49.
62
However, whether referring to the God of Judaeo-Christian teaching (consistent with
Anselm) or not, every culture has gods, whether good or bad, singular, or plural. It would be a
rare group in this world without a deity. So, are we back to Lewis’s argument that the need for
the transcendent points to God? Lewis wrote: “Most of us find that our belief in the future life is
strong only when God is in the center of our thoughts.”
166
Scholars are not ruling out the
existence of God if they disagree with Lewis but are calling in question his Argument from
Desire as probable proof. There is room for debate and chapter two with its’ arguments for and
against Lewis’s bear this out. The arguments on both sides are indicative of the thought that
prevails about God’s existence. Lewis wrote for skeptics and atheists as one who had come from
that background. Scholars may disagree with his sense of the definite in his argument, but it does
make them think about it. In using the word “longing” to describe what had brought him to faith
Lewis identified a human trait that may not be wholly accepted but is accurate for many people.
The longing was a necessary part of Lewis’s life fulfilled in his conversion to
Christianity. Lewis brought about the debate because of the way he framed his thoughts. Lewis
set out to be rational and logical as he described his experience of faith in God. However, he
spoke and wrote from the context of his life and real experiences.
In the Argument from Desire Lewis attempts to explain God’s activity in his life. Why
did Lewis think as he did: was it because of pure reasoning, or was he affected at a deep level? It
is a more profound level than just his mind, that Lewis puts forth, and states as a case for others
who may wonder what is happening in their lives. Religious experience is not devoid of feelings.
History affirms this proposition, as was evident when George Whitefield spoke to the miners in
England, for example, in the English Revival of the 18th century, and tears ran down their coal
166
Reflections on the Psalms, 331.
63
dust-covered faces.
167
Lewis was also emotional, and we can ascertain his emotions from his use
of the word “fear” and his whole attitude of desire and joy. As a result, the Argument from
Desire becomes evident when his writings are studied. There is feeling in words such as “fear”,
“desire”, and “joy”. Lewis is emotionally descriptive in Surprised by Joy as his conversion to
theism gets close and he fully yields as the “most reluctant convert.” There is intellectual
reasoning, but also evidence of feeling in his words. Can the debate against what was real for
Lewis be anything but an intellectual exercise? Beversluis can argue that Lewis was influenced
by Plato, but Lewis would maintain it was more of a Christian influence in his life that brought
him to faith than anything or anyone else.
Regarding feeling, we can maintain that Beversluis, and his supporters know the truth of
what Lewis was doing in his argument. Lewis in talking about longing and desire was
contributing to the case for the existence of God, not just espousing ideas that were worn out by
time and better left alone. However, if one is an unbeliever, they feel an argument must take
place rather than accepting Lewis’s ideas.
There should not be any objection to the Argument from Desire because it entails
feeling(s). Faith is putting trust and having confidence in an object of affection
168
. People trust
people not just as an intellectual pursuit but because they feel (in their emotions) that the person
is worthy of trust. The feeling can be that we know of home as a place where we can be with
certain people. It also follows that with those special people we will eat certain foods and they, in
167
John Pollock, George Whitefield, and the Great Awakening (Tring, Herts, England: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1986), 83.
168
Reader’s Digest Webster’s Canadian Dictionary and Thesaurus (New Lanark, Scotland:
Geddes & Grosset, 2005), 191. “Faith is trust or confidence in a place or thing; a strong conviction, esp a
belief in a religion.
64
addition, will conjure up a feeling that is a fact of association with that place. We do not have
this fact of emotion in every place where we see people or eat food. We may eat alone in a café
that is not as satisfying simply because, at that moment, we are not at home but must have some
nourishment to sustain us. Beversluis and those who agree with his ideas are troubled by such an
analogy. They do not want to visualize proof of God’s existence stemming from desire. Lewis
argued from the perspective of desire, and even though some agree, others are skeptical.
Cook’s
169
line of argument presents a dilemma about belief. Do we trust feelings at all or
Lewis because he describes his desire in Surprised by Joy? Lewis thought his argument was a
probability of God's existence. So, is Beversluis the one who is making the argument and not
Lewis? We can question whether Beversluis put Lewis in a box of his own making and so
created an idea in his reader’s minds that they, in turn, superimpose on Lewis and consequently
formulate this argument as a gloss over his statements in various works. So, is Beversluis setting
out to prove the existence of God by the Argument from Desire, or is it Lewis’s idea? Therein is
a good and viable question about what Lewis said or what Beversluis said Lewis said. And yet
we are confronted with what Lewis said about desire and the probable existence of God. Lewis
has expressed the idea, not in an isolated statement, but several.
170
Lewis did not set out to formulate arguments from his conversion experience, but they
have nevertheless evolved out of the want to give them a name rather than leave them as themes
in his writings. Beversluis provided Lewis’s ideas with a formula, as in this case, the Argument
169
Edward M. Cook, “Does Joy Lead to God? Lewis, Beversluis, and the Argument from
Desire.” Pdf. 2001. Cook puts forth the idea that Beversluis may have misunderstood Lewis. If he
misunderstood Lewis, then the chapter on the Argument from Desire is in question even if the remainder
of the book has a credible contribution to Lewis studies.
170
In Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The Weight of Glory, The Problem of Pain, Reflections
on the Psalms, Collected Letters and Letters to Malcolm.
65
from Desire. Lewis used the word “desire” to promote the logic of his statement that a desire
must prelude satisfaction.
In the context of the world of war and its effects, Lewis put forth his ideas in easily
understood terms. Nevertheless, Beversluis has turned Lewis’s ideas into formulas in his attempt
to be critical of him. Lewis argues for God’s existence from what he had experienced and based
on the logic of cause and effect. If there is no cause, why the effect? If no God, why the desire
for one? Beversluis has, from the basis of these ideas, formed the phrase: “Argument from
Desire.”.
Furthermore, Beversluis postulates the Argument from Desire is a product of Lewis’s
background stemming from his heavy influence by Plato. Beversluis operates from the
assumption that Christianity, as a movement, owes as much to the Greeks as the Jews. From that
assumption, Beversluis has superimposed this idea on Lewis. He has photoshopped Plato on
people who influenced Lewis.
John Beversluis asserts that Lewis’s idea about desire is not particularly Christian, and
that Plato’s philosophy heavily influenced it. Beversluis claimed he had an insight into where
Lewis got his ideas. In the big picture of his faith, Plato is a piece of the puzzle that helps it look
familiar, possible, and realistic. Nevertheless, Lewis affirmed that Jesus was the true myth of
God’s revelation of Himself. Using the idea of Jesus as a true myth, any mention of Plato is used
as a building brick, but the whole structure is founded on Jesus. To use a scriptural analogy:
Jesus is the cornerstone.
171
In addition, Lewis is Christocentric in his writing and speaking, as
noted in his trilemma argument of Jesus as a liar, lunatic, or Lord in Mere Christianity.
172
171
Gospel of Matthew 21:42.
172
Mere Christianity, 56.
66
Even though Lewis references Plato in Surprised by Joy, he emphasizes how the
Christian authors had influenced him in the density of their writing. He noted: “George
MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer,” … He mentions Plato and Aeschylus
but does so along with Spenser, Milton, Virgil, Samuel Johnson, Langland, John Donne, Thomas
Browne, Hooker, Pascal, and George Herbert.
173
Nevertheless, the discussion is glued together on what we mean when we think of
desire.
174
The authors mentioned by Lewis contributed to desire in his life. Desire/longing was
there for something more than the things that can satisfy us such as food, drink, and other
physical needs. Desire can be considered as the essence of what triggers a response in us, and if
our spiritual beings need help, then we can argue that God is the result of the longing that caused
a pursuit in the first place. Lewis saw it as God pursuing him when describing his conversion in
Surprised by Joy.
175
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis traced a pathway to joy because of desire/longing. Scholars
who discuss the Argument from Desire give us fuel to gauge what makes sense of life. We must
decide whether one set of arguments is more forceful and logical than another. Yet, in the
examination of Lewis, we realize that this critical approach is sound. We do not only look at
Lewis with just great admiration but seriously realize that many arguments speak against his
contention. We are amid a debate and can only imagine being in a room where the two sides can
173
Surprised by Joy, 118.
174
Dictionary, 149. “Desire is a longing for something regarded as pleasurable or satisfying…”
175
Surprised by Joy, 123 “The fox had been dislodged from the Hegelian Wood and was now
running in the open, ‘with all the woe in the world, ‘bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind.
And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack: Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert,
Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined the other side.”
67
pitch their ideas back and forth. We must decide to agree or find one set of arguments worth
more consideration than another. Then, we leave the room to reflect on and weigh all we know
about God, whether in our minds, experience, or both.
Lewis’s ideas about desire pointing toward God and existence are sound and
withstand the arguments presented by those who question him. The questioning does not negate
the point raised by Lewis. Lewis described what brought him from his atheism back to
Christianity. And Lewis used the Argument from Desire to present just one of his arguments as
probable proof for God existing. Therefore, the disagreement around the Argument from Desire
is valuable in ascertaining whether we want to dig deep and reason if it is valid or superfluous.
However, the points raised prove that there is more than one approach to an idea. We can read
Lewis and interpret him and then read those like Beversluis, who give a differing perspective.
We can also read those who disagree with Beversluis. By examining what Beversluis and others
say, we must, at minimum, reconsider our thoughts on the Argument from Desire.
Those who disagree with Lewis’s reasonings do not keep him on a pedestal. Taking
Lewis off a pedestal is one of Beversluis's objectives. He feels everyone thinks so highly of
Lewis that serious discussion is prejudiced in examining his ideas.
Beversluis has aided critical debate on Lewis. So, can we ascertain that Beversluis and
his ideas and the debate they generate are not off the mark in thinking Lewis is retooling an age-
old series of formulas into one better understood in his contemporary time and still is today? For
instance, even though many still like the King James Version of the Bible, others prefer the
newer versions, which use more current forms of language expression to convey the meaning of
the original languages of the biblical manuscripts. The essence of the message of the Bible is not
lost if spoken in contemporary English. Lewis’s writings still bear the stamp of a contemporary
68
sound, as evidenced by how much people still read them. Lewis expressed ideas that originate
with Augustine, Anselm, and Occam in language that someone hundreds of years later could
understand. Therefore, on a historical basis, Lewis’s ideas have credibility even if Beversluis and
others disagree with them.
In the big picture of the argument, we are caught in the dilemma that many ideas are not
original but borrowed and reissued in the guise of recent times. Lewis brought the desire, the
longing, and the restlessness of our quest or need for God into a contemporary context. It begs
the question about the history of thought: where, for instance, did Augustine get his ideas? If
Augustine borrowed ideas, can we be affirmative in the arguments from desire that came after
him and built on the structure of his thoughts? In illustration, Christianity originated in Judaism,
and we interpret it in the context of the revelation of God in Jesus. The Old Testament is the
background for the New Testament, and we can read in the Old Testament that historians
recorded certain incidents in some annals of the kings.
176
Ideas germinated in the soil of the past.
Whether Lewis’s ideas have historical precedence or not, in reviewing opinions for and
against the Argument from Desire, longing is satisfied in Lewis’s relationship with God. Lewis is
shouting above the clamor of all the voices that desire for joy led him to God. Lewis has become
personal and taken his ideas away from any aspect of theory to an actual happening in his life.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Lewis, his opinion is based on the importance of joy in his
faith journey. Joy was what Lewis wanted and in believing in Jesus, he no longer needed to
176
By way of illustrating that idea 2 Kings 15:31, 16:19 and 21:25 mention other histories of
details concerning Israel and Judah’s kings.
69
search for it. Joy had been the signpost leading him to Christ.
177
So, we have Lewis’s story, not
someone else’s from the past or present.
It does not appear that people support Lewis out of blind loyalty. That adds flavor to the
discussion. This questioning attitude toward Lewis helps strengthen arguments as they are dealt
with to ascertain whether they have a good foundation or not. What is the tensile strength of
these arguments around the writings of one acclaimed a great apologist? Even great admirers of
him have their critical points of view. In his biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath made this
statement: “Lewis takes pains to make it clear that his conversion had nothing to do with desire
or longing.”
178
Also, and I referenced this earlier, in If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis, he
commented: “Lewis’s ideas are often wise and worth listening to, but that doesn't mean we must
agree with everything he says.” “That doesn't mean he’s right about everything. It just means he
is someone worth listening to.”
179
That statement differs from the quotation from his book, The
Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis.
180
It is not so praising of Lewis and his ideas as we find in
much biographical literature. This critical thinking makes us notice and not blindly accept an
idea because it originates with Lewis.
Nevertheless, we cannot forget the primary source in favor of an interpretation. Therein is
a key to the idea that has emerged about Lewis. What was he trying to say in his talking and
writing about longing and desire? Even though scholars have questions and disagreements on
177
Surprised by Joy, 130.
178
Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis A Life. Eccentric Genius. Reluctant Prophet, 146.
179
Alister McGrath, If I had Lunch with C. S. Lewis, x, xi.
180
Alister McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. Lewis, 108-109. He writes: “Lewis’s thinking
on the apologetic role of “desire” emerges within this literary context (referring to the blue flower in
German Romanticism) and at points appears to have been shaped by it.”
70
Lewis’s Argument from Desire, in Surprised by Joy, we find his effort to describe what
happened to him spiritually. After his conversion to Theism, he says: “My conversion involved
as yet no belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted
for several months, perhaps even a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even
raising that question.”
181
This statement talks of desire for the spiritual as the need for
somewhere eternal not met by physical existence. Lewis has come into a relationship with God,
and the eternal comes with Him.
We cannot dismiss the idea that many of Lewis’s comments were not just put forth in the
philosophical atmosphere of the Socratic Club but also at airfields to pilots who were flying
missions, many of whom did not come back. There was a matter of life and death, especially
from a Christian perspective of life after death. Speculation is not of value to a person in those
circumstances, but the definite hope born of faith in God. Traveling about England on weekends
speaking at air force bases, Lewis was not entertainment but an effort to reach those who may
soon be out of reach of a human voice. Also, Lewis spoke over the radio at a time when people
needed a message in the face of death as London became a battle zone during the Blitz.
182
What
Lewis said on the air eventually became the book Mere Christianity. By contrast, in a
philosophical setting such as the Socratic Club, ideas can be shared and debated without the
same fear of failure. Lewis used his talents in each situation as was pertinent to the need and the
emphasis.
181
Surprised by Joy, 126.
182
The Blitz refers to the systematic bombing of London by Germany during World War II. It is
during that time that Lewis did several talks on the radio. Between the talks to the Royal Air Force and
the radio messages we have most of the content of his book, Mere Christianity.
71
Lewis’s ideas were not theoretical but grounded in the reality of his faith. For Lewis it is
both witness and argument. Lewis told of what had happened to him, but also made the
deduction that it can happen to anyone else who realizes that God has placed a desire in them for
the spiritual and only God can fulfill it. Scholars look at his Argument from Desire in the
historical lineage, and at times negatively, even questioning the origins of the idea. In his essay,
“The Obstinacy of Belief,” Lewis wrote: “we trust not because ‘a God’ exists, but because this
God exists.”
183
One must identify why a person would even consider God a viable reality in their lives.
The Argument from Desire pinpoints the factor in Lewis’s life along with the reasoning and the
trilemma of why he came to faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. That argument is worth
discussion and disagreement. However, the back-and-forth discussion only reinforces the
premise that Lewis and his ideas have worth! We cannot dismiss them because there are
questions around them. Either we see Lewis in terms of God’s existence or, like Beversluis,
dismiss him as a borrower of others’ ideas and a minimum of substance to offer to the syllabus of
Christianity. However, Lewis takes his place in the lineage of thinkers on the existence of God.
183
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 70
72
Chapter 4
Conclusions and Contemporary implications of Lewis’s Argument from Desire/Sehnsucht
to the wider Church community
This chapter will look at Lewis’s Argument from Desire from the vantage point of its’
apologetic quality and its value for evangelism. In looking at apologetics, Alister McGrath’s
work, Mere Apologetics will be referenced.
However, before looking at McGrath’s book and considering Lewis’s place in
contemporary evangelism, it is important to examine Lewis’s philosophy concerning evangelism.
Lewis was definite that Christians should work the essentials of their faith into their writing.
Lewis said: “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more books by
Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.”
184
In a letter to the Milton Society of
America, he wrote: “It was he (referring to his imaginative self) who, after my conversion led me
to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a
kind of theologized science-fiction.”
185
George Sayer aptly sums up Lewis’s sentiment
concerning evangelism when he says: “Jack’s conversion to Christianity made him a different
person. His search for belief was over; he now had a strong platform on which to stand… he
wanted to become an evangelist for the Christian faith.”
186
Lewis came to evangelism with a sense of responsibility. We see it in his praying for
people. He had two lists: those for whose conversion I pray and those for whose conversion I
184
C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics” God in the Dock (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & CO.
Ltd), 93.
185
W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (Glasgow: Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1988), 444.
186
George Sayer, Jack: A life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994), 231.
73
give thanks.
187
John Piper described how Lewis did his evangelism: “He bent every romantic
effort and every rational effort to help people see what he had seen —the glory of Jesus Christ,
the goal of all his longings, and the solid ground of all his thoughts.”
188
Also, Lewis carried on
an extensive correspondence because he felt compelled to respond to questions that readers often
raised due to his writings. The counsel of his letters over a lifetime is invaluable.
Lewis’s goal in evangelism was expressed by him:
The salvation of souls is a means to the glorifying of God because only saved souls can
duly glorify Him. The thing to which, on my view, culture must be subordinated, is not
(though it includes) moral virtue, but the conscious direction of all will and desire to a
transcendental Person in whom I believe all values reside, and the reference to Him in
every thought and action.
189
In his chapter on social morality in Mere Christianity, Lewis noted that what is needed is
laymen living their faith. It is a mission for everyone to be engaged in wherever they find
themselves or whatever their calling. Lewis expended much effort to share his Christian faith
with the public, beyond the walls of the ecclesiastical, into the public arena. He communicated
daily the essence of the faith, and in so doing was as an able apologist of the Christian faith.
Upon turning to Alister McGrath we find he emphasizes Lewis and his ability to present
the Christian message. In this chapter I will reference McGrath’s book, Mere Apologetics to look
at Lewis’s Argument from Desire using inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning. McGrath
described inductive in these words: “Apologetics is about going further and deeper into the
187
John Piper, The Romantic Rationalist. God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis
(Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 165.
188
Ibid., 38.
189
C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 32.
74
Christian faith, discovering its riches.”
190
Deductive as described by McGrath: “Apologetics thus
has a strongly positive dimension—setting out the full attractiveness of Jesus Christ so those
outside the faith can begin to grasp why He merits such serious consideration.”
191
And abductive
reasoning according to McGrath: “ We need to be able to set out and explain the deep attraction
of the Christian gospel for our culture, using language and images it can access. It is no accident
that Christ used parables to teach about the kingdom of God.”
192
McGrath wrote:
It is interesting to note that C. S. Lewis develops three quite different apologetic
strategies in his writings, each of which relates to a distinct audience. In Mere
Christianity (1952) and Miracles (1947), we find Lewis developing the case for the
Christian faith based on an appeal to reason. The dominant apologetic theme in the
Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) and Surprised by Joy (1955) is that the Christian faith is the
fulfillment of human longing. In the celebrated Narnia novels (1950-56), Lewis appeals
to the imagination as the gateway to the soul.
193
In this quote we have reason(deductive) human longing (inductive) and imagination(abductive).
In his book, Mere Discipleship, McGrath has a chapter devoted to Lewis and the
reasonableness of the Christian faith. He writes: “Lewis’s genius as an apologist lay in his ability
to know how a viewpoint derived from the Bible and the Christian tradition offered a more
satisfactory explanation of common human experience than its rivals—especially the atheism he
had himself espoused.” He continues: “Lewis’s apologetic approach is to identify a common
human observation or experience, then show how it fits, naturally and plausibly, within a
190
Alister McGrath, Mere Apologetics How to Help Seekers & Skeptics Find Faith (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books, 2012), 18.
191
Ibid., 19.
192
Ibid., 20.
193
Ibid., 69.
75
Christian way of looking at things.”
194
McGrath also observes: “Lewis tells the truth by showing
the truth.”
195
That approach was often employed by Lewis especially in his fiction and therefore
brought into play abductive reasoning in his readers.
In relation to fiction, McGrath’s notes, Christians have used different forms of
evangelism through the centuries. One form, as old as the gospel accounts, is storytelling (Jesus
used parables to relate timeless truths that enabled and have fortified faith for two thousand
years). McGrath wrote of this storytelling approach.
196
C. S. Lewis used storytelling to get
across his message. In addition, to the storytelling of such works as Screwtape Letters, The
Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces, there are the illustrations in
his sermons and talks.
If one wants to find a book or books of reference and recommendation to a seeker after
the Christian faith, Lewis is a fair starting point. In fiction and non-fiction, Lewis used
affirmative statements about the path to belief in God and the revelation of Jesus. The serious
seeker can struggle with Lewis in Surprised by Joy as he must let go of his atheism and the
desire to be left alone.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote of how books and authors stirred and undercut some of
his cherished ideas. In like manner, others may read Lewis and be stirred to question their
thoughts on faith. Or one can feel the full force of his arguments in Screwtape Letters, Mere
194
Alister McGrath, Mere Discipleship Growing in Wisdom and Hope, 94.
195
Ibid., 97.
196
Mere Apologetics. Chapter 7. “Narratives position realities by locating them within the
framework of a story.” 141.
76
Christianity, God in the Dock, and the various books of essays.
197
Children can be introduced to
faith in the Narnia Chronicles, and teens and adults in the Space Trilogy. In all the above, there
is plenty to fuel the imagination and raise serious inquiry into the Christian faith.
Paul Holmer declared: “The appeal of Lewis’s religious writings depends in large part
upon the ease with which he can address us as we know ourselves in griefs, pleasures, sorrows,
and woes, and he makes Christianity congruent with that.”
198
Alister McGrath concurs:
Lewis is seen to enrich and extend faith, without diluting it. In other words, Evangelicals
tend to see Lewis as a catalyst, who opens up a deeper vision of the Christian faith,
engaging the mind, the feelings, and the imagination, without challenging fundamental
distinctives. Lewis supplements, without displacing, evangelical basics.
199
Before the above statement, McGrath had mentioned how he met many who had been influenced
by Lewis’s writings. Lewis’s evangelical appeal continues to this day.
197
Lewis’s output has been compiled by Walter Hooper in such books as: First and Second
Things, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, Present Concerns, Fern Seed and Elephants and Christian
Reflections.
198
Paul Holmer, C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought (New York: Harper and Row,
1976), 109.
199
Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis A Life, 256.
77
A. Is Lewis still Relevant and Capable of Providing a Paradigm for Sharing the
Gospel?
C.S. Lewis, the apologist, led people into the mystery and helped create hunger and thirst
for the “holiday at the sea rather than staying in the slum.”
200
He helps his readers of The Narnia
Chronicles see that there was something more mysterious about Aslan, the lion, than his just
being a large cat. Those who read Mere Christianity are told Jesus was more than a man with
strange ideas, but the Lord, the revelation of God. He used the abductive method in his reasoning
to help his readers look at things differently and then draw their own conclusion.
In his radio talks, which became Mere Christianity, Lewis put forth what he believed
about the Christian faith. It was presented in such a way that faith made sense to his listeners. He
used illustrations from real life and left his listeners with the decision to believe in Jesus. They
were offered the possibility that God could meet the desire that was being addressed by nothing
else. The listeners to the radio broadcasts were left to make their own deductions.
Lewis’s apologetics can help the reader understand the longing/desire that God has
created in them. In describing his conversion in Surprised by Joy, Lewis helps the reader realize
that one thing after another may be nudging them away from unbelief to belief. In reading
Screwtape Letters, the reader may become conscious of how evil has been working in their lives
and countering the Holy Spirit. Lewis opens the question of whether the probability of God is a
viable possibility. Again, readers are left to their own inductive conclusions.
As previously mentioned, one vital form of apologetics that Lewis employed was the use
of story. In Lewis’s stories readers confront the facts of salvation and must come to their own
conclusions. Alister McGrath, in Mere Apologetics, writes that stories are a gateway for the
200
The Weight of Glory, 26.
78
apologetic approach. McGrath says: “There is now widespread support for the view that stories
are the basic medium through which human beings view reality.”
201
Lewis relates his conversion as a quest for joy in Surprised by Joy. His story can capture
our imagination even today and urge us to ask if there is something that is nudging us towards a
definite point or being. Is that which we may think is very real and satisfying pointing to
something more real and satisfying or not? In relating his experience of what created a longing
and what satisfied it, Lewis helps the reader to understand that finding God is the ultimate in
one’s quest for joy. David Downing agrees: “Yet his ability to attend so carefully to his inner
world is what makes him such a perceptive commentator on his reader’s foibles and failures, and
also on their source of awe, hope, and faith.”
202
Lewis understands, as one who traveled the path from atheism to Christianity, that there
is unfulfilled longing /desire which was not met for him by anything the world offered in terms
of pleasure or satisfaction. No matter where we think our development has taken us, there are
still longings that we cannot fulfill except in attention to our spiritual being. Philip and Carol
Zaleski, in their writing about the Inklings, reiterate the significance of longing to Lewis: “His
spiritual longings could be safely reclassified as aesthetic longings and enjoyed as such….”
203
Lewis may have a whiff of an old-time revivalist meeting in describing our longing for
God. However, we do not dismiss Lewis because of his honesty relating his faith journey. It is
worth noting that what Lewis put in an allegory in The Pilgrim’s Regress, in the early days after
his conversion, he puts in real-time many years later in Surprised by Joy. Because Lewis has
201
McGrath, Mere Apologetics,139.
202
David Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert (Downers Grove: IVPress, 2005), 162.
203
Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship. The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 157.
79
traveled the road to faith, he can communicate to the seeker after truth or the one wanting to
engage with the spiritual side.
Lewis relates the longing for joy and takes his readers along with him on a journey
towards faith in Jesus Christ. As John Randolph Willis phrases it: “Lewis’s writing frequently
presses for a decision; it is polemical writing in the best sense.”
204
Lewis is one of the scholars who espouse a need for God. Historical scholars such as
Augustine, Anselm, and Pascal expressed their ideas in a few words even though they have been
expanded, explained, and discussed. For instance, St. Augustine said: “you made us for yourself,
and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
205
Lewis’s Argument from Desire is also
expressed succinctly: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly
pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.”
206
This statement by Lewis
is only one example supporting his argument.
To present the gospel concisely, a formula is helpful. However, we know more depth and
time is needed to invest in the process of discipleship. To emphasize the importance of spiritual
change, Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born again.
207
However, reading the gospels exposes
one to the many implications of taking up one’s cross and daily following Jesus. The formula is
only the hook to rouse the mind to want to know more. If we fish for humanity, as commissioned
by Jesus, we endeavor to hook those with whom we share the faith.
204
Willis, Pleasures Forevermore! The Theology of C. S. Lewis, xix.
205
Augustine, Confessions,( New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 21.
206
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 118.
207
John 3:3,5.
80
Lewis shared in Surprised by Joy that his imagination was baptized by reading
MacDonald’s Phantasies. In a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis recounted how Dyson
and Tolkien, in their conversation with him, related how Christ was the true myth.
208
This idea
that Christ was the true myth was a hook that he could not ignore, one that drew him closer to
Christianity. Myth was important to Lewis because he was fascinated by Norse tales and other
writings about the north. McGrath writes of the importance in making a connection with the
familiar when explaining/justifying faith: “Apologetics is about building bridges, allowing
people to cross from the world they already know to one they need to discover.”
209
The story of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity arouses curiosity, presents the Argument
from Desire, conveys his abductive reasoning and grasp of the transcendent in his conclusion
that Jesus was the Christ. In telling his story, Lewis identifies specific points in his life that
grabbed his attention, and he expresses that those experiences created a longing that he had
fulfilled. The atheist Lewis could not continue with his chronological snobbery, his new look,
referred to in Surprised by Joy. At his conversion Lewis became a changed man.
Lewis believed there had to be more; his curiosity was aroused. To hook the people
enable them to seek a longing that only God can satisfy; they must be curious about life and its
purposes. Lewis and his writings can be the hook that sparks the imagination and subsequently
leads to faith in God. In Surprised by Joy, we see years pass as Lewis is awakened out of his
208
Walter Hooper editor, They Stand Together, 429. In this letter Lewis said: “Now what Dyson
and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story, I didn’t mind it at all:
… Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but
with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same
way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: …”
209
McGrath, Mere Apologetics, 127.
81
attitude that he didn’t need God. However, seeds were sown, cultivated and after many years
bore fruit.
People may not come to faith with a deductive apologetic approach. Nevertheless, the
abductive method may hook them and in time bring about a conversion experience. Evangelism
takes time and it is evidenced in Lewis’s life and many others. From 1916 when he gives the idea
of an initial baptism of his imagination in reading MacDonald to 1929 or 1930
210
when his
conversion to theism took place is a considerable time span. However, in the details of how the
conversion took place, Lewis uses images that are abductive in that they cause a person to look at
faith as a process in which change gradually takes place. The stories of faith in God are the result
of ideas sown, germinated, and, in season bear fruit. This was real in Lewis’s life in that he
came to faith by looking at it differently than previously. Instead, he saw the world of myth
more like a copy of God’s true myth in Jesus rather than the other way around.
210
There is a debate among scholars such as Allister McGrath about the actual date of Lewis’s conversion
based on other incidents in his life such as the year his father died.
82
B. Can we still use Lewis and his approach to guide people to a knowledge of the existence
of God?
The primary sources of Lewis’s writings provide many avenues for witnessing. Surprised
by Joy is the honest rendering of the path to faith lost and found again. In Surprised by Joy,
Lewis maintained that God pursued him, not letting him go his own way. It is a good rendering
of what transpired in his life because he writes with objectivity about this person who God
outmaneuvered. The narrative is a journey through growing pains as a child who has experienced
significant loss in the early death of his mother, the ravages of a world war, and the ups and
downs of academic life, and finding his first job. McGrath emphasised in Mere Apologetics that
we need to put together our story of faith as a way of sharing about our relationship with God.
211
Lewis’s struggle may be that of many who have had difficult life experiences. Lewis’s
description of questioning God’s existence, his way back to faith, could provide points that
identify with their life. For instance, Dyson and Tolkien and their interpretation of myth pushed
Lewis to see Jesus in a different light. Something in what Lewis said in Surprised by Joy or other
writings may change a person’s outlook on God.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis portrays his conversion as a drama that comes to its climax as
the reluctant convert kneels and prays as though there was no other option available to him. The
portrayal by Lewis is specific to himself as he is honest about his doubts and fears. Conversion
can be a process where arguments are broken down, new ideas are formed, and we admit we
were not right. In that context, Lewis had an inductive conversion experience in that he did not
find joy until he yielded to God. He looked at Jesus differently and saw Him as the true myth. In
that context we can also call Lewis’s conversion experience abductive. McGrath mentions
211
McGrath, Mere Apologetics, “By telling my story, I am confirming the gospel is real in my life.” 141.
83
Lewis’s conversion in these words: “In narrating his conversion in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
clarifies he did not come to believe in God as the result of a deductive argument, but rather by
reflection on his experience.”
212
The place of God is central to conversion, and Lewis did not
discount that idea. Lewis knew he could fulfill his longing if he stopped running and surrendered
to God. Lewis is an objective observer of his conversion and yet stresses the subjective
involvement in his description of what happened in his room in Magdalen. As a result, Lewis
leaves his readers to come to their own conclusion. In using the picture of a chess game that only
ended in God’s checkmating him, Lewis draws an abductive approach to capture the thoughts of
the inquirer. Lewis also used this in his dialogue between the senior and junior devil in
Screwtape Letters. It is imaginative as a look at evil and its influence, but it can place the reader
in a context that may seem familiar. The question can come to mind of whether they were close
to having faith in God and something happened to their attention and the moment was no more.
In the Chronicles of Narnia Lewis uses animals to convey important faith truths about Aslan
who is a figure of the Christ.
Lewis used the idea of longing because he believed that subjectivity was a common
denominator in every person’s life. Lewis had a longing, and as he knew hunger and thirst were
not needs peculiar to his life, he also knew that longing for God was not just his problem. Lewis
realized that he shared with humanity the need for food, water, and spirituality. By the process of
induction, he finds his need met in God. The difference between abductive and deductive
reasoning is subtle, and not generally agreed upon.
213
212
Ibid., 82.
213
blog Your Guide to Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive
Reasoning.
84
Lewis cultivated longing in his writings using imagery. In his writings, we are taken on a
journey to appreciate autumn, the cold of a winter’s evening, and the desire to open a door.
Through the means of story, we may enter the place of truth without realizing we are there. We
find a longing stirred in us when we want to push open the door of the wardrobe in The Lion the
Witch and the Wardrobe and have a cup of tea with Mr. Tumnus. We may find the truth as we
hear his story about Aslan and later encounter the beaver family. We become captivated by a
vision of what could be if we surrendered to God. We look at life differently and realize change
takes place in surrender to God.
We may argue that our longing can be fulfilled in a relationship, listening to music,
looking at a piece of art, and spending time with friends. Lewis would argue that no matter how
great the music, art, or friends, the longing is still there. All those things, such as music, can stir
the longing but not fulfill it. Only God can fulfill a life to overflowing. Lewis could be complicit
in the thought that humanity may not be hiding from God in the garden of Eden. Somewhere in
a garden, on a crowded sidewalk, at a party, in an office cubicle, there is an attempt to keep a low
profile, keep ourselves to ourselves, and hold on to our sin. In his writings, Lewis attempted to
stir people to look to God and stop hiding or running from him. All through Surprised by Joy, we
think Lewis will find joy; however, he needed God. He uses the picture for our minds that joy
was a signpost pointing him in the right direction. So, as an apologetic, that is useful for
evangelism: what are the signposts in our life that may be pointing us toward God? That can be a
statement that opens a people’s minds to the fact that they are being convicted, feel uneasy, about
their spiritual life.
85
In relation to conviction in Lewis, we investigate what happens when the atheist faces the
dilemma of having his precious balloon of ideas burst around him.
214
In, The Soul of C. S. Lewis,
we can read:
Surprised by Joy, though uniquely Lewis’s story, allows the reader to discover bits and
pieces of his or her own story. As Lewis chronicled the events that shaped his life, we
are free to revisit and reflect on our own life-shaping events. Each of us has a context
into which we were born, a family history that becomes our own. The region or city in
which we were brought up feeds into a sense of self and marks our understanding. The
schools we attend, the friendships we form, the books we read all contribute to the life
of the soul. Lewis would not let his readers forget that this is so. As we read Lewis, we
are reminded of another idea as well: these events that shape us also send us on a
spiritual quest; they mark our discovery of a world that properly understood, reveals
that God has been present and guiding us all along.
215
In Lewis’s argument, we must engage our minds and either formulate a better idea then
his line of reasoning or agree that he has touched on a need that, from his logic, only God can
satisfy. William Lane Craig reasoned: “Conversion is exclusively the role of the Holy Spirit. But
the Holy Spirit may use our arguments to draw people to Himself.”
216
Paul Holmer wrote:
The grand yet simple theological truths that Lewis has such a strong concern for are
actually the elementary and plain assertions that make up the gospel itself. These are
the kerygma, the rudimentary components making up the evangel, summarized in the
creed of the apostles. Lewis did not consider these to be theology in the modern
sense, nor were these teachings to be thought of as second-order meditations upon the
primary material.
217
214
Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 125. “But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high
gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction
for a chance to escape?”
215
Walter Martindale, Jerry Root, and Linda Washington editors, The Soul of C. S. Lewis. A
Meditative Journey through Twenty-six of His Best-Loved Writings (Carol Stream: Tyndale House
Publishers, Inc., 2010), 22.
216
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 57.
217
Paul Holmer, C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought, 98.
86
Lewis works the truths of faith into his stories, as Jesus did in his parables. He adapted
the old paradigm of storytelling for getting out a message. Jerry Root observed that Lewis used
three ways to be evangelistic as a writer. “1. Lewis busied himself with preparing people to
receive the gospel message. 2. Lewis’s evangelistic rhetoric was explicitly Christ-centered. 3.
Lewis’s evangelistic rhetoric used imagination.”
218
Lewis can be used in this day and time as we
look for evangelism tools for each generation. Lewis is timeless in that he uses characters that
never age, such as Aslan or the people of the Space Trilogy. In the Space Trilogy the contrast of
good and evil is portrayed in the lives of the main characters. In Perelandra the reader is in a
situation much like Eden of the book of Genesis. There is played out in that setting the tension of
evil wanting its way and yet those there being governed by a higher power. What would we
suggest Ransom do in such a situation? What would we do if the opportunity presented itself to
stop evil? What would we deduce in such as abductive setting? Lewis takes us into the story and
the debate of a situation as old as Genesis.
Looking at Lewis proves McGrath’s point: “Apologetics begins the conversation;
evangelism brings it to its conclusion.”
219
McGrath maintains that not every person can be
argued and reasoned into faith. Looking at the Book of Acts in the New Testament, McGrath
refers to Peter and Paul, who addressed Jewish and Greek audiences respectively and employed
different starting points for their message. In Jerusalem, Peter spoke to many who would have
believed Jesus to be the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, whereas Paul (in Athens) appealed to the
Greek desire for wisdom. McGrath looks at how to effectively develop one’s own apologetic to
218
Jerry Root, “C. S. Lewis, Evangelism, and Cultural Engagement,” The Exchange with Ed
Stetzer, (July/August 2021), 2-3.
219
McGrath, Mere Apologetics, 123.
87
tell a story of faith in contemporary culture. McGrath says: “We are not out to simply prove that
Jesus died on a cross and rose again. We want to convey the significance of those facts for a
fallen and lost world.”
220
We see this approach in Lewis’s writings that originated as radio talks
and lectures on RAF bases during the Second World War.
In Mere Discipleship, Alister McGrath observed: “Lewis’s apologetic often takes the
form of a visual invitation: try seeing it this way!”
221
It was an abductive approach that has
worked for many who profess faith because of Lewis’s writings. However, McGrath would
disagree with that statement. He reasoned: “Where some favor deductive arguments for the
existence of God, Lewis offers his distinct approach, which is more inductive than deductive;
more visual than purely rational.”
222
McGrath also quotes Austin Farrer, who said: “Lewis makes
us think we are listening to an argument, when in reality we are presented with a vision, and it is
the vision that carries conviction.”
223
McGrath also stated (and I mentioned this earlier): “ In
narrating the story of his conversion in Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis makes it clear he did not
come to believe in God as the result of a deductive argument, but rather on reflection on his
experience
224
. Here we are given the impression that he favors the idea of abduction in Lewis’s
conversion story!
In conclusion, Lewis does not simplify the existence of God but rather communicates the
probability that God exists in terms that are understandable for the lay person. Lewis touches the
220
Ibid., 62.
221
McGrath, Mere Discipleship, 89.
222
Ibid., 86.
223
Ibid., 89.
224
McGrath, Mere Apologetics, 82.
88
core of human feeling and thought as he introduces the reader to Christianity. Can we find better
answers than Lewis did about God? Lewis concluded that God was the one who planted the
desire and fulfilled the same in him. That leaves his readers with a probable answer to their
spiritual quest.
Lewis, overcome by longing, put into words what John Beversluis called the Argument
from Desire. We can look to Lewis to assist in the use of apologetics in evangelism. God had
done something experientially in his life and he shared it. That experience satisfied his longing
for joy as well as similar longing in many others who have read his works. If his words worked
effectively in the past, there is no reason to think they will not be effective in the future!
89
Conclusion
We cannot dismiss C. S. Lewis because he was a lay theologian. Lewis’s Argument from
Desire is a phrase coined by John Beversluis, but it sets Lewis on the road of thought with
Augustine, Anselm, Occam, and others who believed in God and endeavored to prove his
existence.
Lewis reasoned that the longing of the human being that is not met by what touches our
physical and emotional needs must have a source. Since spiritual longing must have a source, the
logical conclusion is that God exists. Lewis carves away all the peripheral ideas to come to this
point that God is, and our minds cannot fathom anyone greater. At both highest, according to
Anselm, and simplest, according to Occam, this is the great argument for the human mind and
heart.
For Lewis, the existence of God is a probability that is the only possibility to satisfy the
longing in the human heart. That was the essence of his message in the various genres he
employed, and they, in turn, can point out to those who read and consider his works that belief in
God is reasonable, a means to human satisfaction, a relationship with God, and even joy!
225
225
Dr. Jonathan Wilson, the external examiner, asked the following questions at the beginning of
the thesis and they are answered as follows.:
Wilson: Does Lewis have an “argument from desire?” Answer: This is the argument in Mere
Christianity that there is a desire for heaven and hence God.
90
Wilson: Isn’t it an argument from joy not from desire? Answer: It could be argued from that point
of view. However, the focus of the thesis has been on desire and the emphasis put on that by John
Beversluis. Lewis had other arguments: The argument from reason. The Christocentric argument.
Wilson: Is it an argument for the existence of God? Answer: That has been pointed out in the thesis
in that the desire for heaven also includes the one who dwells there.
Wilson: Doesn’t Lewis undergo at least two conversions? Answer: There is at least the one to
theism and then to belief in Christ. Someone might argue that there are significant points before
that when he is changing in his thoughts, as in the ride on the Headington bus, when he talks of
like a soldier taking off his armour.
Wilson: Does desire play a part in both? Answer: Yes, in that one conversion is a step toward the
other.
Wilson: How does Lewis get from probability to certainty? Answer: He uses the word probability
in his writing to give his argument. In a way it was an evangelism tool in that the person reading
must make up their own mind. However, for Lewis it was a certainty as he described his conversion
to Christ, as a conclusion, arrived at on the motorcycle ride to Whipsnade Zoo described on the
last page of Surprised by Joy.
Wilson: From “idea” to reality? Answer: In Surprised by Joy, he gives the journey to belief. One
can go back as far as 1916 when his imagination was baptized by reading George MacDonald.
From that point his mind is slowly brought to the point of belief. However, in Surprised by Joy,
when he kneels and prays there is a reality there as a matter of the heart and no longer just an idea
in his mind. At that point the longing cultivated over a lifetime reaches a climax.
91
Questions for further research
Would Lewis still be relevant in his argument from desire if he focused on one genre, children’s
literature?
Is Lewis’s trilemma argument ontological in its conclusion?
Does Lewis’s views on purgatory dissolve some of the force of the argument from desire? In
other words, is desire a work of God in us pointing to the work of salvation, or can we balance
the sheet of good and evil in our lives after death?
Is there enough of the gospel message in Lewis’s fiction to bring a person to faith in God!
92
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