Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Lewis, C. S.

  • Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

    Anthony Flood writes, Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word. Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard,…

  • The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief

    A reader sends us to an article that begins like this: The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life.  And then a little later…

  • Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

    Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering": Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)…

  • The Lewis Trilemma

    Does it prove the divinity of Jesus? I argue that it doesn't at the top o' the Stack. People who think otherwise, Peter Kreeft for example, bluster. People love to bluster.  Galen Strawson's rejection of theism is pure bluster.

  • C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

    In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes, We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated…

  • The Future as the Most Completely Temporal of the Temporal Modi and the Least like Eternity

    A tip of the hat to Brother Inky for reminding me of the following intriguing passage from C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. The following is lifted verbatim from Powerline: Another classic passage that bears on the essential maliciousness of the modern “Progressive” mind comes from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. If you’re not familiar with this…