Did C.S. Lewis Have a Crisis of Faith in 1948?

Some C. S. Lewis scholars have popularized the idea that Lewis had a serious personal crisis after a debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, a Roman Catholic philosopher, at the Oxford Socratic Club on February 2, 1948. Anscombe, it is claimed, so demolished Lewis’s argument regarding naturalism and the possibility of human reason that Lewis abandoned apologetics (a branch of theology devoted to defending Christianity) and turned to children’s literature for the rest of his career.1