Never had a class but have attended many open event/lectures of his, and IMO he really is brilliant. I’m going to try to fit in one of his classes in my final year.
I’m inclined to agree 
although the science in them is like a knock-off of Wells a few decades too late. Mind you, if the “body of different movements” thing is read as a pidgin explanation of n-dimensional physics, then he was pretty up to date on that.
Lewis’ skills as an apologist tend to be greatly exaggerated. He is popular with lay-Christians who (frankly) lack either the accuity or the desire to appreciate just how amateurish, derivative (mostly of Chesterton) and fallacious his apologies tend to be. He is convincing mainly to those who are already Christians but even the Christians who are really well educated in apologia know better than to try to cite Lewis.
His most well-known apologies (the Trilemma, the Moral Argument, the Argument from Desire, his attempted refutation of Naturalism) are all fraught with fallacies (Lewis was especially good at strawmen, false dilemmas and excluded middles).
He once watched his book, Miracles, get publicly eviscerated in front of the Oxford Socratic Club by G.E.M. Anscombe (herself a devout Catholic but one who was actually trained in philosophical debate). Lewis’ friends said that he found the exerience humiliating, that he believed his arguments for God had been “demolished,” and that he would no longer attempt to write any apologetic works (and he didn’t, sticking to devotional works instead). according to George Sayer (a friend of Lewis and one of his biographers) said that Lewis said he had been “too proud of his logical ability,” and thought that being humbled as he had been “might be ultimately good for him.”
He eventually rewrote the chapter which Anscombe had torn apart, addressing her responses and changing the title to make it less haughtily categorical (from “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” to “The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist"), but he gave up on apologetics after that.
A little humility might benefit us all. Anscombe herself had a different take on that event:
The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has those qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr Harvard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennet remembered any such feelings on Lewis’s part… My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’s rethinking and rewriting showed he thought was accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends—who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments of the subject-matter—as an interesting example of the phenomenon called projection. — G. E. M. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind
Why you have spent so much emotion excoriating a man who is humble, honest, and admired by those who opposed him is a confounding mystery.
pwned!
So what? She was nice to him. Who cares? How does that refute the fact that Lewis himself felt humiliated and thought that his arguments had been destroyed?
Here’s what George Sayer and Derek Brewer said:
Why do you think it’s relevant that Anscombe chose to be diplomatic? The fact remains that Lewis himself knew he had been pwned and was so humiliated by it that he stopped trying to write apologetics.
Lewis was neither humble nor particularly honest (at least not in his apologetics, where he deliberately ignored facts or counterarguments which he knew would damage his assumptions, opting to construct strawmen instead). While he may have been liked by some of his opponents, he was never very respected as an apologist because he wasn’t very good at it. His apologetics are mainly enjoyed by people who already share his assumptions and who are either unable or unwilling to read them very critically.
I have not spent any “emotion” in this thread, I’m only trying to bring some objectivity to a discussion about a writer who tends to get unjustifiably lionized by Christians.
Lewis was also very hostile to atheists, by the way. Why should I be kind to a writer who was not kind to me?
Ignore this post.
How so?
Lewis was a popular apologist writing for a popular audience, not a philosophical one, to whom it would have been appropriate to consider all possible counterarguments to his positions. His most famous work of apologetics, Mere Christianity, is the book version of a series of radio talks he gave, so he was limited in how much depth, subtlety, and careful, precise reasoning he could do. As a writer of apologetics, I see him as more analogous to the popularizer of science (or whatever subject) than to the scientist. If you don’t think he was very good at that, I’d be interested to know who you thought was better—who really was the best Christian apologist of the 20th century?
As for his honesty, I don’t know; my own impression of him is that the arguments he used most frequently were those that he personally found compelling.
It struck me that your story about Anscombe took a huge hit from Liberal inconveniently quoting what Anscombe actually said about it, which sure looked like pwnage from where I was sitting. 
Diogenes the Cynic writes:
> An example of both self-satisfaction and a fallacious assumption is the way that
> Screwtape reacts to the “patient” becoming a Christian. Lerwis smugly (and
> fallaciously) takes it for granted that Christian faith is somehow virtuous and
> anathema to devils. He expects the reader to share this feeling but does not
> earn it. He also ininuates that atheists are damned and at one point makes the
> idiotic statement that atheists should be prevented from thinking things
> through lest they really how absurd and how perilous their position is. He
> disparages “mere logic.” All of his attitudes towards rationalism
> and “materialism” are insulting, childish, wishful, sanctimonous and fallacious.
O.K., first, you’re misusing the word “fallacious.” I assumed that you meant by “fallacious assumptions” that Lewis was using a logical fallacy in his arguments in The Screwtape Letters. I assumed that you meant that he was making an argument of the sort
All A’s are B’s.
All C’s are B’s.
Therefore, all A’s are C’s.
or something like that. What you mean to say is that Lewis was making a factually incorrect assumption. You seem to be assuming that all the basics of the Christian religion, including the existence of God, are obviously factually incorrect. (And you apparently have no intent on proving that they are, since you dismiss them as “insulting, childish, wishful, sanctimonous and fallacious.”
Yes, Lewis doesn’t prove any of the tenets of Christianity in The Screwtape Letters. He didn’t claim to be doing so. He was assuming the tenets of Christianity for this book. Indeed, he even said that he was assuming things beyond the necessary tenets for the purpose of this book. He said (in the preface) that he didn’t consider the existence of devils to be a necessary belief for Christians. He just used it for the purpose of the book.
The whole idea that it’s necessary to buy the complete set of factual assumptions of a book to find it worthwhile is wrong. People can make good deductions from wrong factual assumptions. Much good science and technology was done on the basis of ancient Greek physics (with the Earth at the center of the universe, gravity doing nothing except pulling things to the center of the Earth, epicyles in the movements of planets, and a flawed understanding of mechanics), including reasonably good predictions of planetary movements, a good estimate of the size of the Earth, and a good estimate of the size and distance of the moon. Even better science was done with Newtonian physics, despite its lack of knowledge of relativity and quantum physics. Even better science yet is being done today, despite the fact that we’re probably going to be seeing a complete revision of physics to something with different assumptions one day.
And The Screwtape Letters is a work of fiction. You don’t have to believe in the existence of the characters and setting of a work of fiction to find it useful. Finally, the OP stated that he doesn’t buy all the factual assumptions of The Screwtape Letters. In particular, he doesn’t believe in the existence of God. I assumed that this thread was about whether The Screwtape Letters is good psychology, regardless of what you think about its assumptions. The truth of Christian beliefs is a different thread, I think.
> As for petty sins, the entire book is a rumination on how easily people are led
> into evil by being cross with their mothers or not praying correctly or becoming
> distracted by petty self-interest. It all comes as across as projection to me and
> smacks of the kind of self-abasement and “we’re not worthy” self-loathing that
> I’ve seen a lot among Evangelical Christians. I’ve never understood that
> attitude at all. In my opinion, It’s God that has to prove himself worthy to
> humans, not the other way around.
The Screwtape Letters is about petty sins. It has little to say about larger ones. Petty sins are what most people are concerned with. If you’re going to eliminate The Screwtape Letters on this basis, you’re going to eliminate virtually every self-help book out there. Incidentally, you call Lewis both self-satisfied and self-abasing. How could he be both of them?
Well now you stand corrected. As you can see, my story took no hit at all. You should try to read with less prejudice.
I wouldn’t expect him to consider all possible counters, but I would expect him to counter the strongest ones, and that’s something he habitually chose not to do.
How about one of the guys Lewis was most influenced by, G.K. Chesterton.
That’s fine if he was only trying to convince himself.
I stand thoroughly rebuked, and by an unimpeachable rebuker.
No, I’m not.
I’m saying that his arguments were circular. He assumes that which he wants to assert.
I’m observing that Lewis did not PROVE it. he did not establish his predicates.
I don’t have to prove they AREN’T true. I’m not the one making the assertion. All I’m doing is observing that Lewis did not prove his own assumptions.
No, that was only how I characterized his attitude towards atheists.
Right, so he was wasting my time as far as I’m concerned.
I would at least like those assumptions not to be bigoted or insulting to me personally.
I have said repeatedly that I think it is psycologically insightful. My main criticism of the book is that my enjoyment in reading those insight is ruined by the constant intrusion of insulting religiosity.
I despise self-help books. I on’t think people need to fixate so much on their own petty failings. They should learn to be comfortable with them instead.
Why can’t he be both? People are frequently contradictory.
[Stephen Colbert] I accept your apology [/Colbert] 
Why, thank you.
…Um, don’t ever let me catch you with your prejudices showing, m’kay?
I’ve just put a hold on it at the library, along with J.R.R. Tolkien’s *Tree and Leaf[/i}, so I reserve all comment on this thread until checks watch next week today…
Don’t we all use the arguments we find most compelling? Are you using arguments you find to be inferior?
I don’t know who will buy into your spin on that, but I certainly don’t. Diplomatic? Do you think she was lying? She directly contradicted what the other people said, calling it a projection.
That’s what a person should do when he doesn’t do it well. If you decide to take a lesson from Lewis, you will stop writing screeds about him.