C.S. Lewis — The Skeptic Who Became a Believer

Inspirational People

He was a respected Oxford atheist who set out to disprove Christianity. Instead, he became its most famous modern defender.

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Who C.S. Lewis was

C.S. Lewis became one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. He wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and dozens of works of scholarship, fiction, and apologetics.

The struggle

Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast. His mother died of cancer when he was nine. He was sent to boarding schools he hated. He became a committed atheist, certain that the universe was meaningless and religion a crutch.

He served in the trenches of World War I, where he was wounded. After the war he excelled at Oxford, becoming a respected tutor in English literature. He lived with his brother, wrote, debated, and dismissed faith as myth.

Then, gradually, his intellectual honesty began to work against his atheism. He found himself unable to explain the moral sense, the experience of joy, or the historical claims of Christianity as easily as he had hoped.

The turning point

In 1929 Lewis admitted that God probably existed. In 1931, after a long nighttime walk and conversation with friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he became a Christian. He did not abandon his intellect; he redirected it.

Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity — books that explained faith to ordinary readers with clarity and wit. During World War II he gave radio talks that became a national comfort. The Narnia books made him beloved by children and adults alike.

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

The principle

Changing your mind is not weakness. It is the price of intellectual honesty. Lewis was willing to follow the evidence where it led, even when it overturned his identity.

Apply it today

Hold your beliefs tightly enough to live by them, but loosely enough to test them. If you discover you are wrong, change course. The person who updates their worldview is stronger than the one who defends it out of pride.