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In assessing Lewis’s significance as a Christian apologist, the key is chronology. He is, of course. best known for his writings of the ’40s, and it is as the author of such celebrated books as Mere Christianity, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Surprised by Joy, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles that he is revered by many readers. But these early books are neither the whole nor even the most important part of the story. There is another more disconcerting side to the C.S. Lewis phenomenon—namely, the dark legacy of his later years. If we ignore or minimize it, we will be left with a very one-sided and highly misleading picture of Lewis and end up valuing him for the wrong reasons.

There is, of course, no denying the fact that, so far as the prospect for Christian apologetics is concerned, the Lewis of the ’40s is a far more encouraging figure. In these early books he fairly leaps from the page as the 20th century’s foremost defender of the faith, “the Apostle to the Skeptics” confronting his unbelieving or lukewarm contemporaries with the “case for Christianity.” Seldom has an apologist succeeded so completely in conveying the impression that Reason is on the side of Faith and that it is not the believer but the unbeliever for whom philosophical discussion poses problems. No issue is too difficult for him, no opponent too formidable. His effortless brilliance and confident finality irresistibly suggest that it is the intellectuals who have made simple things difficult and that it is high time to call a halt to these proceedings. If the real theologians had done their job, “there would have been no place for me,” he ruefully observes. But they have not and so there is. He will make things simple again.

Everything is eminently sensible and straightforward. He is “not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.” But surely it is not, and if we are willing to think clearly and hard, we can establish a great deal “on our own steam.” Not only does he offer us “overwhelmingly probable” arguments for the existence of an infinite Object of desire, a Power behind the Moral Law, and a cosmic Mind; he is equally prepared to take on all comers, dispose of their objections, and put the embarrassed opposition to flight. He has heard it all before. Opposing positions are not only false but ludicrous, and crumble like sandcastles at the slightest nudge: atheism is “too simple,” naturalism is “self-contradictory,” and materialism is “a philosophy for the nursery” to say nothing of ethical relativism, which reduces moral judgments to “mere subjective preference” like a “fondness for pancakes or a dislike for spam,” or theological liberalism, whose denial that Jesus was God logically commits its exponents to saying that he was a lunatic “on the same level with the man who says he is a poached egg.”

Clearly this is the stuff of which legends are made. At first glance, it is a dazzling performance by a philosophical virtuoso at the height of his powers.

But a closer look dispels this initial impression. Lewis’s defense of Christianity relies heavily on three major proofs for the existence of God: the Argument from Desire, the Moral Argument, and the Argument from Reason. He never claimed that these arguments were original and, of course, they are not. They are, in fact, highly-compressed and simplified reformulations of technical philosophical arguments. And they are seriously flawed. Since it is on these arguments that his case for Christianity depends, the case fails.

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