C. S. Lewis

From the Holman-CSB Apologetics Study Bible:  C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)  “Lewis’s parents taught him the proper faith and religious life of an Englishman, but troubles awaited the young man.  His mother died when he was a boy, after which his father sent him to boarding schools.  Though early on he tried to be a good Christian, he came to resent religion and developed instead a fascination with myth and fantasy literature.  His great concerns were with whether Christianity was unique and how it could solve (or not solve) the problem of evil.  When he entered Oxford in 1917, Lewis was a convinced agnostic.  He had sought through logic to debunk religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Yet his favorite authors-Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Plato, Milton, and Virgil-were all people who held some sort of religious understanding of the world.  In reading George MacDonald, and through personal acquaintance with J. R. R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, Lewis eventually abandoned his nontheistic view of the world.  In 1929 he threw in the towel, conceding that ‘God was God,’ and he knelt and prayed-perhaps the ‘most reluctant convert in all England.'”

 

By Chad Owen Brand, The Holman CSB Apologetics Study Bible, pg. 975. 2007. Holman Bible Publishers.  Nashville, TN.