1. The document summarizes philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe's life and work, including her criticism of C.S. Lewis's argument in his book Miracles. 2. It discusses Anscombe's attack on Lewis at the Oxford Socratic Club, focusing on Lewis's statement about irrational causes and his ambiguous use of terms. 3. Lewis later revised his argument in the 1960 edition of Miracles in response to Anscombe's criticism.

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Christy Jusman
Dr. Seth Holler
English Composition II – Annotated Bibliography
Friday, March 20th, 2015
Anon. “Professor GEM Anscombe.” The Telegraph. 06 Jan. 2001. Web. 16 March
2015.
Philosopher GEM Anscombe devoted her life to philosophy, especially in the
discussion of nature of morality and the meaning and limits of language. She was an
exceptional student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She has been a brave critic since her
young age. She wrote a pamphlet to argue about Britain fighting injustice but not
fighting for a just one when she was an undergraduate student.
She later became famous of her attacks to two famous thinkers. One is on C.S.
Lewis Miracles at the Oxford Socratic Club and the other is about the granting of a
honorary degree by Oxford on President Truman.
Her convert into Roman Catholicism when she was a teenager affected her
work as a moral philosopher. She believes that an adequate moral philosophy should
not deny the value of Hebrew-Christian ethic. Anscombe produced a handful of
writings about morality and Aristotle was her favorite subject. During the course of
her life, she has become professor of philosophy at Cambridge (1970-1986), professor
of ethics at Liechtenstein University, taught semantics and logic at Somerville (1946-
1979), and president of the Aristotelian Society in 1987-88. She was known as a
straightforward person, but could be very kind to graduate students who were
interested in philosophy. Her latest work was an essay on murder and the morality of
euthanasia.
Anscombe, G.E.M. “Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind.” The Collected
Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1981. Print.
Elizabeth Anscombe’s first serious interest in philosophy was in the topic of
causality. And later, on perception too. With those interest, she then challenged
Lewis’ argument in Miracles chapter 3 about the self-contradiction of the Naturalist.
Ms. Anscombe said that Lewis’ thesis is wrong because of his statement “no thought
is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes”, the
ambiguousness use of the words “why”, “because” and “explanation” and the
concepts of “reason”, “cause” and “explanation”. Anscombe points out that the word
“cause” and “ground” were also not distinguished properly by Mr. Lewis. When
someone answered to the question “why?” by “because-CE”, it is in a sense causal,
which is not self-refuting to the argument of Naturalism. But, because-GC should be
considered rational reasoning.
At the end of the article, there is a note by C. S. Lewis admitting that “valid”
is a misleading word for what he meant. He realized that he should have also
distinguished “because-CE” and “because-GC” (and he did later in the 1960 Fontana
version). He also tried to explain what he truly meant in the last section of this part.
Cook, Edward M. “’She Obliterated Me as an Apologist’: Lewis and the Anscombe
Legend.” 21 Jan. 2007. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

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In this particular post, Mr. Cook, who claims to have read a large part of C.S.
Lewis’s Collected Letters, Vol. 3, talks about the fallacy Mr. Lewis made in Miracles
chapter 3. Mr. Cook includes Anscombe’s attack towards Lewis’ argument about his
statement “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational
causes” and the two senses of the word “because”. This disputation was done at the
Oxford Socratic Club, of which Lewis was president. Lewis later admitted that his
argument was missing ‘something’ and revised it in the 1960 edition of Miracles.
The effect of the debate left were believed to be huge in Lewis’ life, so huge
that it caused Lewis to back off from the writing apologetics, and turned his passion
to other kinds of writing, such as the Chronicles of Narnia.
Dulles, Avery Cardinal. “Mere Apologetics.” First things: A Monthly Journal of
Religion and Public Life, June 2005. Print.
Dulles talks about C.S. Lewis’ life and work in detail. He mentions Lewis’
areas of expertise, such as, philosophy, spiritual writer, Greek and Latin classics and
literary criticism and his well-known title as an apologist. His works as apologist is
not without criticism, as he meet objections from W. Norman Pittinger and Elizabeth
Anscombe.
Dulles explores the debate about Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity. Lewis
compares Mere Christianity to a hall through which one finds one’s way into the
bedrooms of a house. The hall is not a place where anyone wishes to stay, but it is a
place from which one can gain access to one or another of the rooms, recognizing that
those in neighboring rooms are one’s housemates. What Lewis means by “mere
Christianity” is the common fund of doctrines and practices enshrined in Scripture
and the early creeds, which are foundational for most Christian churches.
Dulles believes that Lewis developed his apologetic for Christianity in three
stages. First is he begins with establishing the existence of God on philosophical
ground. His favorite proofs are from morality (we are unconditionally bound to do
good and avoid evil), reason (which appears in Miracles, about the mind’s capacity
for truth, man and God share reason) and desire (desire to be united with God, cf. St.
Augustine’s Confessions). Then, he demonstrates that God has firstly revealed
himself in Christ and Christianity. Lastly, he defended theism and Christianity against
the problem of evil.
Lewis also puts forth the argument for the divinity of Christ from miracles.
And according to Lewis, all biblical miracles lead up to the Incarnation, which is the
foundation of Christianity.
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Print.
In the first chapter of Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about “the Law of
Human Nature.” Lewis believes that human beings are “ingrained” with a “Law or
Rule” about “Right and Wrong”, which is called “the Law of Human Nature.” It is
called “the Law of Nature” because he believes that people know it by nature, not by
being thought about it. Lewis argues that if there is objection about the existence of
the Law of Nature, how can there be people who says, “its not fair”, if there is no such
thing as “fair” as the right one and “unfair” as the wrong one.
The discussion of Law of Human Nature relates closely to Miracles chapter 5
about the further difficulty of Naturalism, which is Morality. The basic argument is

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that there is basic moral standard or “Law of Human Nature” that everyone is
“ingrained” with no matter what their ethnicity or religion are, such as selflessness,
piety, etc.
Lewis, C.S. “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist.” Miracles: A Preliminary
Study. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947. 23-31. Print.
In this 1947 version of Miracles chapter 3, Lewis made a point about the
validity of rational thought by “not believing in anything inconsistent with its
validity”. Lewis distinguishes the “validity of thought” into “by argument from
observed facts” and “association of ideas.” He tried to explain it by proving that “the
mind as the result of irrational cause” is nonsense. This, Lewis said is the belief of
Naturalism. Naturalism is believed to be the results of irrational causes, and nothing
more.
He also made a point in the last paragraph about Naturalist trying to escape the
notion by saying that they are not interested in truth. The only thing they cared about
is the habit of thought that keeps humanity alive.
The differences between the 1947 and 1960 version of Miracles are not just
the arguments and the elimination of the word “irrational”, but also the number of
paragraphs (from 10 to 25 paragraphs).
Smilde, Arend. “What Lewis really did to Miracles: A Philosophical layman’s
attempt to understand the Anscombe affair.” The Journal of Inklings Studies, October
2011. Print.
Smilde finds his way through the “Anscombe affair” that began in 1948
during the Socratic exchange. He expounds Lewis’ argument in Miracles about
naturalism and mentions that Anscombe agrees that naturalism is untenable.
However, Lewis’ argument and the ambiguous use of the word “irrational” is a big
issue there.
Smilde presents us with Anscombe’s criticism about Lewis’ use of “irrational
causes” as the definition of every natural causes and pointed out that he should have
distinguished “non-rational” from “irrational” causes of nature. Lewis took
Anscombe’s criticism and in May 1960, published his new edition of Miracles.
Anscombe said that Lewis did much improvement to his 1960 edition of Miracles, but
there are still so many things to be criticized. Smilde believes that Anscombe’s
emphasis on the non-existence of any cause of rationality actually strengthen Lewis’
argument that rationality is a non-natural thing.
Vaus, Will. “Defending the Faith: The Argument from Reason.” Mere Theology: A
Guide to The Thought of CS Lewis. InterVarsity Press, 2004. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.
The author expounds Lewis’ arguments from Miracles about reason that
comes from something outside of nature. The author also presents the event at
Socratic Club when Anscombe refute Mr. Lewis’ argument. A helpful summary
presented about Lewis’ argument from reason: “If there is no reason, then the
statement that there is no reason is unreasonable. If reason does exist, then it points to
the reality of supernatural realm.”