Several years ago, Max McLean and the Fellowship for Performing Arts staged “The Most Reluctant Convert,” a play about the life of C.S. Lewis up to his conversion. During the COVID-19 shutdowns, that production was made into a film that received strong reviews. Now, McLean and FPA are offering a follow-up stage production dealing with Lewis’ life post-conversion.
Although “Further Up and Further In” includes some biographical information, such as the writing of “The Problem of Pain” and the recording of the BBC talks that were later published in “Mere Christianity,” this new production takes the much more challenging route of exploring the different aspects of Lewis’ ministry. Not surprisingly, much of the production is focused on his apologetics.
In his day, the great challenge to Christianity was materialism, the idea that everything is just matter and energy. Lewis responded to this by tracing out the implications of that view and showing its utter implausibility. He notes that scientists “observe the behavior of things within the universe. They cannot make statements about things beyond the universe.” Any time a scientist does that, for example by proclaiming that matter and energy are all that exist, he is no longer doing science.
Even more, Lewis says, if materialism is true, there is no reason to trust the scientist doing science. After all, he rightly observed:
“If the materialist view is true, our minds must in reality be merely chance arrangements of atoms in skulls. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it.”