Max McLean Talks about His New C.S. Lewis Movie

On this ID the Future award-winning actor Max McLean joins host John West to discuss his new film, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. West and McLean discuss how McClean came to do stage plays focused on Lewis’s work, and how he and filmmaker Norman Stone came to create a feature-length dramatic film in the midst of the coronavirus shutdown. McLean tells about Lewis’s long and winding conversion from agnosticism to Christianity, and then he and West focus on those aspects of Lewis’s conversion centered on science, evolutionary theory, and rational theism. Key to Lewis’s move from agnosticism to idealism and eventually Judeo-Christian theism—his friend Owen Barfield and the question of the origin of reason. Lewis realized that Darwinian materialism gives us little reason to trust our reason (as Darwin himself conceded in one of his franker moments). Lewis determined that he should and inevitably does trust the human capacity to reason. And if that trust is based on something real, then we have strong grounds to distrust Darwinian materialism, Lewis decided. For more on Lewis’s views on science, evolution, intelligent design, and the rational case for theism, check out this Discovery Institute website on C.S. Lewis.