C.S. Lewis on Christianity: Good and Evil
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan introduce the course "C.S. Lewis on Christianity".
C.S. Lewis’s writings bring the great questions of the Christian faith to life. Through his imaginative and invigorating style, Lewis answers these questions in ways that are compelling to those outside Christianity and energizing to those within the Christian faith.
Lewis argues that morality is not only objective, but also that it is universally understood as such. He explains that the awareness of these axiomatic moral truths—what he calls “the Tao” in The Abolition of Man—is what makes us human, and thus our very humanity is threatened by the rise of subjectivism in the West.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:12.2 | I'm Juan Davalos, and I'm back after a few weeks. We missed you. Yeah, thank you. We're back with a new |
| 0:19.2 | course, and this is one of my favorite courses. This is C.S. Lewis on Christianity. And I was telling Jeremiah before we started recording that I watched this course 11 times because I was working on this course when I worked in production. And every time that I watched it, I learned something new. So you didn't really just watch it. |
| 0:38.6 | You helped shape it. |
| 0:39.5 | That's right. |
| 0:40.1 | That's right. |
| 0:40.6 | Very much choosing the B-roll that we used, all the images, and building the study |
| 0:45.8 | guides and everything for the course. |
| 0:47.4 | And this is a beautiful course with Dr. Michael Ward as the teacher. |
| 0:51.5 | And as we get into this lecture, good and evil, you'll understand why. |
| 0:54.9 | It's a foundational topic. We start with C.S. Lewis's abolition of man. And it's a famous book. |
| 1:02.5 | If you haven't read the book, we definitely recommend that you read it. But the basic point of the book is |
| 1:07.5 | that there is such a thing as objective reality. Lewis famously describes the |
| 1:12.7 | scene of children's book that was presented to him in which in the book there's two individuals |
| 1:18.8 | that are looking at a waterfall and one of them calls it sublime and the other one just simply |
| 1:25.3 | says that it's like his own perception that is beautiful. And the |
| 1:28.7 | difference is, is the beauty of that waterfall in the waterfall itself, that is, is beauty objective? |
| 1:34.7 | Or is it something that is just perception? Yeah, the authors of this children's book has one |
| 1:40.6 | character, I think it's Coleridge, says that it's sublime. The other says it's some word that |
| 1:44.9 | doesn't quite capture the beauty and the grandeur of the waterfall. Maybe it's beautiful or maybe it's |
| 1:50.1 | pretty. And the authors of the children's book say both are equally valid and Lewis says they're not. |
| 1:54.8 | That's right, because there is such a thing as objective reality. There is such a thing as |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hillsdale College, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Hillsdale College and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.