Editor’s note: To mark the release on November 3 of the new C. S. Lewis biopic, The Most Reluctant Convert, we are running a series of articles exploring Lewis’s views on science, mind, and more.

SPECIAL LIMITED-TIME OFFER: Get a FREE chapter exploring C.S. Lewis’s views of intelligent design from the book The Magician’s Twin.

I’ve had an opportunity to preview the new movie about C. S. Lewis and his journey to religious belief — The Most Reluctant Convert. You should read John West’s full review of the film here. It opens tomorrow night, Wednesday, November 3, and I’m glad to see they have been adding more nights of screenings as demand has obviously warranted. That’s good, because it really is well done. Nicholas Ralph and Max McLean are splendid as respectively the young and the fully mature Lewis. Director Norman Stone took some creative liberties — not with Lewis’s life, which is faithfully conveyed, but with what we expect from a nonfiction portrayal like this. The opening and closing scenes are not something I’ve seen before (no spoilers), and the decision to have Lewis at different ages appearing on screen simultaneously is quite unusual but, again, works well.

As we’ve been highlighting here, arguments about evolution and intelligent design played a role in Lewis’s growth as a thinker about ultimate questions. His views have not infrequently been misrepresented, including by theistic evolutionists. As a corrective, our C. S. Lewis channel on YouTube has some excellent offerings. On ID, for instance, Lewis argued for design in life and in nature based on inferences from beauty, morality, reason, and functional complexity. About beauty, he asked whether our longing for it — inexplicable under any purely materialist scheme — must gesture to a reality beyond the merely earthly. This come out in the new film. In several instances, his arguments foreshadowed those of modern ID theorists, including William Dembski. Watch this and learn more: