When I (Jeff Clarke) was rabidly anti-Christian, this type of candor was precisely what made Lewis so interesting to me.  From him you could get idea exchange, as opposed to advocacy. 

Anyway, seeing Lewis' idea, my friend Paul replied:

If you ever find the citation for this, be sure to let me know. I have a client and intellectual-relation-friend who was denominational, evolved into a Buddhist when he claimed he found irreconcilable problems in the Bible. He is very scientific minded, which I am not. I am hoping to link him up with John Clayton and let them go at it.

Anyway, I was just emailing him today and mentioned this very principle in the quote. The Bible has parts which are a sizeable problem to believers, BUT... it has parts which should be a sizeable problem to unbelievers. So far he has not acknowledged this exists.

The quote, by the way, is from Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 11.  The context was,

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason ’has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Of all the intelligently-converted men and women I've ever known, zero (0%) have been reasoned out of their faith.  Many fall away:  through temptation, not through intellectual argument. 

Arguing that Jesus Christ was crazy?, that is a tough debate proposition, and the "outs" (Jesus was distorted by His disciples, was lying, was mistaken, etc.) are even tougher.  I worked verrrrrrry hard to make each "out" happen, and it was certainly beyond me.  It was beyond Lewis, too, who in terms of verbal logic might have been the most intelligent author of the 20th century.

If you've got better ideas in support, I'd love to hear them.

 ..................

Back to the point:  Eliyahu Rips published his test for Equidistant Letter Skips in Genesis and, about a year later, replied sadly that 99% of all reaction to his material was ---- > either immediate acceptance of, or immediate rejection of, Rips' methods ... long before the readers understood him. 

Rips encountered almost nobody who took any time to make up their mind as to his argument's validity... personally, I still haven't decided whether ELS's are well grounded.

In my opinion, any person who claims to have no moods in which the opposite side of the belief question looks likely is --- > kidding himself, kidding us, or both.

Philosophical questions which are easily solved, are not useful.  Thankfully, few of those exist, that I'm aware of.  We will be more civilized when we are able to debate questions like, "Does God Exist?," intellectually rather than passionately.

Warmly,

Jeff