As all inter-college clubs at Oxford had to have a "senior member of the university" as a sponsor, Aldwinckle implored C. S. Lewis to be its first president.
Lewis stated, "In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university, there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into 'coteries' where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus.
The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility.
This debate involved a presentation by Joad that was based on his recent book, published in November 1942, God and Evil, which contained his arguments for theism, but also against Christianity.
He cited Lewis many times in his book, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he was invited to address the Socratic Club.
Anscombe debated Lewis about a portion of Lewis's 1947 book, Miracles, known today as the Argument from Reason, in which he stated that since naturalists claimed all of nature to be irrational, that would make the claim of the naturalists also irrational and therefore contrary to reason (for example, that if there is no God, if nature is the product of chance, then how can a human brain offer anything but chance observations that have no authority?).
[6] The Queen's University of Belfast Socratic Club, founded in 2013, holds similar aims to that of the original at Oxford.