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As theistic debates go, this appears to be a particularly crude one on part of Lewis. Not only being inherently deficient because he writes for both his side and his opponent, but also writing his opponent's side inarticulately. This is the equivalent of drawing the christian as the chad and the atheist as the soyjak.
Well, it's not an essay – it's a novel. I think the antagonist's weak grip on this Martian tongue (I don't recall which of the two they are speaking in this scene) is symbolic and not just to make his argument look weak.
It's justified in universe because the protagonist is a philologist, specifically J.R.R. Tolkein with the serial numbers filed off, while the antagonists are mad scientists who aren't particularly trained in languages. They built a working spaceship with 1930s tech, learned a non-human tongue to at least a broken level, and survived long enough to argue with a planetary archangel/god, so they might be fools but they aren't idiots.
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If you dislike this one then you'll absolutely hate what he does in the sequel. One of the main ideas in the sequel is roughly "Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits. Sometimes you just need to beat him to death (literally, physically, with your bare hands)."
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Speaking as a Christian, one flaw in CS Lewis’ otherwise great writing is that he cannot depict atheism without curling his lip and stacking the deck. Agnosticism, yes, many of the defects of faith yes, but not atheism.
To be fair to him, he was at Oxford at the time when English socialite atheism was at its most arrogant and self absorbed, when atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) was a stance you took on to Make a Statement.
Likely because CS Lewis was an atheist and only converted back to Christianity later in life, partly due to one unremarkable fellow by the name of Tolkien.
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