I have been told that the trilemma argument goes all the way back to Justin Martyr. I've never found the explicit reference, although it seems that aut deus aut homo malus (either God or a bad man) goes back to the church fathers. Many people are shocked when they find out that Lewis didn't invent the trilemma argument.
I asked Peter Kreeft and Richard Purtill who invented this argument, and while they traced it to the middle ages (look, if something has a Latin title, it's got to be old!), but they had no idea who started it. My guess was Athanasius, since it seems to work pretty nicely against Arianism, but it was not in On the Incarnation, the book that Sister Penelope translated and Lewis wrote the preface to ("On the Reading of Old Books").
2 comments:
I have been told that the trilemma argument goes all the way back to Justin Martyr. I've never found the explicit reference, although it seems that aut deus aut homo malus (either God or a bad man) goes back to the church fathers. Many people are shocked when they find out that Lewis didn't invent the trilemma argument.
I asked Peter Kreeft and Richard Purtill who invented this argument, and while they traced it to the middle ages (look, if something has a Latin title, it's got to be old!), but they had no idea who started it. My guess was Athanasius, since it seems to work pretty nicely against Arianism, but it was not in On the Incarnation, the book that Sister Penelope translated and Lewis wrote the preface to ("On the Reading of Old Books").
Post a Comment