The Modest Trilemma

Very often the Trilemma argument is treated as a proof of Jesus's divinity. I'd like to see how far it can go, not as a proof of Jesus's divinity, but simply as an argument against the claim that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God. Whatever other options may be available to us (myth, legendary accretion, mentally ill genius, crackpot eschatological preacher, etc.), does it refute what it is primarily designed to refute, that Jesus was a great moral teacher who tried to teach us to be nice to each other, but the theological claims made concerning him in Scripture are just wrong.

Given the fact that our only sources for Jesus say that he did and said all sorts of things that imply that he was claiming to be God, the idea that he was just a great moral teacher but not God is does seem absurd. Either he was right about all that (in which case he would be God), or he was lying about who he was (in which case he would not be anyone people would want to follow) or he was nuts. If you can't accept him as God, then you can't follow him as a moral teacher. As Lewis put it:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

Now you can back out of these claims by saying that the Scriptures aren't reliable historical records and that Jesus never did or said anything to suggest that he was anything more than a Jewish carpenter with a call to preach. But if the Scriptures are highly unreliable about who he claimed to be, how could they be reliable when it comes to identifying what he taught?

We can call the argument against the "great moral teacher" hypothesis the modest trilemma. In other words, we might ask if the argument is successful against the "nice-guy Jesus" that is often part of popular culture. The ambitious trilemma tries to get you to conclude, instead, that Jesus was God. Defending the modest trilemma will certainly be easier than defending the ambitious trilemma.

Jeff G on the Trilemma

I had missed this post on Jeff G's site.
I’m a big fan of the blog Dangerous Idea. Whether it is in spite of or because of my disagreement with Vic on almost every issue he posts about, I just love to read whatever it is that he has to say.

Thanks, Jeff.
Recently, he posted on C. S. Lewis’ trilemma argument for the divinity of Christ and Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal to it. (Interestingly enough, my Dad sent me a copy of the argument quite independently about a week later.) While I think Vic brought up some good points regarding Dawkins’ arm chair speculations on the matter, I simply must put forth my own reasons for thinking the trilemma argument to be largely, if not entirely bogus.

VR: Although of course I'm well-disposed toward Lewis in general, I have some ambivalence toward this particular argument. I think there's some merit to it, but I have some ambivalence about what it proves. I've done a number of posts on the trilemma:

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search?q=trilemma

Here is the relevant passage from Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

“A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse… But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Let us first grant that the argument has significant intuitive appeal. If any person today were to call himself the Son of God, he would indeed be labeled a lunatic or a liar. Furthermore, I would certainly be disinclined to call such a man a great moral teacher, much less the actual Son of God. By the same reasoning it would seem that the infidel is thereby committed to seeing Jesus as nothing less than a lunatic, liar or both. Since most people are not willing to call Jesus a liar or lunatic, the Christian argues, we are therefore compelled to accept Jesus at his word; he was/is actually the Son of God.

The same reasoning, however, can be applied to a number of other people and the claims which they have made. All who reject the prophetic claims of Muhammad must also be committing to judging him a lunatic or a liar. The same can be said for all non-Mormons about Joseph Smith (the church’s founder) or Gordon B. Hinckley (the church current prophet). Either Hinckley is a liar, a lunatic or a prophet of God. (In fact, some Mormons actually do use this argument, but usually as it applies to Smith.)

An interesting and legitimate point. Of course the claim to be God Almighty, or the future judge of the world, goes considerably beyond what it takes, as a lifelong Mormon, to believe, after ascending to the Presidency, that one is indeed the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the Mormon Church. I think many Christians would have no trouble seeing Smith or Muhammad as religious charlatans pure and simple. In any event for the most part I do not see Smith or Muhammad as great moral teachers.

Consider further the (in)famous case of Apollonius of Tyana. He was alleged to have been miraculously born, to perform miracles including healing the sick and raising the dead, to deliver divine teachings, to claim the power to foresee the future and at the end of his life to have ascended into heaven to live with the gods forever. Are we committed to calling this man a liar, lunatic or prophet? By what criterion to we condemn Apollonius but not Jesus? It would seem that we have no more and no less reason to attribute malevolence or insanity to this man than we do Jesus. The point is that something must be wrong with the trilemma argument for there are simply too many counterexamples.

I posted on Apollonius a few months ago, when I posted a quote from Richard Purtill. http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/richard-purtill-on-fantastic-element.html

One can escape the problem in this case by just saying that the Philostratus account is a legend. Yes, you can make the same case with respect to Jesus if you can defend the legend view. You aren't taking that route here, however. I think we have reason to think that the Apollonius story is legendary, and therefore not a genuine rival.


What exactly is wrong with the argument, however, is not so easy to put one’s finger on. I see at least three possibilities which are open to the infidel:

1. Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not a liar and was a bit insane.

2. Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not insane and was a liar.

3. Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not a liar, was not a lunatic and was simply wrong.

Of course C. S. Lewis would almost certainly be uncomfortable with each of these positions, but it must be admitted that they are all at least possible. Being a scoundrel or a little crazy does not necessarily preclude one’s being a great teacher of anything, morality included. In this post, however, I will not consider (2) so as to better engage the Christian claim. I will simply note that no matter how much the Christian does not like (2), it is nevertheless a possibility.

What impresses many about Jesus is not only his moral teaching but also his moral character and example. This is hard to square with somebody who has the false belief that he is God.

What I wish to focus on instead is the difference between being wrong and being insane. By what criteria do we draw a distinction between the two? Let us consider some examples of the claim “I am X”:

· I am the Son of God.

· I am King.

· I am able to foresee the future.

· I am a garbage man.

· I am a liar. (Gotta love the paradox.)

· I am the smartest person I know.

· (Shouting) I am not angry!

· I am a humble person.

· I am a good singer.

Let us suppose (hypothetically speaking of course! ;-P) that in reality I am none of the X’s which I have just claimed to be. Furthermore, let us assume that I sincerely believe each of the above claims to be true. It seems obvious that in many cases my being wrong does not entail my insanity or my malevolence. In other cases (the first three for example) such an entailment does seem to follow. But what is the difference between the two types?

But aren't there some pretty clear cases things which, if you believed them about yourself, you would have to be nuts. For example, Miracle on 34th St. notwithstanding, wouldn't you be insane if you falsely believed that you were Santa Claus? On the "merely mistaken" issue, there is a really nice exchange between Daniel Howard-Snyder and Stephen T. Davis, which can be found on the apollos.ws website

http://www.apollos.ws/trilemma/

One possible response is that we judge some claims to be crazy due to their being so much less probable than those claims which are merely wrong. While this response seems to be pointed in the right direction, I suggest that it is not good enough. First of all, the Christian’s appeal to probability seems more than a little self-defeating. Second, and more importantly, such a response does not do justice to the question at hand. We do not call people crazy simply because their claims are/seem vastly improbable. If a man were to claim that it will rain in Sacramento, California on August 12, 2007 (an incredibly improbable claim) I would not judge him to be insane. Joe Namath’s prediction that the Jets would win the Super Bowl did not make him crazy either. There must be more to the story.

Another possible response is that we judge the crazy claims to be so due to their being more self-serving than the wrong claims. This, however, suffers from a number of counterexamples as well. For instance, the claim that I am the smartest person I know seems just as self-serving as is the claim that I am King, and yet the former does not seem near as crazy as does the latter. Furthermore, my claiming myself to be the devil incarnate would be seen as being just as self-serving as it would sane. In fact, it could be argued that Jesus’ claim was anything but self-serving, thereby undermining the trilemma argument. There must be more to the distinction between being wrong and being insane.

The difference, I suggest, lies in the reasons which we have for a given belief. I may believe that I can foresee the future based on a number of occasions when I have foreseen the future to some extent. I may also think that I am a good singer because my voice sounds fine to me and nobody has ever told me any different. Accordingly, Joseph Smith and Muhammad may have thought themselves to be prophets due to some very emotional experiences and Jesus may have thought himself to be the Son of God due to what he was told in a dream/vision. What makes some claims/beliefs crazy is not just what the claims are but our reasons for them.

All beliefs (at least those in question) are presumably held for one reason or another. Indeed, if there was no particular reason for a belief it is then that we would judge it to be insane. What I wish to argue is that this apparent exception is actually the rule. There are three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for insanity:

I. The belief must be inappropriate in that it is not what a normal person believes due to its being improbable, unhealthy, immoral, etc.

II. The belief must be held with a significant degree of conviction in that the purported belief is not merely a hunch, a façade or a lie.

III. The belief must not be appropriately supported by any or enough reasons.

Lewis’ argument can be reformulated as follows: Jesus claimed himself to be the Son of God, which meet condition (I). We can either claim him to be lying, in which case he could not be a great moral teacher, or we can believe that he sincerely believed himself to be the Son of God, which would meet condition (II). If we accept that he was not a liar, then his belief was either appropriately supported, in which case he would really be the Son of God, or his belief was not appropriately supported, which would thus meet condition (III) making him insane. Thus, given that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, we are forced to choose between him being a liar, a lunatic or Lord.

Notice, however, the large role which ‘appropriate’ plays in the definition of insanity. This is because insanity is not an objective feature which we read off of people or beliefs. Rather, it is a quality which we impose upon people, beliefs or reasons for their not being “normal” in some relevant way. The fact is that every individual deviates from the norm in some way and to some degree; the line which separates normal from insane is not only largely arbitrary but is also in constant flux across different cultures and different times. This arbitrariness and fluctuation in what is appropriate is exactly what Lewis’ trilemma argument is missing. Specifically, it is entirely possible that what we judge to be inappropriate may be radically different from what some other culture judges to be inappropriate.

Jesus’ belief and/or his reasons may have been completely appropriate within his cultural context. After all, it was not terribly unusual for mortal individuals to be called gods of some form or another. In fact, it is not at all clear what exactly the historical Jesus meant in claiming himself to be the Son of God, if he made such a claim at all. Furthermore, dreams, visions, divinations and the like were also judged to be legitimate or at least appropriate sources of knowledge. Neither of these things can be said for the individual who makes similar claims for similar reasons within our own cultural context.

The problem here is that consistently, on his own authority, if you take the Gospel records at face value, you find Jesus consistently claiming for himself not just the prerogatives of messiahship, but the prerogatives of deity. I mean when he claims to be Lord over the Sabbath, when he claims to forgive sins on his own authority, when he excuses people from fasting because of who he is, when he puts his own words in place of the law of Moses, when he seals his fate by calling himself the future judge of the world, what do you make of it? He came from a religious tradition that was ferociously monotheistic, and he took prerogatives that are attributed to God alone. In doing so he put himself on a path to being crucified. You can imply that you are God in India and mean that your atman is brahman, just like everyone else's. In Israel, no one will take you to mean that.

The problem with Lewis’ argument is that one man, Jesus, and his beliefs are being held to norms which never applied to him while he was alive. It is because the argument appeals to our own particular sense of appropriateness that the trilemma argument has such a strong intuitive appeal to it. Nevertheless, the infidel is not at all committed to seeing Jesus as a liar or a lunatic since the latter’s claims may have been far less inappropriate in his own cultural context than we judge such claims to be in our contemporary context.

The context is Jewish one. The most important thing that the Trilemma argument points out is the impossibility of peeling all the supernatural stuff off and leaving a "historical Jesus" whose life makes sense from a naturalistic perspective. When you read the New Testament you find a Jesus who, when he isn't performing miracles, he's doing all sorts of other things that strongly imply that he is far more than a Jewish carpenter. The idea that Jesus was a good guy who taught everyone to be nice and that the claims of Christianity are based on a misunderstanding is logically possible. It has, however, absolutely zero support from the records. "He did not leave that option open to us. He did not intend to." I won't say that this removes all the options from the infidel. I don't think it does. It just gets rid of the more attractive ones.

McGrew on the origins of the Trilemma argument

"In an unrelated web search this afternoon I came upon a post of yours on a secularist blog in which you stated that you hadn't been able to trace the origins of the trilemma, and that you had asked Purtill, Kreeft, and Beversluis for its origin but they did not know. Your conjecture that it was an anti-Arian argument is, I think correct; in this form I have traced it back to the mid 300s. See Marius Victorinus Afer, De Gener. I, p. 1020 c (Migne):

Haec dicens Deus fuit, si mentitus non est: si autem mentitus est, non opus Dei omnimodis perfectum


Roughly, 'If it is not a lie, then he was God as he said: but if on the other hand it is a lie, the works of God are not perfect (or, complete) in every way.'
Tim
--"

Thanks Tim. I had thought I would find a trilemma in Athanasius' De Incarnatione, since Lewis wrote the preface to a translation of it, and was a little disappointed to discover it wasn't there. You have to remember that Lewis never referred to it as the Trilemma, he called it aut deus aut homo malus, Latin for Either God or a Bad Man. The first I ever saw the word "trilemma" used was by Josh McDowell.

Answers.com on C. S. Lewis

This link is interesting for its list of options besides the three Lewis presents.

From the link:
Trilemma

The term "trilemma" actually comes from Christian apologist Josh McDowell, who based it on one of Lewis's best-known arguments in favor of Christianity from his book Mere Christianity.

The trilemma argument is as follows:

Most people are willing to accept Jesus Christ as a great moral teacher. However, the Gospels record that Jesus made many claims to divinity, either explicitly ("I and the Father are one") or implicitly, by assuming authority only God had ("The Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins"). Assuming that the Gospels are accurate, we are thus left with three options.

1. Jesus was telling falsehoods and knew it; so He was a liar.
2. Jesus was telling falsehoods, but believed he was telling the truth; so He was insane.
3. Jesus was telling the truth; so He is divine.


Thus one cannot argue Jesus is only a great moral teacher. If He was a liar or insane, this would invalidate His moral teachings. If He was divine, He is more than just a great moral teacher.

The trilemma argument presumes there are only three options. In logic, dilemmas are countered by proving that it is a false dilemma – that there are more options than the two presented. Skeptics can easily argue that there are several other options available:

1. Jesus's divinity was exaggerated by his disciples.
2. Jesus was misunderstood by His disciples and improperly recorded.
3. Jesus was divine; but as the Hindus point out, there have been many incarnations of God.
4. Jesus was made divine by the developing theology of the Church.
5. Jesus never literally said He was divine; we are misinterpreting those proof-texts.
6. Jesus was a great moral teacher, despite being partly insane.
7. Jesus never existed: the gospels are simply fictions.


Since many of these counter-options deal with the validity of the Gospels, apologists then turn to a defense of Scripture, which Lewis never personally got into. But Lewis's writings indicate that he rejected all the options listed above.

VR: It's simply false to say that Lewis doesn't defend the reliability of Scripture, as I have pointed out earlier.

Dawkins on C. S. Lewis and the trilemma

I redated this post on the God Delusion, in case people think I'm not interested in the substance of Dawkins' arguments.

From p. 92 of The God Delusion

"There are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to believe in God. A common argument, attributed among others to C.S. Lewis ... states that, since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane of a liar: 'Mad, Bad or God'. Or, with artless alliteration, "Lunatic, Liar or Lord'.

Wrong already. Lewis doesn't use the argument as a theistic argument. It's an argument for Christ's divinity, or perhaps even less than that, an argument against a certain misunderstandings of who Jesus was.

The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal.

Supporting argument for this claim please?

But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case, as I said, there is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.

OK, so now we get the head-slap argument. There's a third option, he was sincerely mistaken! I never thought of that, therefore I disappear in a puff of logic! Let's see, if I were to tell my intoductory philosophy class that I was God almighty, they wouldn't call the men in the white coats to come and take me away. They'd just figure I was sincerely mistaken.

The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like" 'Who wrote it, and when?' 'How did they know what to write?' 'Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?' 'Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?' Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life. All were then copied and recopied, through many scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas."

This is how we settle the question of the reliability of the New Testament? An effective refutation of everyone from C. S. Lewis to William Lane Craig to Stephen Davis to N. T. Wright and Joachim Jeremias?? Many theologians and biblical scholars have studied the evidence and the arguments and concluded that the Scriptures are largely reliable. Dawkins makes it sound like there is some kind of a consensus here. There is a consensus amongst those with Humean presuppositions. Big deal.

Lewis himself was one of the leading literary critics of his time. He offered reasons, based on his reading of a lot of ancient literature, that the NT was, as ancient documents go, a reliable document. He could be very wrong, but he can't be refuted by the kind of hand-waving two-paragraph argument Dawkins offers. Read the two Stephen Davis articles on the trilemma, and even the Howard-Snyder essay that is critical of Davis, and contrast it with this two-paragraph demolition by Dawkins, and ask yourself which of these two men has done his homework.

It may be that although Lewis's argument was rhetorically stronger using this multiple choice format, I prefer changing to to a fill in the blank. Given what the Scriptures say that Jesus said an implied about himself, what could he have been if he wasn't God. It's one thing to mention a possibility, it's another to show that, on close examination, that alternative is plausible. Ken Samples offers sevem alternatives: Man, Myth, Madman, Menace, Mystic, Martian or the Messiah. But hey, there could be still more. Bring them on! Fill in the blank.But then show me that, on close analysis the alternative is plausible, that it makes sense of the facts.

The argument may be a bad one. But it can't be refuted on the cheap, without doing your homework.

The following is a link to a set of articles on the trilemma, see especially those by Davis. (Actually, apollos.ws is no longer a free site).

Ed Babinski Replies to C. S. Lewis

This is Ed's response to me on the Trilemma. My replies are in bold.

C.S. Lewis Replies to Ed on the Trilemma Argument?

Funny thing about Lewis' argument for the chief character in the Fourth
Gospel reading like "Boswell's Johnson," is that Boswell has since been
castigated by Boswell scholars for having both embellished and INVENTED
stories about Dr. Johnson. So I guess Lewis was not only lacking in his
knowledge of comparative Gospel scholarship but also could have benefited
from the results of more in-depth Boswellian scholarship as well.

VR: And do Boswell scholars agree on this? Is there consensus among them? Even if the book contains some embellishment, does anyone seriously think that Boswell's Johnson is as unreliable as Bultmann thinks John is? Perhaps we should hop into the TARDIS, bring C. S. Lewis back from the mid-century, and ask him what he thinks of this radical development in Boswell scholarship.

As Dr. Robert M. Price pointed out in "A Rejoinder to Josh McDowell's
Evidence That Demands a Verdict: 'Jesus-- God's Son'":

"Before one parrots the ludicrous dictum of C.S. Lewis (in "Modern
Theology and Biblical Criticism") that the Johannine discourses bear no
resemblance to ancient, non-historical genres, one owes it to oneself to
read the Gnostic and Mandaean revelation soliloquies abundantly quoted in
Bultmann's commentary on John, something I rather doubt any apologists
take the trouble to do. (I find it amusing that Lewis preferred to compare
John's discourses with Boswell's "reportage" of Samuel Johnson's
table-talk--which, as has recently been argued, seems itself to have been
a literary stylization of the kind critics suggest we find in the Fourth
Gospel!)"

Adding to Price, one should note that anyone reading the Fourth Gospel can
see it begins with the author's intepretation of Jesus, "the Word of God."
But the previous three Gospels begin merely by calling Jesus the Messiah
and son of God, both a far cry from "God the son."

But, as Lewis points out, at the end of all the Gospels, Jesus gets himself crucified by making claims on his own behalf, such as "I'm going to come back and judge the world." So maybe Jesus didn't claim to be god, he just claimed to be the final judge of all the nations. He could have been sincerely mistaken about that, no doubt. Arthur Wainwright, my Bible professor at Candler School of Theology, quoted Bultmann as saying that Jesus couldn't have said he would come on the clouds to judge the world, because if he said that he would have had to have been crazy. Maybe someone can give me the reference; I've been looking for it since. I remember Wainwright quoting Archbishop Temple: No one would bother to crucify the Christ of liberal Protestantism.

And in the ostensibly earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus is merely chosen by God
at his baptism, where an ancient Hebrew coronation psalm that refers to
installing a HUMAN king, is used to illustrate Jesus' status, "You are my
son, this day I have begotten you." A human being chosen at his baptism.

There's plenty of debate about what Jesus claimed. Stephen Davis (in Davis et al ed. The Incarnation (Oxford, 2002) defends the claim that Jesus really did make the claims that generate the trilemma. And he has a formidable knowledge of biblical scholarship, I defy anyone to call him ignorant of the relevant literature.

Also, you can read responses to Lewis' "indirect" arguments for Jesus'
"godhood" in the books I mentioned in my original email to Vic. There's
some online responses as well. Too bad Lewis didn't live long enough to
read them, and instead remained far more ignorant of Biblical theology
than he lets on in his essays. In fact he never wrote an essay revealling
any intimate or detailed acquantance with the biblical sholars and deeper
scholarly questions of his own day, and instead begged off such studies,
admitting he was no expert!

"I have no claim to speak as an expert in any of the studies involved, and
merely put forward the reflections which have arisen in my own mind and
have seemed to me (perhaps wrongly) to be helpful. They are all submitted
to the correction of wiser heads." [Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on
Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, The Role of
Revelation and the Question of Inerrancy (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979),
p. 22.]

He did, however, claim to have an understanding of ancient literature based on his professional career as a literary scholar. Lewis thought that the biblical scholarship of his day, which he did read, suffered from a presupposed methodological naturalism, either consistently adopted or inconsistently adopted, and a treatment of biblical texts which differs from the way in which other texts from the same time period are treated by scholars. So he;s not a specialist, but his own specialized knowledge makes him suspicious of what the biblical specialists say. I don't think his response is irrational.

The important thing to realize here is that Lewis's work should never be presumed to be a complete apologetic for Christianity. There is always more work to do.

Lastly, Lewis continued to refer people to the same book of Christian
apologetics that first converted him, Chesterton's book, The Everlasting
Man, as if it were the be and end all of Christian historical apologetics.
Lewis continued to hold Chesterton's book as the most demonstrative
apologetic word for him, even in some of the last letters he wrote, when
people inquired what a good historical apologetics work was.

Was he saying "This is a nice picture of what I believe, written in a style that laypeople can understand," or was he making some kind of inerrancy claim? I doubt the latter.

Lewis never grew up intellectually, never faced the questions a James D.
G. Dunn did, or the other scholars I mentioned in my original email
comments, many of whom began their scholarly biblical studies as
conservative Christians.

And John A. T. Robinson when from Honest to God to Redating the New Testament. Does "growing up intellectually" mean leaving the fold and agreeing with you? We can sit here and quote scholars all day. I object to this type of rhetoric. If I wanted to repay you in kind, I would say that this type of rhetoric implies immaturity on your part.

Let's take Ben Witherington as an example. Can you honestly say that he hasn't faced the questions? Would you say that he is ignorant of modern scholarship? How about N. T. Wright or Luke T. Johnson, who teaches at Candler now (or at least did last I heard)? Or, to go back a generation, Joachim Jeremias. All I'm saying here is that Jesus's claims are a subject for serious scholarly debate, and the conservative view of what Jesus claimed is ably defended in the literature. This may not be sufficient to defend the trilemma, but it is sufficient to rebut your charge of not growing up intellectually.


"A False Trilemma" by Dr. Robert M. Price
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/chap7.html

An AFR-related trilemma argument

From Manuel Alfonseca's blog. 

On the question of human freedom, whose reality is denied by deterministic philosophy, Brigitte Falkenburg proposes another trilemma, a little different, because in this case any two of the three alternatives can be true, but then the third must be false. This is her trilemma:

1. Physical causality is closed. In other words, physics is deterministic. Every physical phenomenon has been caused by other physical phenomena.
2. Mental phenomena are different from physical phenomena. In other words, the mind is not controlled by physical phenomena. In a previous post I mentioned the four different answers given by philosophers to the mind problem. This assertion would correspond to the dualist approach, or perhaps to emergent monism.
3. We can cause physical phenomena with our minds. That is, final causality is possible. Our intentions (mental phenomena) can have physical consequences (such as pressing a button).

C. S. Lewis replies to Ed Babinski on the trilemma

Last month I got this reply on the comment line from Ed Babinski.

Lewis fleshed out Chesterton's previously fallacious argument that Jesus was divine because he said so in the Gospel John, and hence Jesus would have been a liar, a madman or "worse" [Chesteron] to have lied about such a thing. False trilemma. Both Chesterton and Lewis skipped right over any and all specific questions that theologians have regarding whether Jesus ever said such things. Have you read Is John's Gospel True? by Maurice Casey; or Howard Teeple's The Literary Origin of the Gospel of John? Or take James D. G. Dunn's latest two works on Jesus in which he likewise comes down against Jesus having said the things found in the fourth Gospel. Dunn is a well known theologian (and a moderate with some liberal tendencies) who concludes with other moderate and liberal scholars that Jesus never said a word in the Gospel of John. There are many specific arguments, but one thing to note is that Jesus in the fourth Gospel doesn't utter a single parable and speaks to people constantly about himself, using an "I am" formula time and again, and even disagrees with what he said in the other three Gospels about direct forgiveness in the Our Father, and about how to inherit eternal life. Instead, in the fourth Gospel Jesus changes his tune in a secret nightime meeting with Nicodemus, and introduces a new word about the absolute necessity of having to be "born again" and to believe such and such about Jesus, or be "damned already." Chesteron and Lewis were both ignorant of such questions, and and simply assumed the fourth Gospel picture of Jesus of Nazareth was true, even central! Thus they ignored the questions that even in their day were being asked, and that continue being asked today. See Peter Amue's list of theological works on the Gospel of John from major university presses: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2O7WERBN6M4K2/ref=cm_lm_detail_ctr_full_3/102-5977177-7502511

Interestingly enough, this is one of Pittenger's complaints against Lewis, and Lewis answered it as follows in God in the Dock (Eerdmans) p. 180. He was aware of higher-critical views on the Fourth Gospel and he offered reasons for why those reasons were inadequate. He didn't just assume that the Fourth Gospel is reliable, as Babinski claims. He also points out that the case for the trilemma does not rest exclusively on the Fourth Gospel. He writes:

I confess, however, that the problem of the Fourth Gospel raises in me a conflict between authority and private judgment: the authority of all those learned men who think that Gospel unhistorical, and my judgment as a literary critic whcih constrains me to think it at least as close to the facts as Boswell's Johnson
. If I venture here to follow judgment in the teeth of authority, this is partly because I could never see how one escaped the dilemma aut deus aut malus homo by confining himself to the Synoptics. Moderns do not seem started, as his contemporaries were, by the claim Jesus makes to forgive sins; not sins against Himself, just sins. If Dr. Pittenger told me that two of his colleagues had lost him a professorship by telling lies about his character and I replied, "I freely forgive them both', would he not think this an impertinence (both in the old and the modern sense) bordering on insanity? And of course all three Synoptics tell the story of One who, at his trial, sealed His fate by saying He was the Son of God.

What my book says about the trilemma

A redated post.

Here's what I wrote about the LLL argument in my book. pp. 13-14.

Perhaps Lewis's most famous argument is what is known as the Lewis trilemma. It is unreasonable, Lewis says, to say that Christ is a great moral teacher but not God, because he claimed, both implicitly and explicitly, to be God. If he wasn't God, he either had to be lying, which would make him wicked, or he had to be deluded, which would make him insane. Since these two alternatives are implausible, Lewis says he must be telling the truth and really be God.

Many others have repeated this argument in their own apologetics. The argument makes four assumptions, however, and critics of the argument have challenged all these assumptions.

1. Jesus' claims in Scripture are best interpreted as not merely as claims to be the Jewish Messiah, but as claims to be God.

2. The Gospels are a reliable historical record of what Jesus said and did.

3. No sane person can form the false belief that he himself is God.

4. The claim "Jesus is God" is more antecedently probable than the admittedly antecedently improbable claiim that Jewus was a great moral teacher but and either a liar or a madman.

Lewis supplies some argumentation in defense of all of these claims in various parts of his writings, and it seems to me that there is a good deal to be said on both sides of each of these claiims before a final assessment can be reached. If all these assumptions are defensible, then the argument is a good one. But rather than debating these assumptions, apologists have simply repeated the mantra "liar, lunatic or Lord," while opponents have cried in response "false dilemma." Neither of these responses, in my estimation, does justice to the complex issues the trilemma raises.

Steve Davis on the origin of the trilemma

Hi Victor, several years ago, I e-mailed two prominent patristic
scholars who are friends of mine, and neither was aware of anything
like the Lewis trilemma argument in the church fathers. And I'm reasonably
sure it is not found in Luther or Calvin. Maybe Chesterton made it up;
I just do not know where it came from.

Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or just a Colorful Teacher of World Religions

Per Jason Pratt's request, I have redated this post on the trilemma.

I've been reading John Beversluis's analysis of the trilemma, and his treatment of the issue led me to advance this little thought experiment.

Suppose I were to come to my class in, oh, say, world religion, and I were to say. "This course is about religion, and we will be talking about God a lot. And you guys are all in luck. I, your teacher, Dr. Reppert, am God Himself, come to earth in incarnate form." Now my students would probably think this was a big practical joke. But now suppose after a week or two I catch a student cheating and say, "Not only do you flunk this class, but unless you repent you are going to hear from me when I return for the day of judgment." Suppose some people were to go to the dean and ask about what is up with Reppert's class. The teacher were then to say "Yes, I realize this guy thinks he's God, so of course he's delusional about that. But many students have told me that this just makes the class more interesting. He's a good teacher, and a fair grader. There's no reason to drop the course, or ask for a refund for your tuition, still less to contact the men in the white coats. Just stay in there, and you should be happy." Could this reply possibly be taken seriously by the distressed and confused students?

P. S. (4/8) The point here, it seems to me, is that this just sounds like a psychologically implauisble scenario, doesn't it?

Beversluis's critique of Lewis's trilemma argument

John Beverslius, of course, has more than one paragraph devoted to Lewis's trilemma in his book. This is his entire chapter, which appears on Debunking Christianity. It's a good challenge for supporters of the argument, and a substantial improvement over his previous discussion.

Separating the supernatural from the natural in the story of Jesus--the point behind the trilemma

It is popular to disconnect the plausibility of naturalistically acceptable claims made by the New Testament writers from those involving a supernatural commitment. This kind of an issue has come up before, when people have argued that no amount of accuracy on the part of the New Testament writers in recording mundane matter (such as we find in the Book of Acts), provides any evidence that the supernatural claims are also true.

 It is interesting that some of you who are very eager to affirm the unity of the New Testament when you are arguing against the claim that the New Testament provides independent, or even partially independent strands of evidence for the claims of the New Testament, seem to want to argue that the New Testament is a diverse source when arguing that maybe we can accept the non-supernaturally involved claims while rejecting any element of the supernatural.

First, accurate reporting is a habit of mind. Even in mundane matters, you have people who take varying degrees of effort to get things right. If we conclude that a good deal of what our sources have to say is false, then that reflects poorly on everything they have to say, in much the way that evidence that a witness in a court case is untruthful about one thing can damage their credibility in other matters.

Admittedly, there are differences amongst the scenarios which conclude that the miracle claims are false. On some views, the writers experienced what they said they experienced, but were wrong about the causes of what they experienced. Hallucination theories of the Resurrection fit into this category. If the disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus, then they were "appeared to Jesus-ly," but were mistaken in supposing that the real risen Jesus was the cause of their being so appeared to. Or,t they might have seen lepers walking away from Jesus apparently cleansed, when the cause of this recovery was psychosomatic rather than divinely caused.

But other views treat the claims to be pretty much made up out of the whole cloth. If the New Testament contains a lot of material that was just made up, then it seems to me it would then be hard to credit passages that say Jesus taught that you should turn the other cheek.

I think the Gospels record actions on the part of Jesus that are mostly connected to his supernatural claims in one way or the other. Telling someone their sins are forgiven isn't directly supernatural, but if we accept it, we give ourselves the problem of figuring out how someone could believe that he had the prerogative to do so. Even Jesus's manner of teaching is a little odd from a naturalistic standpoint, in that you have a Jew who speaks on his own authority and even puts his own words (But I say unto you...)
in the place of the Law of Moses.

Now, you can argue, of course, that there are some good moral ideas that you can take from the New Testament even if Jesus didn't do or say much of anything he is supposed to have said. That's a different issue. I think something stronger can be claimed here; I believe that there is an ethical mind behind the Gospels that possessed true moral greatness, and that that is something that would have to be explained by any naturalistic theory. But that is a subject for another time.

But what I do maintain is that an easy separation between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic is going to end up being a whole lot harder than it looks to carry off. It is indeed what the Trilemma argument is driving it.

A response of mine on Logic Matters on the Trilemma

These are some comments of mine from the Logic Matters blog.

The trilemma seems to be pointing to two sets of facts or, at least apparent facts. On the one hand we have the moral genius of Jesus, the kind of moral genius that produces things like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and on the other hand we have the claim, implicit and explicit through the Gospels, to be God. The discussion thus far has been presupposing that both of these set of facts are real facts, but want to say that they are psychologically compossible in Jesus. I was trying to show with my student story that we have good reason to suppose that it is hard to believe that this combination could exist in the real world, and that we would certainly not expect someone who was deluded into believing oneself to be God could even be good and wise enough to be a fair grader and a good classroom teacher, much less a moral genius of the caliber of Jesus. So I was trying to support your side of this discussion, Mike. If you accept the "local delusion" theory suggested by Smith here and by John Beversluis in his revised book, then the students should be reassured by the dean. But the dean's reply doesn't seem reassuring to me at all. Of course here probabilities have to enter the picture--if you have priors according to which any naturalistic account is preferable to any supernaturalist account, then of course the LLL argument isn't going to carry any weight. Or you can say that the facts I alluded to above are only apparent facts but not facts. But what seems to me to be implausible is to accept these two sets of facts as facts and somehow fail to see a serious dissonance that requires some explaining, to say the least. The argument is not bad, or stupid, or idiotic, in my view. The existence of possible alternatives doesn't mean that those alternatives are plausible.

J P Holding on the trilemma

The irrepressible J. P. Holding defends the trilemma.

Andrew Rilstone on the Trilemma

If Rilstone is right, the ambitions of the trilemma are rather limited.

The Narnian trilemma

This is Lewis's trilemma argument as it appears in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lucy, who has a far better reputation for truthfulness than Edmund, claims that she has been though a wardrobe into a strange land called Narnia. She claims Edmund has been there too, but Edmund denies it.

"How do you know," he asked, "that your sister's story is not true?"

  "Oh, but -" began Susan, and then stopped.  Anyone could see from the old man's face that he was perfectly serious.  Then Susan pulled herself together and said, "But Edmund said they had only been pretending." 

  "That is a point," said the Professor, "which certainly deserves consideration; very careful consideration.  For instance - if you will excuse me for asking the question - does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable?  I mean, which is the more truthful?"

  "That's just the funny thing about it, Sir," said Peter.  "Up till now, I'd have said Lucy every time."

  "And what do you think, my dear?" said the professor, turning to Susan.

  "Well," said Susan, "in general, I'd say the same as Peter, but this couldn't be true. . ."

  "That's more than I know," said the Professor, "and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed."

  "We were afraid it mightn't even be lying," said Susan, "we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy."

  "Madness, you mean?" said the Professor quite cooly.  "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that.  One has only to look at her to see that she is not mad. . . Logic! . . .Why don't they teach logic at these schools?  There are only three possibilities.  Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth.  You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad.  For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth." 

The link is to Peter Williams' discussion of the issue of incarnation.

Dialogue with Anonymous on issues related to the Trilemma

Anonymous wrote: Victor, I appreciate that you are not claiming there is a logical error. My point however was a procedural one. Unless you can prove a logical error, your statement that (in effect) "a naturalistic account of the NT is impossible [or implausible] from a naturalistic perspective" is about as meaningful as saying that "a Christian account of the NT is impossible [or implausible] from a Christian perspective".

VR: Not at all. I am saying that a naturalistic understanding of the Gospels will invariably impugn their reliability to the point of rendering them virtually useless. I do not think that a naturalist necessarily has to explain all of the religious texts that have supernaturalist implications. However, insofar as the documents otherwise show signs of reliability but are unacceptable within a naturalistic framework, this represents an anomaly for the naturalist. And if there are religious texts like the Qu'ran that otherwise show signs of reliability but contradict the Christian message, then this is an anomaly for Christians as well as for naturalists.

Anon: You are also [and I think this is an entirely unrelated point] placing an unwarranted burden of proof on naturalists if you demand that they "explain" the Biblical sources. Once someone has adopted a "naturalistic persepective" they have a logical obligation to reject all stories of "miracles" (that is, events that apparently contradict well-attested natural laws as we understand them), wherever or whenever they occur. This includes the miracles reported in Homer, the Bible, the Koran, the Mahabharata, and all the many Roman and medieval histories. Whether the accounts that remain, once all the supernatural stuff has been stripped away, are reliable or unreliable is something that only specialist historians can determine.

VR: I don't think history is such a specialized discipline that ordinary common sense arguments can't be used, and that we have to defer completely to specialists. History is not quantum mechanics. My claim is that a plausible and sensible portrait of Jesus that fits the facts and is psychologically plausible is probably not available, once the supernatural is denied.

Anon: And even if the accounts are considered to be reliable, no opinion on the psychological plausibility of these stories can have any epistemic purchase against naturalism. There are no laws of psychology that are comparable in scope or experimental support to the laws of physics (and their corollaries in the other sciences). To argue that X wouldn't do or say or write something unless the miracle stories were true is to ask a naturalist to abandon well-attested physical laws in favor of unattested psychological laws of your own devising. Obviously the naturalist will not do this, and this is where his or her epistemic obligation ends. The naturalist no more has to explain the (allegedly) odd behavior of the characters in (or authors of) the New Testament than the Christian has to explain the behavior of the characters in the Mahabharata.

VR: Except that we have the historical provenance of the characters in the New Testament. When know when and were they lived, and who they were, and we have good reason to suppose that they were not simply made up, unlike the characters in the Mahabarata or the Book of Mormon, who seem to me to be entirely mythical. Now I know that the mythicist position is out there, but it seems to be a minority report even on Internet Infidels.

I don't know that we have any more certainty concerning the laws of physics than we have concerning certain laws of psychology. Newton's laws, after all, had to be modified. The confidence I have in my beliefs concerning what my wife would do and what she would not do is far stronger than my confidence in, say, the latest deliverances of string theory. So I really think the "physical laws vs. psychological laws" dichotomy doesn't work.

Look, all I am getting out of this is an anomaly claim against the naturalist. I think the historical evidence is more like what we should expect if a supernaturalist story is true than it is like what we should expect if a supernaturalist story is not true. Hence, yeah, this is the basis of a "weak Bayesian confirmation" argument against the naturalist, and I do think the points that I am drawing out of the Trilemma contribute to this case. But that's it. I've thought it would be nice to write a book entitled "Evidence that Politely Asks for a Verdict: The Epistemically Modest Case for Christ." I don't know if it would be a best-seller, though.

Dmitry Chernikov replies to Infidel in Exile

LIAR, LUNATIC, OR LORD

This recent blog entry criticizes C.S. Lewis’s famous argument for the divinity of Christ. As will be recalled, Lewis proposes a trilemma: that Christ had to be either a liar, or lunatic, or, failing these, Lord. Since it is clear from Scripture that Jesus was neither a liar nor a madman, we are forced to conclude that he was Lord and God.

Now I am not a Biblical scholar, so I will not respond to the “Infidel in Exile”’s arguments dealing with whether or not Jesus really called himself God. I will simply assume that he did based on such Biblical passages as “Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.’” (Jn 8:58), “‘The Father and I are one.’” (Jn 10:30), and “Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.’” (Jn 14:9) I will therefore confine my replies to his logical arguments.

Infidel writes: “Could a liar be a great moral teacher? Of course! All the great moral teachers of history were human beings, and like all humans, must have been liars.” First, setting aside the strange claim that all people (including presumably Infidel himself) are liars, it should be clear that not all lies are made equal. How many “great moral teachers” in human history pronounced themselves the infinite, transcendent, immortal God? Perhaps one can lie about one’s youthful indiscretions and still remain a moral man, but to falsely claim divinity would be something that even Infidel should think is extraordinary. This kind of a lie would be utterly irresponsible on Jesus’s part if he was a mere human, for it would entail His infallibility and therefore the absolute correctness of His moral teachings. But no great moral reformer has dared to claim such infallibility, except, of course, the Pope, but only when speaking ex cathedra on faith and morals, and only in virtue of the truth of Christ’s divinity. This very claim, therefore, would justify calling Jesus a bad guy, if He was a liar.

Second, one of the consequences of the belief in Jesus’s divinity has been a 2,000-year-old worldwide religion that has claimed billions of adherers and a vast body of theological and philosophical certainties. If Jesus lied about himself, then the Christian religion is a lie, and he is responsible for it. (And don’t tell me that Jesus’s disciples or the later generations have “misunderstood” Jesus’s message. The Church has developed the Christian doctrine pretty well.) Only the devil could have deceived so many people for so long.

Third, how was Jesus able to deceive his disciples? How was he able to convince erroneously so many people of his own divine/human nature? There must have been something very powerful about him. But the most powerful created being who is a deceiver is the devil. Hence that’s precisely what Jesus was if he was a liar.

Fourth, Jesus was accused of being a devil.

But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “This man drives out demons only by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons.” But he knew what they were thinking and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and no town or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself; how, then, will his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Mt 12:24-28)

His argumentation here seems unimpeachable. But could Jesus have been just a prophet to whom God had given power to perform great miracles? This is highly doubtful, because it would imply that God also approved of Jesus’s message of his own divinity. God would never have favored a man in such a way unless He also knew that he would not abuse the gifts horribly for his own ends.

Fifth, Jesus picked the worst environment in which to proclaim himself God. For the Jews were the least likely people to worship a mere man, and he would know that.

Finally, if Jesus was a liar, then he had to have been a tremendously cunning man. Yet he failed to realize that blaspheming by calling himself God would lead to his rejection, persecution, torture, and death. Alternatively, Infidel must assume that Jesus wanted to die. But that assumption seems dubious and without Scriptural support. Jesus seems highly rational and without any kind of mental sickness like a death wish. He predicts His death, but He does not welcome it.

The conclusion is that Jesus could not have been a liar. Now let us suppose that the second horn of the trilemma is true; that is, that Jesus was insane. Our author continues:

He might have sincerely believed in what he said. He might even have sincerely believed he was God. His followers might have believed it too. That sort of thing has happened before as well. But even if he were crazy, would that invalidate him as a great moral teacher? Crazy people are as likely to say intelligent and insightful things as anybody. After all, saying Jesus was a nut doesn’t really say anything about what kind of nut he was. He might have been a nut like Kurt Godel, one of the great philosophers of all time, who in his later years insisted on communicating with everyone by phone even if they were in the same room. Yet his social strangenesses did not prevent him from being a truly great thinker and teacher.

If Jesus was mad, then one of his mental problems was delusions of grandeur of the most outrageous sort. He did not imagine himself to be the emperor of Rome but God. Now once again, how common is that delusion? In fact, in order to believe himself to be God in human flesh, Jesus would have to deceive himself into believing to be omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, already blessed with the vision of God, etc. Are these beliefs common to the mentally ill? Infidel would have to show that they are, yet he has not done so. And how reasonable would it have been for Jesus’s followers to believe their master’s claims unless he gave them very good reasons to do so?

But suppose that this ultimate delusion of grandeur is, in fact, a recognized form of psychopathology, a “divinity complex” of some sort. As Peter Kreeft points out,

Its character traits are well-known: egotism, narcissism, inflexibility, dullness, predictability, inability to understand and love others as they really are and creatively relate to others. In other words, this is the polar opposite of the personality of Jesus!

In addition, people who are victims of such an exaggerated self-status are very often proud and antinomian and therefore wicked. We read in the Bible, for example, that “The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.” (Ex 33:11) But we know also that “Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.” (Num 12:3) If Jesus falsely thought of himself as God, then he would have no need to be humble (except insofar as he thought he needed to be obedient to the Father). How likely would it be then for his teachings to be coherent and to correspond to reality? Falsely imagining oneself to be divine would poison all of one’s actions and likely result in insane doctrines, as it did, for example, for the 13th century Brethren of the Free Spirit, whose motto was “if the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” Yet we read about Jesus that “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” (Lk 2:40)

Our author continues: “Another problem with this point of view is that in fact there is nothing particularly divine about his teachings in any case; they can be found in the popular philosophy, Cynic and Stoic, of his day, and in the Old Testament.” But no one claims that it is Jesus’s moral teachings that compel our belief in his divinity. Rather, we are to infer it from the manner of his birth, his miracles, his fulfillment of prophecies, His revelations, his resurrection and ascension into heaven, from the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, and lastly from his character that makes Jesus’s self-understanding as a union of the divine and human natures in one person to be believable. Yet these teachings are nevertheless consistent with His divinity and inconsistent with his being a liar or a lunatic.

But suppose for the sake of argument that Jesus, being mad, was nevertheless able to avoid the bad character traits associated with his illness. There is once again the matter of the foregoing signs and wonders. From where could Jesus get the power to persuade the world of his nature and mission? Would God have blessed a madman in such a way? If Christ performed miracles, etc., then that is a sign of his divinity; if he did not perform miracles, then the conversion of billions completely without miracles is a miracle in its own right. (This is not my own argument; Aquinas makes the same one.)

Infidel’s final claim is that Jesus may have used the term “God” and “Son of God” as a metaphor for his secular kingship or claim to the throne. But in light of the life of Jesus taken as a whole, is it really plausible to suppose that he considered himself to be a merely secular ruler? Did he not argue that his kingdom was not of this world? (Jn 18:36) Did he not rebuke those who imagined him to be a secular deliverer of Israel from the Roman rule? Does he seem like a Caesar, afterwards deified? Does he look like the kind of a guy who would claw his way to power, all in order to tax, inflate, regulate, conscript, start wars, lie, and do the sort of things that governments do? Is his message “I will reform the government to make it more efficient?” I think not.

There are two other possibilities, viz., that Jesus was a kind of an Eastern guru and, the most popular idea nowadays, that the whole thing is a myth. I will not argue against these here. But it should be clear by now that Jesus could have been a lunatic either.

Infidel in Exile's Critique of the Lewis argument

There was an exchange on Fides Quaerens Intellectum on the MBG argument, but all the links to the opponent, Infidel in Exile's critique, could not be linked to. But I found the discussion on the IIE blog, which I reproduce here: (I will have to say that I am not thrilled with the tone of this discussion; if your case is a really good one you don't need to remind your opponent at every turn that if he/she disagrees with you he/she just don't know anything.)

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Fides Quaerens Intellectum and the Trilemma

The Trilemma is one of those arguments that takes two hours and five minutes to handle: two hours laughing, and five minutes to rip apart. A friend of mine pointed me to this example at Fides Quaerens Intellectum of a philosophy grad student whose thinking on this issue lacks both depth and knowledge. He writes:

The argument can be waged with success using probabilities, though. So, unless he can show that it is somehow likely that Jesus could mistakenly believe he is God without being cognitively dysfunctional, I think the L3 argument still works.It's hard for me to imagine that in this day and age anyone could take this argument seriously, but it remains a great favorite among believers, indicating that basically Lewis wrote it, like all apologetics, to re-assure believers rather than convince skeptics. I'll discuss this by adapting something I wrote earlier, with quotes from the website above.
Here is Lewis' original presentation:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God."That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."Type this in Google you'll find thousands of Christian websites that apparently feel this is a high point of Christian apologetics. It's actually illogical and uninformed, and it does not reflect well on people who accept it as serious thinking.
The first problem is very basic. Lewis writes "A man who said the sort of things Jesus said...." However, accepting this premise first requires that we establish what Jesus said. But it is not easy to separate what Jesus said from what was added to his sayings later by Christians, who told and retold the many tales of Jesus. There is widespread disagreement among scholars on what goes back to Jesus -- and further, as Crossan pointed out in The Birth of Christianity, there is no widely accepted method for going back into the Jesus material and separating the wheat from the chaff. Many scholars believe, for example, that nothing in John goes back to Jesus. Others argue that anything about Gentiles or food laws is a later addition. Still others point out that Jesus' sayings closely resemble popular philosophical sayings of his time. What arguments or evidence does Lewis offer about what Jesus said? Well, I've read Mere Christianity, and I didn't see any. So unless Lewis can tell me how he knows what Jesus intended, I don't see that there is any support for his claim from that direction. In fact Lewis even writes that Jesus claimed to be God, but nowhere is there a clear statement of that in the Synoptic Gospels, which are usually seen as closer to the original sayings of Jesus (even a statement like "I and the Father are one"can be interpreted in many ways). Many, many scholars would dispute that historical Jesus ever made such a claim.
It is obvious that the writers mentioned in the post at Fides Quaerens Intellectum have erred by not exploring the issue of what Jesus said, and taking everything in the Gospel texts at face value, something no serious historian or New Testament scholar would ever do (Lewis, needless to say, was neither).
But it gets worse, because in addition to lacking textual support, Lewis' position is a string of logical fallacies, and that is something that any philosophy major worth his salt should spot right away. First, he offers you three choices. Either Jesus was really God, or he was a devil, or he was crazy. Any time someone gives you violently opposed choices you should start becoming suspicious about his arguments. Think about it. Could a liar be a great moral teacher? Of course! All the great moral teachers of history were human beings, and like all humans, must have been liars. Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctoral thesis and cheated on his wife. His "I have a dream"is taken unacknowledged from a speech written by a friend of his. Does that mean he wasn't a great moral teacher and leader? Of course not! Just imagine all the great moral leaders and teachers you know - didn't they all have human failings? So with Jesus. There is no reason to imagine that simply because he was a great moral teacher, he must be divine. The greatness lies in the message, not in who brings it.
But further, there is no reason to imagine that Jesus had to have been a liar to make the claims that he did. He might have sincerely believed in what he said. He might even have sincerely believed he was God. His followers might have believed it too. That sort of thing has happened before as well. But even if he were crazy, would that invalidate him as a great moral teacher? Crazy people are as likely to say intelligent and insightful things as anybody. After all, saying Jesus was a nut doesn't really say anything about what kind of nut he was. He might have been a nut like Kurt Godel, one of the great philosophers of all time, who in his later years insisted on communicating with everyone by phone even if they were in the same room. Yet his social strangenesses did not prevent him from being a truly great thinker and teacher.
Another problem with this point of view is that in fact there is nothing particularly divine about his teachings in any case; they can be found in the popular philosophy, Cynic and Stoic, of his day, and in the Old Testament. When Jesus cites the famous Shema in Mark 12:29-31, as Jim Perry points out, he is citing a bit of Jewish moral teaching. So should we then regard all the Jewish teachers who taught this as divine too? The Golden Rule, found in many cultures, is another example of this. Were all those teachers divine too? When Jesus says that physicians heal the sick he is citing a commonplace in Cynic philosophy. Do we then claim that the Cynic philosopher who first thought that up was divine? Probably most people would not.
And here's yet another thing to think about. In antiquity "Son of God"and "God"were royal titles. Consider the Prienne Inscription. Here's an excerpt:

"...surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings for the world that came by reason of him..."
Here Augustus is referred to as "God"and "Savior" (benefactor). His birthday is the "beginning of the good tidings". The Greek word for "good tidings" is euangelion, which readers might recognize as the word "gospel." Similarly Livy notes that Romulus was taken up to heaven as "Son of God."(Incidentally, when Romulus ascended to heaven, those around him fled. Does any of this sound familiar?) In other words, Jesus might well have claimed himself to be "God" or "Son of God"and done so with full knowledge that it was a Royal title. He may have been making a claim to the throne - in many fictional reconstructions of the Jesus story, such as Robert Graves' beautiful King Jesus, Jesus is made a descendent of Herod and claimant to the throne of Judea. There are possible meanings here that Lewis has not considered (not surprising as he made very little attempt to inquire into history, like our philosopher friend at Fides Quaerens Intellectum). And further, since some Roman emperors after Augustus claimed to be a God and a Son of a God, can we apply the Trilemma to them?
In fact, Lewis' argument only becomes coherent if you simply suspend all knowledge of history and historical methodology, as our philosopher friend at Fides Quaerens Intellectum actually did, and operate in a vaccuum. Consider this remark:

I would dare to say that anyone who is aware of the kind of cultural assumptions behind first century Palestinian Judaism would not be so quick to endorse the "just-so" story Howard-Snyder gives to explain how Jesus could make grandiose leaps to believe (falsely) that he was the Messiah, to the belief that the Messiah is divine, to the belief that the Hebrew God is plural in persons, and finally to the (false) belief that he was a person of God.
There are, of course, massive historical problems here. First, there is no such thing as "first century Palestinian Judaism" because Judaism was not a cultural monolith in the first century. There might well have been several routes by which a Jew might have come to believe himself the actual Son of God. First, and by far the most likely, is that it is a later addition in the Jesus tradition. Theissen and Merz' The Historical Jesus, a fabulous encyclopedia of scholarly arguments and evidence from two German Christian scholars, explains why this must be so beginning on page 553. The second route is that Jesus did what other historical individuals who have seen themselves as Sons of the Christian God (and the Brother of the Lord) did -- he had a vision. It is extremely improbable that a Chinese Hakka with no background in Christianity save for half-read missionary tracts in Chinese would title himself Brother of Jesus -- and therefore Son of God. But that is exactly what happened, and the rest was the history of the Taiping Rebellion (though in the end Hong finally went insane). The Zulu Nxele did pretty much the same thing. Culture is not destiny. Further, first century Palestinian Judaism was heavily Hellenized, and split into many sects. It is not difficult to imagine that any of the numerous variations on Judaism could have produced a maverick thinker -- such thinking is inherent in the tradition of Two Powers in Heaven and Divine Mediators that grew up in Judaism. And finally, according to Gospel legend, Jesus was from the least Judaized part of Palestine, Galilee. He must have been explosed to a swirl of cultural and intellectual influences. There's simply no telling what he might have said or done.
Speaking of the Gospels, it is also important to point out that the first Gospel was Mark, and in Mark, Jesus is portrayed as a human being possessed by God. This Christology is called Adoptionism, and was considered heretical in the later Church, which may explain why Mark was rewritten and incorporated into Luke and Matthew. In Mark no human recognizes Jesus as Son of God during his own lifetime. And there are at least two ways the Centurion's Declaration in 15:39 can be read. It is clear from Mark that there are several ways to think about what "Son of God" might mean in early Christianity, a clue that the title was added later and was part of a developing tradition. But I digress
Trivial point: Jesus may well have started out sane, and gradually gone insane. Seeing himself as God may have been the endpoint of a long process. It's not as if there are only two possible states, sanity and not-sanity. One grades into the other, and further, they can come intermittently. Indeed, it is easy to see someone given to intermittent insanity as being seen by others as a Divine Personage -- such was common in antiquity.
In fact, there are many more than the three dramatic choices - God, Devil, or Nutcase - that Lewis offers us. Maybe Jesus was just a human like you and me. Maybe he was misunderstood. Maybe the things he said were made up, or spoken by others and then attributed to Jesus. So next time someone says "Lord, liar, or lunatic?"You can respond by thoughtfully saying, "No, more like man, myth, or misunderstood."
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I responded to a response from another poster:
It is sad to imagine that anyone could buy the kind of argument Infidel presents. Merely note the multiple vague and mere appeals to 'many scholars' and diversity of opinion:
If you want citations, I am happy to provide them. But anyone familiar with the scholarship -- and it is clear that neither the OP nor Lewis was -- knows that disagreement on any of the major issues is widespread. Did Jesus cause a ruckus in the Temple? Fredriksen says no, it's all fiction, Sanders yes but it is fictionalized, Gundry yes and word for word reporting is true. Crossan says no but he did speak against the Temple. Brown says yes but fictionalized. Etc. Would you like more names?
"There is widespread disagreement among scholars on what goes back to Jesus" - the critical questions aren't being asked here, WHAT is the reasoning of these scholars? I'm content to believe that Infidel's not wanting to cite since he's probably done so many times, and his entry isn't intended to be an overarching survey--but at least point to more than one scholar.
I'm very sorry. In the future I'll will try to recall that my audience does not know much about the issues that it believes in passionately and writes on regularly. Wait -- how's that again?
As for scholarly reasoning, I have already cited THE major figure in the historical Jesus studies, John D. Crossan, in _The Birth of Christianity_, on that very issue. There is no accepted methodology, and no criteria has withstood criticism. Another good view is in Porter's book on Criteria in Historical Jesus research. Theissen and Merz also have a good overview. But I recommend _The Birth of Christianity_ as a fabulous introduction to the problems.
"Many scholars believe, for example, that nothing in John goes back to Jesus." "Still others point out that Jesus' sayings closely resemble popular philosophical sayings of his time."
I'm hearing Jesus Seminar, but...
"In fact Lewis even writes that Jesus claimed to be God, but nowhere is there a clear statement of that in the Synoptic Gospels, which are usually seen as closer to the original sayings of Jesus (even a statement like "I and the Father are one" can be interpreted in many ways). Many, many scholars would dispute that historical Jesus ever made such a claim." -
Likewise, "many scholars" such as?, and upon stricter investigation saying that "there is no clear statement" is actually ignorant and lacking ground. Start with this-- http://www.tektonics.org/jesusclaims/jesusclaimshub.html
Actually, none of this is Jesus Seminar. The links between the sayings of Jesus and Cynicism are laid out by F. Gerald Downing, a British cleric and scholar, in a series of works. They are well known to scholars. Here are the refs:
Downing, F. Gerald. 2001. The Jewish Cynic Jesus. In Labahn, Michael, and Schmidt, Andreas, eds. 2001. Jesus, Mark, and Q. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 214. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. pp184-215.
Downing, Gerald F. 1998. Cynics, Paul, and the Pauline Churches. London: Routledge.
Downing, F. Gerald. 1988. Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and other Radical Preachers in First-Century Tradition. Sheffield UK: JSOT Press
As for Tektonics, Holding reads only conservatives, doesn't stay with the scholarship, hasn't a clue about scholarly methodology, and in any case, has decided a priori what the case is (thinks Paul really wrote the Pastorals and Deutero-Paulines, for example). Plus, I have had the joy of interacting with him on many forums...when beaten, as is usual, he retreats into unseemly abuse and insults.
In any case, as Holding admits, nowhere in the Synoptics does Jesus say "I am God" so the whole red herring you've dragged in here is moot and my point stands.
If you want a good review of the issues, I have already pointed you to Theissen and Merz, whom no one would ever mistake for liberals. _The Historical Jesus_ should be on everyone's shelf. There are numerous discussions in T&M, but a major overview begins on p553.
It is true, however, that Lewis was not a NT scholar. But such cheap discussion about his writings is, I would find, quite odd, for someone who attacks as deep as this:
Why is it cheap to point out that sad fact that Lewis' knowledge of the New Testament was incompetent even for his own day, let alone ours? Many people who read Lewis think he actually knows what he is talking about. He doesn't.
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Lewis' position is a string of logical fallacies, and that is something that any philosophy major worth his salt should spot right away. ."
In other words, if DePoe does not agree with Infidel's observations, he is not 'worth his salt', irregardless of his grounds for disagreement. Sound like rhetoric to you?
That's what we call an introductory remark, to tell the reader exactly what I am going to show -- that Lewis logical fallacies and poor argumentation is the kind that should be instantly spotted by any thoughtful reader. Like a philosophy grad student, for example.
--"There are possible meanings here that Lewis has not considered (not surprising as he made very little attempt to inquire into history, like our philosopher friend at Fides Quaerens Intellectum)."

And once again, another "if you disagree you are ignoring all history" type assertion:Beg your pardon. Perhaps you can show me where the OP showed even the slightest hint of a whiff of the issues I have raised? Where is the knowledge of the historical methodology and the problems with the claims Lewis raises? None. Zip. Nada.
"In fact, Lewis' argument only becomes coherent if you simply suspend all knowledge of history and historical methodology, as our philosopher friend at Fides Quaerens Intellectum actually did, and operate in a vaccuum."
Well, DePoe, if you want some insights from an educated layman, email J. P. Holding of www.tektonics.org -- you might merely ask for specific links.
ROFL. Again, please show where DePoe displays any knowledge of the issues of history and methodology he is raising.
Of course, I note that your own response consists of asking for information, such as the widespread disagreement among scholars on what goes back to Jesus, and what methodologies should be used in determining that, that is known to anyone who has made a study of the issues. I pointed you to at least two important works in the piece. If you would like more references, I'd be happy to oblige.
Give me a few years until I get a MA in Classics (and on to doctorate); then we'll see what I can say after a long, long day.
Hopefully it will show more sensitivity to the problems of historical methodology than Lewis does. And actually deal with the points raised.....
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The owner of the blog chimed in, so I responded
As for the dispute raised by the exiled infidel (what a lonely sounding name!), he is questioning the historical grounds of the premises that make up the LLL argument. I, of course, don't engage in that matter in this post.
So, the mention of "first century Judaism" was just for fun? And you didn't really mean this comment...
I think the strength of the L3 argument can be seen at its full strength, and many people with non-Christian presuppositions may weigh the evidence and see that it is rational to believe Jesus is who he claimed to be: the Son of God.
...then. And when you say Jesus claimed to be the Son of God" you mean he claimed to be what your particular doctrine intreprets him to be saying, although you weren't "making a historical argument." Somehow you are able to affirm and interpret the words of Jesus without making an historical argument! Right.
The reality is that anyone with sound scholarly methodology can see why the Trilemma is joke, while anyone operating on conservative Christian assumptions doesn't need it. Lewis' argument was never meant for skeptics, but for believers, generally in the formative phases of their belief, who need reassurance that they haven't gone 'round the bend. That is why it is so popular with adolescents.
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More comments:
What would be interesting would be any attempt by this crowd to make a purely textual argument for the inauthenticity of specific passages, an argument that does not rest explicitly or implicitly on anti-supernaturalistic assumptions derived from folks like Spinoza or Hume.

You do not seem very familiar with "this crowd". Few, if any of the major Gospel scholars rely explicitly or implicitly on methodological naturalism to investigate the major Gospel claims; the vast majority of bible scholars are Christians who believe in the supernatural, after all. Most such critiques rely on the basic understandings of historical scholarship -- for example, that Jesus could not have left any such sweeping proclamations on food laws or else it would not have been an issue for his later followers, meaning that the Gospel stories are in a probability anachronistic and accretions to the tradition. Or else they use forms of literary analysis, noting the paralleling of the Old Testament, Josephus, and Greek and Roman literature, literary conventions, and mythology in the Gospel tales. Or they use various forms of sociological/comparative analysis. Except for Gerd Ludemann, I cannot offhand think of any historical Jesus scholar who uses an explicit criteria of methodological naturalism in assessing the historicity of sayings and events in the Gospel stories, as virtually all of them are believers of one flavor or another. But I would welcome some examples of scholars who have explicitly defined criteria and incorporated that particular one (I do know of one other, but he hasn't published yet).
John is quite right that the only serious considerations relevant to the success of the argument are those relevant to any dilemma or trilemma: the probabilities of the horns of the argument and the probabilities of the ways to jump through the horns.
Then my discussion was quite relevant, for how can you assess the probability of anything without an evaluation of real-world possibilities? On that score all horns of the dilemma are colossal failures, for Jesus need not have been a lord, liar, or lunatic to call himself "Son of God" (even assuming that he actually did so). The L3 doesn't begin to address the possibilities, hence those of us who are not Christians cannot weigh the evidence and consider it rational to believe that Jesus was implanted in the womb by the intervention of a Canaanite Sky Deity, as John asserts.
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Infidel
Atheism, Christianity