Will Vaus on Wright on the trilemma

C. S. Lewis's Sensible Supporters

In analyzing John Beversluis’s revision of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, I think some things have to be clarified, it is important to understand what the book claims to do. To do this we have to distinguish four different types of responses to Lewis:

1) Hagiographical supporters. These are writers who read Lewis and say, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “Well, that about wraps it up for atheism” (or whatever else Lewis happens to be attacking). Richard Purtill and Peter Kreeft certainly sound like this sometimes.
2) Sensible supporters. Sensible supporters hold that Lewis’s apologetics are far from flawless or that a few Lewis quotes are hardly sufficient to demolish whole philosophical traditions. Sensible supporters realize there may be rough edges to sand off and ever errors to correct. However, with proper philosophical development, Lewis’s arguments have real positive apologetic force. Obviously, this is where I would put myself, along with Steve Lovell and Thomas Talbott.
3) Loyal opponents. Loyal opponents think Lewis is an honest, serious, and competent thinker. However, they also maintain that in the final analysis Lewis’s arguments are unsuccessful. Erik Wielenberg falls into this category, as does Beversluis, in spite of some passages in the first edition that might have suggested to some that he belongs in the fourth category below.
4) Hostile critics. These are people who think Lewis is not only wrong, but either stupid, ignorant, insane or wicked, someone who deserves to be laughed off the intellectual stage. S. T. Joshi would be an example of one of these, and in spite of some patronizing praise, would A. N. Wilson.

Beversluis’s central claim is that Lewis’s apologetics are entirely unsuccessful, and that his popularity as an apologist is the result primarily of rhetoric rather than intellectual substance. Assessing this claim is going to be more difficult than it looks. The reason is that a criticism directed again a popular apologist from an earlier generation has involves issues you don’t have when you are dealing with a trained philosopher working in the contemporary analytic tradition. The reason that this is so is that the terminology, the style of argumentation, form a set of common expectations by which we judge each other in contemporary philosophy. But even in dealing with our philosophical predecessors, not all errors in argument are created equal. For example, as I discuss in my book, David Hume’s famous “Of Miracles” employs a mathematical probability theory that no one today would take seriously and which leads to absurd consequences. Whether that results in his argument being judged an “abject failure,” as John Earman suggests that it does, or whether some less severe estimation is in order, is a matter for further argumentation. Could a present-day admirer of Hume, armed with an up-to-date Bayesian probability theory, get the kind of result that Hume was aiming at? I, like Earman, would say no, but to establish such a claim would take more than pointing out the errors in Hume’s mathematical probability theory.

Christian philosopher Thomas V. Morris, in his review in
Faith and Philosophy, makes this claim concerning Beversluis’s first edition:

My main philosophical criticism of this book is that Beversluis seldom comes anywhere near digging deep enough to really appreciate a line of thought suggested by Lewis. All too often he gives a facile, fairly superficial reconstruction of a line of argument, and after subjecting it to some critical questioning, declares it bankrupt and moves on. What is so disappointing to the reader who is trained in philosophy is that in most such instances a few minutes of reflective thought suffice to see that there are very interesting considerations to be marshalled in the direction Lewis was heading, considerations altogether neglected by [Beversluis].

It is a mistake to expect Lewis to have arguments sufficiently polished to pass muster in present-day philosophical journals. Lewis, of course, simplifies them for general consumption. The real question is whether they provide legitimate insights that can be developed into good philosophical arguments. If someone is tempted to think that Lewis can do all of our thinking for us, then it is worthwhile to be reminded that there are things the skeptic can say back. However, this is hardly sufficient to establish a verdict of abject failure against C. S. Lewis.

An example of this would be Lewis’s claim that quantum-mechanical indeterminism is a “threat” to naturalism. Clearly, this is not a claim that I would want to defend. Nevertheless, when we look at Lewis’s overall argument against naturalism, we find that amending naturalism to include quantum-mechanical indeterminism will not get around the difficulty that Lewis is posing for naturalism in the argument from reason. Getting a better, more adequate definition for naturalism, one that leaves Lewis’s central insights essentially in place, is an easy task for a trained philosopher who is a sensible supporter such as myself. So yes, a criticism can be lodged against Lewis, but the criticism isn’t terribly far-reaching.

My own efforts with respect to the argument from reason have been along these lines, attempting, in Morris’s words to draw those “interesting considerations to be marshaled in the direction Lewis was heading.” To get a verdict of abject failure you need to show that there is nothing apologetically fruitful in those considerations. As you might expect, I don’t think that either edition of Beversluis’s book, or Wielenberg’s book for that matter, achieves that goal.

The other danger here, of course, would be to attribute more credit than he deserves in developing the idea, when the actual nuts and bolts of the argument are developed by subsequent people. But, at least with respect to the AFR, I still judge that Lewis's contribution is substantial enough that to justify the title of my book. But you may disagree, of course.

Barack Obama replies to the State of the Union

Maybe this will work now.

Gordon Hinckley is dead

The prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church has died at 97. Who replaces him will have a major impact on Mormonism, since, if anything, the president of the Mormon church is more powerful in the Mormon Church than the pope is in the Catholic Church.

Wright on Lewis the apologist

N. T. Wright: Lewis has indeed built a fine building with lots of splendid features, and many people have been properly and rightly attracted to buy up apartments in it and move in. Some parts of the building have remained in great shape, and are still well worth inhabiting. But I fear that those who move in to other parts will find that the foundations are indeed shaky, and that the roof leaks a bit.

VR: Why should anyone expect an apologetic mansion in perfect repair from a mid-century popular apologist? If Wright's criticisms are all that is wrong with the trilemma argument, it's in pretty good shape.

On C. S. Lewis and success

Ed Babinski and John Loftus: Was it so difficult to understand that in the post on reasons for Lewis's success as an apologist I meant that success in being popular and persuasive? After all, if you read to the end of the post, you would have seen that I said that:

All of these things, I believe, have contribute to Lewis’s popular success as an apologist. However, all of these achievements, which are considerable, are quite compatible with Lewis’s having provided poor and inadequate reasons for accepting Christianity. Lewis's apologetics still must be put before the bar of rational argument, just like anyone else's.

Actually, this was the beginning of an essay I eventually published in a four-volume Lewis encyclopedia in which I replied to Beversluis's first edition on the problem of evil, A Grief Observed, and ethical subjectivism. I am linking to a page on the encyclopedia set here. I think some of the points in this essay could be carried over to the new edition, while others of course would not.

Obviously, people are going to be debating Lewis's arguments long after Beversluis and I are both dead. I think that they provide at least the foundations of good apologetical arguments by and large, and he does not. I think, for instance that he missed some important points in my development of the argument from reason, which I plan to discuss either here or at DI2 in the near future.

As for Ed's question as to whether I am the only Christian philosopher that references Lewis very often, just read Beversluis's book and count the number of Christian defenders of Lewis he responds to. Big hint: the number is much higher than 1.

A new word in the Book of Mormon

That's a way to deal with the problems generated by apparent conflict between science and one's holy book: just get the holy book changed a little.

P. S. One Brow is quite right, of course. The change is to the introduction, written in the 1980s. A more interesting question concerns what this does to the historic mission of the Mormon church. Historically, this has involved a special mission to Native Americans on grounds that they are Lamanites, that is, descendants of the Book of Mormon peoples. At one time this was the basis for an adoption program of Native Americans into Mormon households, and past President Spencer Kimball is notorious for having said that the program must be working because you can see the effects of greater righteousness in these adoptees by seeing that their skin has gotten whiter in the course of their adoption to those Mormon households. If Mormons stop believing that the people who live on the res are Lamanites, doesn't that entail that one of the Mormon Church's primary missions has been misguided all these years?

Another interesting question is whether the Prophet, Seer and Revelator (aka the President) of the Mormon Church could change the text of the book of Mormon if the PSR were to claims fresh revelation as a basis for doing so. Given a belief not only in modern revelation but also in ongoing revelation, this would be more to be expected coming from Mormonism than it would be coming from either Catholic or Protestant Christianity.

More on Lewis and Determinism

Lewis actually asserts that indeterministic naturalism admits something other than nature, not something supernatural, but rather subnatural, and therefore on his view indeterminism and the quantum-mechanical level is in conflict with naturalism.
What he says is:
Now it will be noticed that if this theory is true we have really admitted something other than Nature. If the movements of the individual units are events 'on their own', events which do not interlock with all other events, then these movements are not part of Nature. It would be, indeed, too great a shock to our habits to describe them as super-natural. I think we should have to call them sub-natural. But all our confidence that Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on, would have disappeared. There is apparently something outside her, the Subnatural; it is indeed from this Subnatural that all events and all 'bodies' are, as it were, fed into her. And clearly if she thus has a back door opening on the Subnatural, it is quite on the cards that she may also have a front door opening on the Supernatural-and events might be fed into her at that door too.

So, contrary to what Jason says, I don't think Lewis is considering non-deterministic forms of naturalism in this chapter. What he's saying is "these guys aren't really naturalists, naturalists have to be determinists."

The real problem with using this against Lewis's argument is that when you look at what Lewis says is missing from a naturalistic understanding of reason, namely, the relevance of ground-consequent relations and the perception of ground-consequent relations in a world governed by blind cause and effect, you find that denying determinism doesn't get the naturalist where the naturalist wants to go in overcoming what Lewis takes to be the "cardinal difficulty."
One of the complaints that I am going to be making against Beversluis's discussions of Lewis is that he too often presents a problem for what Lewis says without determining whether this problem can be easily fixed by a Lewis-friendly philosopher. On the other hand, in this case Beversluis doesn't seem to me turning this into one of the primary objections to Lewis's argument.

Debate on God at Stanford

Following the evidence where it leads

DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design
Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University

WHAT:
Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford.

WHO:
Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards

Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great.
VS.
Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery.

Hosted by Ben Stein — Journalist, author and actor in the soon-to-be released movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Moderated by Michael Cromertie — Vice President at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; co-editor, with Richard John Neuhaus, of Piety and Politics.

WHEN:
Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST

WHERE:
Stanford University
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
471 Lagunita Drive
Stanford, CA 94305

TICKETS: You must have a ticket to attend the event. Tickets can be reserved/obtained at no charge, by emailing: idea.stanford@gmail.com You must provide this information: Name, Affiliation ("Referred by …"), # of tickets. Seating is limited and tickets will be reserved on a first come, first reserved basis. On the day of the debate there will be a table out front for reserved tickets, and you can pick them up there at the event.

Why Determinism is irrelevant to the argument from reason

Lewis's account of naturalism seems to imply that it does, although he mentions quantum-mechanical theories suggesting it does not. John Beversluis, in his treatment of Lewis's argument from reason, points out that Lewis does not consider or refute indeterministic forms of naturalism.

However, in dealing with more recent versions of the argument from reason the question of determinism is irrelevant, as I argued in a recent essay:

Exactly what does Lewis mean by naturalism? Very often the terms Naturalism and Materialism are used interchangeably, but at other times it is insisted that the two terms have different meanings. Lewis says,

“What the naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process of time and space which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every event (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because some other event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each particular thing (such as this page) is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is.”

As a presentation of naturalism, however, this might be regarded as inadequate by contemporary naturalists, because it saddles the naturalist with a deterministic position. The mainstream position in contemporary physics involves an indeterminism at the quantum-mechanical level. Lewis himself thought that this kind of indeterminism was really a break with naturalism, admitting the existence of a lawless Subnature as opposed to Nature, but most naturalists today are prepared to accept quantum-mechanical indeterminism as part of physics and do not see it as a threat to naturalism as they understand it. Some critics of Lewis have suggested that his somewhat deficient understanding of naturalism undermines his argument. Lewis, however, insisted on “making no argument” out of quantum mechanics and expressed a healthy skepticism about making too much of particular developments in science that might be helpful to the cause of apologetics.
However, contemporary defenders of the Argument from Reason such as William Hasker and myself have developed accounts of materialism and naturalism that are neutral as to whether or not physics is deterministic or not. Whatever Lewis might have said about quantum-mechanical indeterminacy, the problems he poses for naturalism arise whether determinism at the quantum-mechanical level is true or not.
Materialism or naturalism, as we understand it, is committed to three fundamental theses.
1) The basic elements of the material or physical universe function blindly, without purpose. Man is the product, says Bertrand Russell, of forces that had no prevision of the end they were achieving. Richard Dawkins’ exposition and defense of the naturalistic world view is called The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a World Without Design not because no one ever designs anything in a naturalistic world, but because, explanations in terms of design must be reduced out in the final analysis. Explanation always proceeds bottom-up, not top-down.
2) The physical order is causally closed. There is nothing transcendent to the physical universe that exercises any causal influence on it.
3) Whatever does not occur on the physical level supervenes on the physical. Given the state of the physical, there is only one way the other levels can be.

These three claims can be true if "the physical" is deterministic or not. Even if there are no determining physical causes, if all that makes it undetermined and is nothing but brute chance, this hardly introduces libertarian free will or reason.

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.

Madeleine Bunting on Richard Dawkins

Dawkins seems to want to magic religion away. It's a silly delusion comparable to one of another great atheist humanist thinker, JS Mill. He wanted to magic away another inescapable part of human experience - sex; using not dissimilar arguments to Dawkins's, he pointed out the violence and suffering caused by sexual desire, and dreamt of a day when all human beings would no longer be infantilised by the need for sexual gratification, and an alternative way would be found to reproduce the human species. As true of Mill as it is of Dawkins: dream on.

Craig vs. Kai Nielsen on Moral Values

This is a debate between Bill Craig and Kai Nielsen on morality and objective moral values.

A question concerning the relations of religion to morality

1.) Consider the following cases of the relation of morality and religion.

a) The 9/11 hijackers thinking they are doing the will of Allah by attacking the World Trade Centers.
b) A Christian refusing to get an abortion even though carrying the child to term would cause economic hardship.
c) A religious couple delaying sex until marriage because of their religious beliefs.
d) Hakeem Olajuwon refusing to market an excessively expensive basketball shoe because of his belief that Allah does not approve of gouging the public. (Remember the kids who were murdered for their Air Jordans?)
e) Thomas Jefferson saying that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.
f) Girls forced in the name of religion in Colorado City to enter into polygamous marriages with older men.
g) Martin Luther King’s conviction that there is a law above the laws of the state of Alabama which make it wrong to discriminate against African Americans, even though it’s the law.

All these are instances of religion influencing morality. But they don’t seem to be all equal. What makes the effect of religion on actions good, or bad, or in different?

Bobby Fischer is dead

Bobby Fischer's passing marks the end of an era for chessplayers of my generation. As a player in high school and college in the early 1970s I followed Fischer's rise to the world title very closely. The final match with Spassky was, no doubt, the chess event of the century, filled with drama from beginning to end. I am linking to Dennis's blog for more information.

Dennis's chess story about Fischer reminds me of my own big Fischer story. I was playing in the American Open in 1972 in the last round. I had just declined a draw offer from my unrated opponent, hoping to squeeze the point out of a slightly better position. Then I heard a huge ruckus as hundreds of people started milling across the playing room towards the top board. The reason eventually became clear: Bobby Fischer, the newly crowned World Champion, had walked in the room, and wanted to see Larry Remlinger's top board game. So I did the only sensible thing; I took my draw and joined the throng. He headed out the building into one of about six cabs to escape detection. I heard someone say as he left, "I've just seen God."

John Hare on the evolutionary foundations of morality

John Hare is a Christian philosopher and the son of R. M. Hare.

How does religion, or the lack of it, affect values?

What it is to be physical

Since the issue of what the physical came up in a comment b y Amandalaine in the combox for the "computers" entry, I thought I would explain further.

In my view, there are four things that have to be lacking for something to be considered "physical."

1) Intentionality. At the most basic level of analysis, no physical thing is about any other thing. Intentionality, if it exists, is a system by-product.

2) Purpose. There is apparent purpose which is explained away in terms of Darwinian function.

3) Subjectivity. Physical things, per se, have no point of view.

4) Normativity. Nothing about the physical entails that some physical state ought to exist as opposed to some other.

On Beversluis's New Edition

I have redated this post by a few days because I wanted people to notice that I put a correction on the comment line to one claim that I had made about the conclusion of Beversluis's argument.

23 years ago, John Beversluis’s book, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion was published. I was then in my first year as a philosophy student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The previous semester I had taken Hugh Chandler’s metaphysics class and we had already begun discussions of what later came to be known as Lewis’s argument from reason. At that time Beversluis’s book was published by a Christian publisher, Eerdmans, and two of the endorsements on the dust jacket were from leading Christian philosophers. On that basis, a reader might have come to expect Beversluis’s book to be a relatively friendly critique of Lewis’s apologetics, perhaps along the lines of Thomas V. Morris’s critical study of Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics. Morris showed that Schaeffer’s arguments were underdeveloped, admonished against excessive idolization of popular apologists, and made some recommendations as to how the Schaeffer’s arguments could be made stronger, though he also recommended that they be put to the service of more modest claims.

In the beginning of the book, it might seem as if that was what Beversluis was up to. But further reading dashed those expectations. The criticisms of each argument: the argument from desire, the moral argument, the “trilemma,” and the argument from reason, yielded a verdict of abject failure, with no suggestion that the arguments could be revised and strengthened. The tone at points was quite harsh, attributing blatant fallacies to Lewis, especially the fallacy of the straw man and the false dilemma. At some points expressions like “irresponsible writing” and “considerably worse than fuzzy” thinking were used. Though at other points Beversluis seemed to show at least some sympathy toward Lewis the man.

In the latter part of the book Beversluis made the case that Lewis had no adequate answer for the problem of evil, and that his own agonized response to his wife’s death in A Grief Observed constituted a repudiation of his previous apologetics and an abandonment not only of his previous views on pain and suffering, but also of rational religion itself. The conclusion of the book was not simply that Lewis had failed to successfully defend Christianity, but that his apologetic career showed that Christianity could not be rationally defended.

It should not be too surprising that persons well-disposed toward Lewis and his apologetics might be angered by a critique of this kind. Now, sharply worded criticism is part and parcel with the activity of philosophy and is to be expected. But some responses to Beversluis went considerably beyond criticism to actually impugning the Beversluis’s intellectual integrity. One response, by Richard Purtill, defended this claim:

My purpose in this paper is to convince the reader, by evidence and argument, that the general impression given by the television play, the books, and the article are not only false, but perniciously and culpably false. It is in fact part of the counter-attack against Lewis’s outstandingly successful defence of the rationality and probability of Christianity, and it is a particularly unfair and underhanded counter-attack, because it distorts Lewis’s work and exploits his personal tragedy. (Purtill, “Did C. S. Lewis Lose his Faith” in A Christian for all Christians, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990).

Further on in his essay, he explains Beversluis’s motivation in terms of envy at Lewis’s success as an apologist.

Now, there may be times when it is reasonable and sensible to make charges of this sort. However, if unless one is prepared and able to meet a very high standard of proof in defense of such claims, it is best to avoid making them. It doesn’t help Purtill’s cause at all that he entitled his essay “Did C. S. Lewis Lose his Faith,” a question that Beversluis answered quite firmly in the negative. Beversluis never said Lewis lost his faith, he said that in the course of his grief experience he decisively compromised his apologetic position; that after calling God a bunch of names for putting him through that the ordeal of grief he abandoned the objections, but also moved from what Beversluis calls a Platonist view of God to an Ockhamist view of God. That is a very different charge, one that can be criticized, (and I have criticized it myself), but one that Purtill never actually addresses.

It is valuable to remember that Lewis himself, after making a charge of misinterpretation against Dr. Pittenger, wrote:

"How many times does a man have to say something before he is safe from the accusation of having said exactly the opposite? (I am not for a moment imputing dishonesty to Dr. Pittenger; we all know too well how difficult it is to grasp or retain the substance of a book one finds antipathetic.)”

Lewis is more than sensible in refusing to charge his opponent with dishonesty even when he found himself to be egregiously misinterpreted, and in the absence of very strong evidence we should do likewise.

Any doubts I might have had about the honesty and seriousness of Beversluis’s work on Lewis was decisively smashed when I read his review of A. N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis. He protests against Wilson’s psychoanalyzing, claiming that many of his assertions are based on very poor evidence. But one paragraph stood out to me. In his book and in a related article published at the same time Beversluis quoted some people who claimed that Lewis essentially abandoned apologetics after the exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe, but in the review of Wilson, he takes that all back.

First, the Anscombe debate was by no means Lewis's first exposure to a professional philosopher: he lived among them all his adult life, read the Greats, and even taught philosophy. Second, it is simply untrue that the post-Anscombe Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics. In 1960 he published a second edition of Miracles in which he revised the third chapter and thereby replied to Anscombe. Third, most printed discussions of the debate, mine included, fail to mention that Anscombe herself complimented Lewis's revised argument on the grounds that it is deeper and far more serious than the original version. Finally, the myth that Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics overlooks several post-Anscombe articles, among them "Is Theism Important?" (1952)—a discussion of Christianity and theism which touches on philosophical proofs for God's existence—and "On Obstinacy of Belief"—in which Lewis defends the rationality of belief in God in the face of apparently contrary evidence (the issue in philosophical theology during the late 1950s and early 60s). It is rhetorically effective to announce that the post-Anscombe Lewis wrote no further books on Christian apologetics, but it is pure fiction. Even if it were true, what would this Argument from Abandoned Subjects prove? He wrote no further books on Paradise Lost or courtly love either.

(Beversluis, “Surprised by Freud” Christianity and Literature (1991).

I remember reading this passage when James Sire, the former editor of IVP, sent Beversluis’s paper to me. Ideologues and dishonest thinkers don’t take their claims back if they find them to be unsupported by evidence. They just don’t. Besides, what I have called the Anscombe Legend is a key dimension in the anti-C. S. Lewis playbook. It gets repeated over and over again until people actually think it’s true. Most recently, I found it in Philip Pullman’s anti-Lewis diatribes. No anti-Lewis ideologue could possibly abandon the Anscombe legend, but Beversluis did.

Now that Prometheus Books has published a second edition of Beversluis’s book, I can say that the spirit that engendered this change in the treatment of the Anscombe controversy can be found throughout his revised edition. He has called by own book “scrupulously fair,” a compliment that I am more than proud to receive. In his treatment of the argument from desire, he acknowledges a critic’s charge that Lewis’s argument could be developed as an inductive argument as well as a deductive argument, and considers the argument as an inductive argument. In his treatment of morality in the previous edition he considers it irresponsible that Lewis characterized ethical subjectivists as people for whom moral judgments are on a level with “a liking for pancakes or a dislike for spam” but in the revised edition he admits that Russell said almost the same thing in describing his own view. His treatment of the “Lord or Lunatic” argument takes critics into consideration. He once again criticizes the Anscombe Legend, though he defends Anscombe’s arguments against Lewis. In his treatment of the problem of pain he withdraws the charge, made in the prior edition, that Lewis started with a Platonist view and then retreated to a position that “differs only semantically from Ockhamism.” The new edition is a fresh, serious effort that deserves fair attention by Lewis’s admirers. It’s must reading for anyone interested in Lewis’s apologetics.

Now I am not going to say, with John Loftus, that Beversluis has provided an overwhelming blow against Lewis’s apologetics. Beversluis thinks that the apparent strength of Lewis’s apologetics is mostly in the rhetoric, and I do not. He thinks a case against the rationality of the Christian faith can be developed on the basis of Lewis's life and writings, and I do not. Unlike him, I think that we can follow what I have called Lewis’s “outstanding philosophical instincts” and find and develop good arguments, although I would not vouch for the technical adequacy of those arguments as Lewis presents them. We “sensible supporters” of C. S. Lewis have work to do, too. But I think that I have shown with my book, and Beversluis with his, that the merits and demerits of Lewis’s apologetics can be discussed with courtesy and without recourse to ad hominems.

Aut Deus Aut Malus Homo

The actual structure of the argument generally known as the "trilemma" is indicated by the argument's Latin name, aut deus aut malus homo or either God or a bad man. This suggests that in order to understand the argument you have to consider it a dilemma first, and then subdivide "bad man" into however many possibilities you like: liar, lunatic, legend, benignly delusion, that you want. If an argument has a name in Latin, this suggests that the argument is quite old, and it raises some questions as to who its initial target was. I have talked to people who have worked on it more than I have and they just say it goes back to the Middle Ages. So who was the target. Not, I suppose, members of the Jesus Seminar. Not atheists, who were not prevalent back when Latin was spoken. Arians and post-Arians, maybe? Or Muslims, who consider Christ a great prophet but vehemently deny his claim to be God?

In any event this essay is interesting, in that it takes off from a passage which John Meier, who have Jesus Seminar-type views on Jesus, thinks comes from Jesus himself. This reminds me of the arguments of Stephen Davis, who takes statements the Jesus Seminar thinks Jesus actually said and argues, on that basis, that even going from those passages Jesus is still making implicit divine claims.