C.S. Lewis may have been the worst philosopher of the twentieth century. Worse even than his contemporary Ayn Rand. And that’s saying something; because she was pretty bad at it. Weirdly, he was an even worse historian. As Bart Ehrman put it, “The problem is that in addition to not being a philosopher or theologian by training, Lewis also was not a biblical scholar,” or even a historian. Lewis’s capacity to comprehend how ancient mythology was framed and composed, particularly in the Roman period, was practically non-existent. Just compare his naive incompetence in this regard with modern sophisticated scholarship on the Gospels. He’s sometimes claimed to have been an expert in medieval literature (he wasn’t), but he couldn’t even tell that medieval mythologies of the Saints also look exactly like the Gospels and thus refute his absurdly false claim that the Gospels don’t read like myths. They look exactly like myths, particularly from the period they were written (from the Hellenistic to the Second Sophistic).
But it’s Lewis’s incompetence at philosophy that interests me today. I’ve documented this already (once here and twice here). But I also mentioned as another example his face-palmingly bad Trilemma argument: that Jesus had to be either the actual Lord, or a malevolent Liar, or a total Lunatic, and since no person said to be as moral as him could lie, and no one who acted like him could be insane, he must have been God! I once used this terrible argument as an analogy to how conservatives try to evade the truth about Donald Trump’s treason and criminality. Because it’s essentially same lame angry argument, “Trump was either a genius, a liar, or a lunatic,” and how dare you suggest he’s a liar! And look how sane he is, he can’t be a lunatic!
This is indeed often framed as angry, whether for Trump or Jesus: it’s often voiced with emotional outrage that we’d even suggest Jesus was a liar or lunatic. So, just like it still does in conservative politics today, the Lewis Trilemma plays on emotion in the hopes that it prevents you from applying reason. But anyone who sets emotion aside and calmly thinks about it will realize: those aren’t the only three options, nor even the most likely ones; nor are the two derided options included actually all that unlikely on the specific evidence of Jesus and the general evidence of world history. The argument is thus both factually ignorant (insanity doesn’t work the way Lewis thinks, nor does history evince that “revered moral leaders” are immune from lying) and logically incompetent (it’s a false trichotomy, thus violating the Law of Excluded Middle).
Lewis’s trilemma (as it’s often called) falsely leaves out the options of “mistaken” (as Wikipedia summarizes, Jesus’s claims about himself could easily be “good-faith mistakes resulting from his sincere efforts at reasoning”) and “misreported” (claims about Jesus are a later legend—the “fourth option,” as Bart Ehrman called it). It also falsely dichotomizes “lunatic” as either “totally sane or raving mad,” when in fact we know mental illness, particularly its most common form of “clinical delusion,” exists in wide ranges across numerous axes, and most mental illnesses leave their victim perfectly ordinary and capable in all matters but for their specific delusion or incompetency. In other words, most insanity, and by far most delusion, does not constitute “raving mad.” Most delusional people are completely functional, indeed in all other respects totally competent (as are also the schizoptypal, particularly in accepting environments: see Element 15 in Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Indeed, this is what has historically made such people dangerous as demagogues and cult leaders. Hence ignoring that possibility is precisely what makes this kind of reasoning dangerous in general: all “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” type arguments are tailor-made to trick you into following any future Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Marshall Applewhite. Or, as we see lately, Donald Trump. Christians should be terrified that they think this is a good argument.
This Isn’t New
I’m not the first to point any of this out. James Still composed a good short brief on it long ago. His point is that it is too easy to be mistaken that God is speaking to you and declaring you special through the Holy Spirit. Practically every honest “holy spirit”-inspired preacher in the history of Christianity claims this; and really believes it. They are simply mistaken. As must be, of course, all analogous persons in other religious traditions throughout history who believed gods or spirits are speaking through them, or have chosen them for some great assignment. Humans routinely take what they “feel” to be true as actually true. That makes them neither insane nor liars. It just makes them fallible.
Even Hitler may have sincerely believed he was chosen by God to conquer the world and cleanse it of his believed evils. That’s what some personal accounts relate that he said. And he certainly acted as though it were true. So, Lord, Liar, or Lunatic? “But,” you might complain, “surely he was lying?” Maybe. But how do you know? Maybe he really believed it. He certainly seems to have. And yet, even if he lied, what of it? What if he had won the war, and thus only his faithful and devoted got to write accounts of what he said and did—exactly as happened for Jesus. Do you think it would paint Hitler as a great moral teacher persecuted by villains whom he vanquished by the hand of God? Would Lewis’s argument then hold? Obviously not. Yet that means it cannot hold for Jesus. Because we can’t trust that we have a full and honest account of anything Jesus said or did, any more than we would have had of Hitler in such a case. “But,” you might then complain, “maybe Hitler was just crazy!” Yeah. Maybe. How does that change any conclusion here?
Insanity and deception were thus entirely possible for Jesus. But even self-deception was more than possible for a man we are supposed to imagine Jesus to have been. Seeing the placebo effects of his charisma and ecstatic presence on the “sick” and “possessed,” obsessively reading into signs and prophecies, being told by others he was practically divine in his teachings or deeds, and being treated by his followers as if he were divine—even if it was never outright said that he was God or God’s Chosen—put all that together and it’s quite easy to see how a man like Jesus could be misled in that day and time into a sincere belief that he was God’s agent on Earth, manifest and chosen for a particular purpose.
This is all the more likely now that we know for a fact that many individuals were claiming to be, or were proclaimed to be, “God’s Messiahs” of one form or another in those very days—and they even seem to have wanted to get themselves killed, to fulfill prophecy and establish they really were God’s Chosen and the Savior of God’s People (see my Wichita Doomsday Talk, with slides). Jesus looks exactly like those guys. So there is nothing “unlikely” about it. And everyone in Judaea was looking for just this sort of thing: God’s Agent made manifest to liberate Israel—physically or spiritually (see Elements 1 through 10, in Chapter 4, and 22 through 29, in Chapter 5 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Even demands for proof could too easily be met with warnings that God is not to be tested, your faith is insufficiently great, and the like (e.g. Luke 4:12, Matthew 12:38-39, Mark 6:3-5; and my discussions of the flawed methods of ancient religious epistemology in Not the Impossible Faith, Chapters 7, 13, and 17, as well as Chapter 6 of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire).
Robert Price also covered Lewis’s Trilemma quite well many years ago. One of his points is that Lewis (and all Christians echoing his ignorant and incompetent argument ever since) aren’t even establishing what it is that Jesus is even supposed to have actually claimed of himself, as I recently explained in my survey of Justin Brierley’s attempt to deploy this argument. Mainstream scholars aren’t even convinced Jesus claimed to be the Messiah! But they are all pretty sure he never claimed to be God. As I wrote:
Brierley asserts that the original Christian claim was that “Jesus Christ was Yahweh in the flesh” (p. 96). Any mainstream expert could have told him this is false. The Bible never once says this. Paul, our earliest and most reliable source, makes very clear that Jesus was not Yahweh, that he was a being created by Yahweh, separate from him and speaking for him, merely the functional equivalent of an archangel upon whom Yahweh bestowed his authority (for Biblical verses and scholarship see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 10, pp. 92-96).
Even John 1:1, often claimed as asserting Jesus “is” God, actually only asserts the common Jewish theological view (found already in the writings of the pre-Christian Jewish theologian Philo) that the first created archangel identified by Jews as “the firstborn son of God,” “the image of God,” “God’s agent of creation,” “high priest of God’s celestial temple,” the one “assigned to be God’s prefect over the universe,” literally “the Paraclete” and “the Logos,” all titles Christians assigned to Jesus, was an emanation of God. As in, in the beginning was only God, then God started separating out of himself beings he created and assigned powers to (the angels), and the first of these was the Logos (Ibid., Element 40, pp. 200-05). This is why it matters that John 1:1-4 says that in the beginning the Logos was God—past tense. Meaning, after God then created Jesus out of himself and made him a separate Logos, and tasked him with carrying out the creation and governance of the world on God’s behalf, Jesus was no longer God. (See Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God.)
The Gospel of John actually has Jesus making a distinction between himself and God, not the other way around. Which is even clearer in its Jewish theological context. For example, the burning bush (whom John’s Jesus implies he had been) was regarded in that day as actually an angel speaking with God’s voice, not God himself; and when John’s Jesus says he is “one” with God, he very clearly means of the same mind, united in purpose—not metaphysically identical (see, for example, the same grammar and vocabulary as used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:8, referring to two separate people “being one”).
C.S. Lewis didn’t even know any of this. Yet his argument was ignorantly and naively based on the false belief that the Gospels and Paul claim Jesus said he “is” God. They don’t. They never did. And so neither is Jesus likely to have. In fact:
Many mainstream experts conclude [Jesus] didn’t [even claim to be the Messiah]; that this was a claim attributed to him after he died, in an innovative effort to rehabilitate his mission. But I suspect it’s entirely possible, even likely, that if Jesus existed, then he did claim this; because it would put him in company with several other men who established themselves as a “Jesus” (Joshua) and “Christ” (Messiah) in the same period (see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 4, pp. 67-73), who may even have all deliberately tried to get themselves killed to usher in the apocalypse based on a prediction in Daniel 9 that the death of “a messiah” would indeed foredoom that very result (Ibid., Elements 5 through 7, pp. 73-87; see also my Wichita Doomsday Talk, with slides). Then our Jesus would be just one more in a trend, and simply the one that stuck—probably because his followers came up with the novel idea of preaching that he’d risen from the dead and ascended to heaven and preached the end times were thus proved nigh.
Thus, we have his followers making these claims, not Jesus. Indeed, they even admitted that only private revelations told them this, not the historical Jesus. At most what Jesus may have claimed wasn’t even an unusual thing to claim back then. Lots of men claimed the same. So what does “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” get us in their case? What if we only had “Gospels” about them written by their fanatical followers? Would Lewis’s argument then hold for them as well? Again, obviously not.
Jim Perry has also surveyed these problems before, outlining all the above and more, and referencing yet more critiques of the Trilemma (and disingenuous attempts to evade them). Wikipedia has a whole section on these things. Whereas in response, apologetics tends to ignore the facts being related here. For example, Justin Taylor and Martin Cothran operate from the already-refuted claim that Jesus and his earliest followers claimed he was literally God. This simply isn’t true. That idea arose much later, and generally (it appears) only after Christianity separated into anti-Semitic Gentile sects; and it is only a merger of some of those sects (later organized, with Roman Imperial support, under the Vatican) that developed such ideas about their god—not the original Jewish sect of Christianity (which might now survive in the form of Islam), which appears always to have maintained Jesus was not and never claimed to be God.
Logical Breakdown
The Trilemma argument basically goes:
- P1: Jesus claimed to be God.
- P2: No one would claim to be God unless they were either:
- P2(i) actually God,
- P2(ii) an immoral liar, or
- P2(iii) a raving lunatic.
- P3: P2(ii) and P3(iii) do not match the evidence and are therefore probably false; because:
- P3(i) the Gospels depict a great moral teacher, and great moral teachers cannot tell such lies; and
- P3(ii) the Gospels do not depict a raving lunatic, nor could a raving lunatic have inspired a following.
- P4: Therefore, P(i): Jesus was probably God.
It’s a demonstrable fact that even if Jesus existed, he never claimed to be God. So the Trilemma is dead at its first premise. But even if you tried to salvage it by altering its first premise (and every other) to something like “Claimed to be sent by God” or “Claimed to be given authority by God” or any such like variant, the argument as formulated is still both illogical and unsound. Because it’s a false trichotomy; but also because the alternative horns of that Trilemma are not correctly represented in any version of the argument.
Insane people, persons with delusional or megalomaniacal disorders, actually do act a lot like the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. Even believing you’re God happens a lot; but even more, merely His Messiah. And such madmen will get on fine—if anyone believes them. And in antiquity, such claimants were widely believed, garnering thousands of followers. Just as the Prophets of all religions, Jewish and pagan, were widely believed to actually be talking to God and voicing His very words. This was commonplace. So that lemma can’t even be ruled out here. Jesus could easily have suffered a delusional disorder compelling him to believe he was God’s Chosen. But liars, too, can successfully convince people of that, and have done. Famous examples include Jim Jones, David Koresh, Hong Xiuquan; even Joseph Smith, Marshall Applewhite, Mohammed. The examples are countless. To their devoted believers, they were truly God’s Chosen and great moral teachers, and the tales they wrote of them were tailored to prove it. But alas, all false.
Thus, P3(i) is false: people depicted as and claimed to be great moral teachers can be liars. And P3(ii) is false: the insane can act exactly as Jesus is depicted and can amass followers. And this is because P2(ii) falsely assumes someone can “only” be completely and overtly immoral “or” never tell a lie. In reality, almost all human beings fall in between those two extremes; and examples of revered moral teachers telling grand lies are well attested in history. Likewise P2(iii) falsely assumes someone can “only” be completely sane “or” a “raving lunatic.” In reality, most mental illness, especially the varieties of it that would apply here, does not present like that. Yet black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking like this is commonly at the core of delusions; and Christianity is a delusion. This is why Christians so easily fall for illogical arguments like this. They lack ambiguity tolerance. Everything has to be absolutely true or absolutely false, grey areas and nuances and mixed cases and varying probabilities are literaly too cognitively painful to contemplate or allow.
But there is another problem here: the argument actually requires us to test P2(i) as well, not just only P2(ii) and P2(iii). The tendency to only look for verification of your belief, rather than properly testing your belief by looking for its falsification, is also an extremely common cause and sustainer of delusions. Sound critical thinking, the only Defense against Delusion there really is, requires doing the opposite (see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning). But that means we need to query the truth of P2(i) in exactly the same way, and with exactly the same fervor, as we do P2(ii) and P2(iii). And when we do that, we do not get supportive results. In fact we get much worse results than we do for P2(ii) and P2(iii).
As I wrote earlier this month:
[T]his is a hypothesis that entails predictions; and they aren’t the ones that bear out. If the Bible is just another collection of mythology and bad ideas, we expect exactly what we observe: the rampant corruption of its text over time, and its dubious storytelling even from the start, and its often repulsive moral teachings (e.g. recommending even mutilation, tearing apart families, and oppressing women, to upholding slavery as a moral model, and more—as I discussed before), and profound ignorance (e.g. Jesus didn’t even know about germs, as I also pointed out earlier on; he thus didn’t know the catastrophic importance of recommending rather than condemning personal hygiene).
If Jesus were God, we’d expect him to do Godlike things. But he never does. He doesn’t even act all that wisely or morally. The evidence he did anything amazing is the worst. Indeed, Paul never mentions Jesus doing anything amazing at all when he was alive (he actually implies the reverse, that Jesus abandoned all godlike powers in the incarnation). Whereas the Gospels are foreign tracts written in foreign lands in a foreign language by persons unknown a lifetime later, and were never vetted or fact-checked by any competent authority that we can tell. But even the Gospels admit Jesus didn’t cure a single disease. He cured a few random people with ailments that look suspiciously psychosomatic. But he never cured a disease. For example, he didn’t abolish polio from the Earth. Even we did that, and we aren’t even gods. So Jesus clearly can’t be a god.
As I wrote earlier this month, on the hypothesis of P2(i):
Brierley’s God actually came here, actually went around talking to people and answered their questions and cured a few dozen people of mild ailments, but didn’t cure a single lethal world disease. He just let half of all the children alive when he arrived, tens of millions of children, die of horrible illnesses before he left. And then he let that happen again and again and again every generation thereafter, for a hundred generations or more. Half of all kids. Dead by their mid-teens. Including a third of all babies before finishing their first year, and a quarter of all toddlers. You know all about antibiotics [and vaccines], go to that world, and then withhold them?
It’s deeply suspicious that even in the Gospels Jesus acts exactly like a guy with no Godlike powers or knowledge at all. Even when he is claimed to have worked a miracle, it’s usually either not miraculous (like placebo-curing psychosomatic paralysis or blindness) or “conveniently” doesn’t happen in public—only a rare few see anything, conveniently always only his top people. And still we never even hear this from them. No one would buy this from any megachurch preacher today.
Likewise, as I wrote in The Christian Delusion (pp. 308-09):
A walking corpse—indeed a flying corpse (Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:9–11) or a teleporting corpse (Luke 24:31–37 and John 20:19–26)—could have visited Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, the masses of Jerusalem, the Roman legions, even the emperor and senate of Rome. He could even have flown to America (as the Mormons actually believe he did), and even China, preaching in all the temples and courts of Asia. In fact, being God, he could have appeared to everyone on earth. He could visit me right now. Or you! And yet, instead, besides his already fanatical followers, just one odd fellow ever saw him.
If Jesus was a god and really wanted to save the world, he would have appeared and delivered his Gospel personally to the whole world. He would not appear only to one small group of believers and one lone outsider, in one tiny place, just one time, two thousand years ago, and then give up.
Whereas this is exactly what we expect to see if Jesus wasn’t God, nor sent by God. Hence for all these reasons P2(i) is demonstrably false in exactly the way P2(ii) and P2(iii) aren’t: when correctly formulated, “Jesus is God,” or even just God’s agent, entails predictions that don’t bear out even in his fanatical followers’ own accounts. Whereas their accounts do match other examples of the fawning tales of revered liars and lunatics in the world history of religions. The argument thus flips the other way around: when we add back in all the information he left out, Lewis’s Trilemma reverses into an argument against Jesus having been God. As happens to all arguments in Christian apologetics.
Conclusion
It’s questionable whether Jesus was so great a moral teacher anyway, as moral teachers go. See Christmas Is Better Than Christ, my essay on Musonius Rufus, and my discussion of Jesus as a Philosopher. So that he could have been running a con, or a pious lie for what he perceived to be a greater good (like many a religious prophet or guru throughout history, and every other messianic claimant in his own day), is not even all that unexpected. He could also have delusionally believed his own lie, as many others have done. Even if he did claim to be God, as many others have. But the evidence plainly shows he didn’t even claim that. Which makes the options of delusion or deception even more likely than they already were. The evidence also shows Jesus wasn’t any kind of god. He had no godlike knowledge, powers, or character.
So Lewis’s Trilemma—Lord, Liar, or Lunatic…or Legend or Fool—honestly really only leaves us with, “Almost certainly not a Lord; most likely just a Legend; or possibly just someone mistaken, or suffering a delusional megalomaniacal disorder; or a conman who ended up believing too much in his own hype and got himself killed for it.” Just like Jim Jones or Joseph Smith or David Koresh. Or any combination thereof. Contra Lewis, the evidence we have is compatible with all of it.
Except the God hypothesis. That doesn’t fit at all.
As a psychologist, I simply want to verify one of the central points here, that people with a genuine mental illness that produces delusional beliefs can indeed be otherwise functional under certain circumstances. This is a true statement. Hence, the term “insane”, here to mean profound mental incapacity and/or incoherence, is not the only option that can produce false apprehensions of reality. And so we can add “psychologist” to the list of things that Lewis wasn’t.
But more to the point, one does not need to be mentally ill to be captured by a delusional belief. To go back to Trump, it is entirely possible that he now believes his own lie that the 2020 election was rigged, even tho it began as an obvious lie well before the election itself (even back in 2015). Motivated reasoning is a powerful thing.
That would depend of course on what definition of insane one is using. That actually isn’t a term in psychology (it is a term in law, which employs a very narrow definition thereof). Mental illness and mental disorder are the scientific terms. And delusions are a clinically-assessed mental disorder or mental illness. So, in a meaningful sense, anyone captured by a delusion is insane: they no longer correctly perceive reality and this will negatively affect their lives.
You are right though that “colloquially” people associate the word “insane” with more debilitating disorders; and Lewis hyperbolized this to its farthest extreme (and being a terrible philosopher, the resulting equivocation fallacy eluded him). This is why you end up with the illogical argument, “so-and-so is delusional; ergo, insane; insane people are not competent to handle their own affairs; ergo so-and-so should be committed to an institution.” The definition of “insane” has been switched mid-argument here, producing an equivocation fallacy, essentially just like Lewis’s. It’s generally just pragmatically easier to avoid the word “insane” so as to avoid triggering such erroneous reasoning in people who don’t actually know what that word means.
See my article Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion.
P.S. I am not so sure Trump really believes anything he says. Narcissists will play at believing things, with apt success even, if it benefits them (e.g. if it gets cheers and “followers”; or makes money). And Trump has exhibited this behavior countless times (changing what he claims to believe as soon as it is convenient for him to do so; and saying different things privately than what he says publicly). This may be one of those things. There is testimony, for example, that Trump has acted in ways suggesting he doesn’t actually believe the election was rigged (for instance, in private he has said the cranks lobbying him on that point are crazy and their claims not believable).
This is worth pointing out because liars are also a common denizen of the ranks of religious founders and defenders. And they can look exactly like crazy people—when it suits them to do so. Which is: when the crazy they are emulating is treated with authority and reverence by the audience they want to exploit or convince.
just before i took my longest break from Facebook [over mostly-Trump-adjacent outrage fatigue] in 2017, Vox’s piece “The Bullshitter-in-Chief” became my most effective blood pressure medication. It finally dawned on me (or at least, it was greatly comforting to be convinced) that the truth-content of the donald’s punchbowl-turds was entirely irrelevant to his purpose du jour.
nowadays I’m far more worried about how staggeringly corrupt and wasteful the GOP, election campaign cycles, and SCOTUS are.
My school chaplain introduced me to this Lord,Liar, Lunatic argument many years ago. His approach was balanced though because he also introduced me to the ‘God of the gaps’ error, as pointed out by Bonhoeffer. By the way, I think Shadowlands about C.S. Lewis is an impressive play/film and does have insight into human suffering, even for atheists.
Lewis was a thoughtful and interesting writer. He was just a really awful apologist and philosopher. It’s not a surprise: There’s no necessary overlap between good fiction-writing skills (and even generally good academic skills that he and Tolkien shared) and being properly rigorous in philosophy, and people tend to get worse and less careful when they are defending their woobie.
Off-topic: Some of your links keep looking like strikethroughs for me, when they’re clearly not.
On-topic: What bothers me so much about this argument is that its modern adherents and C.S. Lewis are parasitically taking advantage of something that people say in order to get along.
After all, the only reason the trilemma even supposedly works is because it is said to someone who says that Jesus is a great moral teacher. In that instance, the person deploying the trilemma is saying, “Well, he also said he was God, so he can’t have been a great moral teacher”.
Even putting aside that this is at best a genetic fallacy (the dude could have been out-to-lunch delusional or a craven seeker of power and still been a keen moral thinker), the problem is that people say that in a spirit of conviviality. There’s a sentiment that I think even religious skeptics need to be careful not to tamper with too much where we try to steelman people’s religions. As a Buddhist, I’ve always reflexively interpreted Jesus’ teachings in the best possible light. And there is some good stuff in there. The Canaanite woman at the well, for example, can be read as a racist nationalist message (which Matthew almost certainly meant it as), but the cadence of the story actually feels more to me (assuming that Jesus existed and this story is at all accurate of course) like Jesus fucking with his disciples, showing them how silly their racist presuppositions were because he knew this woman would have a clever retort.
But if someone asks me this question, I can easily just say, “Okay, fine, he wasn’t a great moral teacher, he was a grifting asshole. You happy?” But people are more reticent to do that because it is said after someone already tried to give the Christian a concession. So this is yet another apologetic that is implicitly psychological manipulation. It plays judo with the sentiment people have to try to be nice to try to force them to convert. And then Christians who do this kind of apologetic get mad when suddenly people who “seemed so reasonable” start pushing back. Yeah, man, you locked me out of doing anything else.
It’s also a subset of the things that people say in favor of Christianity that betray absolutely no familiarity with cults. I just watched Paulogia reply to Todd Friel trying the “500 eyewitnesses, they got tortured, etc.” schtick on a random person. And that never would have worked on me, because aside from the sheer number of eyewitnesses nothing that that standard apologetic includes is remotely surprising if you’ve grown up around cults. I live in NorCal and so I have friends and family in all sorts of alternative spiritual movements. The idea that some people could easily follow some rando until he died then go even further off the deep end is just not surprising at all. The go-to example I use today for Christians is the Falun Gong.. Based on their own purported gullibility, they have no excuse for converting to the FG: A persecuted movement that has a leader who has people who will swear up and down has done supernatural things?
Similarly, anyone who’s spent any time among cults knows that cult leaders can often be really insightful, thoughtful people with really interesting ideas worth pondering… that they usually don’t apply to their own lives, making moral exceptions to their calls and abusing authority dynamics because they are narcissists or sociopaths or otherwise have various antisocial disorders that only worsen from the cycle of cult life both isolating them and surrounding them with an echo chamber of toadies. (Incidentally, I personally have a theory that the transition point from dysfunctional cult to relatively-stable religion tends to come when leadership stops being based on sheer charisma and teaching moves away from a “I’m an absolute authoritarian” to something more like “I’m a teacher but that doesn’t make you not an adult” or “I have institutional power and thus institutional accountability). Jesus could easily have been a smart, countercultural rabbi who got up his own ass with Messianic predictions and got killed for it.
In that context, the only thing the trilemma exposes is that the person offering it is a misinformed rube.
Well, at they very least I much prefer C. S. Lewis’s fiction to Ayn Rand’s fiction
That is worth pointing out. He was, if nothing else, a good writer. Rand was a good polemicist, but a terrible writer. Her fiction is just awful. You can almost teach a course in how not to write novels using hers as an example text.
Of course their relative skills as “writers” wasn’t relevant here, so I didn’t bring it up. But still, it’s worth at least nodding to the one thing Lewis did do better at than Rand.
I still have yet to understand the fascination contemporary Christians (Catholic, Protestant, et.al) have with this man. I’ve never read the Narnia stuff (and I probably never will) but people treat him like he’s another Augustine or something. Part of this may be because I am more familiar with Catholic thinkers but I would consider Barth (whom I am not the biggest fan of, either) to be miles above a C.S. Lewis. A stroll in your local (big box) bookstore shows shelves of his stuff but nothing by Barth, Van Til, or Plantinga. Though this can be explainable by the fact that those three are much more nuanced and require several years of formal training to understand, especially with Plantinga. I suppose that’s also why I see so many continental philosophy books but nothing by Parfit, Jaegwon Kim, or the Churchlands……
Augustine was pretty terrible as a philosopher as well. Compare him to Aristotle or Ptolemy or Sextus, and his entire opus practically illustrates the decline of Western civilization. But I share your sentiment.
I was also curious what the strikethrough links mean. Are they different than regular links?
It’s an automated function on my WordPress suite. It is supposed to mean the link is broken or lost or down. But because of bad coding across the internet, many sites “read” as inaccessible that actually aren’t, so you get a false positive. The only way around this is to ignore the line-out and just click the link and see if it works. Over time I work my way through a generated list of these and delete the false positives, but the system is continuously operating, so more and more false positives will inevitably arise. (And sometimes they aren’t false and the link has indeed changed and needs to be fixed.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/v2e9ck/does_the_author_of_john_think_that_god_creates/
Dr Carrier,
“medium connections” had this to say :
OK, so there’s a lot wrong here. Let’s start with this:
It is by no means clear that this is correct. Paul’s Christology is hotly debated, and there are many scholars who would contest what Carrier says here. For example, see Charles Gieschen’s book Angelomorphic Christology, where it is argued that Paul viewed Jesus as a sort of theophany or manifestation of YHWH, inspired by traditions about the “Angel of the Lord” from Hebrew scripture. In particular, Gieschen specifically denies that Paul viewed Jesus as a created being, saying that he instead “identifies Christ within the mystery of the one God of Israel.
This is very much not what the author of John thinks about Jesus. In John 20:28, Jesus is explicitly called “Ο Θεος” (“O Theos”), a term reserved exclusively (by Jews, at least) for God in the fullest sense. John does not think that Jesus was an angel, or a created being, or anything like that; he thinks that Jesus is God. So if Carrier wants to advance this interpretation of John 1, he first has to show that it wasn’t written by the same author as the rest of John, since if it was, it scuttles his entire argument (as we know John doesn’t believe what Carrier is claiming).
Again, this is absolutely not what John thinks about Jesus. If Jesus is “no longer God” following the events of John 1, then why is he explicitly referred to as such in John 20:28?
That Christian dogmatists try to debate the scholars who have demonstrated that this is a fact of history is to be expected. I am only interested in what the facts of history tell us was actually the case at the time. I am not interested in Christian dogmatists attempting to rewrite history to conform to their now-different beliefs. That their beliefs don’t match that of the original Christians is embarrassing. So this is difficult for them to accept.
If, instead, you want to know what the facts actually are, I cite the relevant scholarship and evidence on this point in On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 10, Chapter 4. See also Bart Ehrman who makes the same points as I do (and cites even more scholarship supporting us) in How Jesus Became God. His and my reading of the evidence is actually mainstream (as in, not the position of fundamentalists and apologists, but of objective and honest scholars).
That book actually presents only evidence for my view, and backs literally everything I said in substance (just not in vocabulary). Gieschen presents no evidence for his “special interpretation” of Jesus as a “different kind” of angel from any others (he only has modern Christian dogma to cite for that position, not ancient evidence of any kind, which is quite the contrary). But Gieschen shows with evidence that Jesus was separate from God by being drawn out of the substance of God and materializing one aspect of God (the Logos). But he can’t dogmatically accept that this is, basically, an act of creation. So he plays semantics with what the word “create” means. That’s Christian dogmatism, not scholarship. He drops the ball as an honest scholar at that point. But in the rest he makes clear: he is saying the same thing I am.
When you ignore the word “create” and just look at what Gieschen is describing, he is literally describing exactly what I am: at one time God was a unified being; then he separated out of himself the Logos part, making it then the first archangel, and assigned it certain powers and privileges. Whether you call this “creating” that angel or not is a silly semantic argument. By any normal meaning of the word, it’s an act creation: that separate being didn’t exist as such, then was formed into being by God’s will. That’s creation. That the created being was made “out of” the mystical substance of God is no more relevant than that Adam was made “out of” the clay of the Earth. Made is created. Trying to quibble over that is just more eye-rolling desperation from embarrassed Christians who don’t want to admit the facts as they are.
Incorrect. In the Greek Thomas uses the nominative, not the vocative (theos; not thee, as we see Jesus crying out to God in the vocative in Matthew). Even when those are treated as interchangeable (though the NT never shows that being the case, e.g. that passage in Matthew), we are left not knowing which the author means. But the tendency to prefer the correct vocative case in the NT (per Matthew) argues for the nominative being intended. And even if one wanted to deny that, you still can’t claim to know it wasn’t. So this case has to be interpreted in light of all the other evidence, as I document, which is toward this being a nominative declaration, not a vocative.
In other words, this is a declaration just like any we make today when we say “My God.” We don’t mean the person we are saying this to “is” God. Of course, today we don’t mean this literally at all. But even for those who do mean it literally today, they are saying something of God’s will and design are present in what they have witnessed; they are not calling someone they are saying this to “God.”
Thomas is thus being made here to acknowledge the presence of his Lord and his God (indeed, distinctively: it’s not “my Lord and God” but “my Lord and my God,” two separate things). Thus, we have the same doctrine represented here as I explained (and, indeed, as Gieschen explains): Jesus is the manifestation of God, per my previous point; just as the Metatron was, to Moses in his encounter with the burning bush, per contemporary Jewish thinking when this text was written. It does not mean they are literally identical.
This is evinced by the repetition of “my” (indicating two separate entities are being identified rather than one entity with two roles) and the absence of the vocative (the form one would use when addressing the entity you are thus naming) and supported by all the other evidence I already adduced (which is conveniently here being ignored; but honest historians don’t get to ignore inconvenient evidence).
Hi Richard, the trilemma is used by woolly Anglicans and their ilk as a proselytising device, seeking to give the appearance of logical reason and thought to something that is actually pure fantasy.
Its psychological appeal rests upon the charismatic sway of Lewis’s wildly popular Narnia books, especially the inspiring depiction of Aslan the lion as a Christ figure. The most vivid statement of the Christian symbolism in Narnia is this, explaining in suitably emotionally resonant and simple terms why Jesus is superior to all other religions because he incarnates the eternal supernatural God from beyond the physical universe: “though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”
To imagine this author as actually a profound theologian rests upon the appeal of this children’s story as a new Christian myth, and fully suits the motivated reasoning of those who deceptively assert the logical status of the trilemma.
That’s a lot of words to deny a simple truth.
It always takes more words to prove a claim false. A false claim can just be stated in a single sentence. Whereas all the reasons it’s false require explication.
Colette, your “simple truth” is the claim that Christ is either liar, Lord or lunatic. That is far from simple and far from true. A far more elegant and simple explanation is that Christ is imaginary.
Certainly vis-a-vis the Jesus of theology. Which is the only one we have any writings about.