There are plenty of holes to poke. For instance:

• Why couldn’t Jesus have been not only a liar, but a good person as well? Maybe he thought his own behavioural advice would reach more people if they believed it was divinely supported. If so, he was dead right.

• Could he have been genuinely mistaken, but not a lunatic? If believing something which isn’t true is the definition of madness, most people are mad. Assuming the stories are roughly accurate, Jesus’ behaviour in his adult life made logical sense, based on the premise that he was the Son of God. Even if that was a false premise, he did what he needed to do if it was true. That’s pretty sane.

• Lunatic, liar, Lord or legend? What if the Bible is way off and Jesus didn’t do the stuff it says he did, or in fact never existed at all?

So not only is the trilemma a false trilemma, even within its confines the two undesired horns are plausible.

You need to realise that “basically correct” really means, “I don’t see anything wrong with it.” Lewis’ Trilemma is designed to look “basically correct”, regardless of whether it is plain old correct.

Posted: July 15th 2008

See all questions answered by SmartLX

It’s always worth being cautious of any argument that seeks to blinker the possible viewpoints of a given subject. In many cases this is so the person making the point can stop others from heading into directions that the debater doesn’t want them to or knows all too well that they can’t answer them should they be brought up.

In regards to C.S. Lewis’ trilemma, let’s look at the individual points;

Jesus is a Lord – The account of the Bible is spotty and self-contradictory in some places. There are little to no contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life (remember that Israel was under Roman occupation at the time, a notable inclusion if you consider how much information we have on random “normal” people alive at the time). Therefore we cannot prove this is true.

Jesus is a liar – Probable, it’s impossible to tell, even if the Bible is an accurate account of events, what Jesus was thinking.

Jesus is a lunatic – Again probable, if he was insane he could have easily hidden it or have been so convincing people believed in his own delusion.

However, C.S. goes on from this starting point to claim Jesus must have been God because if he had been either insane or a liar, his teachings would have been nulled because of these properties. Of course this goes against the presumption that his teachings could be taken on their own. After all no Atheist would deny the usefulness of the Golden Rule (although many, including myself, would question it’s validity in all situations). In Lewis’ eyes a person who is fundamentally a liar or crazy cannot be taken on his word. This can be easily disproved by the following purposefully false statement;

Hitler was a vegetarian. Hitler was a bad man. Therefore being vegetarian is wrong.

As you can clearly see, this doesn’t make logical sense; the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian has little, if nothing, to do with his actions. In the same manner if Jesus was indeed a liar or crazy, it doesn’t automatically detract from the general truthfulness of a statement such as “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely”.

The other argument brought to this by Lewis is the notion that because of his divine properties and actions as noted in the Bible, it’s more likely that the first of the three is true. This ignores of course the very clear idea that the Bible isn’t an accurate portrayal of events. Indeed the Bible as we see it today was cobbled together by a sort of divine committee meeting, with vast chunks of the Gospels of the other disciples, including Judas, left from the “official” version. Who knows what other events would have been documented in those long-since forgotten passages.

Posted: July 15th 2008

See all questions answered by Maxx Power

Lewis’ Trilemma is an example of a false trichotomy – like a false dichotomy, but with three options instead of two. He assumes that the biblical portrayal of “Jesus” was factually accurate, and those are the only options available to us for interpretation.

What if “Jesus” was a composite figure (see Horus or Mithras), or just an average guy whose words were exaggerated and misunderstood? Considering what we know about the history of the Bible, the way it was assembled by biased committees (the Councils of Nicaea etc.), I’m amazed that people think it is any kind of accurate history of people or events.

Posted: July 15th 2008

See all questions answered by brian thomson

Lewis’ trilemma was that Jesus is either a Lord, liar, or a lunatic.

He then makes the fatuous claim that he could only be Lord based on some flimsy interpretations of Bible verses and some spotty logic on the side.

This assumes (arrogantly, I think) two things:

1. The Bible is absolutely true.
2. Only those three things Lewis postulated can even be considered.

First, there is no real evidence for the authenticity or infallibility of the Bible. Much of the falsifiable statements of the Bible have already been proven false.

Second, I can think of many other possibilities than Lord, liar or lunatic. For example: Jesus was non-existent and created out of plagiarised bits of Judaism, paganism, and Zoroastrianism; Jesus was a real man but only a few bits of the story we now know are true (i.e., Robin Hood, King Arthur, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry); or the story of Jesus was never meant to be taken literally and it was originally just a story to tell children as they went to sleep. There are far more possibilities than what Lewis insists on.

Posted: July 14th 2008

See all questions answered by Reed Braden