Lewis's Trilemma

C.S Lewis's Trilemma is probably the most famous argument in Christian apologetics.

The argument is thus:

"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."^[5]

The logic appears sound. It is hard to imagine someone going around claiming to be the Son of God, whilst just being a regular human male, unless they were either 1. totally deluded and suffering from seriously bad mental illness or 2. A complete liar.

But as with most arguments, the value of the argument depends on who it is addressed to and the underlying assumptions that are brought to the table.

The "trilemma" on it's own can only be addressed to people who already accept all of Jesus's teachings as being historical words that the historical Jesus actually spoke. In other words, the argument doesn't address the possibility that Jesus did exist but that he didnt say everything that was attributed to him OR that he didn't exist at all. Before you can use it, you need to either 1. assume or prove that Jesus made his various claims of divinity , or 2. you need to know that your audience already accepts this. Having said that, there are good historical reasons to suggest that Jesus did make claims to divinity- therefore once you've done that groundwork, then the argument may be put to use and could be effective to some degree, to a wider range of people than those who Lewis was originally addressing.

 

Lewis claims that people "often" say that Jesus was just a teacher, but his argument still isn't wholly effective even to that target audience. Many people in that category would have the objection that they simply can't accept any supernatural stuff- and that is why they stick to the moral teachings. I think that kind of objection requires philosophical arguments against naturalism per se, in addition to a historical argument such as the Trilemma. For someone who has a strong naturalist outlook that they bring to bear on the Jesus question, and who believes they have good independent reasons for believing naturalism, it is difficult to imagine them being convinced of Jesus's divinity merely by the Trilemma, even if they already accept the historicity of Jesus's claims to divinity. However in this instance, the Trilemma could form a part of an overall argument or set of arguments.

 

With the above qualifications in place, we can see that the Trilemma can have some value in showing that Christianity is reasonable.

CS Lewis- Cosmic Milk Jugs and Comparative Religion

This morning I've found a couple of CS Lewis quotes which are worth posting. I'd seen both of them before, but they both make you stop and do some serious thinking so I'll post them here.

Firstly, from Victor Reppert's Dangerous Idea , he quotes CS Lewis on comparative religions. I won't paste the whole thing here, but I recommend you check it out. Basically Lewis argues that Christianity and Hinduism are the only two religions worth considering, more or less on the basis that they are the only ones which are all encompassing. I'm not sure what I think of the quote, but I always find it interesting hearing about how different people compare religions. The famous Mortimer J Adler, who converted to Catholicism after being somewhat of an agnostic for most of his life, argued for monotheism- he narrowed the field of play down to the three Abrahamic religions, putting them ahead of the Eastern ones. Unlike Lewis, he wrote Hinduism off alongside Buddhism. Sociologist Rodney Stark wrote a book called Discovering God where he argued for Christianity on the basis that it's the most complex revelation. I haven't read any of those books- Adler or Stark- but I've heard about their approaches and find it all very fascinating.

The Lewis quote came from a book titled God in the Dock, so I found that book and started skimming through on Google Books. It's a collection of essays and letters written by Lewis, mostly very short ones of a few pages each. Looks like it'll have to go on my ever increasing list of books to read. As I was scrolling through it and skimming the various essays I came across this quote, which I've seen quoted a multitude of times on various blogs (perhaps that's because a couple of the blogs I visit are written by CS Lewis affectionado's, and scholars of the Argument from Reason. Or perhaps it's just because Lewis seems to get quoted anywhere and everywhere. Nonetheless I digress....). Here it is:


If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts -- i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy -- are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.