Lewis's Trilemma, Obvious Refutations

C.S. Lewis’s false trichotomy

Lewis says that any reasonable person would acknowledge that Jesus must be one of three:

1. Lord
2. Liar
3. Lunatic

It’s pretty obviously a bad argument for a number of reasons.

Trichotomy

When you start with the assumption that Christianity is special, so the historical approach to evidence should be replaced with something more accepting or emotion-based, instead of making a clean case as one would in a courtroom, using the best evidence, and responding to the best counter-arguments from informed interlopers, when you don’t hit it hard, you open the door to special pleading. When special pleading is possible, now you could believe anything with similarly slim, 1,000-year-old evidence. Dozens of other groups could make similar high-falutin’ claims that Lewis has already dismissed out of hand or without even knowing in the first place. He needs to investigate all of these thousands of claims fairly (giving them the benefit of the doubt as he asks us to do for Christianity) so we can believe his own claim that Christianity is (1) worth investigating seriously and (2) somehow aligned with Jesus’ original intent in the first century, an even more difficult thing to prove.

It seem pretty obvious that Christianity is not one thing, and to pretend it is one clear set of beliefs—or that today’s Christianity correctly represents the same early Christian church—is folly. (This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_denomination lists around 1,800 or so denominations. WTF. It’s not a stretch to say that people who consider themselves Christians don’t all agree on anything. Pretending that this is not a major problem seems idiotic.) If I present these points to you, and you think to yourself, that is a sinful man, who is just looking for an excuse to avoid believing and continuing in his way of sin, I could say the same to you: “You refuse to read the Quran because you are a sinner and a child of Shaitan. Get in line and read up. The Surrahs are well attested. Study and pray to Allah and you will know it is true. Blah blah blah.” What stops you from giving Islam the benefit of the doubt and investigating it seriously? Special pleading.

Lord

In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus never said he was the Son of God, he only spoke of the coming Son of Man. Only devils call him “Thou Son of God,” and he rebukes them. Or in the Gospel of John one could argue that the author (not really John) thinks Jesus is divine, because Jesus makes all kinds of coded claims, such as: the Father and I are One; tells his disciples to be one with him as he is one with the Father, etc. (or John 10:34-35 where he quotes the OT about how those to whom the law came (Moses, Aaron, Joshua) were called gods—to defend calling himself God’s Son). Jesus could have honestly communicated better that he was The Son of God without trying to rope his disciples into that role each time, instead of leaving a coded mess, or having the Synoptics disagree with the Gospel of John.

Also, the author of John or any of the Gospels could be mistaken about Jesus being the Lord. The fact that the Jesus of the synoptics never claims something so important, in his own words, never claims to be the Son of God, so that the author of John has to dump this information on us after the fact (Luke 3/ Matthew 3 being the exception, where modalism breaks trinitarianism, where a ventriloquist God incarnate announces his own divinity?)—this all seems like evidence that humans mucked with the narrative. Not acknowledging this mess seems like a major problem. You could claim to believe the author of John, and I could claim to believe the authors of the Synoptic gospels, and one of us has three times the evidence of the other (also, earlier evidence), while the other fails to believe their own scriptures!

Liar

Which is more likely, that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? (Thomas Paine) Fraud among the disciples (at worst) or inadvertently changing the story (at best), or a combination of the two, could account for the fish tale getting bigger. Confabulation is possible even when people think they are trying to be honest. Saying something untrue doesn’t make you a liar if you are honestly mistaken. People make honest mistakes all the time. This point is very important. I don’t think Jesus was a liar, I think the disciples (or later Gospel authors) were mistaken. If you don’t think witnesses could be mistaken, then why are you not investigating Mormonism, or Islam, or the Baíhía faith, or many, many other religions? Why don’t you believe that Apollonius of Tyana was a miracle-working Son of God? Or why don’t you believe in the second coming of Caesar Nero?

Also, wouldn’t it be possible for Jesus to share some profound truths about humanity and the divine, but be mistaken about other things (coming Son of Man, end of the world, which seems to NOT have happened yet), based on the limits of his historical context? It honestly makes a ton of sense. Other self-proclaimed prophets probably did something similar, where they taught some true principles, or some profound principles, but they regurgitated some incorrect beliefs as well. If Joseph Smith or Emmanuel Swedenborg did something like this, why couldn’t others, such as Jesus of Nazareth? Also, why is Jesus accused of being a Liar just because his illiterate disciples shared the tales of his deeds orally (in Aramaic) but the Gospels were written down decades later in Greek by presumably well-intentioned literate men with their own agendas? To not allow for this seems negligent at best and malicious at worst.

Lunatic

It is also possible that Jesus is not a lunatic or liar, and actually had a real beatific vision or psychedelic trip or connection with cosmic, infinite love, and just tried his best to teach and explain his experience. That could definitely have happened. It’s possible his followers misunderstood the words he used to attempt to convey the ineffable. (We don’t have any of the writings of Jesus. Also, an all powerful but illiterate Son of God who somehow cannot carve his message directly into stone and keep it preserved that way seems less powerful than one who can.)

Lots of people have entheogenic experiences and try to share them, and it doesn’t make them Lord and it doesn’t make them liars or lunatics. Why don’t you believe that some random guy you knew in college really saw a giant serpent swallow the earth, or whatever? It doesn’t mean they are lying, but it also doesn’t mean there is a giant serpent poised to swallow the earth. They experienced what they experienced, it changed their lives, and what they claimed happened only occurred inside their own body and mind, and is not metaphysically foundational, not true in the naturalistic sense—except the part where visionaries remind us that we are all inextricably connected, that seems hard to argue against, from a physical point of view, in terms of shared DNA and life on earth and sharing oxygen, etc. It’s also possible that various people tapped into something universal, since many people from many cultures have these transformative or visionary experiences. Maybe it’s just how human psychology works, at the edges. The Buddha, The Báb, Joseph Smith, Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, Mohammed, many others. I would say it is likely that many of these men really had one or more extreme experiences. (But it is also even more likely that their contradictory professed beliefs (or at least the alleged beliefs handed down by their followers) cannot all simultaneously be true, however.)

Conclusion

All of these possibilities just seem so obvious, to anyone who has thought about it for more than an hour, who wasn’t brainwashed into being scared of basic logic. Again, Christians are not afraid to use logic to bludgeon Mormonism or Islam, but it takes a special pleading argument to fail to wield logic against Christianity. Can we trust someone thus motivated?