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 JonesDavid 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 mutilationtearing 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.

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