Lewis Trilemma

The Lewis Trilemma is a fallacious apologetical argument for the divinity of Jesus, invented 1844 by preacher (published 1846 in Lectures on the Evidences of ChristianityLectures on the Evidences of Christianity by Mark Hopkins (1846) T. R. Marvin.) and popularized by C. S. Lewis on BBC radio, hence the name of the trilemma.
The argument is also known as "liar, lunatic, or Lord", "mad, bad, or God", or "myth, madman, or messiah", referring to the three given parts of the Trinity trilemma — a three-way false dilemma.
==Lewis's own statement of the argument==
Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (1943) Collier Books.
Lewis’s own words appear to undermine premise 3 of his argument below, which relies on Jesus being a great moral teacher to rule out the possibility of his being a lunatic. Additionally, his final statement, which he tries to make sound like a conclusion he came to reluctantly, bears all the hallmarks of being precisely the conclusion he wanted to reach.
Lewis does not seem to countenance the option of accepting some facets of Christ but not others. This is akin to saying that if you accept that Martin Luther King was a great man, you must accept that cheating on your wife is perfectly fine. Lewis also ignores the option that some of Jesus' words and claims may have been altered when they were reported.
Lewis' formulation of the argument does not intend to prove the divinity of Jesus (although Lewis believed in it), but merely the impossibility of accepting Jesus as a moral teacher while refusing his claims to divinity.
==The logic of the argument==
Assuming Jesus claimed to be God, Lewis' thoughts can be summed up as follows:
1. Due to the law of the excluded middle, Jesus was either correct or incorrect in his claim of divinity. He also either believed or did not believe he was divine. Therefore, one of 1A, 1B, 1C, or 1D applies to Jesus:
:1A. Believed He was God and was correct in His belief (Lord).
:1B. (lunatic).
:1C. Correctly believed he was not God because he wasn't God (liar).
:1D. Did not believe He was God but actually was God (ignored as a possibility).
This trilemma, on its own, is relatively sound. The problem is how Lewis tries to use it to prove that Jesus Christ was God. From this, Lewis gets:
Jesus spoke out against liars, so he was either a hypocrite, or he was not a liar.
Jesus did not show any other signs of being deranged, and was a great moral teacher, so he was not a lunatic.
Everybody who knew about Jesus paid attention to him.
Therefore, you must believe Jesus was God or completely reject Him.
===Additional points by other authors===
Josh McDowell writes:Jesus: God or Just a Good Man? Analyzing our 3 options to explain His identity: a liar, a lunatic, or Lord? by Josh McDowell, Cru (archived from December 31, 2018).
==Problems with the argument==
===Hidden premises===
The above argument holds a few hidden premises beyond the ones given outright by Lewis. These hidden premises include:
#The Abrahamic God exists.
#Jesus existed.A necessary starting point, since if he didn't exist, the debate is moot.
#The Gospels are an accurate record of Jesus' life and teachings.Also an important point to raise, since there is quite a bit of evidence against it (which, to be fair to Lewis, he probably wasn't aware of).
#Jesus (and people in general) are of homogenous character and cannot contain contradictory or opposing aspects within their person.
#Jesus himself claimed to be God.There is some debate about this, as there are no overt claims to divinity made by Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels that he is God. Rather, that is found in subtextual readings and later writings.If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?, interview with Bart Ehrman, scholar and author of How Jesus Became God.
These hidden premises appear when we formalize the trilemma, and all can be challenged or undermined, with the last one breaking the logic altogether. Anyone with any non-zero amount of social activityi.e., everybody over age three except for good ol' Jack, whose literature indicates he has not talked to any actual humans for years. has tons of experience encountering good and bad facets in themselves and others. Even young children can remember cases where they or someone else contradicted themselves.
There are a further 2 points:
#If Jesus existed, it is assumed that all the sayings attributed to Him were by Him. If the preachings of many men were attributed to Jesus, some may have been mentally unstable and/or liars.
#Any false accounts could have been added to the narrative during the decades of before the Gospels were written down.Given how oral transmission works, there may not have been any conscious attempts to change the narrative, but it probably happened anyways, since information that is preserved in human memory alone is incredibly likely to be distorted over time. In other words, even if we assume that the authors of the Bible were honest and did not intend to deceive their readers, they may still have presented a false narrative due to having bad information. (They also probably wouldn't have defined historical truth the same way that modern historians do, but that's a separate issue.) See our page on lie detection for more information on how honest people may unwittingly fail to tell the truth.
===Delusion===
There are also more problems with the argument beyond these alone. Step 3 in the argument can be challenged, as Jesus may have had that one delusion of the false belief of auto-divinity but been otherwise okay, much like how Isaac Newton was an alchemist and tried to find messages in the Bible, but otherwise made great contributions to science.
Did Lewis overestimate how deluded a person who saw himself as God would have been in ancient Judea? The concept of a human as God is totally unacceptable in Judaism, but in the Greco-Roman religion, men can be gods.Both the Bible and actual archaeological evidence suggest that the Greco-Roman religion would have had a great deal of influence on Judaism during Jesus's lifetime, as well as influencing Christianity afterwards. The Roman emperor was, for example, seen as a man and a god.Seeing women as goddesses was less important if it happened.
===Morality===
One could disagree with the claim of Jesus being a great moral teacher.Christian Morality: Hostile to the Individual and Society A great deal of Christian morality is about inducing guilt and reducing self-respect.The Myth of Christian MoralityFor instance, is generally regarded as the greatest of the — though this is in part because it is the opposite of which is the greatest of the The teachings of Jesus have been used to justify widely divergent belief systems, like Christian communism, Christian economics, and Liberation theology. The teachings of Jesus' followers were used to justify the Spanish Inquisition and various other persecutions of those considered heretical by various Christian orthodoxies. In the United States, they were used at least as much in favor of slavery as they were for its abolition. How the moral teachings of Jesus are interpreted is greatly affected by how later Christians developed what is in the New Testament.
In Lewis' specific version of the trilemma, it is not apparent how Jesus would not have been a great moral teacher simply because he falsely believed himself to be God and for no other reason. This blends with the above paragraph: Newton practiced the pseudoscience of alchemy, yet that did not make his contributions to actual science any less valuable. Many great moral teachers had significant flaws: Aristotle justified slavery; Kant was an anti-semite; was an imperialist and racist; to say nothing of Mohammed,That's a whole other can of worms — one which has been rather heavily mutilated by people with axes to grind against Islam. Nietzsche, or Shaw.Philosophers justifying slavery, BBCConfronting Philosophy’s Anti-Semitism, New York Times 18 Mar 2019Artist of the Impossible, The Guardian, 26 Jul 2006
The true essence of the argument is that Lewis, in reading the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, simply had the subjective opinion that it did not seem like they could have come from anyone but God, and the rest of the argument is mere window dressing around that core.
===Tetralemma===
Our fourth, ignored possibility — of Jesus not knowing he is God — also shows up. It isn't enough to refute the trilemma beyond turning it into a "tetralemma"Just a dilemma with four conflicting possibilities, much like a trilemma has three or an ordinary dilemma has two. and is little more than a triviality due to the confusing implications that nobody, either theist or atheist, has explored in depth. That possibility isn't part of the established story, and no one has made the claim (that we know of). Beyond that, Jesus claims his relation to divinity multiple times throughout the Bible, though they all appear to be in arrears of other people claiming it.
===In Narnia===
A version of the trilemma appears in Lewis' fiction book The Lion, the Witch, and the WardrobeThe Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950) HarperCollins. in the Narnia series. After Lucy visits Narnia through a magic wardrobe and tells her siblings, they dismiss her story. Later, one of her brothers enters Narnia with her, but when they come back, he denies the story to the older two. This prompts the older two siblings to voice their concerns about Lucy to the owner of the house where they are staying. However, the owner, a professor, argues that since Lucy is neither dishonest nor insane, her story must be true. This shows both the absurdity of the argument and the disingenuity in employing it (the man had already visited Narnia, and thus this argument wasn't his true reason for believing Lucy, just as Christians have other reasons for believing in Christianity).
In fairness, the professor was referring to a specific single claim of Lucy, not to the broader worth of all of Lucy's musings. Lewis' argument works if you only look at Christ's claim to be God — He was either lying, if He did not believe it,This covers Him being lucky. If He did not believe it but by odd fortune actually was God, then He was at least lying in spirit. delusional, if He was incorrect in believing it, or actually God.
In addition, Lewis may not have decided at the time that the professor had been to Narnia before, since the book where he and a friend witness Narnia’s creation as children was written several years after this one.
===Hammurabi's Trilemma===
If one accepts the Lewis Trilemma, then one would have to accept very similar arguments for the existence of gods Christians don't believe in. For example, the begins with an introduction asserting that all the gods of the Ancient Mesopotamian religion descended from heaven and told Hammurabi that he is so totally awesome that he gets to make all the laws. A Babylonian could therefore argue Hammurabi either
a) Did not believe he was chosen by the Ancient Mesopotamian gods (liar),
b) Believed he was chosen by the Ancient Mesopotamian gods but was wrong (lunatic), or
c) Believed he was chosen by the Ancient Mesopotamian gods and was correct (lord).
The Babylonian apologist could further argue that Hammurabi cannot be a liar, because Hammurabi condemned liars (prescribing the death penalty for perjury). The apologist could argue that Hammurabi could not have been a lunatic, as he was able to keep control of a city without being assassinated or overthrown. If one accepts this argument, they would have to conclude that the Ancient Mesopotamian gods exist and that they did indeed choose Hammurabi to make all the laws.
This argument carries the same flaws as the original Lewis Trilemma. Namely, it is possible Hammurabi could lie despite condemning lying in others. It is also possible Hammurabi could falsely believe he was chosen while still having the mental capacity to rule a city.
==Hitchens==
Within his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens claims to be refuting Lewis, but basically follows the same fallacy (only Hitchens applies it to the entire Gospels)
==See also==
*False dilemma
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Apologetics and counter-apologetics
Category:Christianity
Category:Jesus
Category:Existence of gods
Category:Philosophy