Muhammad was either a liar, a lunatic, or a prophet.
Right. It wasn’t some poorly constructed argument for Christianity. You had a personal experience.
The claimed evidence are the stories whose veracity we are questioning.
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The trilemma doesn’t have “prophet” as one of the options, though. It is meant to be “Lord”, i.e. God. So I guess this wouldn’t apply to Muhammad who never claimed he was God…??
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Lewis’ argument works for those who assume the truthfulness of the text, which is what I suppose the cultural drift of the Church was around him.
Personal knowledge would be a better description.
There’s all kinds of evidence… kind of like when a friend or stranger tells you they saw someone rise from the dead.
So kind of like how a friend or stranger said they met an angel named Moroni who showed them where to find a hoard of golden plates.
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It’s still evidence, but not very good from where I’m standing. If it’s a good friend who I trust, then I would give it more than a passing consideration.
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That’s been my understanding too. It doesn’t take a total Jesus mythicist (one who questions whether Jesus even ever existed) to have a problem with this. [I doubt most unbelieving skeptics are so extreme as to be that sort.] No - all it takes is someone who is a skeptic about the text giving us accurate and complete recordings of what Jesus actually taught and said. Lewis’ trilemma glosses right past that difficulty, ignoring it, before one can even get to the trilemma as stated. It is a reasonable objection for those who want all evidential considerations to be weighed.
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It’s a valid point, and contrary to what Dan Brown so ironically popularized while capitalizing the personal pronoun, belief in Jesus’ divinity goes right back to the earliest history of the Church.
And given my experience, I find the greatest reassurance in a Triune God. I couldn’t imagine a Christian religion without him or the Gospel.
@vjtorley still has a BL account, though he hasn’t used it in a few years. Maybe he’ll see this and weigh in. Meanwhile …
If Lewis’s argument only works for those who already believe, it’s not much of an apologetic. He’s preaching to the choir, so it’s no surprise the choir finds it convincing. I’m not sure what you mean by “cultural drift” in the second part of your sentence. Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC radio broadcasts during WWII. Do you mean the culture of 1940s Britain assumed the text was truthful, or the opposite? I’m confused.
You forgot the magic spectacles. I really don’t want to apply the “trilemma” test to Joseph Smith or Mohammed, but suffice it to say that I have a hard time with both those religious origin stories, including the polygamy practiced by both men and the fact that Islam initially was spread by conquest. That’s to say nothing of my objections to the content of those religions, and the fact that Joseph Smith’s version of North American history is laughable. I couldn’t be a Mormon or a Muslim, and to be honest, if my choice was to believe the YEC interpretation of scripture and history or to abandon Christianity, I wouldn’t be a Christian right now.
Evidence and reason play a part in belief, but they’re not the deciding factors. I’m a Pascalian in that regard:
If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.
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It would have been for those who thought Jesus teaching was good and truthful, but didn’t want to accept what Jesus taught about himself.
I saw something like this recently with the Sermon on the Mount. Someone had expressed a view that sees it as a moral lesson that has nothing to do with what you believe about God. Craig Keener nailed it in a few briefs words on the passage.
Kind of … not. More like someone who claims that their scripture was given to him directly by God, but you’ll have to give him a few minutes to translate it into English, and when he’s done all that’s left are the pages of English transcription and an ancient seal with something like hieroglyphics on it, and a theology that says that after death spirits will continue breeding just like Father God and Mother God into eternity.
I think the argument is correct in principle but maybe fails in execution?
For instance, someone who says Jesus is a great moral teacher probably has a lot of respect for many of the moral teachings of Jesus. And I understand the point of arguing that “well, if Jesus was making all these metaphysical or theological claims about himself it would seem to undermine his moral teachings too if you disbelieved them.”
Still, I myself went through a period of skepticism where I thought Jesus may have been an ancient cult leader, so I think this argument applied to me at the time may have distanced me from Christianity further.
I think the spirit of the trilemma is better used as a question or a conversation starter, like, “you seem to agree with many of the moral teachings of Jesus but not some of his theological claims. What is your reasoning for rejecting those?” And “Do you Jesus’ teaching can be separated from his theological views?”
Note: I am not an apologist so maybe I’m off the mark here
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I think this is a huge piece of it too. There were many “new age” movements at the time that saw Jesus as just another prophet in a pantheon of others. I think the “point” of the trilemma is that Jesus really did preach an “exclusivist” message about God and himself. If you reject that you end up rejecting much of his teachings.
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I know Vincent keeps a very busy RL schedule. I’ll drop a heads-up to him at TSZ. An alternative is to add a comment in his thread there.
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And as a cult leader, like the many many many there have been, it’s still possible he was a liar or a lunatic, guileful or guileless.
Has that happened to you? Anyone else reading these comments had someone tell them someone they know rose from being dead? It hasn’t happened to me, unless 8 seconds counts.
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Mike,
I glanced over the older thread you referenced. I don’t have time to review it, or the eye power these days or a convenient screen reader that works well with the Dialogue software.
If you want to review it with me, could you kindly sum up what you have in mind. As you know, apologetics is not an area of great interest to me, and it seems to me that it is hugely important to you. If this discussion is important to you as well, please save me some time and eyestrain.
Thanks.
It’s been a long time, but I recall that Lewis also argues that, regardless of the exact degree of accuracy of the gospel texts, they nevertheless present a consistent portrait of a recognizable person in Jesus, one that could not be the result of fabrication since the necessary techniques in fiction-writing had not been developed yet.
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That’s fine. I barely remembered the comment, what I did remember was that you thought I was too far removed from Peter and his cultural context to understand (or use) his argument in the present context.
So I don’t see any need to rehash that if you don’t have an objection with my understanding of Peter or John now.
So “glossed over” or “ignored” were, no-doubt, uncharitable words on my part toward Lewis. As you are recalling in part, he most likely addressed the challenge at the textual transmission level too. I was just reacting to the popular repetition of the “bumper sticker version” of the trilemma which is what gets remembered. Rarely a fair thing to do to someone like Lewis.
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This is certainly a thought provoking thread. Thanks. I like the “devil’s advocate’s” 3 fold response in the referenced thread, too–which doesn’t even include the possibility that the NT authors fabricated the facts to fit what they wanted (even subconsciously). It looks like the advocate acknowledges that his responses are not definitely answers, but food for thought.
Does anyone else find difficulty with the arguments for the resurrection of Jesus, similar to this?
Thanks
Of course, I accept the resurrection, but I don’t want to use reasoning that is not helpful.
A few weeks ago, a sermon I listened to said that Luke’s use of two witnesses (allusions to Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, for example; which are historical allusions) provided irrefutable proof that Jesus’ birth, and our faith in Him, was justified. I am concerned that such discussions are misleading. One could as well argue that because Muhammad alluded to Makkah and Medina, that what he said about himself and God were accurate.
All this is good for thoughts.
Thanks.