C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), usually known as C. S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends), was an Irish-born British writer, scholar of English medieval and renaissance literature, and Christian apologist]. He was a fellow of University of Oxford from 1925 to 1954, the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at University of Cambridge from 1954 until his death.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way — one might cite Pascal — and to some it is dreary and absurd–here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis — both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible. The Lewis Trilemma is an apologetical argument for the divinity of Jesus, invented c. 1844 by preacher Mark Hopkins (published 1846 in Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity) 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," or "myth, madman, or messiah" referring to the three given parts of the trilemma.

Lewis's own statement of the argument
Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

Note that his 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.

The logic of the argument
This can be summed up as:

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, Jesus either:
 * 1A. Believed he was God and was correct in his belief (Lord).
 * 1B. Believed he was God and was incorrect (lunatic).
 * 1C. Did not believe he was God and was correct (liar).
 * 1D. Did not believe he was God and was incorrect (ignored).

2. Jesus spoke out against liars, so he was not a liar. 3. Jesus did not show any other signs of being deranged, being a great moral teacher, so he was not a lunatic. 4. Therefore, Jesus was God.

Hidden premises
The above argument holds a few hidden premises beyond the ones given outright by Lewis. These hidden premises include:


 * 1) The Abrahamic God exists.
 * 2) Jesus existed.
 * 3) The Gospels are an accurate record of Jesus' life and teachings.
 * 4) Hypocrisy is impossible.

All of these hidden premises appear when we formalise the trilemma, and can all be challenged or undermined, with the last one breaking the logic alltogether. Anyone with any non-zero amount of social activity has tons of experience of hypocrisy in their lifetimes. Never mind that the very statement "hypocrisy is impossible" can be considered blatantly hypocritical. Even young children can remember cases where they or someone else was hypocritical.

Delusion
There are also more problems with the argument beyond these alone. Step 4 in the argument can be challenged, as Jesus may have had that one delusion of 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.

Morality
One could disagree with the claim of Jesus being a great moral teacher. A great deal of Christian morality is about inducing guilt and reducing self-respect. 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 were used to justify the Spanish Inquisition and various other persecutions of those considered heretical by a range of different Christian orthodoxies. How the moral teachings of Jesus are interpreted has a great deal to do with 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.

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," and is little more than a trivium due to the confusing implications which nobody, either theist or atheist, has really explored in depth. Anyhow, 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 own relation to divinity multiple times throughout the Bible.

In Narnia
A version of the trilemma appears in his fiction book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the Narnia series. After Lucy visits Narnia and tells the other three children, they dismiss her story. The owner of the house at which they are staying, however, 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).

Lewis gets Hitchslapped
Christopher Hitchens takes up the old coot on his trilemma, shedding the following light in his (itself rather great) God Is Not Great;