The Trilemma

I’m a big fan of the blog Dangerous Idea.  Whether it is in spite of or because of my disagreement with Vic on almost every issue he posts about, I just love to read whatever it is that he has to say.  Recently, he posted on C. S. Lewis’ trilemma argument for the divinity of Christ and Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal to it.  (Interestingly enough, my Dad sent me a copy of the argument quite independently about a week later.)  While I think Vic brought up some good points regarding Dawkins’ arm chair speculations on the matter, I simply must put forth my own reasons for thinking the trilemma argument to be largely, if not entirely bogus.

Here is the relevant passage from Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

“A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse… But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Let us first grant that the argument has significant intuitive appeal.  If any person today were to call himself the Son of God, he would indeed be labeled a lunatic or a liar.  Furthermore, I would certainly be disinclined to call such a man a great moral teacher, much less the actual Son of God.  By the same reasoning it would seem that the infidel is thereby committed to seeing Jesus as nothing less than a lunatic, liar or both.  Since most people are not willing to call Jesus a liar or lunatic, the Christian argues, we are therefore compelled to accept Jesus at his word; he was/is actually the Son of God.

The same reasoning, however, can be applied to a number of other people and the claims which they have made.  All who reject the prophetic claims of Muhammad must also be committing to judging him a lunatic or a liar.  The same can be said for all non-Mormons about Joseph Smith (the church’s founder) or Gordon B. Hinckley (the church current prophet).  Either Hinckley is a liar, a lunatic or a prophet of God.  (In fact, some Mormons actually do use this argument, but usually as it applies to Smith.) 

Consider further the (in)famous case of Apollonius of Tyana.  He was alleged to have been miraculously born, to perform miracles including healing the sick and raising the dead, to deliver divine teachings, to claim the power to foresee the future and at the end of his life to have ascended into heaven to live with the gods forever.  Are we committed to calling this man a liar, lunatic or prophet?  By what criterion to we condemn Apollonius but not Jesus?  It would seem that we have no more and no less reason to attribute malevolence or insanity to this man than we do Jesus.  The point is that something must be wrong with the trilemma argument for there are simply too many counterexamples.

What exactly is wrong with the argument, however, is not so easy to put one’s finger on.  I see at least three possibilities which are open to the infidel:

1.      Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not a liar and was a bit insane.

2.      Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not insane and was a liar.

3.      Jesus was a great moral teacher, was not a liar, was not a lunatic and was simply wrong.

Of course C. S. Lewis would almost certainly be uncomfortable with each of these positions, but it must be admitted that they are all at least possible.  Being a scoundrel or a little crazy does not necessarily preclude one’s being a great teacher of anything, morality included.  In this post, however, I will not consider (2) so as to better engage the Christian claim.  I will simply note that no matter how much the Christian does not like (2), it is nevertheless a possibility.

What I wish to focus on instead is the difference between being wrong and being insane.   By what criteria do we draw a distinction between the two?  Let us consider some examples of the claim “I am X”:

·         I am the Son of God.

·         I am King.

·         I am able to foresee the future.

·         I am a garbage man.

·         I am a liar.  (Gotta love the paradox.)

·         I am the smartest person I know.

·         (Shouting) I am not angry!

·         I am a humble person.

·         I am a good singer.

Let us suppose (hypothetically speaking of course! ;-P) that in reality I am none of the X’s which I have just claimed to be.  Furthermore, let us assume that I sincerely believe each of the above claims to be true.  It seems obvious that in many cases my being wrong does not entail my insanity or my malevolence.  In other cases (the first three for example) such an entailment does seem to follow.  But what is the difference between the two types?

One possible response is that we judge some claims to be crazy due to their being so much less probable than those claims which are merely wrong.  While this response seems to be pointed in the right direction, I suggest that it is not good enough.  First of all, the Christian’s appeal to probability seems more than a little self-defeating.  Second, and more importantly, such a response does not do justice to the question at hand.  We do not call people crazy simply because their claims are/seem vastly improbable.  If a man were to claim that it will rain in Sacramento, California on August 12, 2007 (an incredibly improbable claim) I would not judge him to be insane.  Joe Namath’s prediction that the Jets would win the Super Bowl did not make him crazy either.  There must be more to the story.

Another possible response is that we judge the crazy claims to be so due to their being more self-serving than the wrong claims.  This, however, suffers from a number of counterexamples as well.  For instance, the claim that I am the smartest person I know seems just as self-serving as is the claim that I am King, and yet the former does not seem near as crazy as does the latter.  Furthermore, my claiming myself to be the devil incarnate would be seen as being just as self-serving as it would sane.  In fact, it could be argued that Jesus’ claim was anything but self-serving, thereby undermining the trilemma argument.  There must be more to the distinction between being wrong and being insane.

The difference, I suggest, lies in the reasons which we have for a given belief.  I may believe that I can foresee the future based on a number of occasions when I have foreseen the future to some extent.  I may also think that I am a good singer because my voice sounds fine to me and nobody has ever told me any different.  Accordingly, Joseph Smith and Muhammad may have thought themselves to be prophets due to some very emotional experiences and Jesus may have thought himself to be the Son of God due to what he was told in a dream/vision.  What makes some claims/beliefs crazy is not just what the claims are but our reasons for them.

All beliefs (at least those in question) are presumably held for one reason or another.  Indeed, if there was no particular reason for a belief it is then that we would judge it to be insane.  What I wish to argue is that this apparent exception is actually the rule.  There are three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for insanity:

                                     I.      The belief must be inappropriate in that it is not what a normal person believes due to its being improbable, unhealthy, immoral, etc.

                                  II.      The belief must be held with a significant degree of conviction in that the purported belief is not merely a hunch, a façade or a lie.

                               III.      The belief must not be appropriately supported by any or enough reasons.

Lewis’ argument can be reformulated as follows:  Jesus claimed himself to be the Son of God, which meet condition (I).  We can either claim him to be lying, in which case he could not be a great moral teacher, or we can believe that he sincerely believed himself to be the Son of God, which would meet condition (II).  If we accept that he was not a liar, then his belief was either appropriately supported, in which case he would really be the Son of God, or his belief was not appropriately supported, which would thus meet condition (III) making him insane.  Thus, given that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, we are forced to choose between him being a liar, a lunatic or Lord.

Notice, however, the large role which ‘appropriate’ plays in the definition of insanity.  This is because insanity is not an objective feature which we read off of people or beliefs.  Rather, it is a quality which we impose upon people, beliefs or reasons for their not being “normal” in some relevant way.  The fact is that every individual deviates from the norm in some way and to some degree; the line which separates normal from insane is not only largely arbitrary but is also in constant flux across different cultures and different times.  This arbitrariness and fluctuation in what is appropriate is exactly what Lewis’ trilemma argument is missing.  Specifically, it is entirely possible that what we judge to be inappropriate may be radically different from what some other culture judges to be inappropriate. 

Jesus’ belief and/or his reasons may have been completely appropriate within his cultural context.  After all, it was not terribly unusual for mortal individuals to be called gods of some form or another.  In fact, it is not at all clear what exactly the historical Jesus meant in claiming himself to be the Son of God, if he made such a claim at all.  Furthermore, dreams, visions, divinations and the like were also judged to be legitimate or at least appropriate sources of knowledge.  Neither of these things can be said for the individual who makes similar claims for similar reasons within our own cultural context.

The problem with Lewis’ argument is that one man, Jesus, and his beliefs are being held to norms which never applied to him while he was alive.  It is because the argument appeals to our own particular sense of appropriateness that the trilemma argument has such a strong intuitive appeal to it.  Nevertheless, the infidel is not at all committed to seeing Jesus as a liar or a lunatic since the latter’s claims may have been far less inappropriate in his own cultural context than we judge such claims to be in our contemporary context.