I was reading a thread over at TheologyWeb, in which several people were impugning some of C.S. Lewis’s arguments with some nonsense about their being pure rhetoric with no (or highly flawed) logic behind them, and so forth. Now being a bit of a Lewis fanboy and pretty familiar with the arguments, I thought that I ought to say something in response; and since I now have this page to put my comments on where I won’t have to deal with people making inane and insulting comments in response instead of thinking. Thus, this goes here.
I’d like to start with a few comments on what is probably Lewis’s most popular and most unpopular apologetic argument, the argument known as the trilemma. For those who might not remember, it goes about like this:
“Consider the things that Jesus said and did. Things like claiming Messianic titles like Son of Man, like applying the name ‘I am’ to himself, like claiming to forgive sins against God. There are three ways in which a person can say these things. Either he does not believe them, or he believes them and they are false, or he believes them and they are true. Thus a person who says these sorts of things can reasonably only be one of three things: in the first case, he’s a blasphemous liar and malus homo (as many Jewish leaders came to think); in the second case, he’s completely insane, being an ordinary person who thinks he’s God; in the third case, he actually is who he says he is. Now if we’re convinced by his other actions that he’s not a lunatic (and we should be), and that he’s not Satanically evil (and we should be), that leaves the last option. If we think that Jesus was a good, sane man, we ought to think that he was God.”
Of course as you’ll recognize by the Latin above this argument is much older than Lewis: aut Deus aut malus homo is a very old argument, and all Lewis has done is fill in the third option (that of insanity). Now the first thing to notice about the argument is that it’s valid. Given that Jesus said such things, there are really only those three options. And it’s pretty hard to make a good case for Jesus’s being an evil man or a nutcase, so we’re left (shockers!) with the last as the most reasonable case. And since we have a valid argument, there’s only one way to get out of the conclusion...
Which is to deny the premise. Now, the funny thing about most of the people who object to the trilemma argument is that they think that the premise is part of the argument itself. So they respond with some obvious comment like, “Well, what if Jesus didn’t say those things, and other people later made it up? Then what? No trilemma now, huh? That’s another option!” Well, duh. That’s another option indeed, but it doesn’t mean that Lewis’s argument is obviously fallacious and that he was just a rhetoric-slinging illogical blowhard. It just means that they’ve denied the premise. It’s not that hard to get out of an argument’s conclusion by denying the premise. Thus we have lesson #1. Arguments have premises. Just because you think the premise is false doesn’t mean the argument is stupid.
Of course this leaves us in the position now of defending the premise. And its denial does have rather a lot of prima facie plausibility. So why should we accept that premise? And what is Lewis doing making an argument with this kind of premise?
There can be many cases made for accepting the premise. Lewis makes a number of them in other places, and hordes of other people tackle the topic also. I won’t go into them now. What I’m more interested in is the fact that Lewis doesn’t need to defend the premise here because the argument is directed at people who already (mostly) accept it. If you are convinced that the Jesus presented in the Gospels is a product of rapid mythmaking and that the things he says there are not reasonably accurate preservations of things he actually said, then the argument is not directed at you. The argument is for those people who think that the things that Jesus says (if not the miracles that he does) in the Gospels are pretty close to the things he actually said. After all, if the Gospels don’t preserve what he said pretty well, then why would you say Jesus was a great moral teacher (those that say this are the audience of Lewis’s argument here)? You’d have nothing to base the assessment on.
Now I’d like to write a little about another much-maligned argument that Lewis makes: the argument from reason (for supernaturalism). This one appears in a lot of places -- Mere Christianity, Miracles, and a number of essays -- and it has a number of variants. The basic gist of the argument is that naturalism (the claim that only physical things exist) leaves us with no grounds for trusting in our reasoning capacity. Since reasoning leads to truth, we should reject naturalism.
One form of the argument can be summarized by the statement that Naturalism is self-defeating. It runs like this. Suppose that naturalism is true. Then, all of our thoughts are nothing more than physical interactions, with purely physical causes. Thus when we believe in some logical deduction, we don’t believe it because it is true (as we think), but because of some physical interactions which have no particular propensity to lead to what we call a true belief. So we have no reason to think that our reasoning is true. But why should we believe naturalism? Well, because of some chain of reasoning. Now if we can trust our reason we might debate whether that chain is sound or not, but if we can’t, then it doesn’t matter: there’s no particular reason to think that our reasoning has led us to anything true; thus, there’s no reason to believe that naturalism is true.
There is an obvious objection to this which in my experience people never fail to bring up. They don’t want to give up reason, so they dispute that the physically-caused nature of our thoughts means that we have no reason to think them true. They say that true beliefs and accurate reasoning are survival characteristics, so evolution has produced them in us: thus we can trust our reason. This takes a little force out of the argument. Though it’s a bit question-begging to assume that correct reasoning is a survival characteristic and favored by evolution, at least with that assumption a naturalist thesis can survive this form of the argument.
But there’s still something fishy going on here. Under Lewis’s supernaturalist thesis, Reason is a given -- it’s something which God bestows on us, and we begin by assuming that our reason is reliable. Under a naturalist thesis, however, it can’t be: but this objection tries to make it so.
Consider that a metaphysical theory has to provide an answer to the question: “Why should we believe our reason?” Validity of reason is so fundamental that there is no question of accepting a theory which can’t tell why we should believe it. Now note that the answer to the question need not be derived from outside the metaphysic. Indeed it cannot be, because you can’t offer a proof that reasoning is valid (for the very obvious reason that such a proof would need to use reasoning, whose validity is the problem in question!). But there must be an answer to the question.
Now, Lewis’s Christian supernaturalism gives this answer to the question: we believe that our reason can be accurate as a premise. Because it’s a supernaturalist system it can do this; obviously the correctness of reason isn’t a physical premise, but it might as well be a supernatural one. Then, once it’s taken as a starting point, we can talk more about its source (in God, in Lewis’s case). What answer can naturalism give?
It can’t give any supernatural or mysterious source of reason, because we’re dealing with a naturalist thesis, which automatically precludes such things. So it can’t take the correctness of reason as a premise. Well, then, how will we be convinced to trust our reason, if its correctness is not a premise? By reasoning from premises, obviously... and we see the problem. We’re going to need to assume the correctness of reason – namely, the reasoning we use in our argument -- to show that reason is correct, and that is the one thing that a naturalist account cannot assume. It is stuck. There is no possible way out.
This may sound rather strange, that we’ve so thoroughly eliminated naturalism... without even considering its arguments. Isn’t there something funny going on here? Well, sort of. We’ve certainly not shown that naturalism is false. That’s not something you can do without appealing to certain supernaturalist intuitions (about, e.g., notions of self, soul, etc.), and of course the naturalist isn’t going to let us do that (how come is a topic for another time). Instead, what this shows is that we cannot rationally believe a naturalist metaphysic. Still a pretty strong statement. And (as every argument has premises) what were our premises? That our reason is reliable, and that our metaphysics should be able to tell us why we should believe our reason, given the metaphysical premises. I think that’s a pretty good criterion for rational belief in a metaphysical system.
Of course there are even more forms to the argument from reason than the ones I’ve mentioned here. (I mentioned that Lewis gives several, and the second form I have given here is one he does not give, but is my adaptation.) Still, I think this shows that there’s a lot more to the argument than its detractors give credit for. I’ll probably come back to the argument later.
But this is getting long already and I am tired, so I think I’ll stop here.
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