I didn’t spin anything, I just don’t see anything in what she said that ameliorates the fact that Lewis got his ass handed to him and knew it.
Of course she was lying. She didn’t need to kick a guy anymore when he was down.
So you think his friends were lying about what he said and that Anscombe was able to divine that they were “projecting” by her own psychic powers. Do you think she didn’t really believe that she had demolished his arguments?
I think you’re projecting. 
His selection of arguments is one thing, but his avoidance of counterarguments that he knew would damage his case bespeaks intellectual dishonesty and cowardice.
Yes, of course. Because otherwise, you’d be wrong.
Don’t ask me. You’re the one who knows when she’s lying and when she isn’t.
Actually, he didn’t avoid them. In fact, he changed his book to accomodate them. Remember? You expressed how badly making those changes reflected on him.
No I wouldn’t. She was “lying” politely, the way LeBron James was lying politely when he said that game 5 against the Pistons was a “team effort,” but even if you accept everything she says as being honest, it still doesn’t contradict the fact that Lewis told his friends he had gotten his ass kicked. She expressed an opinion that Lewis’ friends were “projecting,” but she didn’t KNOW that and they quoted him directly. Nobody HAS to be lying in this scenario. Do you think Lewis’ friends were inventing the quotes they attributed to him? For what purpose?
This one time he did (because he was publicly called on it), but i was speaking of his rhetorical style in general, like how he avoids addressing the obvious comebacks to his Trilemma or to his Moral Argument.
I never said making those changes reflected badly on him. I just said he made them. If anything it reflected well on him.
I’m guessing the Trilemma is his liar, lunatic, lord argument? The major comeback I see to this attacks the credibility of the source. Can you give a little info on this? You’re good at what you do.
Yes.
Yes, the major flaw in the trilemma (but not the only one) is that it presumes that Jesus claimed to be God. It does not account for the possibilties that he never said it, that he was misunderstood or that he never existed in the first place. The Biblical claims that he self-identified as God (i.e. the Gospel of John) are ambiguous enough to allow other interpretations ("…Before Abraham was, I am…"), but it isn’t even necessary to consider interpretations unless and until somebody can prove that Jesus actually said that. Lewis (and contemporary hacks like McDowell who still cite the Trilemma) expect us to just assume that the Gospels are accurate in how they quote Jesus. There is no reason in the world to make that assumption and every reason not to (especially for attributed claims to Divinity in GJohn which are uncorroborated by the synoptics and were written 70 years after the crucifixion by an author who never met him).
The source isn’t the only problem, though. It can also be argued that his argument still fails even if we accept his flawed premises. Why can’t a person be simultaneously deluded and wise? Why can’t he be honestly mistaken? Why can’t he be lying and wise? Lewis wants the “Liar” and “Lunatic” choices to be accepted as incompatible with goodness or wisdom but gives us no real reason to do so.
Thank you for explicating on the trilemma, Diogenes, I was just going to bring that up.
I adore C.S. Lewis. I find most of his writings (including Screwtape)to be very enlightening regarding human nature, and I think they’ve influeced my life quite a bit.
But he wasn’t perfect. The man had biases, and they’re pretty easy to see, I think. Especially if you’re on the outside (i.e. not a Christian) looking in.
Also, I’ve never heard the audiobook, but I hear John Cleese’s voice when I’m reading all the same.
To be fair to Lewis, if I’m remembering correctly (and I may not be), he used his famous Trilemma specifcally as a rebuttal to the assertion that Jesus as depicted in the Bible was a great moral teacher but was merely a normal human being. Though I have indeed seen “contemporary hacks” who try to use it for more than that and are seemingly blind to the obvious flaw you mention, whether or not Lewis himself was.
Ah, sorry; I had misread your post.
That’s correct. And interpretations like Dio outlined are simply ridiculous — why can’t He be both a liar and wise, etc. There is nothing wrong with a trilemma, just as there is nothing wrong with a dilemma. The problem arises when when the trilemma or dilemma does not model the proposition. (And incidentally, this particular trilemma isn’t even original to Lewis. John Duncan proposed it in Colloquia Peripatetica.) Given that Jesus claimed to be God (denial of the premise does nothing with respect to the validity of the argument), then either He is or He isn’t. That’s a dilemma. If He isn’t, then either His claim was deliberately false or it wasn’t. Now we have the trilemma. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
With all due respect, I’m not sure how to connect most of what you’ve said in this thread to reality. Beginning with your first post, you have summoned the whole thesaurus to condemn Lewis as dishonest, stupid, and worthless. The notion that you suddenly find something (conditionally) reflecting well on him is like a mental whiplash.
O.K., Diogenes the Cynic, it’s clear to me now that you’re not even trying to make sense of what Lewis is saying. You’re using whatever interpretation of his works makes him sound stupidest. Of course Lewis wasn’t asserting that God exists in The Screwtape Letters. He was, at most, only assuming that God exists. Furthermore, he was assuming that God exists only in the sense that a fictional work makes assumptions (i.e., within the book, we need to assume that God exists to make sense of it). That doesn’t mean that the author necessarily even believes himself the assumptions of his works of fiction. Indeed, Lewis even states in his preface to the book that although he believes in devils, he doesn’t consider them a necessary belief for Christians. Within the context of this book, the existence of devils is an assumption for the fictional purpose of the book.
Given that Lewis was not asserting the existence of God, the argument is not circular. Indeed, there’s no argument there at all. The Screwtape Letters is a fictional work. Fictional works do not make assertions in the way that nonfictional ones do. At most they make assumptions for the purpose of their fiction. So Lewis did not make a circular argument in The Screwtape Letters or any argument at all. He did not make a fallacious assumption either. His assumptions may or may not have been factually correct, but that’s not the same thing.
So you may understand the word “fallacious,” but you don’t understand that it can’t be applied to a fictional work, and most of what Lewis wrote is fiction. If we set aside his scholarly works like The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, nearly all of Lewis’s well-known works are fiction. The Chronicles of Narnia, the Ransom novels, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Pilgrim’s Regress are all fictional works. Lewis believed some of the fictional assumptions that he used in those books, but he certainly didn’t believe all of them. He didn’t claim that there must be other parallel worlds like Narnia, he didn’t claim to know anything about the inhabitants of Mars and Venus, and he didn’t claim to know what devils did (or even if they definitely existed).
Lewis was making assertions only in his scholarly works and in his few apologetic works, like Mere Christianity. Even the extent of his assertions in his apologetic works are exaggerated. Mere Christianity is a much sketchier and less thought-out work than is claimed by both fans and detractors of Lewis. There’s a book called C. S. Lewis in a Time of War (or C. S. Lewis at the BBC, depending on which edition you pick up) by Justin Phillips that details the evolution of the lectures that lead the creation of Mere Christianity, which was very much ad hoc. Lewis never meant to have people consider it his complete, definite defense of Christianity.
Indeed, much of this confusion has been created by many fans of Lewis who seem to believe that Lewis was writing a Summa Theologica in his apologetics, fiction, etc. in which he was making a major defense of Christianity. Lewis never intended to do any such thing. His nonfiction (other than his major scholarly works) was much more off the cuff and limited in scope than that. Many detractors of Lewis have picked up this claim and also think that Lewis was making more definite claims than he actually did. One example of the is the misguided picking out of the Trilemma from Mere Christianity. First of all, Lewis never used the name “Trilemma” himself. He didn’t even think of it as being a single piece of argumentation. As Thudlow Boink has already partially indicated, the point of the Trilemma is generally misunderstood. Indeed, it’s my contention that it’s completely misunderstood by most people who quote it and it makes a different argument than they claim it does. I think that analyzing the Trilemma is a new thread though, so I’m not going to discuss it any further in this thread. Start a new thread for that.
Yes and no. Lewis did not intend for the Trilemma to be a proof of Jesus’ divinity (as McDowell and other now try to use it), but he did not qualify his premise as you suggest (“Jesus of the Bible”). As you say, he intended it as an objection to people saying that Jesus could have been a moral teacher without being God, but he did not qualify “Jesus” as a literary character of the Bible. Here’s what he said:
Essentially Lewis is saying “you don’t have the right to like Jesus unless you think he was God.” He’s not saying his Trilemma proves that Jesus was God, he’s arguing (quite fallaciously, as every philosophy or theology student knows) that Jesus can’t have been a great moral teacher UNLESS he was God.
No, Lib, it isn’t correct. See my post above.
Well, why can’t he? Even the Bible says he lied to his disciples at least once.
I didn’t say there was anything wrong with “a trilemma” (or a dilemma). I said there was a problem with LEWIS’ trilemma (which is popularly referred to as "the Trilemma). The problem is that it’s a FALSE trilemma (and Lewis was prone to false dilemmas in all his apologetics).
In other words, when the dilemma (or trilemma) falsely limits the choices, as Lewis does with this one.
Cite?
Maybe that’s how you would like things to be but that it is not, in fact, how it works. If the premise can’t be established (or at least provisionally agreed to), then the argument is over. Accusing me of “denying” the premise is backwards. The burden to establish the premises rests with the person making the argument.
That’s not the dilemma. The dilemma is that (according to Lewis) his (unproven) claim to Godhood means that he can’t be a moral teacher unless he is God.
There’s everything wrong with it because even if we accept the premises, Lewis still gives us no reason to accept his assertion that a guy can’t be crazy or a liar and still be a great moral teacher. That’s baloney.
I also said I found him psychologically insightful. People are capable of having both good and bad qualities. Lewis was both insightful and egoistic.
You’re right. “Fallacious” was probably not the best word for me to use with regard to his fiction. I think it would probably more accurately reflect my subjective opinion of Screwtape just to say that I found his assumptions intrusive, gratuitous and at times insulting (to me as a nontheist).
I know that, and yet Lewis commonly gets characterized as one of the “greatest Chrsitian apologists ever” amomg lay Christians (Google “best Christian apologist” and see whose name garners the most hits). He is NOT regarded as having been very competent by serious philosophers or theologians and is seldom cited by them (Christian theologians are as tough on the Trilemma as atheists), but there seems to be a popular misconception that he was some brilliant defender of the faith.
exactly.
The primary misunderstanding I’ve seen of the Trilemma is that people think it was intended to be a proof of the Divinity of Jesus. It wasn’t supposed to be that, but it still fails even to make the case that he intended it to make.
Well, it’s already under discussion in this thread, so…
But it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a CS thread for people to discuss the Screwtape Letters as a work of literature. Now, it has become a sentence-parsing Great Debate regarding Lewis’s honor and status, about which you’ve unloaded an enormous amount of emotional hyperbole. I’m not going to argue with you here about what a dichotomy and trichotomy are (you’re wrong), and I’m not going to try to have a rational discussion with you about anything to do with Christianity. You believe our faith is irrational by default, and frankly I’ve never seen you recognize any Christian apologist as reasonable, and so as far as I’m concerned, Lewis is just somewhere in your pile of disdain like all the rest. I know you’ll want the last word, so have at it. If I return to the thread, it will be to engage whoever is still discussing the topic.
I was specifically asked to give an analysis of the Trilemma. I did.
I haven’t really felt emotional in this thread at all. I’ve given my dispassionate opinion of Lewis’ skills as an apologist (which is not the same as giving an opinion of him as a a person).
I’m wrong but you’re not going to tell me why? That’s rather uncharitable, don’t you think? if I need correction, please provide it.
We aren’t having a discussion about Chrisianity we’re having a discussion about C.S. Lewis. Please don’t take everything so personally.
I don’t think 'irrational" is the right word. “non-rational,” maybe? " “A-rational?” “extra-rational?” I think specific faith cannot be arrived at by reason, but that doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable. I don’t personally understand how people can believe in some things without proof but it doesn’t mean I think that they’re irrational or stupid individuals.
I can recognize plenty of them as reasonable. Convincing? No. Not to me personally, obviously, but some of them are at least capable of being structurally sound in their logic (it’s the premises which are flawed) without engaging in strawmen or false dilemmas like Lewis did. I like Spong, by the way. There’s a Christian who knows how to talk to unbelievers.
Resisting… temptation… to rant about… Spong…
Whew. Another hijack averted.
I will say that although I love Lewis, including and especially Screwtape, I have to admit that his apologetics are not his strongest writings. I much prefer his fiction and devotional work. But, as has been pointed out, Screwtape is fiction, not apology. And Josh McDowell [shudder]… I read a bunch of his books in the mid-80’s and met him in person a few times when we sponsored him to come to our university. He packed the house; but he was very disappointing.
As for Spong… I’ll just say that he really can’t be considered an apologist at all, really. He has made a career of attacking orthodox Christianity and denying core tenets of the faith, not defending them. Other than his clerical collar and self-identification as a Christian, I’m not really sure how his writings can be considered Christian works at all (at least for any meaningful definition of “Christian.”)
Damn, the Spong-bashing snuck in the back door. Sorry about that.
I’m curious, having just reread the Letters I don’t get the impression that Lewis thought atheism alone would condemn a soul to hell. He mentions that all the great teachers taught the same message. Although not explicitly stated, I get the strong impression that he didn’t think Christianity was the only way to heaven. Am I wrong?
Just as a technical point, when I did that, the person with the most hits seemed to be William Lane Craig.