Rational Agnostic
Well-Known Member
CS Lewis' most famous argument for the divinity of Jesus is trivially easy to refute. The argument goes like this, quoted directly from Mere Christianity:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and 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. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form."
Now, of course this argument is intellectually bankrupt. There is no reason why being a great moral teacher and being a lunatic should be mutually exclusive. For instance, Pythagoras was a phenomenal mathematician who revolutionized our view of geometry, yet he was also more than a bit loony, and started his own religion that was primarily based upon his hatred of eating beans. Nikola Tesla was a revolutionary scientist, electrician, inventor, and all-around genius who even predicted future events correctly. Yet he was also irrational in many ways, fearing quantities of anything not divisible by three, and believing that he communicated with Martians. There are many other great scientists, philosophers, geniuses and moral teachers who were mentally ill. I cannot understand why Lewis would think that a mentally ill man could not have good ideas, and I cannot understand how this so obviously illogical argument is still used today as an argument that Jesus must be God.
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and 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. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form."
Now, of course this argument is intellectually bankrupt. There is no reason why being a great moral teacher and being a lunatic should be mutually exclusive. For instance, Pythagoras was a phenomenal mathematician who revolutionized our view of geometry, yet he was also more than a bit loony, and started his own religion that was primarily based upon his hatred of eating beans. Nikola Tesla was a revolutionary scientist, electrician, inventor, and all-around genius who even predicted future events correctly. Yet he was also irrational in many ways, fearing quantities of anything not divisible by three, and believing that he communicated with Martians. There are many other great scientists, philosophers, geniuses and moral teachers who were mentally ill. I cannot understand why Lewis would think that a mentally ill man could not have good ideas, and I cannot understand how this so obviously illogical argument is still used today as an argument that Jesus must be God.