Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis: Put Up or Shut Up

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The influence of C. S. Lewis on modern Christians in the West is hard to overestimate. Few stories of apologists coming to faith don’t include a mention of Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Lewis was a student of Norse, Greek, and Irish mythology since his youth. He knew mythology and, he felt, knew reality by contrast. Here’s his critique of the overall feel of Christianity as he compares it to the two possibilities, myth and reality.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

Simple as a test for religion

Lewis is making several points here, one that simplicity isn’t what we should expect to find in Christianity. Lewis says earlier in the book, “It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple.”

While it’s true that natural things are often messy and complicated, a supernatural God could answer, clearly and unambiguously, the big issues Christians fight over in a single page.

Christianity has much to be confused about. Look at the long list of Christian heresies about the nature of Jesus, the role of Mary, and so on. These have been resolved by mandate and tradition, not by objective evidence. Look at modern debates over morality (same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia). Look at the second coming, the Trinity, justification for God’s abominable actions in the Old Testament, and other murky issues. Look at the 45,000 denominations of Christianity that exist today. When Christianity can get its act together, get back to me.

No, complex is just what made-up religions look like. Religions, especially the old ones, are usually quite complicated. Simple is a reasonable thing to ask for.

Queer? That can be tested, too.

Let’s return to the point that I think is more interesting. Lewis said, “[Christianity] has just that queer twist about it that real things have.” It’s an instinctive reaction, so let’s label this argument Lewis’s Appeal to the Gut. Christianity just feels like reality rather than myth.

Let’s pursue this. Lewis says that myth feels one way, and reality feels another way. All right, Clive—formalize and quantify this “queer twist.” Give us an algorithm for reliably telling myth and reality apart in a document. Does it have to do with passive vs. active voice? Is it dynamic vs. passive action? Male vs. female characters? A direct storyline vs. one with tangents? Word choice or subject matter or archaic language or sentence length? Turn this feeling into something that can be tested.

Challenge 1. Let’s take this powerful tool on the road. Test your algorithm on biographies, hagiographies (a biography written to flatter), legend, mythology, and so on. See if it accurately separates Myth and Reality.

Challenge 2. See how it does with religious writings. Does it put the Bible (and only the Bible) into the Reality bin?

Challenge 3. Now use your algorithm to invent a supernatural story that has the traits of Reality. This is a supernatural story that you know is false (because you made it up), and yet you are compelled by your genre argument to declare it true (because that’s how you know Christianity is true). You’re obliged to believe this story as strongly as Christianity by your own argument.

But if you reject this invented story, you’ll need to reject your test as well. Maybe “if the genre feels right, then the story is believable” isn’t so useful after all.

Lewis has company

Early church father Tertullian (died ca. 240) said about the resurrection, “it is wholly believable because it is absurd.” The New Testament says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

That’s right—it is both foolish and absurd, but that’s not something to celebrate.

That’s not how the adults do it

Instead of the feel test, may I suggest that we follow the lead of the experts? We already have a scholarly discipline devoted to deciding what happened in the past. It’s called History. It uses principles shaped over centuries that do a good job of synthesizing what actually happened from what is invariably insufficient or contradictory evidence. Spoiler: history is no friend of the supernatural. The consensus view of historians scrubs the supernatural from the record.

The resurrection, the Trinity, hell—there’s plenty of nonsense within Christian dogma that has just that queer twist about it that legend has. Only by inverting Lewis’s argument does it make sense.

For more rebuttals to nonsense from C. S. Lewis, check out these posts:

When we remove all the unevidenced beliefs
[from supernatural thinking]
we are left with naturalism.
And when we remove all the unevidenced beliefs
from naturalism,
we are left with naturalism.
— commenter Greg G.

Image via KMW2700, CC license

12 Reasons Why Jesus Is a Legend

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Apologist C. S. Lewis is famous for his Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trilemma—Jesus must be either a liar (he knew that his claims of deity were false), a lunatic (his nutty claims are explained by his being crazy), or he was who he said he was, the Lord.

But, of course, this ignores the bin into which we put similar claims—Legend. (For more background, read “C. S. Lewis Gets it Wrong: Liar, Lunatic, Lord … or Legend?”)

Let’s consider 12 possible Christian rebuttals to the legend hypothesis.

Jesus legend

1. “Legend” isn’t the consensus view among scholars. You ridicule Creationists for rejecting the scientific consensus, but you’re guilty of the same error here.

Who are these scholars? Are they Christian theologians as well? If so, could they be (dare I say it?) biased? Historians filter supernatural explanations out of history, labeling supernatural claims myth or legend.

Consider the consensus response of Muslim scholars to the gospel story. They reject the resurrection, and yet they have no bias against supernatural explanations and they’re experienced with ancient documents. If Christian scholars accept the gospel story but Muslim scholars don’t, then it looks like religious scholars can shoehorn data to fit their religious worldview. My conclusion: the consensus of religious scholars is quite different from a scientific consensus.

2. Jesus claimed to be God. The tomb was empty. The disciples believed they’d met the risen Lord. These facts can’t be simply dismissed.

The story says that Jesus claimed to be God. The story says that the tomb was empty. The story says that Merlin could change his shape. The story says that Grendel was a big, scary monster. We must go beyond the stories to figure out the actual history.

The empty tomb, the risen Jesus, the martyred disciples, and so on are part of the story. The entire story is suspect—the New Testament isn’t even internally consistent on whether Jesus remained on earth for one day or forty days—so Christians can’t use one part of the story (crucifixion plus empty tomb) to support another (resurrection).

And beyond the earliest days of the religion, early Christians were believers because they’d been converted, not because they were witnesses to supernatural events, just like today. The 9/11 hijackers believed in Paradise for martyrs, but that doesn’t mean that that’s true. We have no good reason to imagine that eyewitnesses wrote the gospels rather than someone simply documenting the Jesus story as it had developed within their church community.

3. Arguments explaining away the resurrection have all failed. These claim that Jesus “swooned” and wasn’t killed by the crucifixion, the women mistakenly went to the wrong tomb, the disciples stole the body, and the “risen Jesus” was just a hallucination. These are universally rejected by scholars.

Christians love these arguments because they’re easily knocked down, but I don’t use them and I don’t know of any modern atheist who uses them either. These arguments assume that the empty tomb is history; I say that it’s just a story.

4. The Jesus story is corroborated by non-Christian historians.

Josephus (born about 7 years after the death of Jesus), Pliny (31 years), Suetonius (39 years), and others said little more than “there are people called Christians who worship a man called Jesus,” and sometimes a lot less than this. These are natural claims and do nothing to support the Bible’s supernatural claims. It’s not like we actually have good evidence, like a video recording or an objective article from the Jerusalem Times written immediately after each miracle.

5. You don’t think much of the evidence of the gospel story, but you must admit that it’s something. It’s more evidence than you have. You have no case without positive evidence of your own. For a scientific issue, you provide a scientific argument, but you’re in the domain of history now, and you must play by its rules. You have an alternate explanation of the gospel story? Then provide your historical evidence.

I don’t have contemporary evidence that refutes the claim that George Washington could fly. Must I provide evidence of contemporaries reporting Washington not flying before you’ll reject that claim? Couldn’t I simply refute such a claim by pointing to likelier explanations of the facts? (More.)

We will never have first-century documentation by someone who can verify that Jesus never walk on water (and how trustworthy would such a document be anyway?). So what does that mean—that the gospels must therefore be historically accurate? No—the plausible natural explanation always trumps the supernatural.

The Christian claim is: Nothing explains the facts better than an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent god creating the universe and sending Jesus to spread his message. This is about as remarkable a claim as could be stated, and yet it is tossed out lightly. Christians seem to imagine that “God did it” is as plausible as the natural explanation that stories grow with the retelling.

The Christian has the burden of proof, and it’s an enormous burden given this enormous claim.

Continue with Part 2.

If [Christianity] offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, 
I should feel we were making it up. 
But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. 
It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/29/12.)

Image credit: aka Tman, flickr, CC