Why do you believe?

[Gottservant]

Belief, takes a man, and makes him something holy.

Folly, takes a man, and makes him something choosy.

If you cannot believe, choose folly, but if you cannot choose folly, choose death.

 

[LottyH]

My dear sister, this is the most profound and sincere defense that I believe I have ever read on this forum. You have greatly encouraged me by it.

Thank you, that's kind of you

 

[LottyH]

Why? The trilemma seems to miss some rather obvious options, thus making it a false trichotomy. It ignores the quite real possibility that Jesus was a sane Galilean Rabbi with good ideas on morality and social ethics, but who incorrectly interpreted the Messianic prophecies and incorrectly concluded he himself was the Messiah.

In this scenario, his claims to divinity are wrong (so he's not 'lord') but he doesn't know it (so he's not a 'liar') and he was merely victim to specious logic (so he's not a 'lunatic') - thus, it seems, Lewis' trilemma fails.

Hmm I don't agree with your example. If Jesus incorrectly believed he was the messiah he'd be pretty delusional especially when He said things like 'I am the living bread which came down from heaven.' That sounds like a nutcase to me. But even though I don't agree with your example perhaps you are right and I've accepted it without really questioning it - I'll think about it some more.

 

[Gadarene]

Hmm I don't agree with your example. If Jesus incorrectly believed he was the messiah he'd be pretty delusional especially when He said things like 'I am the living bread which came down from heaven.' That sounds like a nutcase to me. But even though I don't agree with your example perhaps you are right and I've accepted it without really questioning it - I'll think about it some more.

But this is assuming that he did say those things, which is what underpins the lewisian trilemma - and wiccan has commented on this already when talking about it.

Given that it is not a first hand or even eyewitness account, that assumption is debatable.

 

[LottyH]

But this is assuming that he did say those things, which is what underpins the lewisian trilemma - and wiccan has commented on this already when talking about it.

Given that it is not a first hand or even eyewitness account, that assumption is debatable.

I guess that's where the question of faith comes in, you either believe the bible is the word of God or you don't.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Belief, takes a man, and makes him something holy.

Folly, takes a man, and makes him something choosy.

If you cannot believe, choose folly, but if you cannot choose folly, choose death.

Since I cannot believe (I've not seen sufficient evidence), and since I cannot choose folly (I prefer intellectual integrity), you're saying I should kill myself?

That seems a little harsh.

 

[Gadarene]

I guess that's where the question of faith comes in, you either believe the bible is the word of God or you don't.

But then arguably you don't need the trilemma, so it becomes pointless.

If you're going to just believe regardless, then there is no point to such things.

If on the other hand you are trying to convince someone to rationally change their minds, then the holes in the trilemma need addressing.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Hmm I don't agree with your example. If Jesus incorrectly believed he was the messiah he'd be pretty delusional especially when He said things like 'I am the living bread which came down from heaven.' That sounds like a nutcase to me.

To us, yes: we live in the west in the 21[sup]st[/sup] century. Scepticism is baked into our bones, as we know that mental disorders can create all kinds of convincing, but ultimately erroneous, beliefs. But a mundane carpenter from 1[sup]st[/sup] Galilee wouldn't be as well-versed in human psychiatry as we are, however sane he might be.

The human brain is absolutely terrible at intuitive statistics, meaning we fall for all sorts of fallacies with disturbing frequency - the Gambler's Fallacy, confirmation bias, sampling bias, etc.

But even though I don't agree with your example perhaps you are right and I've accepted it without really questioning it - I'll think about it some more.

Looking at one's beliefs critically and sceptically is the hallmark of a rational mind

 

[Wiccan_Child]

"If" your theory or scenario had support, then it would render Lewis trilemma a false trichotomy.

That's the beauty of it, it doesn't need to. The trilemma fails if there is even the whiff of another option, as Lewis argument only works if there are only exactly three options.

My point isn't so much to argue that the scenario is probable, merely that it's possible - 'Mistaken' is an option Lewis excludes, rendering his trilemma false.

To suggest that Jesus made a mistake about who He was, is to insinuate that at the age of twelve He was mistaken.

Mm, yes, for what 12-year-olds are ever mistaken or have an exaggerated sense of importance...

For even then, His self-concept was evident in claiming He must be about His Father's (God's) business. In order for this theory to go through, you must also demonstrate that John the Baptist was mistaken, as well as Jesus' own disciples, all of which except one were martyred for their beliefs.

Argumentum ad martyrdom. They martyred themselves for the same reason non-Christians martyred themselves: sincere, but mistaken, belief. For instance, contemporaries of Muhammed (e.g., the sahaba Zayd) martyred themselves for him, but that doesn't prove Islam. So pointing to Christian martyrs, even contemporaries of Jesus, just proves that Christ was convincing, not that he was right.

You must also demonstrste that those pharisees and instructors of the Torah were all mistaken who came to believe Christ was the Messiah; all of which would have at the very least, faced ostracism and become outcasts for this belief. You must also demonstrate that the thousands who followed and believed on Christ were mistaken, for they all believed He was who He said He was, and this was not without great consequrnces, oftentimes resulting even in death.

Argumentum ad populum. As a Christian, do you not believe that the 4.1 billion non-Christian theists (0.9x7b - 2.2b) are fundamentally wrong in their religious beliefs?

This is just a miniscule sample of the insuperable difficulties one runs into when having to demonstrate that this theory is even plausible. That is the reason this hypothesis is not seriously entertained among NT historians. It never has and never will.

So in conclusion, although it is logically possible Jesus was mistaken, the absence of a sound argument for the hypothesis and the presence of positive evidence that He was not mistsken gives us justification for dismissing the hypothesis as tenable.

And yet, that is not good enough for the trilemma. Lewis' trilemma delineates what it asserts are all possible options, not merely the top three.

 

[AlexBP]

I define evidence as something that can be demonstrably true and can be peer-reviewed by anyone

There is nothing that can be peer-reviewed by anyone. Infants and small children cannot peer review anything. Neither can the senile, the severely retarted, or the mentally ill. Blind people cannot peer review sights and deaf people cannot peer review sounds. Illiterate people cannot peer review written material and people who don't speak a given language cannot peer review something from that language. People who lack intellectual background in a certain area cannot peer review things in that area; a plot in the frequency domain may serve as evidence to some people, but other people have no clue what it means.

Obviously any appeal to peer review cannot literally claim that material "can be peer reviewed by anyone", but instead must claim that the evidence in question can be peer reviewed by some people but not others. You yourself said "testimony is just not reliable on the account of truth. Of course, in particular cases it is". That's begging the question: in what cases do you choose to trust testimony and why?

 

[nebulaJP]

I can't help but feel you're tying arbitrary conditions onto this request - an article giving a general and exhaustive overview of the equation (such as the Wikipedia article) does contain the information you seek. Ultimately, the Schrödinger equation describes how a physical systems, mathematically described by their wavefunctions, evolve in space and time. Entanglement is an inescapable consequence of how wavefunctions behave, but it doesn't suddenly become non-physical. The wavefunctions persist over all of space, changing over time, and the two entangled particles exist as a superposition of these wavefunctions, which collapse at the point of measurement (for however you interpret wavefunction collapse).

You are associating entanglement with wave function behavior but here it is not particles but diamonds that are entangled. Do the wave functions of all macroscopic objects such as human bodies also persist over all of space? I don't know that's why I'm asking.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

You are associating entanglement with wave function behavior but here it is not particles but diamonds that are entangled. Do the wave functions of all macroscopic objects such as human bodies also persist over all of space?

Yes.

One of the classic examples in QM 101 is to model billiard balls as quantum particles and explain why they don't 'tunnel' through other balls to get into the pocket. The reason is one of scale: billiard balls do have a probability of tunnelling to any point in space (this is as simple as plugging in the coordinates, r, into the equation, and out pops the probability), but the probability of them tunnelling anywhere more than a billionth of their radius away is remote indeed. Electrons, meanwhile, can be expected to tunnel quite far away, relative to the size of an atom.

Diamonds are nothing more than a particular aggregate of carbon atoms. Since carbon atoms are quantum mechanical, so too is the diamond (holism be dаmned). It is usually too mathematically hideous to model macroscopic diamonds using QM, so we usually use a very good approximation - classical mechanics. Nevertheless, not all macroscopic behaviour can be explained with CM, such as this peculiar macroscopic entanglement effect. It's also been done with buckyballs.

(I'd also be wary of scientific journalism; while New Scientist is a great magazine, macroscopic entanglement most certainly doesn't force a coin showing 'heads' to flip over and show 'tails' )

 

[Gottservant]

Since I cannot believe (I've not seen sufficient evidence), and since I cannot choose folly (I prefer intellectual integrity), you're saying I should kill myself?

That seems a little harsh.

Better to die than not choose at all, for to not choose at all is certain death.

And what alternatives do you have? Either you believe something, or you believe folly, there is no imaginary fence!

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Better to die than not choose at all, for to not choose at all is certain death.

Since I haven't chosen, yet I'm still alive, I fear I must disagree.

And what alternatives do you have? Either you believe something, or you believe folly, there is no imaginary fence!

Sure there is. "I don't know" - there's the fence, right there.

 

[LottyH]

To us, yes: we live in the west in the 21[sup]st[/sup] century. Scepticism is baked into our bones, as we know that mental disorders can create all kinds of convincing, but ultimately erroneous, beliefs. But a mundane carpenter from 1[sup]st[/sup] Galilee wouldn't be as well-versed in human psychiatry as we are, however sane he might be.

The human brain is absolutely terrible at intuitive statistics, meaning we fall for all sorts of fallacies with disturbing frequency - the Gambler's Fallacy, confirmation bias, sampling bias, etc.


Looking at one's beliefs critically and sceptically is the hallmark of a rational mind

So what you are saying is that Jesus was simply mistaken rather than having a mental disorder. I don’t agree because Jesus said many things about himself that would seem really crazy unless He was trying to deceive them. I gave one example previously ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven’.

But you are right, the people of the day may not have recognised mental disorders and perhaps would have concluded that He was demon possessed. I don’t think there is any account of people referring to Him as mad in the bible and very few refer to Him as demon possessed. But I think that would be the general consensus if it wasn’t for the amazing miracles He did – who can say someone is a lunatic (or a deceiver for that matter) when they have just brought someone back from the dead or healed a blind man?

Now if you believe the bible was made up by people and not from God Himself then I can understand where you are coming from. I am only coming from the angle that everything in the bible is true and it is God's word but in that case the CS Lewis argument is a waste of time because it does not relate to people who think the bible is full of errors.

 

[LottyH]

But this is assuming that he did say those things, which is what underpins the lewisian trilemma - and wiccan has commented on this already when talking about it.

Given that it is not a first hand or even eyewitness account, that assumption is debatable.

Thanks for your reply. My last post is written in response to you too. Sorry, I should have pressed the 'multi quote' button!

 

[AlexBP]

It seems that the only reason you did join was because it fit your personal beliefs.

You say "the only reason you did join [Christianity] was because it fit your personal beliefs" and clearly you think this is a mark against my decision. But people make major life decisions based on what fits their personal beliefs; what else could they do? If a man decides to spend his life as a teacher in an inner-city school when he could earn much more money elsewhere, he certainly makes that decision because it fits his personal beliefs. When Oscar Schindler chose to risk his life during the Holocaust to save thousands of innocent people, he made that decision because it fit his personal beliefs. And why does anyone choose to get married or have children, if not because it fits his or her personal beliefs? I have the utmost respect for those who make their decisions based on the principles they believe in. It seems much better than being willing to make decisions that flatly contradict one's principles.

And then further knew Jesus was God's son? What convinced you?

The fact that what Jesus said seemed, as best I could tell, to be true. My non-religious instructors told me that I should indulge whatever sexual tastes I had and I'd be happy. Jesus told me that doing so would make me unhappy, and that marital fidelity was the right thing to do. Jesus was right; the others wrong. My non-religious instructors that more money would always make things better. Jesus told me that hoarding money would put my soul in danger, while giving away earthly treasure would lead to treasure in Heaven. Jesus was right; the others wrong. My non-religious instructors felt that pouring out unrestrained anger constantly was a good thing. Jesus told me to love my enemies. Jesus was right; the others wrong. When I first became a Christian, I felt sure it was right to be one in the liberal and universalist vein, as I said. But the more I studied and considered, the more I realized the absurdity of trying to base my life on Jesus's moral teachings while ignoring his teachings about his own nature.

(I entirely rejected the theory that Jesus didn't actually claim to be Messiah or God and that such works with attributed to him after the fact, since I've never seen the slightest reason to believe such a thing.)

How do you know that it was not just the feeling of belonging, agreement and safety of the other Christians that you labeled the "Holy Spirit"?

Well, how do I know that anything I experience is genuine rather than my brain playing tricks on me? How do I know that I'm not actually sitting in a tub of orange goo while machines use my body heat to generate electric power? I've heard a lot of theories offered by the non-religious to explain away the experiences of the religious, but none have been convincing. I've chosen not to be a solipsist.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

So what you are saying is that Jesus was simply mistaken rather than having a mental disorder.

No. I'm saying that this is a possibility that Lewis' trilemma ignores, thus making it a false trichotomy.

I don’t agree because Jesus said many things about himself that would seem really crazy unless He was trying to deceive them. I gave one example previously ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven’.

But you are right, the people of the day may not have recognised mental disorders and perhaps would have concluded that He was demon possessed.

Or they could have concluded that he was the genuine article.

You're a Christian, so it's probable you don't believe the central figures of other religions - Buddha, Muhammed, the Guru Nanak, etc - did the various supernatural things their respective religions claim they did. Yet, Buddhism, Islam, and Sikhism, are flourishing. If the followers of those people were mistaken, why couldn't the followers of Christ?

I don’t think there is any account of people referring to Him as mad in the bible and very few refer to Him as demon possessed. But I think that would be the general consensus

Why?

if it wasn’t for the amazing miracles He did – who can say someone is a lunatic (or a deceiver for that matter) when they have just brought someone back from the dead or healed a blind man?

Lewis' trilemma addresses those who broadly agree with the mundane aspects of the Gospels, but disagree that with the supernatural aspects (they dispute that the resurrection of Jesus and Lazerth, etc, occurred), instead saying that Jesus was merely a good moral teacher. Thus, the trilemma does not begin from the premise that the miraculous things occurred.

Naturally, if Jesus really did bring people back from the dead, that would make people sit up and listen, but the trilemma aims to prove Jesus' divinity using logic, not empiricism.

Now if you believe the bible was made up by people and not from God Himself then I can understand where you are coming from. I am only coming from the angle that everything in the bible is true and it is God's word but in that case the CS Lewis argument is a waste of time because it does not relate to people who think the bible is full of errors.[/COLOR]

On the contrary, that is exactly the kind of people to whom Lewis is addressing: those who broadly agree with the Gospels, but dispute the more improbable, supernatural stuff.

Lewis argues that such people are left with three possibilities: that Jesus was lord, lunatic, or liar. He then proceeds to disprove the latter two, leaving us with only the first option left, which we must therefore conclude is true.

My only point, then, is that these people have a fourth option: that Jesus was simply honestly mistaken in his claims to divinity, and not through mental illness.

 

[Davian]

...
How do you know that it was not just the feeling of belonging, agreement and safety of the other Christians that you labeled the "Holy Spirit"?

Well, how do I know that anything I experience is genuine rather than my brain playing tricks on me? How do I know that I'm not actually sitting in a tub of orange goo while machines use my body heat to generate electric power? I've heard a lot of theories offered by the non-religious to explain away the experiences of the religious, but none have been convincing. I've chosen not to be a solipsist.

The last line of that paragraph is in contradiction to the first, and evades rather than answers the question.

To rephrase the question asked of you, how do you know that your "religious" experience is genuine, rather than your brain "playing tricks on you"? Do you have anything convincing?

 

[Gottservant]

Since I haven't chosen, yet I'm still alive, I fear I must disagree.

At this stage all you are doing is making a spiritual statement, if all you do is make a spiritual statement and death comes for you, you die. And death comes for us all, my friend. Are you spiritually alive? Really?

Sure there is. "I don't know" - there's the fence, right there.

Please show me this "I don't know" where is it? How long does it last? What is it made of? Please!