Hint about logic - if you're going to attack someone's syllogism you have to advance beyond bare assertion.

You haven't presented a syllogism, or anything resembling one. You've only presented 3 premises and then 4 unrelated conclusions.

My mistake - before you attack a syllogism you need to learn to recognize one.

It's easy enough; there's one major premise, one minor premise, and one conclusion that stems (in one of a limited number of valid ways) from the two.

Here is a decent primer for newbies.

finally I can put some words to what I've been feelin'

I certainly appreciate your intellectual honesty about Paul.

As for me following in his insanity? Thanks, but, no thanks.

That you're insane? I hope not. Someday you will realize that truth equals fact. Until then? Well, that's up to you....

You are happily insane? When someone believes that rational disagreement with their position and indeed ridicule of it is only further affirmation of their stance then they are truly caught in a vicious circle of self-deceit.

I would also just like to thank the main contributors to this thread and especially Zeno for helping to create the most informative and interesting thread on RGT to date.

Here's a follow up for those interested in this issue.

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search/label/trilemma

This is from Victor Reppert's blog. Reppert is a philosophy prof and author of a book about Lewis' Argument from Reason. His latest post on the trilemma mostly agrees with my assessment. If people just actually read what Lewis said it's no great feat to understand what he meant.

Let me try again. You listed only these three premises for the trilemma:

1. Jesus was a great moral teacher.
2. Jesus was a good man.
3. Jesus claimed to be God.

There is actually a fourth, unstated premise:

4. Palestine ca. 0CE was the one place and time in human history where there were no mystics.

Of course Lewis didn't notice this premise, because he had no concept of mystic experience. (Yes, I've read Surprised by Joy.) Lewis, like many thinkers in the Anglophone tradition, was completely ignorant of human spirituality.

The trilemma is the poster child for what happens when you bury your head in a sandbox of religious abstraction, and ignore even BASIC empirical facts of human psychology.

Edit - come to think of it, I've read Surprised by Joy TWICE. Sick life, huh?

Actually, many more unstated premises than that. They can be summed up in a way that would allow syllogistic proof:

4 - Jesus affirmed the logical proposition "Jesus is God."
5 - The statement "Jesus is God" is either true or untrue.
6 - Jesus either believed the truth of the proposition, or didn't.
7 - If Jesus affirmed the proposition without believing it, then Jesus was a liar.
8 - If Jesus believed the proposition despite the falsehood of the proposition, then Jesus was a lunatic.
9 - It is impossible to be both a liar and a good moral teacher.
10 - It is impossible to be both a lunatic and a good moral teacher.

Of course, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE ASSUMPTIONS IS LUDICROUS. And many are bigoted.

It's possible to believe oneself to be God without being a lunatic. It is possible to lie without being a liar. It's possible to be a good moral teacher and a liar and a lunatic all at the same time. Thus, the trilemma fails. It's nothing more than an expression of Lewis' prejudice (and ignorance of human nature, and egregious ignorance of how mental illness works).

Just a follow up. Jefferson's letters to Dr. Joseph Priestley (Apr 9, 1803) and Dr. Benjamin Rush (Apr 21, 1803) discuss Jesus and his morals, etc. In both letters he offers his appraisal of Jesus and gives his opinion that much of his simple teachings have been tampered with, but does not mention Paul by name. He does say:

“ …They [Jesus’ teachings] have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating & perverting the simple doctrines he taught by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian sophist…

in his letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush. This is a general statement, but certainly Paul's theology started Christianty down that path. As you know Jefferson had vast correspondences with a great many people and my one volume of his writings does not come close to covering his letters. That’s all I could find with a quick review.

-Zeno

The main problem with the trilemma for me is the pejorative word "lunatic", or "crazy" as NotReady put it. If the account of his words in the Gospel is accurate, I certainly believe Jesus was delusional, but I can believe that someone is delusional and still think them to be a perfectly rational person of sound mind. That is, in fact, exactly what I believe about NotReady himself. I can set out a very similar dilemma for NotReady:

1. Believing in all-powerful, magic-power wielding, invisible imaginary friends without evidence is delusional.
2. NotReady claims to believe in such an entity called "God".
3. There is no evidence that God exists.

therefore NotReady is either a liar or lunatic.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. If accepted, all the premises show is that NotReady holds a delusional belief in one instance. This doesn't necessarily make him completely crazy.

Your logic deteriorates exponentially, much like Madnak's.

Premises 1 and 3 beg the question.

The statement that I'm either a liar or lunatic doesn't require that I be completely crazy, therefore you haven't shown the conclusion doesn't follow. If believing in God is false it isn't an "event" that comprises "one instance".

I'm not considered a great moral teacher so there's no issue as with Jesus that He can't be considered a great moral teacher if He was liar or lunatic - I can be a liar or lunatic without that apparent contradiction. Therefore your analogy sucks.

You forgot at least 3,182 other premises, such as:

11 - We use a numbering system with base 10.
12 - Base 10 means there are 10 digits, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.
13 - The first place digit represents ones.
14 - The second place digit represents tens.
15 - We will number our premises on that system so that the first premise is number 1.
16 - The second premise is number 2, followed consecutively by 3, etc.
17 - The English alphabet consists of 26 letter and various punctuation marks.
18 - Well you can fill in the other 3,164 yourself.

You forgot - it's possible for A to be non-A. Such an omission is nothing more than evidence of your ignorance of the nature of ultimate irrationality.

Why would we assume Paul here? It sounds more like he is speaking of someone like Augustine than Paul.

These premises are all generally accepted. Yours range from controversial to absurd.

The law of the excluded middle only applies in particular situations. This is not one of them.

The statement below is true.

The statement above is false.

Did your universe explode? No? Then clearly, not every statement represents a logical proposition to which the law of the excluded middle applies. I'll let others elaborate.

Forget the technical stuff. The trilemma is flawed because Jesus could be a good man and a good moral teacher even if he mistakingly believed he was God or at least had a direct pipeline to him, especially in those days. It wouldn't mean he was a lunatic.

It is also possible he was a liar simultaneous with being a great moral teacher.

Lewis most likely got it right because what you're proposing is dangerously close to the Nicolaitan sect heresies that Jesus disparaged through John in Revelation.

The fact that D.S.'s answer is not in-line with Christian beliefs and Lewis's is not a reason why one is more likely to be right than the other...

His post shows a very reasonable and logical train of thought but I think scripture answers most questions if you pay a lot of attention to it and then search things out.

I doubt there's an objection that can be raised that hasn't already been answered in it. Its just a matter of interpreting the old prosaic language into modern terms.

OK, but the argument he is making is that much of the Bible is in error, so you can't really use the Bible to refute him. If, for the purposes of this discussion, the Bible is assumed to be completely factual, then the debate was over before it started.

It's frustrating that this...

...gets this response...

...instead of an attempt to show what it even means for 'Jesus is God' to be 'true' or 'false.'

Let me just introduce a different proposition: 'NotReady is God'. This is 'false', right? But why? What is it that counts against this proposition, that makes us call it 'false'?

Also, take the proposition S: 'Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Jewish mystic.'

Are there any grounds for reasonably doubting S? If yes, what are they? (What is 'reasonable doubt', anyways?) If no, what would constitute such grounds?

In the ordinary sense of the words, is S less than 'certainly true'?

Edit - this is also what I was trying to ask in my thread about the Qur'an. In what sense is it less than a certain truth that Muhammad had no help from the Archangel Gabriel? Are there any grounds for doubting the proposition: 'Muhammad was a sixth-century Arab mystic'?

Huh? How so? Premises 1 and 3 make no reference to the subject matter of the conclusion (i.e. you) and therefore can't beg the question.

This strikes me as nitpicking. Definition #1 of "lunatic" on dictionary.com is "an insane person". This surely requires that the person "be completely crazy".

Wow, I didn't realise you were actually arguing that the two were mutually exclusive (as opposed to arguing that Jesus couldn't be considered only a moral teacher. The idea that you can't be both insane and a great moral teacher is completely absurd to me. In fact, a little insanity is virtually a job requirement.