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zntneo comments on Book trades with open-minded theists - recommendations? - Less Wrong Discussion
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hmm... god delusion generally wouldn't be at the top for "best arguments" for atheism. I'd go with something like the Atheism: the case against god or if he'll read a tome you have Atheism:a philosophical justification, the impossibility of god, the improbability of god. These are all pretty high level philosophy books but they are the best and strongest books out there. Did your friend really recommend mere Christianity for best argument on his side?
I would have picked something by william lane craig,richard swinburne or alvin plantinga. I mean mere christanity if i remember right is the book where he brings up the triliema argument for the jesus being god.
Lewis doesn't argue that the trilemma proves Jesus was God - he uses it to dismiss the wishy-washy agnostic position of "Well, Jesus was a great moral teacher, and worthy of respect, so whether he was God or not doesn't matter."
Lewis' position is "No, hang on a minute, this is someone who's spouting moral platitudes that everyone already agrees with, not anything new as far as the morals go. But he's also claiming to be God - he's saying, over and over again, that he is God. That leaves only three options, really - either he's actually God, or he's a liar, or he's deluded. Whatever he was, he wasn't an exceptionally decent human being, so get off the fence."
I just want to say thank you for pointing this out. I used to think the trilemma was a terrible argument, but your interpretation reduces my criticism.
Still it's worth noting that Lewis assumed the gospels accurate. He missed an obvious fourth alternative: That Jesus was misquoted and misunderstood.
Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend. I'm not a full-blown mythicist, but I think it's very likely Jesus life and sayings were embellished by others.
A fifth alternative: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Just Plain Wrong. It's amazing that the simplest explanations -- that someone might simply be mistaken, that they might have sanely and honestly misinterpreted the data -- gets so completely ignored and erased.
Yeah, but 'Just Plain Wrong' is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It's not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.
The question is whether it's possible to simply be mistaken about having divine powers, without having an underlying mental disorder. And clearly the answer is 'yes;' and clearly this possibility has a higher prior probability than 'Jesus is Lord.' So neglecting the option is unconscionable, and is where the trilemma gets nearly all of its plausibility as an argument for Christianity.
Suppose a few really unlikely events happened, and caused everyone around you to think you were the messiah and/or divine. Would it be inconceivable, barring true insanity or deliberate deception, to come to think oneself the messiah and/or divine? Do you think that every psychic, every cult leader, is either (independently) insane or deliberately lying? It just ain't so; self-deception is stronger than that.
That reminds me of Yvain's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'
True, but again that works for Lewis' argument - if our only sources on him are incorrect, then you still have no basis for saying "Well, he was a specially decent human who did good things..."
Lewis is one of the few religious apologists for whom I have any time, because he at least tried to make decent arguments, and wasn't interested in convincing people by fraud.
Perhaps it's my own philosophical upbringing coming to rear its ugly head, but Plantinga is practically worthless as a true defense of Christianity. "Basic beliefs" in particular are such an obviously nasty hack, and the resulting epistemological relativism is frightening to behold.
Well he does have other arguments such as the evolutionary argument against naturalism but generally he is considered one of the more rigorous of christian philosophers.
oh and btw yea the basic belief argument seems absolutely horrible to me.
Yeah. Then again that was probably "best" in the same sense that TGD was "best" for me: what came to mind on the spot. He's probably read a bunch of other books (and obviously, the Bible), MC was his answer to "which work is most likely to get an open-minded atheist to take one step in my direction".
In fact there were plenty of things in Mere Christianity that I agreed with, it just didn't make much of an impression on me as an argument for the existence of God. It boils down to "we have a strong intuition that there is an objective morality, therefore God".
(ETA: now that I think of it, though, he may have recommended the book also as an answer to the question "what is it exactly that you believe in". Looking back, there may have been some ambiguity to our agreement.)