STEPHEN VAN ECK
Those of you who engage in debate with amateur apologists will from time to time come across classic arguments by leading apologists of the past, albeit in a deficient way. If you want to be prepared to recognize and refute these arguments, here they are.
PASCAL’S WAGER. Most of you have heard of it. It’s a popular tactic with amateur evangelists, who think it’s devastatingly clever. It goes like this: If you believe in Jesus and are wrong, you’ve lost nothing. But if you don’t believe and are wrong, you’ve lost everything. So the sensible thing to do is believe.
There are problems with both propositions. The first one commits the fallacy of Neglected Evidence. Lost nothing? What about the integrity of your mind—filling it with nonsense? What about the freedoms lost while under the burden of a false and restrictive dogma? Plus, no matter how “sensible” it may be to believe, one cannot force oneself to believe against one’s own inclinations. The case for Christianity is simply not adequate, notwithstanding the angle of self-interest. Bottom line, it’s intellectual cowardice, hedging one’s convictions. Real truth is not based on calculations of self-interest.
LIAR, LUNATIC OR LORD. This is C. S. Lewis’s famous trichotomy, likewise popular with amateur evangelists. Like Pascal’s Wager, they think it is an airtight logical trap. Basically, it puts forth three options that exhaust all possibilities: Jesus was either a liar claiming Messianic status or he was a lunatic or he was what he said he was. Lewis eliminates the first two options too hastily.
Lewis says that if Jesus was a liar, he would have been found out and suffered a loss of following, plus death as a false prophet. Well, he DID get executed, but they append another meaning to that. As for loss of following, not necessarily. Joseph Smith would have been certified legitimate by Lewis’s test. He was a liar, as Lewis might have conceded, yet he had a following that thrives to this day. And anyway, Jesus might have been another False Messiah, not False Prophet. Premise false.
As for the lunatic possibility—no one would have followed a lunatic? The Rev. Jim Jones comes to mind, and he had more followers, obedient to death, than Jesus is said to have had when he died. Premise false.
Lewis’s trichotomy neglects a fourth valid possibility: LEGEND. Christianity seems to have been a Jewish version of the “savior” Mystery Cults, which Gentiles later adapted, erroneously thinking it described an actual historic figure. It’s a more plausible explanation than Lord. Sorry, C. S.
THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT OF ST. ANSELM. I’ve seen some pretty poor versions of this presented by amateur apologists. Here it is, in all its glory:
1) Even a doubter of the existence of God would have to have some understanding of what it is they’re doubting.
2) They would understand God to be a being than whom nothing greater can be thought.
3) But it is greater to exist outside the mind than merely as a concept in it.
4) Given this, whoever doubts the existence of God is making a contradiction, since they would be saying that it is possible to think of something greater than a being of whom nothing greater can be thought.
5) Hence, by definition God necessarily exists.
This is a remarkably moronic display of faulty logic.
One cannot conclusively demonstrate the existence of something outside the mind from the fact that a concept for it exists in the mind. If that was necessary, then Superman or any other fictional character would be demonstrably “real”.
The key phrase here is “by definition”. A contradiction in the definition does not comprise proof by default. It’s mere wordplay that proves absolutely nothing. Besides, Premise #4 is erroneous, since even a doubter’s doubt clearly includes the hypothetical notion that God might be real.
Further clarity can be found if one starts by hypothetically assuming that there is no God. One could still conceive of a being greater than whom nothing can be thought. It would still be valid to say that it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind, but this is only if the object in mind actually exists outside it! A Supreme Being would not magically come into existence from a definitional contradiction, all the less so because this contradiction is not really there at all. Just like God …
Anselm’s problem, in addition to being logically impaired, was his failure to examine the proposition from the other side, from the perspective of God not existing; an unthinkable thought to the committed zealot, who prejudges the case, and who inevitably will make logical errors.