Debunking Christianity

Beversluis: "Jesus: Who Was He?"

2008-07-07T07:03:00.012-04:00

The following text is chapter five of Dr. John Beversluis's book C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion: Revised and Updated, which I heartily recommend. It's part of the Debunking Christianity Challenge.

Book 2 of Mere Christianity concludes with a discussion of Jesus and his claims about himself. According to Lewis, many of Jesus's claims shocked his contemporaries, but none shocked them as much as his claim to forgive sins-any sins. It is this claim that provides Lewis with his point of departure, as he delineates (what he thinks are) our options about who Jesus was. Since I quoted both passages at some length in chapter 3, I will not quote them again, but formulate them schematically and examine their logic when stripped of the persuasive rhetoric in which they are cloaked.

Every Lewis expositor whose work I am familiar with treats these passages as containing a single argument. Actually, they contain two arguments that are logically independent and intended to establish two different claims. The first argument is a dilemma. I call it the Lunatic! or Fiend Dilemma. It goes like this:

(i) Jesus' claim to be forgive sins-any sins-"makes sense" only if he was God (or the Son of God).
(ii) There are people who do not believe that Jesus was God (or the Son
of God) and claim that he was just a great moral teacher.
(iii) However, a man who said "the sort of things" that Jesus said, and was not God (or the Son of God), would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or a fiend.
(iv) Therefore if Jesus was not God (or the Son of God), he was either a lunatic or a fiend.

I will refer to this argument as Argument One.

It is important to be clear about what this argument is intended to establish. Every Lewis expositor whose work I am familiar with thinks Lewis is trying to establish that Jesus was God (or the Son of God) and thus refute people who deny that. But the passage does not lend itself to that interpretation. In Argument One Lewis's announced target is not people who deny that Jesus was God (or the Son of God) as such, but people who deny that and then go on to say that he was a great moral teacher-a group that includes not only non-Christians but also "liberal" Christians. The claim that Jesus was not God (or the Son of God) but only a great moral teacher is precisely the "really foolish thing" that he is trying to prevent them from saying. Lewis was emphatic that this "is the one thing we must not say" (Me, 56). In Argument One, being a lunatic or a fiend are not alternatives to being God (or the Son of God), but to being a great moral teacher.

Of course, Lewis believes that Jesus is God (or the Son of God). But he does not try to establish that until the next radio broadcast in which he advances (what I will refer to as) Argument Two. Unlike Argument One, this argument is not a dilemma, but a trilemma. I call it the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma. It goes like this:

(i)Either Jesus was "just what he said" or he was a lunatic or a fiend (that is, the Devil of Hell).
(ii) It see obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend.
(iii) Therfore the only rational alternative is that he was "just what he said."

Puzzlingly, the conclusion Lewis says he "has to accept" in his summary of Argument Two is not the same conclusion he claims to have established in Argument One. In Argument One he confuses matters by vacillating between saying that Jesus was God and that he was the Son of God-two very different claims. However, at the outset of chapter 4 he claims to have established that Jesus was God. There is no mention here of the possibility of his being the Son of God.

In The Problem of Pain, published three years before The Case fir Christianity, Lewis advances what at first glance looks like an earlier version of Argument Two, but is actually a different argument:

There was a man among the Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be "one with," the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking ... that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. (PP, 23-24)

Schematically:

(i) Jesus claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be "one with," God.
(ii) Either he was a (raving) lunatic or he was "precisely what he said."
(iii) He was not a (raving) lunatic.
(iv) Therefore he was "precisely what he said."

I will refer to this argument as Argument Three. It differs from Argument Two in several ways.

First, unlike Argument Two, which is a trilemma that confronts us with three alternatives--either Jesus was God or he was a lunatic or a fiend. Argument Three is a dilemma that confronts us with two alternatives--either Jesus was (raving) lunatic or he was "precisely what he said." There is no mention of the third possibility of his being a fiend.

Second, although Argument Three is more compressed than Argument Two, it is more complex. First, Lewis makes a threefold distinction between who Jesus claimed "to be, or to be the son of, or to be "one with" (PP, 23, my italics). These multiple possibilities introduce an even more fundamental ambiguity. The original ambiguity is in Argument One where Lewis vacillates between saying that Jesus is God and that he is the Son of God, whereas in Argument Two he is clearly God. In Argument Three he is "precisely what he said." The trouble is that, on Lewis's own showing, Jesus said three different things. So instead of "If Jesus was not a lunatic or a fiend, then he was God," we have "If Jesus was not a lunatic or a fiend, then he was either God or the Son of God or "one with" God. It is puzzling that, having tacitly acknowledged that Jesus makes three different claims about himself, Lewis argues that if he was not a lunatic, then he was "precisely what He said"-leaving the careful reader to wonder how anyone who speaks so ambiguously can be said t to have spoken precisely. It is equally puzzling that throughout the discussion Lewis alludes vaguely to "the sort of things" (plural) that Jesus said about himself, thereby tacitly conceding that there is no single and unambiguous answer to the question of "precisely" who he claimed to be.

Third, Argument Three contains an allusion to "the records." Lewis does not explain what he means by this expression, but presumably he means the synoptic Gospels (and perhaps also the Gospel of John). However, as he also tacitly concedes, the synoptic Gospels depict Jesus making very different claims about himself. God, the Son of God, and "one with" God. And if we add "the Son of Man"-a title which Jesus often uses when referring to himself but which (for reasons he does not disclose) Lewis does not mention-we have four different claims: Jesus was God or the Son of God or "one with" God or the Son of Man.

In the later essay "What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?" published in 1950, Lewis advances yet another version of the argument, which I will call Argument Four:

(T)he Christian hypothesis ... is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood-and come up again, pulling it with him. The alternative hypothesis ... is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can't) one turns to the Christian theory. (GiD, 159-60)

On the face of it, this looks like a disjunction-an either-or proposition whose second disjunct is another disjunction-that is, either p or (q or r): that is, either Jesus was God or he was a lunatic or the authors of the synoptic Gospels (or Jesus himself) were liars. So now we have even more possibilities. Of the three alternatives presented by Argument Four, two are completely new. The first gets us embroiled in theological details of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. The second is that the whole story is "lies"-an alternative that is absent from the previous three arguments. However, although it looks like this argument presents us with three alternatives, Lewis's allusion to the "second alternative" implies that there are only twin which case the argument is a dilemma. If that is correct, it is very different from the two previous dilemmas because it introduces the hitherto-unmentioned possibility that someone was lying--either the authors of the synoptic Gospels or Jesus himself. Lewis does not explain which.

In short, although Lewis's expositors refer to his argument (singular) as a trilemma, when we examine all the relevant passages, what we actually find is not one argument, but four: one is a trilemma, three are dilemmas, and each poses a different dilemma.

I am sorry if I seem to be introducing needless complications into what might look like a very simple issue. This apparent simplicity is an illusion. We are not dealing with a single argument, but with four arguments, and they are all different. Before we can hope to assess them, we need to make some distinctions, determine what each claims to establish, and thereby introduce some order into the untidy state in which Lewis left them. In view of the careless, offhand, and internally inconsistent ways in which he formulates his arguments, I marvel at the fact that his expositors and champions continue to talk about a single argument, called "the Trilemma," and to endorse it as an unanswerable argument that poses an insoluble problem for both non-Christians and "liberal" Christians.

I disagree. Far from being insoluble, the problem is a pseudo-problem. To see that, the first step is strategic. We should not allow ourselves to be browbeaten into admitting that since Jesus does not seem to be a lunatic or a fiend or a liar, we are "forced" to conclude that he was "precisely what he said." Instead, we should ask Lewis's expositors and champions a question of our own: Precisely who do you think he was and on the basis of what textual evidence have you arrived at your opinion? If they take Lewis as their guide, they will be "forced" to admit, as he himself does without actually saying so, that there is no single and unambiguous answer to the question. That alone is sufficient to rebut the Trilemma.

But I do not want to rest my case on that. All four arguments are open to other objections. One of the most fundamental is that they all uncritically assume that the synoptic Gospels are historically reliable sources that accurately report what Jesus said-narratives that preserve his very words (or a very close approximation) rather than narratives that incorporate later recollections, interpolations, embellishments, fictionalizations, and ascriptions of deity. So we have to believe in the veracity of Scripture before Lewis's arguments can have any claim on our attention. That this is so is borne out by the fact that he tries to prevent "liberal" Christians from saying that Jesus was nothing more than a great moral teacher, not by producing an independent argument, but by saying that it is incompatible with what he says about himself in the synoptic Gospels. He does the same thing in his essay "The Language of Religion": "Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God because He said so" (CR, 13 7). But that begs the question. "The Jesus of the synoptic Gospels says p" does not entail "The historical Jesus said p."

Lewis anticipated the objection that the Gospels contain later ascriptions of divinity to Jesus by his disciples and devoted a sentence to it that he deleted before going on the air. It read: "The theory only saddles you with twelve inexplicable lunatics instead of one."3 That is an undeniably clever quip and it would be dynamite at a cocktail party. But it is hardly cutting-edge New Testament scholarship. For one thing, as Lewis knew perfectly well, not all twelve disciples wrote Gospels. (In fact, none of them did.) Second, after the betrayal and suicide of Judas Iscariot, there were no longer twelve disciples, but only eleven. But twelve is a good round number and it is certainly a lot more impressive than the accurate number-which is zero. When Lewis composed that sentence, he was obviously more interested in being "effective" than in being accurate. It is to his credit that he had the good sense to delete it. To my knowledge, no New Testament scholar has had the temerity to suggest that the authors of the synoptic Gospels were lunatics. "Lunatic" is not a term used by any actual New Testament scholars. It is a term ascribed to imaginary ones whose source is Lewis's sometimes overly fertile imagination. In short, this is a bogus criticism that enables him to divert attention from the real issue and confront readers with odious alternatives from which they understandably recoil.

Although it can be believed by faith that the sayings ascribed to Jesus by the authors of the synoptic Gospels are his actual words, it cannot be known with certainty that this is true of any of them. In fact, there is a sense in which it can be known with certainty that it is true of none of them. The reason is simple and indisputable: ]esus spoke Aramaic and the synoptic Gospels were written in koine Greek. So except for the tiny handful of passages in which he is depicted as speaking Aramaic-for example, Matthew 27:46, in which he cries, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" ("My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?"), the synoptic Gospels are not his actual words. As paradoxical as it may seem, the Greek texts of the synoptic Gospels, which have been translated into countless languages, are themselves translations.

Another seldom mentioned fact needs to be mentioned. Although Lewis has an enormous following among intelligent lay readers, professional theologians and philosophers largely ignore him and rarely mention his books. The few who do are not impressed. Commenting on the so-called Trilemma, philosopher-theologian John Hick says that those who endorse Lewis's claim that "someone claiming to be God must be either mad, bad, or God; and since Jesus was evidently not mad or bad, he must have been God ... continue to be unacquainted with modern biblical study," which does not uncritically assume that the synoptic Gospels are accurate repots of what Jesus said. He adds:

It is widely agreed that the earliest New Testament documents-some of the letters of Paul-were written about twenty years after Jesus's death (i.e. around 50 CE), with the earliest of the Gospels, that of Mark, some twenty years later and the remainder during the next thirty or so years, moving toward the end of the century. None of the writers was an eyewitness of the life they depict. The Gospels are secondary and tertiary portraits dependent on oral and written traditions which had developed over a number of decades ... We also have to remind ourselves that the Gospels were written, in a period between forty and seventy years after the time of Jesus, in a quite different cultural milieu from that of the original events.

This is not just one man's opinion. It is the opinion of mainstream New Testament scholarship generally. To treat the synoptic Gospels as objective reportage written by eyewitnesses soon after the events they recount is a hermeneutical blunder. Since it is impossible to determine which of the many (and sometimes inconsistent) claims that are ascribed to Jesus by the writers of the synoptic Gospels are really his and which are interpolations by later writers, it is also impossible to determine whether he actually claimed to be God. So questions about whether he was right or deluded or lying, and so forth cannot be answered; indeed, they cannot even be asked. Since that is so, it follows that the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma and the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma can never arise. I conclude that both arguments fail on the basis of purely textual and hermeneutical considerations.

Lewis's champions typically respond to scholarly based claims like Hick's with a flurry of nonscholarly pseudo-questions. Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli are representative. They ask why the authors of the synoptic Gospels would go to such lengths to fabricate and perpetuate what they knew was a myth and possibly even a lie? What was their motive? What was in it for them? How could they have engaged in such blatant deception (and even self-deception)? Why would they be willing to die for what they knew was a hoax? What enabled them to face martyrdom and go to their deaths "with hymns on their lips"? Who originated this lie? And why does it continue to attract "the brightest minds in history?"6 These pseudo-questions should be ignored. In suggesting that these desperate remedies are the only alternatives to reading the synoptic Gospels as accurate historical reportage, Kreeft and Tacelli are throwing dust in our eyes. It is significant that although they raise questions like these, they never cite any actual New Testament scholar who does. The reason is obvious. There is no one to cite. No mainstream New Testament scholar has ever suggested that the authors of the synoptic Gospels deliberately fabricated and perpetuated what they knew was a lie.7 That is not the sort of claim that serious scholars make. It is the sort of claim that a certain type of Christian apologist manufactures in hopes of making opposing points of view seem implausible and even ridiculous.

The "evidence" that Kreeft and Tacelli offer in support of their contention that Christianity has attracted some of "the brightest minds in history" is typical of their question-begging approach: If you were to pit "bright minds" like Paul of Tarsus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Kepler, Newton, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, T S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis, against (apparently) "dull" minds like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Renan, Freud, Darwin, Marx, La Mettrie, Skinner, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Thomas Paine, and the ACLU, "it would hardly be a fair fight."9 Two comments are in order here. First, the operative but suppressed criterion of who is "bright" seems to be agreement with Kreeft and Tace/Ii. So the criterion of who is "dull" must be disagreement with them. Second, the operative assumption is that the truth of a claim follows from the fact that the person defending it is "bright" and won the debate. Both the criterion and the assumption are absurd.

But let us allow Lewis's champions their moment in the spotlight. Let us admit that Christianity has attracted some very "bright" minds, though not necessarily "the brightest minds in history." What, exactly, does that prove? The answer, of course, is nothing. Moreover, since Kreeft and Tacelli have carried the battle into the potentially sensitive area of high and low I~, it might not be wholly inappropriate to observe gently in passing that Christianity has attracted infinitely more average, below average, and even marginal minds. The Romans were the first to notice that and they made the point repeatedly. I am sure that no Christian apologist would care to draw any resounding inference from that. But if the fact that unintelligent and undiscerning people accept Christianity is not a reason for thinking it is false, neither is the fact that intelligent and discerning people accept it a reason for thinking it is true. Both inferences are not only transparently fallacious, but downright silly, as are all Kreeft and Tacelli's other inferences based on idle observations about who believes a story and who does not; about how a story based on a myth, mass hallucination, and even outright lies could have become so widespread; and about how this story could attract adherents who were willing to go to their deaths "with hymns on their lips."

To dispose of these pseudo-questions, we need not say that anyone was making things up or lying. We need only say that their accounts of Jesus's words and deeds-written more than half a century after the fact by authors who were not eyewitnesses-are accounts of an actually existing person whom they idealized and whose words they have inadvertently misreported, probably partially misunderstood, and embellished with ascriptions of deity. Past history and news reports about religious cults in America in recent decades reveals how easy it is for impressionable disciples to idealize a charismatic person-a profound (or seemingly profound) moralist, a healer (or alleged healer), a fulfillment (or alleged fulfillment) of prophecy-and to see him as larger than life and even as a savior or a god. Examples such as Emmanuel Swedenborg, Sun Myung Moon, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Joseph Smith, and even L. Ron Hubbard abound. The same could have been true of the authors of the synoptic Gospels. If the fact that many of Jim Jones's followers voluntarily committed suicide in obedience to his (apparently divine or divinely inspired) command is not a cogent reason for believing that his teachings were true, why should the fact that many early Christians voluntarily went to their deaths "with hymns on their lips" be a cogent reason for believing that Christianity is true? The fact that a person is willing to die for his or her beliefs reveals the depth of his or her commitment to them. But no inference about the truth-value of the beliefs is possible. Whether people are willing to die for their beliefs and whether their beliefs are true are completely separate questions.

Lewis never resorts to the disreputable tactics employed by some of his champions. In replying to the claims of mainstream New Testament scholarship, he relies on three strategies.

First, he dismisses the possibility that Jesus's disciples misunderstood his claim about who he was on the ground that they were Jews and, therefore, shared the typically monotheistic Jewish belief in one God who is "the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from everything else" (MC, 55). I find this unconvincing for three reasons. For one thing, it falsely assumes that some of Jesus's disciples wrote Gospels (when, in fact, none did). Second, even if one or two of them had written a Gospel (or reported Jesus's sayings to whoever did), the unanswered question is: If they understood his claim about who he was, why did they report it so variously and so ambiguously? Finally, even the most cursory reading of the synoptic Gospels reveals that Jesus's disciples seldom have the slightest idea of what he is talking about. It is no exaggeration to say that they are among the most unpromising assortment of blunderers it was ever a sage's misfortune to endure. They are always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, asking obtuse questions, jumping to absurd conclusions, missing the point, or otherwise putting their foot in their mouth. As a result, he has to spend an inordinate amount time correcting (and sometimes rebuking) them for their monumental misunderstandings and other howlers. At times, his discouragement and weariness are almost palpable. As J. D. Salinger's character Holden Caulfield irreverently but astutely observes, Jesus's disciples "were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. And they kept letting Him down." In view of considerations like these, it borders on high comedy for Lewis to suggest that this group of uneducated and uncomprehending Galilean fisherman, who are baffled by the Parable of the Sower, somehow managed to arrive at a reasonably clear grasp of Trinitarian theology.

The second way Lewis responds to the claims of mainstream New Testament scholarship is by appealing to his own expertise as a literary critic. In an essay entitled "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" he confides that while he respects the learning of the great New Testament critics, he is not convinced that their judgment is to be equally respected (CR, 161). His reasons are not exegetical, but autobiographical: he has read too many myths and is "too experienced in literary criticism" (SbJ, 236) to regard the synoptic Gospels as myths or legends (CR, 161). In fact, there is a sense in which "they're not good enough" and "too artless" to be legends. Hence:

If [a New Testament scholar] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel. (CR, 154)

But that is not an argument. It is a question based on the false assumption that wide reading in a particular genre necessarily makes one's judgment more reliable than narrow intensive reading in the same genre. Again:

These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight. (CR, 157)

That is not an argument either. It is ridicule.

Lewis's third response to the claims of mainstream New Testament scholarship is based on a generalization and a comparison. Here is the generalization:

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point-and often involves throughout-the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood or misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. (CR, 157)

All theology of the "liberal" type? That is a surprising claim, coming, as it does, from a man who, according to Lewis biographer A. N. Wilson, "had read almost no books of biblical scholarship." If Wilson is right, how could Lewis possibly have known what all "liberal" theology involves? Equally surprising is the fact that he actually provides a bit of documentation for his sweeping claim-two sentences from Rudolf Bultmann's massive Theology of the New Testament (CR, 155).'3 I wonder how he would have responded to a pupil during a tutorial session who made an equally uninformed and poorly documented generalization about what "all" literary historians and critics say about some of his favorite poets, such as Edmund Spenser, Thomas Malory, or William Morris.

Having made this generalization, Lewis offers a comparison based on his own personal academic experience:

Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory before. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. (CR, 157)

So when he heard the same thing being said about the teachings of Jesus, he found himself in "a privileged position" (CR, 157) and forearmed in advance. Here is his assessment:

The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance. (CR, 158)

Stripped of the rhetoric in which it is cloaked, this seemingly magisterial remark-the ostensibly authoritative voice of a man speaking from an uncommonly rich literary experience-amounts to a confession that he had made up his mind long ago that all such claims are "preposterous" and his opinion has been impervious to argument and evidence ever since.

Lewis concludes that "if [the Gospels] are not history then they are realistic prose fiction of a kind which never actually existed before the eighteenth century" (GiD, 101). In support of this claim, with its air of sweeping omniscience, he offers another tiny piece of textual evidence: John 8:8 in which Jesus stoops down to write something in the dust after the scribes and Pharisees had produced a woman caught in the act of committing adultery (GiD, 101). One hardly knows what to make of this "evidence." For one thing, if the fact that Jesus stooped down to write something in the dust struck someone as important enough to include in his Gospel, why did he neglect to include what he wrote? Furthermore, can anyone seriously hope to challenge the life's work of a great New Testament scholar like Bultmann by citing one verse from one Gospel? This response to the claims of mainstream New Testament scholarship is based on (what I call) the Argument from Personal Incredulity: I, for my part, cannot bring myself to believe that the Gospels are myths or legends; therefore they are not myths or legends.

It is time to return to the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma and the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma. As noted earlier, these arguments fail on the basis of purely textual and hermeneutical considerations. But they are also open to objection on many logical grounds. Before examining the arguments themselves, there are some important preliminary matters.

Lewis begins Argument One by saying that unless Jesus was God, his claim to be able to forgive sins-any sins-is so preposterous as to be comic and that the kindest description we could give of his conduct is "asinine fatuity." He adds that Jesus "unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the party chiefly offended in all offences." I suppose that makes for stirring devotional reading, but how did Lewis acquire this information? All mainstream New Testament scholars agree that the synoptic Gospels are fragmentary, episodic, internally inconsistent, and written by people who were not eyewitnesses. So how could anyone writing almost two thousand years later presume to have identified the beliefs that prompted Jesus to behave in particular ways-not to mention, to behave in those ways "unhesitatingly"? That is just another piece of Lewisian rhetoric. Moreover, its substantive content is not only undocumented but cannot be documented. To my knowledge, there is not a single passage in the synoptic Gospels in which Jesus says (or implies) that all sins are sins against him or that sinners break his law or that they wound his love; he always says all sins are sins against God and that sinners break God's law and God's commandments.

Nor is it true that Jesus's claim to forgive sins-any sins-"makes sense" only if he was God. What prevents us from saying, with many New Testament scholars, that, in telling people that their sins were forgiven, Jesus was not forgiving their sins himself, but announcing-or "proclaiming"-that their sins have been forgiven by God? Surely that is a possible interpretation and one that Lewis should have considered-if for no other reason than that if it is sound exegesis, it rebuts his claim that "a man who was merely a man" and said "the sorts of things" Jesus said would be guilty of "asinine family." To say that Jesus's claim to forgive sins-any sins-"makes sense" only if he was God is also contradicted by the fact that he gave his disciples power to forgive sins. Surely no one wants to claim that they were God too. So Lewis's claim needs to be qualified. What he should have said is that a person's claim to forgive sins-any sins-"makes sense" only if that person either is God or has been delegated, that is, authorized, to forgive sins by God. It follows that Jesus's claim to forgive sins does not require us to say that he was God, since he might have believed that he had been delegated by God to forgive sins. This interpretation is perfectly compatible with Lewis's qualified claim.

Lewis moves much too quickly. He begins by saying that if Jesus was not God, then his claim to forgive sins would imply "a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history." I am not at all sure that is true. History has produced some pretty silly and conceited characters, and Lewis's claim that a nondivine Jesus would top them all needs to be argued, not just asserted. But let us assume for the sake of argument that it is true. In that case, we would be required to say that if Jesus was not God, then he was silly and conceited-a cranky but comparatively mild criticism. However, less than a page later Lewis says that if Jesus was not God, then he was either a lunatic or a fiend ("the Devil of Hell")-which is anything but a mild criticism. Now anyone who leaps from saying that Jesus was silly and conceited to saying that he was a lunatic or a fiend needs additional evidence for this much more radical claim. But Lewis cites exactly the same evidence: Jesus's claim to forgive sins-any sins. Clearly, Lewis is overreaching in this passage. Why does he introduce the notion of a "fiend"-much less "the Devil of Hell"-into the discussion in the first place? What does he mean by a "fiend"? Is he suggesting that if Jesus was not God (or the Son of God or "one with" God or the Son of Man or whoever he thought he was), then if he was not a lunatic, he was the devil of hell? That, of course, would be a lot worse than being silly or conceited--or even a lunatic. But surely these are not our only alternatives. This is just another false dilemma.

Throughout his discussion of who Jesus claimed to be, Lewis employs two rhetorical strategies. The first is a reliance on robust assertion infused with confidence-inducing adverbs like "unhesitatingly," witty ascriptions of character traits like "asinine fatuity," and attitude-shaping rhetoric about fiends, devils, and people who think they are poached eggs. The second strategy is a reliance on negative images and reprehensible character traits that people associate with lunatics-not to mention "raving" lunatics-and from which they instinctively recoil. But psychological revulsion should not be mistaken for logical cogency. To assess Lewis's arguments logically-as opposed to being swept off our feet by them rhetorically-we need to neutralize their high-voltage psychological charge by replacing their emotive content with factual content. Instead of endorsing his ill-considered generalizations about some undefined and undifferentiated group of people called "lunatics," we need to do some serious spadework in clinical pathology, specify exactly the kind of mental disorder he is talking about, and determine whether his claim about the complete (or all but complete) mental incompetence of people suffering from particular delusions is defensible in light of contemporary psychiatric opinion.

We also need to improve on his terminology. "Lunatic" is much too imprecise and colloquial for what purports to be a serious philosophical discussion. Like "insane," "crazy," "out of your mind," and "nuts," it is a term that laypersons casually toss around, but it has no descriptive clinical content and, therefore, provides no basis for clinical diagnosis. And that, of course, is what is needed-not the after-hours musings of a literary historian and, by his own admission, amateur theologian writing two thousand years after the facts about which he is making such confident pronouncements. Nor should we accept Lewis's claim that "a man who was merely a man" and said "the sort of things" that Jesus said would be "a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men" (GiD, 157). Again, that is sheer rhetoric. The claim is false and the inference by which it is derived is fallacious. From the fact that Person A is more insane than Person B, it does not follow that Person B is sane--much less, that he is the "most sane" of men.

In addition to using terms that are imprecise and making comparisons that are unwarranted, Lewis misunderstands the nature of mental illness-in particular, the state of mind characteristic of persons diagnosed as delusional. This is borne out by a remark in his essay "What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ":

The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said-"I am begotten of the One God," "Before Abraham was, lam", etc (GiD, 157)-is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that kind of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. (GiD, 157-58)

That is all very well, but is anyone really interested in Lewis's "opinion"? About such matters, opinions are neither here nor there--unless they are expert psychiatric opinions, and even then there is often room for doubt. Anyone with even a modest understanding of clinical pathology knows that delusions are seldom-if ever-total in a way that "undermines the whole mind of" the person suffering from them. Being delusional is not a generalized state of mind. Delusions are intentional (in the sense of "intentional" discussed in chapter 2). Delusional people are deluded about something—sometimes about more than one thing. But they are rarely, if ever, deluded about everything. It is a psychiatrically well-documented fact that people who are delusional-even severely delusional-in some respects are perfectly competent in others and occasionally even brilliant. As psychiatrist Cleridge McCurry puts it, "It is perfectly possible to be delusional or even psychotic and still behave rationally otherwise." This suggests that even if Jesus was delusional (or even psychotic) about being God, that is compatible with his being perfectly sane in other respects and even being a great moral teacher.

A very different interpretation, according to which we need not regard Jesus either as delusional or psychotic, was suggested to me in e-mail correspondence with the psychiatrist Stuart Brown:

I see Christ's words as expressions of the divine within him, a condition open to all of us without needing to rely on historic facts such as was there a real resurrection or not .... So your question of whether or not he is or is not the Son of God does not, if indeed he actually was not the real incarnation of God, mean a delusion and therefore lunacy. " . "Lunatic" means to me, psychotic, i.e. a precisely definable condition with a whole Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that supports the definitions of what it is to be crazy .... Now, if Christ was not biochemically and physiologically divine and did not really rise from the dead, does that make him psychotic? Based on• [Joseph] Campbell's readings of the origins and nature of mythic needs that permeate all of humanity, and also based on the great spiritual insights of Christ, and also based on the percept that we all have divinity inside us (as well as sin and evil), I say, of course not! Metaphoric truth is the closest we mortals get to "real truth," in my judgment. To force the Christian message into a literal historic straightjacket without ambiguity is like demanding that we see the earth as being created in six literal days, meaning you have to be nuts to deny the overwhelming evidence that the cosmos and our planet are very[,] very old! Tolerance emanates from being freed of the straightjacket of literalism.

Both remarks should be pondered carefully by anyone who is impressed by Lewis's arguments.

Predictably, Kreeft and Tacelli follow Lewis's cue and claim that Jesus does not exhibit any of the character traits typically associated with people suffering from "divinity complexes" such as egotism, narcissism, inflexibility, inability to understand and relate to other people, and so forth. They instantly conclude that he has the "wrong psychological profile" to be a lunatic. That is a bold claim in view of the fact that their "analysis" of Jesus's personality is less than a page long and is based on criteria of normality that sound like the kind of pop psychology one hears on television talk shows. It also fails to confront the real issue. Claiming to be God does not render one vulnerable to the suspicion of being delusional only if it is accompanied by further psychopathological symptoms; the claim is itself symptomatic of being delusional.

Let us explore this in more detail. If Jesus had the "wrong psychological profile" to be delusional, why are Mary and Joseph so distraught over his peculiar behavior as a youth (Luke 2:41-49)? Why does he fail to recognize his own mother and brothers, and say that his disciples are his mother and his brothers, as is anyone else who does the will of God (Matt. 12:46-50)? Why do people think he is "beside himself and even demon possessed? (Mark 3:21)? Why does he have conversations with demons and "unclean spirits"? (Mark 3:11-12) Why does he permit one of these demons to leave the body of a possessed man and enter into a herd of two thousand pigs who immediately gallop down a precipice into the sea and drown (Mark 5:12-14)? As the nineteenth century German New Testament scholar David Friedrich Strauss astutely comments:

The difficulties connected with this point are multiplied by the natural reflection that the drowning of the herd would involve no slight injury to the owners, and that of this injury Jesus was the mediate author.

Why does he borrow someone else's colt without asking permission (Mark 11:2-4)-behavior that would ordinarily be regarded as theft? Why does he curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit when it is not the season for fruit (Mark 11:13-15; Matt. 21:19-20)? Again, Strauss sees the problem with penetrating clarity:

The moral end of punishment, namely, to bring the punished person to a conviction and acknowledgment of his error, can have no existence in relation to a tree .... For one to be irritated against an inanimate object, which does not happen to be found just in the desired state, is with reason pronounced to be proof of an uncultivated mind; to carry such indignation to the destruction of the object is regarded as barbarous, and unworthy of a reasonable being .... Jesus must ... have known that it was the wrong season; so that the enigma remains, how [he] could be so indignant that the tree was in a condition which, owing to the circumstances known to him, was inevitable? ... Mark does not always go to work in the most considerate manner. Thus he hastens to furnish the explanation, that it was not the time for figs, not observing that while he accounts for the barrenness of the tree, he makes the conduct of Jesus morally inexplicable.

Even more inexplicable is his conduct in Matthew 11:20-24 where he threatens three entire villages (Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum) with eternal torment because their inhabitants did not embrace his teachings and repent because of his miracles. This seems shockingly unjust. Surely not everyone in those villages was present at his sermons-babies, the elderly, the deaf or otherwise handicapped, the sick, the dying, people who never heard of him, and so on. Is it just (or even rational) to consign people to a lake of fire eternally because they do not accept your teachings? He also threatens to cast people into Hell for not receiving his missionaries (Mark 6:11).

Other questions cry out for answers. Why does he just tell people what he thinks ("Verily, verily I say unto you ... ") and expect them to accept his teachings on his authority instead of entering into discussion with them, giving reasons for his beliefs, and replying to their objections? Some of these teachings are not only highly counterintuitive but lead to absurdities. To cite one particularly bizarre example, in Matthew 5:27-28 Jesus says, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." This enigmatic utterance, according to which wanting to do X is a way of doing X, seems to imply that wanting to commit adultery is as bad as actually committing adultery. But if that is correct, then two ludicrous conclusions follow. First, there is no longer any point in trying to resist temptation. Indeed, in trying to do so, one is guilty of a conceptual confusion: it is logically impossible to try to refrain from doing something that one has already done. Second, if wanting to commit adultery is as bad as actually committing it, then by parity of reasoning wanting to donate $50,000 to the American Leukemia Society is as good as actually donating it. In wanting to do so, one donates the money "in one's heart."

Why is it that the only reason he ever gives for being virtuous is prudential and self-seeking-"great will be your reward in heaven"?-or worse, to escape hell-fire? It is apparently a sin not to worship Jesus or, at least, not to believe that he is God (or the Son of God). That seems unreasonable and unethical. As Richard Robinson rightly points out:

No belief is as such morally wrong; but it is morally wrong to form one's belief in view of something other than truth and probability; and Jesus demanded this moral wrong.

Furthermore, since he is convinced that it is so important that people accept his teachings, repent, and believe in him, why does he teach in parables that even his own disciples often do not understand? And when they ask why he explains his parables to them privately but does not explain them to "the multitudes," why does he say that it is given to them-that is, his disciples-to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but not to "the multitudes" (Matt. 13:11)? In that case, why bother with "the multitudes" at all? What is the point? Other equally problematic passages could be cited. I am not suggesting that these passages depict Jesus as "raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type"-much less, as a "megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men." That is the rhetoric Lewis employs to make his readers smile knowingly as he moves on to more manageable topics, thereby preventing them from being seized by the realization that these passages exist and need to be explained, not explained away or ignored.

Kreeft and Tacelli are silent about all these passages in spite of the fact that they constitute strong and, after a while, cumulative textual evidence that counts against their claim about Jesus's "psychological profile" and soils the whitewashed portrait of him on which it depends. That portrait also ignores many other passages in which Jesus not only becomes angry, but erupts in "vindictive fury"20 that prompts him to lash out at the scribes and Pharisees with appalling abusiveness, calling them a "generation of vipers," "hypocrites," "fools," "blind," "serpents," and "whited sepulchers," and upbraiding them with even more menacing threats of being cast into uttermost darkness and a "furnace of fire in which there is only perpetual weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth" (Matt. 11:21-24, 12:34, 13:42,49,23:13-33,25:30,25:41-46; Mark 6:10-12, 9:48; Luke 11:39-52). The frequency of these "Woe unto you!" passages and the obvious glee with which this eternal punishment is described and contemplated is altogether remarkable. This extraordinary torrent of invective is not directed at social injustice or poverty or hunger or oppression or slavery or tyranny, but at people who disagree with him. These violent outbursts bespeak a zero tolerance for dissenting opinion and a very conditional interest in (and concern for) prospective followers. Is not that sort of behavior indicative of a "psychological profile" that bears looking into? Even if it is not the behavior of a lunatic or a megalomaniac, it is not quite what one expects from the main character in "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Plato and Xenophon never portray Socrates behaving in such ways. On the contrary, he characteristically responds to disagreement and lack of interest with cool detachment and impenetrable unflappability. I cannot imagine him resorting to name-calling, insults, verbal abuse, and threats of the kind that fill the synoptic Gospels.

I do not dispute Kreeft's and Talicelli's contention that there are also passages that depict Jesus as gentle, kind, and compassionate. But those passages, in which he is in a different mood, do not present the whole picture. There is another side to his personality that needs to be candidly acknowledged and honestly assessed.

Having dealt with the necessary preliminary material, it is time to turn to the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma and the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma themselves. The apparent force of the first is traceable to the alleged fact that if we deny that Jesus was God (or the Son of God), we cannot say that he was a great moral teacher-a claim few would wish to deny. The apparent cogency of the second is traceable to the alleged further alleged fact that if we agree that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, we are "forced" to conclude that he was God (or the Son of God). The rhetorical potential of both arguments was exploited to the hilt by Lewis and it has been further exploited by a succession of more recent popular apologists. Although these arguments have convinced many readers, they are both fallacious.

In the first edition of this book I did not distinguish the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma from the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma. I discussed only (what I called) the Lunatic or Lord Dilemma and argued that it is a false dilemma on the ground that being a lunatic is not the only alternative to being God. Several critics faulted me for failing to explain how anyone could make such a colossal mistake without being a lunatic. Like Lewis, they assume that honestly believing you are God is the sort of mistake that only a lunatic could make. Lewis encourages that kind of woolly thinking when he says, "If you think you are God, there is no chance for you" (GiD, 158). But this apparent witticism evades the real issue. This can be shown in two ways. First, we need to ask these critics (as someone should have asked Lewis) precisely what they mean by the term "lunatic." Until they have explained that, their contention is "mere" bluster and should be rejected in favor of the expert psychiatric opinion cited earlier in this chapter. Second, even if they could provide a reasonably clear explanation of the term, the dilemma has force if and only if saying that Jesus was a lunatic (or a fiend) are our only alternatives to saying that he was God. But clearly they are not. We can cheerfully concede that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a fiend without being "forced" to conclude that he was God.

I still think the dilemma is a false dilemma and that other rhetorically less explosive alternative views about Jesus are open to us. The various candidates I explored earlier in this chapter are among them. First, the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels is very ambiguous about who he is and makes a number of claims that are not only quite different from each other but also inconsistent with each other. That alone undermines both the dilemma and the trilemma. Second, "The Jesus of the synoptic Gospels says p" does not entail "The historical Jesus said p." That inference depends on a prior belief in the historical accuracy and general veracity of the synoptic Gospels. But that just begs the question. Third, according to mainstream New Testament scholarship, the synoptic Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but by later writers who based their accounts on oral traditions and (in some cases) earlier documents. In short, these Gospels are accounts of a person about whom their authors had no firsthand knowledge, whose character they have fictionalized and idealized, and whose words they have variously interpreted, perhaps inadvertently misreported, and freely embellished with ascriptions of deity.

Of course Lewis's champions will contest all these claims and shower us with reasons for rejecting them. But that is a very self-incriminating argumentative maneuver. The very fact that, having advanced the dilemma or the trilemma, they still find it necessary to refute each of these claims limpidly reveals that neither argument exhausts the available alternatives. If they did, there would be nothing left to refute.

Although I still think the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma is a false dilemma, I will not rely on that argument. In this second edition I will adopt a different strategy. Instead of arguing that the dilemma is a false dilemma, I will argue that the passage in Mere Christianity in which it occurs provides us with a way of logically blocking the dilemma before it can arise. My argument avoids rhetorical flourishes about lunatics, fiends, demons, and people who think they are poached eggs, and focuses on the nerve of Lewis's argument, which is a proposition that has nothing to do with such entities and is more fundamental than either the dilemma or the trilemma. The proposition is this: "No one who mistakenly claims to be God can be a great moral teacher." More precisely, "It is not possible for someone to mistakenly claim to be God and also be a great moral teacher." The dilemma and the trilemma both depend on the truth of this proposition. If it can be shown to be false, that is, if it is possible for someone to mistakenly claim to be God and be a great moral teacher, then the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma would be blocked. Recall that in Argument One being a lunatic or a fiend are not alternatives to being God, but to being a great moral teacher. I will argue that this proposition is false.

Lewis's claim implies that we should expect to find significant-and possibly glaring--differences between the moral teachings of a Jesus who was God and a Jesus who believed that he was God but was not, since his delusion of being God would completely "undermine" everything else he believed. I have already presented reasons for thinking that this amateur "diagnosis" is groundless. But I do not want my present claim to depend on that. So here is an independent argument. To say that we would expect to find significant and possibly glaring--differences between the moral teachings of a Jesus who was God and a Jesus who believed that he was God but was not is tantamount to saying that if Jesus was not God, then he would not have taught what he taught as depicted in the synoptic Gospels. He would presumably have taught something very different from and, in all likelihood, sharply opposed to it. For example, a Jesus who was God would presumably say things like, "Forgive people seventy times seven," whereas a Jesus who believed that he was God but was actually a lunatic or a fiend would presumably say things like, "Forgive people once or twice, but after that get even." Or possibly, "Don't forgive people at all. Hold lifelong grudges."

How does one go about determining whether someone is a great moral teacher? Obviously, by examining that person's moral teachings. So let us imagine a person who taught that we should love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves, that we should be meek, pure in heart, peacemakers, patient, honest, kind, nonlegalistic, nonjudgmental, forgiving (even of our enemies), compassionate, mindful of the poor and the downtrodden, and so forth. I suspect that most people would be inclined to say that such a person was a moral teacher-and possibly even a great one. But if the synoptic Gospels are reliable and historically accurate--a thesis on which Lewis's entire argument depends-that is precisely what Jesus taught.

I hasten to add that I am not advancing this as a startling claim that no one has ever thought of. It is a commonplace observation and it completely undercuts Lewis's argument. The reason is as follows. Lewis advocated a different way of determining whether Jesus was a great moral teacher: not by examining his moral teachings, but by examining his claims about himself-in particular, his claim to be God (or the Son of God or "one with" God). If that claim is false, then, according to Lewis, Jesus would not be a great moral teacher, but either a lunatic or a fiend. However, if Lewis is going to rely on the synoptic Gospels as his source of information about Jesus's claims about himself, he must also rely on them as his source of information about his moral teachings. The fact is that the foregoing list contains precisely the sort of moral teachings that Jesus is depicted as imparting and precisely the sort of moral virtues that he is depicted as urging his hearers to cultivate. If these teachings really are characterized by the "sanity and depth" for which Lewis extols them, then it does not matter whose teachings they are. Their "sanity and depth" make them self-certifying and worthy of acceptance on their own merits, not because they are the teachings of someone who was God or enjoyed some other equally lofty metaphysical status. In short, the question of whether Jesus's moral teachings are sound and the question of whether Jesus was God are separate questions and must be answered in logically independent ways.

If it is not the metaphysical status of a moral teacher but the content of his teachings that makes them sound ("sane," "deep," and so forth), then they remain sound ("sane," "deep," and so forth) even if the teacher was mistaken about other matters, for example, about who he was. What gives Lewis's claim its surface plausibility is the tempting but false assumption that we should expect to find significant-and possibly glaring--differences between the teachings of a Jesus who was God and a Jesus who believed that he was God but was not. This surface plausibility evaporates the minute we recognize that idle speculation about anticipated differences between the teachings of these two Jesus’s is irrelevant. If the synoptic Gospels are historically accurate, as Lewis believes, then we know what Jesus taught, whoever he was (or thought he was). The crucial point is this: Whatever conclusion we come to about who Jesus was, the soundness of his moral teachings is unaffected. If he was God (or the Son of God), then his moral teachings are the teachings of a man who was God (or the Son of God). If he was not God (or the Son of God), then his moral teachings are the teachings of a man who believed that he was God (or the Son of God), but was not. But although the identity and metaphysical status of Jesus would be drastically different depending on whether he was or was not God (or the Son of God), the content of his teachings would be exactly the same. So the proposition we started out with-"It is not possible for someone to mistakenly claim to be God and a/so be a great moral teacher"-turns out to be false. It follows that, contrary to what Lewis claims, we can deny that Jesus was God and say that he was a great moral teacher.

We can now dispose of the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma once and for all.

Since the proposition "It is not possible for someone to mistakenly claim to be God and a/so be a great moral teacher" is false, it follows that the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma is logically blocked, since it presupposes that this proposition is true. We can go further. Since the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma has been blocked, it follows that the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma is also blocked because in order to conclude that Jesus was God, we must first deny that he was a lunatic or a fiend. But these alternatives were both eliminated from the discussion when the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma was blocked. In short, the Lord, Lunatic, or Fiend Trilemma depends on the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma. If the dilemma fails, as I have argued, the trilemma goes with it.23 In the future, let us hear no more about these arguments.

Before turning to other matters, a disclaimer is in order. I am not faulting Lewis for failing to clear up the Doctrine of the Trinity and for failing to present a complete Christology in a ten-minute radio broadcast The Christian church did not attain any tolerable degree of clarity about that until the Council of Nicea (325 CE), which declared that Jesus Christ is "the onlybegotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of the same substance with the father, by whom all things were made." The Athanasian Creed added that "we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity: neither confounding the Persons, not dividing the substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. ... And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal" and perhaps more to the point "not three incomprehensibles ... but one incomprehensible." And the question of Jesus's own metaphysical status-whether he was God, a man, and whether he had one nature or two--was not settled until the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). Before those definitive creedal statements, theological speculation was rife and a wide variety of theories competed for allegiance. The problem was generated by the fact that the synoptic Gospels portray Jesus eating, drinking, getting tired, getting angry, being lonely, suffering, and dying-which suggests that he was a flesh and blood human being. But they also portray him casting out demons, visited by Moses and Elijah, stopping storms, healing the sick, raising the dead, and rising from the dead himself-which suggests that he was more than a human being. The so-called Christological heresies were pre-Nice an and pre-Chalcedonian attempts to make sense of these two aspects of Jesus.

The English term "heresy" comes from the Greek term hairesis, which means "choice." No theory is heretical in and of itself. It can only be judged so against the background of an orthodox doctrine (or body of doctrine) from which it is an aberration. "Orthodoxy" comes from two Greek words: orthos (straight or correct) and doxa (opinion or belief). Just as an orthodontist gives you straight teeth, so an orthodox theologian gives you straight (true) doctrines. Heresy is a form of heterodoxy-from the Greek words heteros (other) and doxa (opinion or belief). So a heretical belief is a belief other than the true one. Since it is impossible to know that a doctrine is heterodox until you know what is orthodox, heterodoxy is parasitic on orthodoxy. The Council of Chalcedon ruled that Jesus had two natures--one human, the other divine. He was not half man and half God, but fully God and fully man-a God-man-two natures, one person. These two natures were said to be related "without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation-the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive nature of each being preserved, and combining in one person and hypostasis-not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten God, Logos, Lord Jesus Christ." That is to say, the two natures are unmixed and unconfused, on the one hand, and undivided and unseparated, on the other. It is hard to know what to make of this far from perspicuous-if not downright self-contradictory---creedal affirmation. But from 451 on, it was orthodoxy. Any other view was heresy.

There were a lot of them. According to Monarchianism, Jesus was an ordinary human being with an indwelling divine power. (This view is sometimes called "Adoptionism" because it implies that Jesus was God's chosen, or adopted, means of revealing himself to human beings.) According to Arianism, repudiated in 325 by the Council of Nicea, Jesus was not God, but a lesser being created by God-not "of the same (homoousion) substance" as the Father, but of a "like" or "similar" (homoiousion) substance.2s According to Docetism, he seemed human and seemed to die, but he did not die because he was not human but God in human form. According to Nestorianism, he did not have two separate natures, but was two separate persons: the man Jesus and the divine Son of God. According to Monophysitism-from the Greek words monos (one) and physics (nature)-he did not have two natures, but only one. According to Apollinarianism, he had a human body but a divine mind. According to Monothelitism, he had two natures, but one will. I could go on. But even this whirlwind survey of the Christological heresies should be enough to convince any fair-minded reader that the question of "precisely" who is Jesus has no simple and obvious correct answer.

But while I am not faulting Lewis for failing to clear up the Doctrine of the Trinity and for failing to present a complete Christology in a ten-minute radio broadcast, I will fault him on another ground. In view of the fact that it took the best theological and philosophical minds of the Christian church the better part of five centuries to reach even minimal agreement about who Jesus was, it is nothing short of astounding for Lewis to tell his (in most cases) theologically and philosophically uninitiated radio listeners that if they are not prepared to say that he was a lunatic or a fiend, their only alternative is to admit that he was "precisely what he said" (PP, 24). If Jesus's claim about himself had been even remotely that precise, the strife-torn history and bitter controversy that plagued early Christianity for five centuries would have never taken place. Lewis's apparent willingness to ignore these inconvenient facts seems to render him vulnerable to his own rather harsh criticism of "people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about" (MC, 145). In view of his carelessly formulated arguments and complete silence about five centuries of raging controversy about the very doctrine he assures his readers is so simple that they have only three alternatives and two of them are absurd, it is no wonder that professional philosophers and theologians do not take him seriously and, in fact, largely ignore him.

I will conclude this chapter with a discussion of what is arguably the heart of Men' Christianity. One of the reasons Lewis objects so strongly to saying that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God is because Christian writings, beginning with the New Testament, place much more emphasis on what he did than on what he taught. They are constantly talking "about His death and His coming to life again .... They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed" (MC, 57):

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. ... We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying he disabled death itself. That is the formula, that is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. (MC, 57-58)

Having expounded this "formula"-the core proposition that "has to be believed" if one is to be a Christian-Lewis distinguishes it from particular theories about how Christ's death accomplished this. He starts with one of his analogies:

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done for him without knowing how it works. All theories are quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (MC, 58-59)

However, although Lewis thinks all theories about how Christ's death put us right with God are secondary, he acknowledges that some of them "are worth looking at" and discusses one particular theory that he describes as "the one most people have heard"-the one "about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us" (MC, 59). The theory that Lewis formulates so pithily is (what theologians call) the Theory of Vicarious (or Substitutionary) Atonement. Although most people have heard this theory, they have probably never heard anyone admit that before he became a Christian, he thought it was "a very silly" and even "immoral" theory," but now that he is a Christian, it no longer seems "quite so immoral and so silly as it used to" (MC, 57, 59). That is the man with whom we have to deal-"the Apostle to the Skeptics" at his quasi-irreverent best.

As Lewis sees it, the problem is this: "If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did he not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead?" (MC, 59). He replies by making a distinction. There is no point at all if you are thinking of "paying the penalty" in the "police-court sense," according to which wrongdoers must be punished for their own crimes and the vicarious punishment of innocent parties is out of the question. However:

[I]f you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take "paying the penalty," not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of "standing the racket" or "footing the bill," then, of course, it is matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend. (MC, 59)

According to Christian theology, Jesus is the "kind friend" who gets Man out of the "hole" into which he has "got" himself by dying for him (MC, 57).

In these passages Lewis advances several claims that should be noted carefully. First, he makes a sharp distinction between the "formula" that "has to be believed"-that Christ's death has washed out our sins and somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start-and particular theories about how it accomplished this. Second, he emphasizes that while Christians must believe the "formula," they need not accept any particular theory about how it works. Third, having relegated all theories to a very secondary status, he singles out one of them-the Theory of Vicarious (or Substitutionary) Atonement, according to which Christ was punished for our sins-and dismisses it as a "silly" and "immoral" theory because there could be no "possible point" in allowing a guilty party to go free and to punish an innocent party instead. Fourth, having rejected this theory out of hand, he recommends another one, according to which Christ's death puts us right with God, not by being punished in our place, but by paying the debt we owe to God.

However, a moment's reflection reveals that Lewis got this very wrong. It is not the monetary sense of justice, but the moral ("police-court") sense that is involved in the redemption of mankind. The total inadequacy of the monetary model was shown once and for all by Thomas Paine:

If I owe a person money and cannot pay, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself; it is then no longer justice, it is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay ... and that in truth there is no such thing as redemption.

The total inadequacy of the monetary model can be seen even more clearly by considering two examples:

Situation A: Smith borrows $5,000.00 from Jones and agrees to repay it in six months. When the due date arrives, he does not have the money and cannot repay the loan. His "kind friend" Brown learns of his plight and offers to bail him out by repaying Jones himself. Jones agrees. Brown then pays him $5,000.00 plus interest. Jones is delighted that he has his money, Smith is delighted that he is off the hook, and Brown is delighted that he could be of service to Smith.

Situation B: Mr. and Mrs. Black are spending the evening visiting friends. While they are out, Green breaks into their home and is in the process of stealing Mrs. Black's jewelry when the Blacks return unexpectedly. Mr. Black catches Green red-handed, and picks up the phone to call the police. Green pulls out a gun, shoots Black dead, and flees. Mrs. Black arrives on the scene, and discovers her jewelry missing and her husband dead. She calls the police. They arrive promptly, apprehend Green who is still lurking in the neighborhood, and take him back to the house so Black's widow can press charges. In the meantime, the Black's next-door neighbor, White, has heard the commotion and comes out to see what is going on. Seeing Green's plight, he implores Black's widow to press charges against him and allow Green to go free. She agrees. Green is delighted that he will not have to go to prison for burglary and murder, "kind friend" White is delighted that he could be of service to Green, Black's widow is distraught about her husband's untimely death, but delighted that someone will be punished (she does not care whom), and the police are delighted that the "suspect" is in custody and law and order has been restored. I am confident that everyone will agree that Situation A is completely acceptable both legally and ethically. I am equally confident that everyone will agree that Situation B is completely unacceptable both legally and ethically-and even absurd.

The disastrous implications for Lewis's monetary-based theory of atonement are unavoidable. Anyone can repay a loan. But only the guilty can justly be punished for their crimes. In moral contexts, all talk about substitutes and vicarious punishment is misguided. Whereas Brown's willingness to bail Smith out is admirably generous and frightfully nice, White's willingness to be prosecuted for Green's criminal conduct is preposterous. Brown can justifiably "foot the bill" for Smith's loan, but White cannot justifiably "foot the bill" for Green's burglary and murder--even if he volunteers. Indeed, there is no "bill" to "foot." Again, moral wrongdoing is different from financial indebtedness. Whereas Jones's willingness to accept payment from someone other than his debtor is an act of kindness or, at least, one that shows good business sense, Mrs. Black's willingness to press charges against White for crimes he did not commit is as preposterous as White's willingness to have the charges pressed. The police are equally benighted.

But if it is not the monetary sense of justice but the moral ("police-court") sense that is involved in the redemption of mankind, it follows that Lewis's analogy is not only a poor one, but also an analogy that is open to a serious moral objection. Crimes against other persons (including God) are not legal debts that must be repaid, but moral offenses that must be punished. This deprives Lewis of the only reason he gives for rejecting the atonement by punishment theory. So either he is left with no theory at all or he must embrace a theory that he himself regards as "silly" and "immoral."

It is odd that Lewis defended a theory of atonement that was decisively refuted almost two centuries before he wrote Mere Christianity without ever mentioning Paine and attempting a rebuttal. It is even odder that an author who believes that God is the Power behind the moral law, a being who is supremely good in our sense and "intensely interested" in right conduct and "fair play," advocated a theory of atonement that not only fails to satisfy our sense of justice, but violates it. This egregious error removes a keystone in the arch supporting his bridge between reason and faith.

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Used with permission of the author who retains all of his copyrights. Others may link to this chapter but copying and pasting it into any other site is expressly forbidden.

From Wycliffe Bible Translator to Freethinker

2008-07-06T22:52:00.007-04:00

I'd like to thank Ed Babinski and John Loftus for encouraging me to join this blog. You can read my blow-by-blow story on the Secular Web, but I'll provide a condensed version here.

My parents met and married as evangelical/fundamentalist missionaries in Ethiopia, my birthplace. My parents' missionary career also took us to Liberia and Nigeria, where we remained until I was 16. It was during my ninth grade year at boarding school in Nigeria that I entered into what I considered a personal relationship with Jesus, pouring out my heart to God with earnestness and reading his word (the Bible) daily.

After returning to the U.S., I went on to earn a B.S. in computer science at LeTourneau University, a non-denominational Christian college in east Texas. From there I went on to gain a one-year graduate certificate of biblical studies at Columbia Biblical Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Shortly after that I met a young lady who shared my goal of becoming a missionary Bible translator for a language group that did not yet have a translation of the Bible. We married in 1992 and joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1993. After the required linguistic training and support-raising, we set off to Europe for French learning before heading to a predominantly Muslim West African country to learn a minority language and translate the Bible into it.

We were still in the language learning process in 2000 when doubts that I had entertained during my college years began to re-surface. I had difficulties with many of the passages in the Old Testament, so I went online in search of apologetic materials to answer my questions. As it turns out, instead of finding anything to help me, I found the opposite: Robert M. Price's online book Beyond Born Again. This sent my faith into a tailspin from which I recovered twice before I finally threw in the towel about nine months after my March 2000 crisis. We left the mission field in the summer of 2000 so I could work through my doubts, but due to my waffling, the mission board requested our resignation in October 2000 (a painful but appropriate decision, in retrospect).

I remained a firm believer in God for about a year after my deconversion from Christianity, considering myself a deist, but gradually moved toward an atheist-leaning agnosticism. For all practical purposes, I am today an atheist, though I suppose I haven't yet grown fully comfortable with the term, preferring labels like freethinker or humanist.

Though my wife of 16 years remains a committed evangelical Christian, we have a relatively strong marriage with no intention of parting ways. We have three children, 13, 11 and 9 who attend church with my wife. At least the older two show some signs of independent thinking. Only time will tell where they end up.

So that's my journey in a nutshell. I do encourage you to read my full story on the Secular Web if you'd like to know more about what brought me down this path. I look forward to engaging with believers and former believers alike. I'm especially interested in knowing what leads some of us to desert the faith and others to remain in it. What is it that makes the difference?

The Father's Foreskin Feast

2008-07-06T03:38:00.003-04:00

Sarah Cooper (35) of Augusta, Maine, was just another ordinary member of St. Luke’s Catholic Church, along with her husband and their three children. That all changed at a church fish fry on a certain Friday afternoon. Little did Mrs. Cooper know, but she was about to make headlines!

“I was just sitting there, nibbling on my hushpuppies and fries. When I took a bite of my fish sandwich, I started to taste a funny taste. Then I noticed something chewy and gross in my mouth. I got sickened by the grossness and quickly spit it out. That’s when I noticed what it looked like. It looked like a human foreskin!”

And she wasn’t wrong. A human foreskin was indeed found in her fish sandwich, smothered under ketchup, tartar sauce, and a nice helping of mayo. “Well,” said Father Perry Showalter (56), devoted priest of St. Luke’s parish for the last twenty-one years, “at least it didn’t cause the commotion until after everyone finished eating.”

Nicely, Mrs. Cooper agreed to be discreet about the matter until it was brought to the attention of the monsignor, but her husband was none too thrilled about the fact that for a brief moment, his wife was led into involuntary sin by having a part of another man’s penis in her mouth. “It’s a sad day for all religions when a faithful Catholic Christian woman can’t go to church without chewing on another dude’s cock! I’m furious and I want to find out how this happened!” said a red-faced and visibly distraught Matthew Cooper (39), an air force captain and husband of thirteen years to Sarah. “I’ve been a good Catholic all my life, and never have I seen anything like this!”

We understand Mr. Cooper’s rage, and we also want to find out what happened. So we decided to sit down with Father Perry, who was gracious enough to take the time out of his busy schedule to discuss the issue with us at length. Father Perry was not hesitant to put the blame where he said it was due—on his own church for the institution’s timelessly bad habit of going hog-wild for holy relics. In this case, the holy relic was believed to be the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity.

“Well, it’s pretty simple,” Father Perry explained. “The only way the foreskin could have wound up in Mrs. Cooper’s sandwich is because of the recent truckload of foreskins, which was delivered to our church only a week earlier. One of them must have somehow gotten mixed in with the food during meal preparation, that’s all.” Father Perry, seeing our dissatisfaction with his words, elaborated further…

“You see, we are Catholics, and over the years, many Catholic churches have claimed to possess the one true foreskin of our Lord and Savior, along with tons of other “holy” relics that were found to be out-and-out frauds. Our church absolutely loves bombastic claims of the healing power of shrines and holy relics, and despite having some learned sages and scholars among us, our members are still stupider than Jupiter—stupid enough, in fact, to believe that visiting a holy site or touching a holy relic will bring healing and blessings from above.

Now you would think that with all the ‘seeing’ that the Holy See does, that they’d be able to detect what is true and what is false in the department of holy relics. But, as it turns out, God is more interested in having the Virgin Mary appear on tree stumps, making statues bleed, and having our Italian grannies make good garlic and tomato sauces to go with freshly-cooked pasta than he is in certifying accuracy in matters of the divine.

Over the centuries, the Catholic church has been as wrong as a still-working lottery winner on a great number of things, so it shouldn’t surprise us when pious, boy-touching bachelors with deadpan grins, tall hats, and fears of falling victim to chronic masturbation tell us lies. And not only is the Catholic Church filled with liars, but with shameless hypocrites too.

We once burned people alive for denying that un-baptized babies go to Hell, but now we believe precisely the same thing we once condemned others for believing. That’s just how we work. We’re a church of fallible human beings, and we’re no different than any other glorified, gregarious, gaggle of old geezers out there who claim a monopoly on faith and forgiveness.

So, getting back to the matter of the foreskin, the problem is that we can’t say for sure which of the possibly holy foreskins belonged to Jesus, even after many centuries of feuding and quarrelling with rival churches over the issue. To keep from throwing away the true foreskin of God Almighty (and to raise money for the church by having everyone of them put on display so that people will pay to come and see them), we decided to keep them around. Maine’s Roman Catholic Diocese thought it was a good idea to keep the foreskins here, and that is what led to the unfortunate accidental ingesting of the foreskin by Mrs. Cooper.”

When asked what he intends to do about the situation as a means of restitution for Mrs. Cooper, Father Perry replied, “We’ll do the same thing we’ve always done when we mess up—give a formal and somber apology, and then pretend the whole thing never happened. Every time we screw up (and we do often), we just say “I’m sorry,” and it has worked like a charm! No matter how many men we burned alive or stretched on the rack, no matter how many innocent women were tortured and falsely accused of being witches, all we had to do was offer up an apology and it was like spilled milk!

That’s what we did with Galileo, you’ll recall; the church wronged him, and not until many years after his death did the church get around to offering an arid, half-assed apology for it. Well, we intend to be much better to Mrs. Cooper than we were to Galileo by apologizing to her while she is still alive. And here it is for the record (and we’re only going to say it once): We’re sorry, Mrs. Cooper!”

When asked if she felt that the resolution of this matter was sufficient, Mrs. Cooper commented, “Oh yes. Of course, I accept the apology, although I’m having mixed feelings about this; the thought of having another man’s private part in my mouth was very disturbing. But then, I must admit that our church says that the foreskin I had in my mouth might have belonged to Jesus Christ, and if that is the case, I am deeply honored to have had a part of my Savior’s blessed hoo-haa in my unworthy mouth!”

(JH)

Isis Heals The Sick Boy

2008-07-06T01:58:00.002-04:00

Ancient Egypt had a lot of firsts. Resurrection and healing were two of them. In a story that you can read here Isis the Mother of Horus and the Wife of the resurrected Osiris, sets the standard for Jesus to follow by healing a sick boy.

Stories of Isis and Osiris precede the development of writing. That means before 3100 BC. I highly recommend that Christians take a college course in Egyptology. Keep in mind the principle that the greater civilization influences the lesser. Some of the things Christians should focus on are Egyptian Mythololgy, the pounding the egyptians gave the Syrians every year for about twenty years (around 1479 - 1425 BC) and the "foreign kings" (1648–1540 BC) that ruled the egyptian Delta.

Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

2008-07-05T22:03:00.000-04:00

Link. Thanks to Ed Owens who alerted me to this story.

Weekend retreats for recovering from religion

2008-07-04T05:54:00.003-04:00

Leaving your Religion?

or still feeling the effects?

It's not the end of the world!

Join us at a recovery retreat in August, 2008, in Berkeley, CA.

"Release and Reclaim I", Aug. 8-10, will be a supportive retreat for those who are beginning to let go of toxic beliefs and recover from an authoritarian religion such as Christian fundamentalism.

"Release and Reclaim II", Aug. 15-17, will be an advanced weekend for moving beyond religion and reclaiming a life of joy, creativity, and connection. It will be open to those who have already attended a retreat or have done healing work already.

Both retreats are led by Dr. Marlene Winell, author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving the Fold. Interested participants are asked to discuss their situation with Marlene first. Both weekends are also open to professionals by special arrangement. Call Dr. Winell at 510-292-0509

More about Marlene Winell is at www.marlenewinell.net.

RELEASE and RECLAIM I: Sorting it out and Healing

Do you feel alone in your struggle for healing? Join us for a powerful weekend with others who can understand and support you. We'll rant and rave, tell our stories, discuss the issues, visualize, role-play, dance and draw – whatever it takes to let go of toxic teachings and reclaim our lives. A joyful, empowered life is your birthright and we will use individual and group processes for learning new directions. Bring your sense of humor and plan to have fun too.

WHEN: FRIDAY, August 8, 7PM until SUNDAY, August 10, 3PM

RELEASE and RECLAIM II: Growing and Thriving

Have you left your religion behind but you're not sure what's next? Join others who are feeling liberated and wanting to rebuild a life that allows full, creative expression of who you are. We'll help each other with courage and confidence dealing with "the world," sharing our experiences and doing exercises for tapping into inner resources of wisdom, love, and strength – perhaps more than you ever expected if you were taught to be dependant!

We'll look at issues of enjoying life now instead of later, sexuality, "spirituality," and relationships. In a supportive group, we'll use art, movement, and visualization as well as discussion. Bring your wild and worldly self and plan to have a great time.

WHEN: FRIDAY, August 15, 7PM until SUNDAY, August 17, 3PM.
BOTH RETREATS:

WHERE: A beautiful house in Berkeley, California, with hot tub and other amenities. The closest airport is Oakland, and we can help you with connections from there.

COST: $320 for the workshop, $125 for room and board. $445 total. $25 discount given for full payment by July 20. Financial need considered and options available.

TO REGISTER: Contact Marlene Winell for a telephone discussion about your interest. Send an email to mwinell@gmail.com or call 510-292-0509. $100 deposit will then secure a space. Register soon as group size is limited to 8.

Note: These retreats are designed to help develop networks of support that extend beyond a single weekend. With time for sharing meals and relaxing in a house together, participants often make lasting friends - face to face, not virtual! We also have an online group and conference calls as a follow-up support system.

Read comments about a previous retreat at: http://marlenewinell.net/

One Mechanism for Biological Bases for Behavior

2008-07-02T12:20:00.005-04:00

This is a datum to support my assertion that Biological Bases for Behaviors are incorrectly interpreted as "Sin" and that we don't have as much free will as we think we do. The new field of Epigenetics is documenting that regulating gene expression in the brain affects how susceptible we are to maladies such as depression, anxiety and drug addiction.

One viewpoint that I keep pushing around here is that we don't have as much free will as we think we do. I argue that the brain is an electrochemical device where millions of tiny biological switches accept combinations of thousands of analog signals that interact together to turn processes on and off to produce what we call "our self". Now I know there is lot a packed into that statement (presumptions and all) but I want to focus on one molecular mechanism that is a part of all of that.

First, a layman's description of Genes and Gene expression.

What is a Gene?
Genes are a smaller component of DNA. It is made up of combinations of chemicals units called A (Adenine), T (Thymine), G (Guanine) and C (Cytosine). Chromatin proteins called histones compact and organize DNA to form chromosomes. Chromosomes are made up of DNA and reside in the nucleus of a Cell. Chromosomes guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins.

Genes carry chemical information that is used by the cells to collectively determine their characteristics. Each cell contains from 20,000 to 25,000 genes attached to a strand of DNA coiled up into a chromosome, sitting in the nucleus of a cell.

One estimate I found states that there are between 75 to 100 trillion cells that make up the human body. Only in the brain there are estimated to be 100 billion cells interconnected by trillions of synapses (http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/070405_brain_use.html).

Gene Expression
Our genes form the blue prints for proteins. Our bodies are built on proteins, just like a nicely marbled rib eye steak. Accordingly our brains are built on proteins. Every cell has every gene, but each cell only uses a subset of those genes. For a gene to be "expressed" it must be accessed by a chemical catalyst to cause the formation of an RNA molecule. The RNA is then used to make a protein, and the cell uses the protein to carry out its purpose in life, whatever that may be. In the brain, the purpose is to run your body in the background without any conscious effort or knowledge of it on your part and to produce the various stages of consciousness you experience between sleep to stressing out in traffic. Don't forget that while you are stressing out in traffic and worrying about that slow person in your way, you are still listening to the radio, working the pedals, breathing, remembering to call someone when you get in, etc. There's a lot going on that you are not conscious of so it is not accurate to say that YOU are in control, but it is accurate to say that your sense of self is one of those processes going on in the brain that you are not of aware of or even know how to manipulate. But those process are manipulated automatically biologically by a wide range of bodily process which include hormones produced by your organs (the endocrine system). Your brain gets feedback from your organs and it is regulated by them whether you like it or want it or not. Your brain reacts to stimulus and is regulated by the various chemicals that are set into motion as a result. Your experience in traffic changes your mind, your mood, your attitude, your thoughts, your wishes, your desires whether you like it or not. Those molecules that are the catalyst for creating RNA molecules are released, and they go about feeding the cells that your brain is using to handle your traffic experience. Your performance, your emotion, your mood, you thoughts, your access to your memories and your sense of self depends on how well those molecular processes work.

For an RNA molecule to be produced, a chromosome "unravels" (remember that a chromosome is coiled up DNA) to permit the catalyst molecules access to the sequence of ATGC that it is made up of. To "silence" a gene, is to prevent the interaction of the catalyst by preventing it from getting to the uncoiled part of the chromosome or from preventing the chromosome from uncoiling. The body does this on its own, your 'self' doesn't have any choice in the matter, whether it works properly or not. In fact, you or your personality can be modified and you won't even realize it. Just like gene expression causes your pancreas to work properly to do what it is supposed to do, gene expression causes your brain to work properly to do what is supposed to do which is run the processes in your body (such as your sense of self), and create your physical and emotional characteristics that everyone else knows as "YOU".

Now the Hard questions. Were does the soul fit into this? What is "the Soul"? Is the Soul "the personality"? Is the Soul the "I" in "I am alive"? If the personality/soul likes chocolate or to harm animals, can it stop liking those things? Why do people like anything? Am I responsible for things that I like? How do we turn "liking" on or off?

I'll buy a beer for anyone that can tell me why chocolate is so appealing to people. I know why, I'm just looking for audience participation.

One way to turn "liking" off is by manipulating the brain. Its bound to be more reliable than praying and there's no worrying about whether you've got the right god or not.

Nature versus Nurture.
We have been living with this concept since as long as I can remember. What makes one tomato more tasty than another or one person more amicable than another? Finally we know, it is a feedback loop between nature and nurture and we have identified one mechanism by which it happens. Now that this mechanism is revealed, scientists hope to develop treatments for maladies such as drug addiction, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety. Maybe one day they can discover where a specific desire originates from. Maybe one day it can be used to rehabilitate criminals. Maybe one day they can fix the Limbic Systems in psychopaths or make sociopaths more compassionate. Maybe one day they can give me something that will allow me to like mushrooms.

If I were to take a liking to harming animals, and I acted on that, then I am responsible and should be stopped, not necessarily for punishment because punishment may not mean anything to me, but I should be stopped simply to prevent more harm. However, if I have the desire, but do not act on it, since it is "in my heart" the bible says that I am still responsible for it. The desire is born in the brain, electrochemically, and subject to the "nature vs nurture" feedback loop. Since this feedback loop is verifiable, and predictable to a degree, and at least one mechanism for how it works has been identified, to say that human kind is accountable to the creator for "its sin" is as ridiculous as to say that I am responsible for how ugly I am or I am responsible for my dislike of mushrooms or that I even have a choice in the matter.

For further reading
Scientific American Mind, June 2008
* The New Genetics of Mental Illness (subscription or print only)
* Unmasking Memory Genes (subscription or print only)
* Addicted to Starvation: The Neurological Roots of Anorexia

From me on DC
* Reasonable Doubt About Sin: Biological Bases for Behavior
* Sin, Genes, Sugars and Alcohol
* Brains "Trust Machinery" Identified
* "When Our Vices Get the Better of Us"
* Negativity Is Contagious, Study Finds
* Schizophrenia Candidate Genes Affect Even Healthy Individuals
* Brain atrophy in elderly leads to unintended Racism, Depression and Gambling