Oxford, 6/10/08

Don June 10th, 2008

Most of the students are in a set of flats about a mile from town center.  They’ve organized themselves into a cooperative so they can pool their money and cook dinner for one another: home made meals for less than 2 pounds a person!  They were kind enough to invite me last night.  After cleaning up they disperse to the Bod (Bodleian Library) to study, then to the Bird (Eagle and Child, the original Inklings’ favorite pub) to hang out before heading back to bed.  This is not a for credit course, but they are studying harder than most of my students for whom the work counts.  Maybe it’s the romanesque, gothic, or neoclassical surroundings in the various parts of the library.  It couldn’t be that our lectures are actually motivating them–could it?

Today I covered Mere Christianity, concentrating on two of Lewis’s arguments: the moral argument for theism and the famous trilemma (“Lord, Liar, Lunatic) argument for the deity of Christ.  Lewis’s version of the Moral Argument (the existence of an objective and absolute moral law requires a moral Lawgiver) is somewhat dated, because sixty years ago he could make certain assumptions that we can no longer take for granted.  For example, he says with some confidence that nobody says, “To hell with your standard” when caught in a moral breach; they are more likely to make excuses.  Today people are quite capable of saying such things–or, at least, they think they are.  But it’s one thing to say that you theoretically believe in no moral absolutes when you are thinking of yourself as the one potentially getting away with something you want to do, such as preserving your promiscuous lifestyle.  It is quite another thing when you are asked to contemplate yourself as the potential victim.  “So, if I were strong enough to get away with it, it would be perfectly all right for me to . . .”  No, it wouldn’t.  The moral argument can still work, but we may need to add some extra steps today that Lewis six decades ago could afford to skip. 

The Trilemma has been attacked (e.g., by Beversluis) as fallacious.  So we analyzed it carefully to see if it can withstand its critics.  There are two ways it could fail.  First, logically, it might commit the fallacy of false dilemma:  there might be other options that Lewis left out.  Assuming that Jesus really did seriously claim to be God incarnate, are there any other alternatives?  He was telling the truth, he was lying, he was insane.  We tried hard to think of other options, but they all quickly reduced to being versions of one of Lewis’s three.  So we concluded that the argument does hold together logically.

The other way an argument can fail is if one of its premises is factually incorrect.  The trilemma has been attacked at this point: it assumes that Jesus said he was God, but, it has been argued, modern scholarship casts significant doubt on whether Jesus actually said those things.  N. T. Wright criticizes Mere Christianity on this point in a recent Chrstianity Today article.  But this attack fails when one brings in the essay we read yesterday, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” or “Fernseed and Elephants.”  Lewis shows the methodologies by which the historical reliability of the Gospels is supposedly overturned to be fundamentally flawed.  Wright ignores the audience for which Mere Christianity was written: uneducated English laymen in World War II.  It would have been inappropriate, indeed silly, to bring Biblical criticism in to complicate things for them.  But Lewis shows elsewhere that if someone raises that issue he is more than prepared to deal with it.  So the trilemma is also valid, if we are prepared to deal with the potential objections from negative critics.  The burden of proof is on them that the eyewitness sources are unreliable, and their reasons for questioning them are woefully inadequate.

Then Dr. Bauman spent an hour on A Grief Observed, Lewis’s account of his grief over the loss of his wife Joy to cancer after their happy but painfully brief marriage.  Lewis brilliantly describes the process of grief, openly lets us see his doubts and struggles, and wins through them back to vigorous faith in the end.  We finished with a practical discussion of how to counsel people who are grieving.  The consensus was that it was better to listen and be there for them rather than try to hurry them through the process with lame words. 

This afternoon the students have a seminar on how to get into grad school at an Oxford college.  They are absolutely drooling over the idea.  After that I think some are heading over to the Ashmolean Museum, full of Greek, Roman, Assyrian, and Egyptian antiquities, Modern (i,e., Renaissance through the present) European art, and the Alfred Jewel, which apparently actually belonged to Alfred the Great, the scholar king of the ninth century who saved England from both the barbarity of the Vikings and the darkness of her own illiteracy.  But don’t get me started on Alfred.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

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