{"id":5493,"date":"2011-03-06T17:59:08","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T17:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5493"},"modified":"2011-03-06T18:37:34","modified_gmt":"2011-03-06T18:37:34","slug":"lexington-concord-fought-in-vain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/lexington-concord-fought-in-vain\/","title":{"rendered":"Lexington, Concord Fought In Vain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The fame of C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” argument has always been deeply baffling to me. The normal reaction of a thoughtful person (me, Martin Gardner, Richard Dawkins) on first hearing it is: Why couldn’t Jesus just have been mistaken<\/em>? People mistakenly believe all sorts of wacky things; and the notion that one might be divine was a lot less wacky in 1st-century Palestine than it would be in 21st-century Manhattan. It is after all a tenet of most religions that every one of us is to some degree <\/em>divine.<\/p>\n

Yet this (it seems to me) trivial piece of illogic is<\/em> mightily famous. Google turned up “about 11,200 results”\u00a0\u2014 admittedly less famous than Pauli’s Exclusion Principle<\/a> (91,900 results) but nearly twice as famous\u00a0as the Ragsdale Conjecture<\/a> (6,090 results). The defenses of it, which form a good portion of that 11,200, are logic-free, so far as I could be bothered to look.<\/p>\n

The other thing that baffles me about ol’ C.S. is that he has been so enthusiastically embraced by American Christians. I recall reading that there is a church somewhere in the Republic with a Lewis-themed stained-glass window.\u00a0 The dotty-Anglican type<\/a> is perfectly familiar to anyone raised in England, but I’m surprised it travels so well, or least has in Lewis’s case.\u00a0 If Americans will swallow this, what possible objection can they have to Marmite<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew: The fame of C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” argument has always been deeply baffling to me. The normal reaction of a thoughtful person (me, Martin Gardner, Richard Dawkins) on first hearing it is: Why couldn’t Jesus just have been mistaken? People … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,711],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5493"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5496,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493\/revisions\/5496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}