If you believe the New Testament you have only 3 choices… Islam doesn’t hold the Gospels to be inspired from God so you are right they would say none of the above.No, there are more than 3 options, the most obvious of which is that he never actually said those words. This is precisely why the Trilemma is logically fallacious.
Muslims doubt the veracity of the New Testament, and so if you provided a Muslim with the multiple-choice style question she’d probably say “none of the above”.
Sure, once you claim that selective texts are corrupt, all bets are off. Very convenient.I don’t know that Lewis’ Trilemma is insulting to Islam, but if anything Islam is evidence of the trilemma being logically fallacious.
So in searching for the truth, you look towards Islam? Why not Isaiah? Why not other books of the OT? Why not other apologists? I realize that some apologists will use the same books that you question but not all do so. Some actually use logic and reson.Personally, I see my Catholic faith as an extremely coherent way of explaining reality and life in its diverse facets. Truth be told, prayer and the attempt to foster a personal relationship with Jesus Christ have been a key factor in this coherency, but still I can never be sure whether the God I am praying to is the Trinitarian God or Allah of Islam.
So, I go to apologetics for reassurance. There have been eucharistic miracles down the centuries, there are the incorruptibles, there are the mystics, those with the stigmata, the arguments for the resurrection, and other fallible aesthetic experience I have had which leads to the likely conclusion that God is indeed love.
But I’m not bigoted enough to say that the evidence I have seen for Catholicism is the monopoly of all evidence for faith with regards to every person. This is the way I see history, philosophy, and logic, and thus for me it is within reason to make the elevated step towards faith in Christ. However, I can only assume that every person of every other religion goes through the same process. Certainly it would be non-sensical to believe something if your reason objected to it (the sacraficium intellectum of Thomas Aquinas).
So, then, there must be a reason why the Islamic faith does not view Jesus as God. It seems from people’s responses that it is because the NT is invalid, whether by a purposeful deceit or extreme ignorance on the part of the authors.
Perhaps Lewis should have rephrased to say, “Given the Gospel accounts as a historical record, then Jesus was either lord, liar, or lunatic.”
Jesus SAID “I AM”, but more importantly, he SHOWED “I AM”. His birth, his life, his miracles, his works, his words, his choice and education of disciples, his crucifixion, and Resurrection.But your history comes from the New Testament. Muslims don’t accept that the NT is inerrant. They think it is a mixture of truth and errors.
Muslims believe Jesus was a (lesser) prophet, but his teachings were misunderstood (or distorted) by his followers. Jesus never said “I AM” (as far as they’re concerned). All that “God” stuff is part of the errors of the early Church who misunderstood Jesus.
If you accept only the parables of Jesus as divinely inspired wisdom (which Muslims do) then Jesus could well be a prophet (and, indeed, he was). The trilemma does not hold if you reject the idea that Jesus claimed to be divine. “Inspired prophet” is a perfectly valid alternative.
The trilemma rests on the assumption that Jesus actually said “I AM.”
I’ve always found C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” to be somewhat of a logical embarrassment to Christianity. As others have already pointed out, the assertion relies on the assumption that the Gospels record the sayings of Jesus accurately (also, language differences aside)–something that Christians would likely accept but something that a non-Christian would probably be pretty skeptical about.Is the classic trilemma apologetic argument (that Jesus was either lord, liar or lunatic) insulting to Islam?