"Jesus would have been an atheist."….Wait, what?

Richard Dawkins, captain of the S.S. New Atheism, just made one of the most confusing statements I’ve heard in a long time:

“I wrote [an] article called ‘Atheists for Jesus,’ I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: ‘Atheists for Jesus.’ Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

His proposal, of course, begs the question: what new knowledge–scientific, moral, historical, or religious–would cause Jesus to reverse his claims of divinity?

And then there’s the tired old “great moral teacher, but not God” claim. Matt Archbold responds to that with that famous passage from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

The claim that Jesus was just “a great moral teacher” or just “one religious leader among many” is both silly and rampant. But as Lewis explains, that option isn’t tenable. Lewis’ famous trilemma shows that Jesus must either be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. The one thing he cannot be is just a respected sage.

(Modern critics suggest a fourth option. They say, “Sure, those three conslusions are the only options *if* you think the Bible is trustworthy. But what if you don’t believe in the veracity of Scripture?” I’d point those people to my post titled, “Is the Bible Just a Myth?“)

Fr. Barron gives his own response to this claim in the very first episode of his Catholicism series:

(HT: Matt Archbold)