“Lunatic, Liar or Lord?” in the Transhumanist Age
Jesus’s claims, the Engineered Cosmos, and Critical Rationalism.
C. S. Lewis famously argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not be safely reduced to a “great moral teacher.” In Mere Christianity, he wrote:
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.
This “Lunatic, Liar or Lord?” trilemma remains foundational in Christian thinking and evangelism.
Lewis’s argument is an early example of hypothesis-space reduction, in this case, the disciplined refusal to allow comforting but incoherent explanations.
What Lewis did intuitively, Karl Popper later formalised: good explanations must take risks.
This essay updates Lewis’s trilemma for a technological, evolutionary, and transhumanist age, while remaining faithful to Popper’s demand for bold, falsifiable claims. For further explanation of the CTA’s commitment to Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism, see the footnote.
1. A Critical Rational Starting Conjecture: The Universe as an Engineered Artefact
Christian Transhumanism’s cosmology begins with a premise that emerging science continues to infer is the best explanation. That is, that we are part of an engineered artefact. This is a conjecture that is increasingly difficult to ignore without additional explanatory cost.
The universe does not behave like brute chaos; our reality behaves like an engineered artefact. It is:
Law-governed (all of Physics’ understandings and formulae)
Information-dense (DNA’s 3-billion-base code)
Fine-tuned (cosmological constant’s precision, 1 in 10^120)
Capable of bootstrapping intelligence through long, indirect processes
This does not require rejecting evolution. Quite the opposite. Evolution looks precisely like what you would expect if a Creator preferred process over coercion, emergence over fiat, freedom over determinism.
In Popperian terms, this is a bold metaphysical conjecture:
Reality is a designed system with a telos, even if that telos is only partially discernible.
It is risky. It could be false. That is its virtue. It may take the emergence of Artificial Super-Intelligence to help us attempt meaningful falsification, surveying vast hypothesis spaces to meaningfully test alternative non-teleological explanations that might fully account for reality’s structure. Time will tell – certainty now is evidence of a closed mind.
2. Why the “Nice Moral Teacher” Hypothesis Still Fails
Lewis’s trilemma was never about forcing belief, it was about excluding explanations that do not explain. Popper insisted that bad theories are not those that are false — but those that are immune to refutation.
“Jesus was a great moral teacher” fails not because it is insulting, but because it explains nothing:
It does not explain Jesus’s supreme authority claims
It does not explain the claims of the miraculous, that dominate the Bible’s narrative more than moral teaching
It does not explain why he speaks as if he stands above Torah, Temple, and history
It does not explain why his moral teaching is inseparable from his self-understanding
It is an ad hoc rescue hypothesis — precisely the kind Popper warned against. If Jesus was nothing more than a “great moral teacher”, why would he bet his legacy on faked miracles and resurrection?
3. A Christian Transhumanist Trilemma
Once we accept both:
An engineered, telos-bearing cosmos (e.g., Bostrom’s Simulation Theory)
The historical data about Jesus’s claims
we are again forced to choose one of three options. The ‘Liar’ fork (Jesus as deliberate deceiver) fades in a transhumanist lens, as evolutionary psychology favors sincere belief over calculated fraud (e.g., costly signalling in martyrdom). Thus, we consolidate it into:
- Randomly Deluded Agent, OR
- Highest emergent moral archetype OR
- The Logos Incarnate
Option 1: Randomly Deluded Agent (Updated “Lunatic”)
Jesus sincerely but mistakenly believed he had a unique divine role. His followers inherited and amplified this error.
This hypothesis is:
Naturalistic
Psychologically plausible
Easy to state
But it performs poorly as an explanation.
Delusions typically fragment cognition. They do not generate:
Coherent ethical systems
Radical enemy-love
Non-violent self-sacrifice
A complete absence of self-aggrandisement
From an evolutionary standpoint, this option predicts failure, not global moral influence. Nor would it generate such dedicated followers. His 12 disciples were all convinced they saw the resurrected Jesus. All were prepared to die rather than recant, (at least 6 were martyred, another 5 probably) let alone the millions who continue to follow him.
It is falsifiable, and historically weak.
Option 2: The Highest Emergent Moral Archetype (Replaced “Liar”)
Archetypes in humans emerge from our biology as sets of inherited personality traits, shaped by culture and reproductive choices. Successful behaviour strategies are coded in our DNA and reflected in our cultures.
Here, Jesus is the maximum moral attractor produced by evolution and culture:
The innocent sufferer
The non-retaliatory agent
The embodiment of self-giving love
This is a far stronger hypothesis than “nice moral teacher.” It takes evolution, psychology, and human aspirations seriously.
But it fails at a critical point.
Archetypes do not:
Forgive sins, making such an outrageously powerful claim
Speak with personal authority over reality
Predict their own vindication through resurrection
This model explains why Jesus is compelling, but not why he speaks as if he is in charge.
Popper would call this a partial explanation with unaccounted residue.
Whilst the moral archetype is a lowest tenable starting point for discussions about Christ, a future blog post will expand on and prove inadequate the “Jesus as Jungian Archetype” proposed by Jordan Peterson. Peterson sees Christ as the ‘axis of history’s moral evolution’... yet the CTA contends Christ was probably far more.
Option 3: Logos Incarnate (Updated “Lord”)
The final option is the most metaphysically demanding — and the most explanatory.
Jesus is the Logos:
The rational–creative agency through which the universe exists (classical Christian theology)
The Logos understood as the personal, intentional source of the engineered order we observe in reality
The Logos entering creation from within, not as myth or symbol, but as a concrete historical agent
In this view, incarnation does not require a crude suspension of physical law, but a non-ordinary causal intervention at a higher explanatory level, much as software can redirect hardware behaviour without violating its constraints. What appears miraculous from within the system is consistent with intentional action by the system’s author.
In transhumanist language:
The Architect enters the simulation-like artefact
The Engineer inhabits the machine
This option:
Explains Jesus’s supreme authority claims
Explains the coherence and extremity of his moral teaching
Explains his refusal to seize political or coercive power
Explains resurrection as a genuinely new mode of embodied life rather than metaphor or myth
Crucially, this hypothesis is risky.
It is falsifiable, not because it is testable in a laboratory, but because it stakes everything on specific historical claims that could, in principle, have failed. If the resurrection were shown to be symbolic, fabricated, or decisively false, the Logos-Incarnate hypothesis would collapse without ad hoc rescue.
In Popper’s terms, this is a bold conjecture: it forbids symbolic retreat.
It demands a response.
Which is precisely why it remains alive.
4. Popper, Faith, and Risk
Christian Transhumanism, in the tradition of Popper, rejects faith that insulates itself from criticism, investigation and falsification.
Faith is never blind, but it does not operate in the absence of risk — it is the willingness to live inside a risky hypothesis because it explains more than its rivals. Faith, in this framework, is not belief without evidence, but commitment to a risky explanatory hypothesis that refuses to protect itself from falsification.
The Logos hypothesis is not safe, but it is explanatory.
Lewis understood this instinctively, and Popper gave us the language.
In an engineered cosmos, the incarnation is not an embarrassment. It is a coherent design decision.
5. Conclusion: You Must Still Choose
The modern world did not outgrow Lewis’s “Lunatic, Liar or Lord?” trilemma, it merely decided to not think about it seriously, or to invent extraneous attempted defeaters like adding “Legend” – that he never existed (untenable to all but crank historians).
But avoidance is not explanation.
Reinventing the trilemma for Christian Transhumanism, incorporating the best insights from critical rationalism and the emerging technologies and cultural challenges of this century and next, Jesus must now be considered to be one of:
A glitch – a deluded random event recounted with fake miracles we can ignore
An emergent moral maximum
Or the Logos – the creative and motive force that engineered this artefact we call the cosmos – made flesh
The “nice moral teacher” option still does not make any sense. As Lewis said, a “nice moral teacher” would not tell such lies.
Call to action:
The simulation hypothesis, or more broadly the recognition that reality behaves like an engineered artefact, moves us no further than Deism unless it is joined to a credible account of who that intelligence is and how it relates to us.
Christian Transhumanism insists that Jesus’s claims must be taken seriously at this point, not as comforting mythology, but as historically risky, metaphysically demanding, and existentially consequential.
CTA exists to help those who have been displaced by fundamentalism or disillusioned by reductionism recover a faith that is intellectually honest, technologically literate, and spiritually transformative.
To move forward with Jesus, or to reconnect with him after many years, one place to start is the classic “four spiritual laws”, also re-imagined for the coming transhumanist future.
Footnote on falsifiability
Karl Popper did not require that a hypothesis be experimentally repeatable to be meaningful, only that it forbid certain states of affairs. The Logos-Incarnate hypothesis is falsifiable in this sense because it makes concrete historical claims — above all the resurrection — whose non-occurrence would decisively refute the theory, and no ad hoc modification would rescue it. Christianity here does not immunise itself against criticism; it accepts total failure as a live possibility. See Biblical Foundations of Critical Rationalism for the scriptural roots of this epistemic posture.