Fri 21 Mar, 2008
The responses to my question last week include the following.
From SteveK:
I’d say a religion that confirmed, or aligned with, what we are most striving for…. What has humanity been striving for throughout history? At the top of the list: love, truth, joy, contentment, justice, peace, understanding, relationship, significance, hope, etc.
Leslie explained that followers’ devotion is not a true test of a religion, then added,
Personally, the historical authenticity and reliability of the religion’s writings seems to me to be one of the few ways to take an unbiased look at the validity of what the religion teaches. I’m not sure it’s the whole test, but for me it’s definitely part of it.
Paul wrote:
I’d need to be able to communicate with the God of the religion in a normal fashion. I’d need a being that I could communicate with directly, as easily as I do my friends.
Doctor(logic)’s answer seemed to be that there is no test. Does that imply there’s no way to know what is not a true religion?
Medicine Man said he believes a true religion must display internal consistency of its beliefs and ideas. Then he linked to a page on his blog where he adds these tests:
- It has to provide meaningful impacts on one’s daily life
- It must correlate to reality
- It must be internally consistent
- The worldview must be supported by rational, real-world supporting evidence
- These tests must be objective
He expands these five items with commentary there.
wf3 offered a surprising suggestion:
Since truth, by necessity, excludes error, I would look for a religion that claims to be the sole truth.
Fabio picked up an earlier theme on the adherents to a religion and suggested,
at if you want to judge a religion by its adherents you would not measure the adherents by some set bar, but rather you would measure each adherent by the changes, positive or negative, in that person.
This follow-on was amusing:
Obviously that’s difficult to do and subject to interpretation (would a relativist agree that a liar who became honest is a better man?).
Further, he added,
this religion should not contradict scientific fact…. [and] he religion should account for the origin of the entire universe, not just earth or mankind, and the religions god should be external to the universe. If a religion claims that its god is part of and contained in the universe, then it can hardly be true.
Havok pointed to the internal consistency test that was raised more than once, and suggested that those commenters were holding to an internal coherence theory of truth. That’s not necessarily the case. Internal coherence theories typically say that a system of beliefs is true just if it is internally coherent. Internal coherence is the sole test. We saw among these comments, though, that there ought also to be a correspondence with reality. Correspondence theories include coherence as one test, but not the only test of truth.
Since I’ve already moved from recapitulating into analyzing, I’ll continue. No one pretended these comments would make an exhaustive list of tests, but there are some good ones here. wf3’s is the most unexpected: A religion that claims to be the sole truth. I think this is on the right track. If religions disagree with each other, and one of them is true, then the others must be false (where they disagree with it). Moreover it seems that the one true religion quite plausibly would have the self-awareness to know that its truth excludes all conflicting truth claims.
In The Reason for God, which I’ll be reviewing soon, Timothy Keller makes an interesting related point. If there is one true religion, then your culture and mine, as well as all other cultures, are going to think it’s wrong on some significant point. Why? Because ultimate spiritual reality is not culturally conditioned. Every religion teaches that humans have a problem with knowing or doing the truth. A problem like this is bound to appear in cultures as well as individuals. Every culture will have a problem with knowing or doing the truth.
Because of cultural conditioning, though, we are likely to see it the other way around. We tend to think of our cultures as having “arrived,” but this, too is culturally conditioned. Westerners typically think it’s illiberal and unethical, for example, to judge another culture, but other cultures disagree with that. Are we going to judge them and say they are wrong? That’s contradictory and can even become comical. Mark Steyn wrote of Lady Kennedy’s apparent belief that
our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable.
Paul’s test, to be able to communicate with God as a friend, raises all kinds of interesting thoughts. I’ll outline a much-too-short Christian response. First, God calls us into a very personal relationship with Him, where there is true communication. Second, it cannot be as a friend to a friend, because God is God and we are not (nor are our friends). God is worthy of worship, not casual hanging out together. Third, human rebellion from God creates a barrier which God overcomes in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross (it’s Good Friday today, when we commemorate that). Real relationship is possible for those who enter it on God’s terms, but not for those who refuse the terms for which He lovingly gave His life. And the real relationship we can experience now is nothing compared to the intimacy we’ll experience in heaven with God.
To summarize, we have several tests on the table here:
- Internal consistency
- Meeting the desires/strivings of humans, including love, meaning, forgiveness, joy, relationship, …
- Life change of adherents
- Correspondence with extra-religious fact, including science and history
- Transcendence
- A claim of unique truth
- Challenging individuals’ and cultures’ beliefs and actions
That’s not a bad list. We can work with it.
Tom, forgive me for not continuing the LNC dialog for a moment.
When I compared God to a friend, I didn’t mean to do so in the ways you commented on. I merely request an approximate ease and frequency of communication that I have with my friends for God, or even something close to it.
Regarding rebellion, I can rebel against my friend yet I can still communicate with him. That’s not the case with God, even if you assume I am rebelling against God, because I still can’t communicate with him. So rebellion is not a factor in my wanting a friend-style communication system with God.
I’m not asking for *true* communication, whatever that is, I’m just asking for the type of communication I have with my friend, however true or false that is, it would be more than what I have with God now.
It sure would help me come to God’s terms if I could communicate with him, but he apparently requires that I accept some terms of his before we even communicate. Not even my enemies always require that. So this God of yours won’t even communicate with me unless I do so on his terms? I have no terms or requirements for communication with God. I’m ready and willing anytime. But the silence is deafening.
One other thought: the style of communication your God requires, apparently, is that you must believe in him before communication takes place. But that automatically, by definition, excludes people for whom communication would be be important in their spiritual growth towards God. What, God doesn’t like communicators? Even human enemies communicate with each other. God is below that?!
You’ve conveniently defined God’s communication style to require belief in him before communication can take place. I assure that if I truly didn’t believe in the existence of some person behind a hypothetical screen in some odd experiment, and that person communicated with me in the style that I do with my friends, I’d believe in the existence of that person.
Hi Paul,
As I think this comment will be a distraction on this thread I’m going to tag it onto the LNC thread. That one’s gone through enough topical contortion that it probably won’t mind another.
Tom, if this is a bad idea I won’t be hurt if you put the kibosh on it …