Commenter Havok has been asking for evidences that could convince him that Christianity is true. He has been asking for the answer to one type of question in particular, as here:
But there are many different Gods experienced. Some claim Yahweh, others Jesus, others Allah, others Ganesh etc. With all of these conflicting experiences, how can you trust that any one experience is accurate? To me, they all seem to be based on the same evidence, that is personal testimony of an internal revelation.
Given that there are many different religions, how can we have confidence that one of them is true? That’s a big question, and I’m relaxing on a Friday evening, I’m going to ask you for help with it. If you’re willing to do this with me, we’re going to define the question more clearly. I’d like your answers to this:
Assume for the sake of discussion that there is one true religion, that it can be known to be true, and that its truth means that contrary beliefs are false. How could its truth be known? What might be some indicators of its being more trustworthy and reliable than other beliefs?
I’m not asking for answers in the form “here is the test and this is why Christianity passes,” or conversely “this is why Christianity fails.” I’m just asking for the first part of it: what would you consider to be the kind of thing that might indicate the truth of a religion? If you want to tell us you think Christianity does or does not measure up to your test, that’s fine, but you need not go into how it succeeds or falls short. We’ll come back to that very soon. For now, I’d be interested just to know what readers think would constitute a useful truth test for a religion.
Please think in terms of real-world tests. I’m not asking for signs like, “If God wrote Jesus’ name on every brick in the world, then I’d know.” Even those of you who are skeptics or atheists might be able to think of tests like that. You could think about how you might fill in X here: “If I were to find out that X, then I might believe that Y was the one true religion.”
I hope this is clear. Thanks for participating!
Oh, I see how it works now. Make us answer the really difficult questions while you sit on the porch swing watching basketball and sipping tea all weekend. 😉
In another comment I pondered the mystery of knowledge as I see it. Specifically, that you must know something about what you are attempting to know before you begin to look for it.
So, as a general answer to the question I would say humanity would mostly be in agreement with respect to knowing what it was looking for.
What has humanity been looking for throughout history? At the top of the list: love, truth, joy, contentment, justice, peace, understanding, relationship, significance, hope, etc.
I’d say a religion that confirmed, or aligned with, what we are most looking for.
That’s enough for now. The Lakers are playing on TV and they need my support.
Aaahhh….I ran out of editing time! Let me put the changes here. For the most part I changed ‘looking’ to ‘striving’ to connote our innate sense of purpose.
So, as a general answer to the question I would say humanity would mostly be in agreement with respect to knowing what it was 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.
In other words, we know these are the things we should strive for before we start trying to know what it is we should strive for.
I’d say a religion that confirmed, or aligned with, what we are most striving for.
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.
Many measure a religion by the faithfulness of its followers…a more devout group appearing to belong to a truer religion. This falls apart when you consider the devotion displayed by members of self-destructive fringe groups. Similarly, it seems skewed to think one’s own personal failures change the validity of a religion that existed long before one’s own existence.
Others measure the credibility of a religion by its success or failure at carrying out good for people. Success indicating validity. That’s not a perfect measure either as what’s “good for people” can be highly debatable.
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.
It has to be reliable and testable, and if it isn’t, it’s supernatural and I’ll never ever be able to accumulate any real evidence. At best, I’ll only accumulate a collection of (as yet) inexplicable events. But here you seem to be asking “what would convince you that a religion was correct short of reliability and testability?” My answer is: nothing because the religion has isolated itself from confirmation when it isolated itself from disconfirmation.
I think one of the important considerations is internal consistency. There are a great number of religious systems that can be excluded immediately based on this, because their beliefs are inherently self-contradictory, Hinduism being a prime example.
I’m not saying that the system cannot have ideas hard to fully understand, or ideas that need to be balanced against each other. I’m talking about violations of the Law of Non-Contradiction. God’s omniscience vs. free will is difficult to fully understand, but it’s not impossible for both to be true.
It’s reasonable for us to assume that a “true” understanding of the universe has to be consistent with itself, and that can begin narrowing the field.
Tom,
I wrote about this here, giving my response to that very question. I don’t know if it’s a link you’d want posted in this discussion, so I’ll leave it up to you whether to keep or delete this post.
What would you consider to be the kind of thing that might indicate the truth of a religion?
Since truth, by necessity, excludes error, I would look for a religion that claims to be the sole truth.
Well, first, as already hinted at, you cannot look at how “good” or happy or devout the adherents of a religion are to judge the religion itself. To borrow from CS Lewis (whom I’m sure borrowed this idea from others before him), you would have to look at the “raw materials.” Meaning that 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. Obviously that’s difficult to do and subject to interpretation (would a relativist agree that a liar who became honest is a better man?).
Another test is to say that the true religion should never contradict itself, which was already said, and very well at that.
A similar test is that this religion should not contradict scientific fact. If a religion says that the sun revolves around the earth and the moon is made out of cheese, things we know to be false, then this religion cannot be true.
Lastly (I promise), the 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.
This isn’t really a test, but it would be helpful in increasing the probability of a religion being true if the religion were to predict things. And I’m not just talking about prophecies, I mean things like predicting the age of the universe, the order of creation, etc.
This is a very slippery question.
We all come to knowledge by personal experience.
For example I run an experiment in a lab and see the results. Or I read about an experiment in a source that I trust.
So the question is entirely personal.
What are my standards for determining truth?
I don’t think that’s a question we can all agree on.
It seems that many of you are promoting a coherence theory of truth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_theory_of_truth
This results in a correspondence theory of truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth
As far as I can see, religions attempt to form a coherent system, but all fail in the correspondence to the real world (to which I’m sure there’ll be disagreements).
As doctor logic said, if it’s supernatural, then as we can’t study/test it, we can’t know what it is with any certainty (yes, we’ve been arguing this on another thread). You can assign any attributes you want to the supernatural, even if they’re contradictory 🙂
Edited by siteowner
The series of comments left here by “moslem” are not relevant to the very specific question I asked in this blog post. I have always required relevance, as noted in the Discussion Policies linked just above the comment box on every page. Therefore, just as I would do with any other comment that’s not connected to previous discussion properly, I have deleted these comments.
On the other hand, they contain information on Islam from at least one adherent’s perspective, and as such may be of interest to some readers. Therefore I have preserved them for anyone to read here.