Thinking to Believe

One final note on the abortion poll…. Did you notice how support for aborting a baby because s/he was conceived due to rape or incest enjoys the same level of support as saving the life of the mother (70% vs. 75% respectively). While I am persuaded that the logic of the pro-life persuasion does not justify abortion in cases of rape/incest, at this point in time any attempt to outlaw abortion that does not make an exception for such cases is likely to fail. On a tactical level, we would do well to work towards passing legislation that limits abortion in those areas where the majority of Americans support such limitations. Once we have accomplished those limitations (which constitute 94-95% of all abortions), then we can take on the rape/incest justification. Of course, that is on a legal plane. In our personal, one-on-one pro-life evangelism we should demonstrate how the pro-life logic rules out rape/incest as morally justifiable exceptions as well.

Continued from below….

The Ayres, McHenry & Associates poll also gauged the public’s support for specific abortion rationales. Ironically, while a slight majority of Americans favor abortion rights, the vast majority of Americans reject the reasons for which the vast number of abortions are performed in this country. The majority of Americans think it should be illegal to obtain an abortion for the following reasons:

Legal / Illegal

• The woman does not like the gender of the fetus 17% / 79%
• The woman thinks a child would interfere with her education or career plans 24% / 72%
  The fetus has a physical abnormality that could be repaired, such as a cleft palate 28% / 66%
  
• The woman feels she cannot afford to raise a child 31% / 65%
• The woman has all the children she wants 32% / 64%
• The woman feels she is not yet ready to raise a child 32% / 63%
• The woman is not married 32% / 62%
• The pregnancy could cause depression or pose other mental health problems 42% / 51%
  

What reasons do justify an abortion?:

Legal / Illegal

• The pregnancy endangers the life of the woman 75% / 18%
• The pregnancy poses a threat to the physical health of the woman 70% / 21%
  
• The pregnancy resulted from rape or incest 70% / 24%
• The fetus has a serious physical or mental deformity 55% / 36%

This is quite amazing. We know that only 5-6% of all abortions are obtained to protect the health of the mother (in which “health” is so broadly defined so as to include mental health, rather than just physical health), because of fetal abnormalities, or due to rape/incest. The other 95% are obtained because the child will interfere with the mother’s education (10.8%), will cause financial hardship (21.3%), the mother is not ready for children yet (29.6%), the mother does not want any more children (7.9%), etc. That means Americans actually oppose 94-95% of all abortions being performed in this country!! This tells me Americans don’t know what their support for abortion in general, and their support for Roe in particular, is actually accomplishing. We would do well to inform them that their support of Roe not only allows the 5-6% of abortions they think are legally justified, but also the 94-95% they think should be illegal. A reasonable response by the pro-abortion majority would be to call for the overturning of Roe, and then work in their state to restrict abortion rights to the particular circumstances they believe to be legally and/or morally justified. Of course, a reasonable response by the pro-life minority would be to restrict abortion even further according to our own persuasions of what abortions are morally justifiable.

In conclusion, while the majority of Americans support Roe, the margin would be reduced to a statistical wash if Americans were correctly informed of Roe’s real import. Furthermore, while the majority of Americans support abortion rights, they only do so for a slim fraction of all abortions. We would do well, then, to educate the public that overturning Roe will not make abortion illegal in the U.S., and that their support of Roe has the unintended effect of killing the very babies they think should be protected by law.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center and Judicial Confirmation Network suspected that many who support Roe do so because they are under the false impression that if Roe were overturned, abortion would become illegal in the United States. If the public were properly informed that overturning Roe would simply return the abortion issue back to the states to decide the matter for themselves, public support for Roe would decrease. To test their hypothesis they hired a national public relations firm, Ayres, McHenry & Associates, to conduct a poll that would gauge the genuine public support for Roe v Wade, as well as other abortion-specific questions. The findings are quite significant to our understanding of the supposed public support for abortion rights.

To discover if their suspicions were correct, respondents were asked twice to declare their support, or lack of support for overturning Roe: the first time without being informed, and the second time after being informed that overturning Roe would merely return the issue of abortion back to the states, allowing them to decide their own positions on abortion. The poll results confirmed the suspicions of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Judicial Confirmation Network.

Prior to being informed of the import of Roe, 34% of respondents supported overturning Roe, while 55% did not. After being informed that overturning Roe would merely return the issue of abortion back to the states to decide, support for overturning Roe increased to 43%, while opposition decreased to 48%. The margin narrowed from 21% to 5% in favor of not overturning Roe. That is quite a shift! I think the media and pro-abortion advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood are largely to blame for the perception that overturning Roe would ban abortion in the U.S.

I will discuss what this poll tells us about how Americans really feel about abortion in a separate post.

Before Thomas saw the risen Christ, he would not believe the report of the other disciples who said they saw Him alive. But then Jesus appeared to Thomas as well, and he believed. Jesus told Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have believed: blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” (John 20:29) 

It’s important to note that “believed” is in the aorist tense. Contrary to popular interpretation, Jesus is not referring to those in the future who would believe He rose from the dead without having seen Him alive, but to those in the past who believed He rose from the dead without having seen Him alive. This is important to the discussion we have had on this blog about why the disciples waited so long to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection. For Jesus to say there were people in the past who believed in His resurrection without having seen Him alive requires that the apostles/disciples were proclaiming the resurrection prior to Pentecost! If they had not been proclaiming the resurrection, no one except for those to whom Jesus had appeared to would believe in His resurrection. Of course, we don’t know how many people the disciples told about the risen Christ, or who they told (only previous followers of Jesus, or unbelievers as well), but this passage is evidence that the disciples did not wait until after Pentecost to begin proclaiming the resurrection. That proclamation only intensified and widened after Pentecost.

While the direct object of Jesus’ words were past believers, the principle is equally applicable to future believers. It’s as though John is using Jesus’ words to Thomas to speak to skeptics who argue, “It was all very well for Thomas to believe given His experience with the risen Christ, but you can’t expect me to imitate that kind of faith unless I have the same kind of experience/evidence Thomas had.” John counters this argument by pointing out that there were individuals before Thomas who believed without experiencing what Thomas experienced, and Jesus considered them blessed for having done so. Empirical evidence is not necessary for faith in Christ’s resurrection. 

This passage is often used by those who oppose apologetic arguments for the resurrection of Christ. They argue that if God’s blessing is given to those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection without seeing, then not only are apologetic arguments in behalf of Christ’s resurrection unnecessary for evangelism, they actually rob people of the blessing that comes through faith. This is a misinterpretation of the passage. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are those who believe without evidence,” but rather, “Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet believe.” He is not pronouncing a blessing on those who believed in His resurrection without any reason to do so, but those who believed without actually seeing Him alive in the flesh; He is not pronouncing a blessing on those who believe without any evidence for believing, but those who believe without empirical evidence like Thomas had. While we have many reasons to believe Jesus rose from the dead, we are doing so without having actually seen Jesus, and thus we are blessed.

Skeptics make much to do of differences in details between the Gospel accounts, claiming they prove the Bible is full of contradictions, and thus can’t be the Word of God. One popular example is the number of angels at the tomb of Jesus. Was there one angel (Mt 28:2; Mk 16:5) or two (Lk 24:4, 23; Jn 20:12)? Other differences include the discoverers of the tomb. Was Mary Magdalene the lone discoverer of the empty tomb (Jn 20:1) or were there others (Mt 28:1; Mk 16:1; Lk 24:1, 10)? How many others, and who were they (each account gives a different number and grouping of names)? And then there’s the demoniac of the Gadarenes. Was there one demoniac (Mk 5:1-2; Lk 8:26) or two (Mt 8:28)?

It’s important to note that none of these examples are contradictions; they are mere differences. A contradiction is to say something is both A and not A at the same time and in the same way. That’s not what’s going on here. We simply have one author providing more details than another author. Adding details someone else left out is not a contradiction. If I hit a 2 base run and a home run during a baseball game, it’s not a contradiction for sports writer A to say I hit a home run and sportwriter B to say I hit a homerun and a 2 base run. One is providing more details than the other, but neither is contradicting the other. One provides more details, but neither has conflicting details.

Other passages aren’t so easy to explain, however. Consider Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s servant. Who came to Jesus asking Him to heal the child? Was it the centurion (Mt 8:5), or elders of the Jews (Lk 7:3)? This seems to be a genuine contradiction. Or is it?

We tend to force modern writing standards on the Biblical writers. We expect them to be as concerned about including every little detail as we are. When a big news story breaks we spend hours exploring and reporting on every (almost meaningless) facet of it. Every detail must be included, and everything said must be quoted exactly as spoken/written. Not so in the ancient near eastern world. They were more interested in the big picture, not the details; the gist, not the minutae.

I was reading the Gospel of John recently when I noticed something that illustrates my point beautifully. John 3:22 says, “After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized.” Baptized is in the third person singular, the antecedent singular subject being “Jesus.” And yet in John 4:1-2 we read, “When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, (though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,)….” Same author. Same book. Same context. Clealry John did not see any contradiction between these two statements. Notice how similar this is to the story of the centurion. Who came to Jesus? One person: the centurion? Multiple persons: the elders of the Jews? I think the answer to who came to Jesus is the same as who was doing the baptizing. Jesus’ disciples were doing the baptizing, but John could say it was Jesus because His disciples were doing so in His behalf. Likewise, the elders of the Jews came to Jesus, but Matthew can say it was the centurion because the Jewish elders represented him.

Or consider John 20:1 again. John only mentioned Mary Magdalene as a witness to Jesus’ resurrection, and yet in the very next verse he records Mary as saying to the apostles, “We do not know where they have laid him.” While John only reports Mary as a witness, he is clearly aware of the fact that there were more present than Mary.

My point is not to try to answer every kind of apparent contradiction in Scripture, but only to point out that what we think is a contradiction in Scripture would not have been viewed as such by the authors of Scripture. We are guilty of imposing modern standards of historiography and discourse on the apostles; they are not guilty of contradictions.

The new liberal mantra on abortion is that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,” made famous by Hillary Clinton. I always find this ironic. What other Constitutional rights does anyone work toward making rare? The reason abortion-choicers such as Clinton want abortion to be rare is because they know abortion is immoral (but can’t admit it). After all, if aborting a child is no more moral significance than pulling a tooth; and if aborting a child is a good thing for the mother and society, why work to make it rare?

Some abortion supporters are angered at those like Hilary Clinton who say they want to reduce the number of abortions in this country. Why? Because they know it implies that abortion is not a good thing; i.e. it is wrong. Francis Kissling, President of Catholics for Free Choice, wrote an article in the October 2^nd edition of Salon Magazine to address the topic:

If abortion is a morally neutral act and does not endanger women’s health, why bother to prevent the need for it? After all, the cost of a first-trimester abortion is comparable to the cost of a year’s supply of birth control pills–and abortion has fewer complications and less medical risk for women than some of the most effective methods of contraception.

…

Is abortion a morally neutral act? Is it, as some have said, an unambiguous moral good? This is where we go limp and get tongue-tied. If abortion is such a good thing — if it results in women coming to terms with their moral autonomy, making good choices for their lives, and acting in the interests of society and their existing and future children — then why, people ask us, do we want to reduce the need for it? Simply put, the movement as a whole and most of our leaders find it difficult to acknowledge publicly that we have spent our lives, our passion, fighting for something that both is central to human freedom and autonomy, and ends a form of human life.

…

Why then do we get so caught up, so tongue-tied when we are asked if we want to prevent abortion? We spend countless hours trying to find the most nuanced way of answering this question. We worry that some woman will be hurt if we acknowledge the moral ambiguity of abortion.

There are many other quotable sections of this article as well. Kissling argued that being in favor of abortion rights does not mean one has to treat the unborn as worthless things. As life, they are worthy of respect:

We interpret life broadly. We say we are in favor of legal abortion because it protects women’s lives. We do not mean just their physical lives; we mean their capacity to live full, free and happy lives. Why, then, should we think that a presumption in favor of life is inappropriately applied to fetal life? Why do we insist that because the fetus is not a person in any theological, scientific, legal or sociological sense, it does not deserve our consideration? Do not people want to know if those of us who advocate a moral right to choose an abortion also approach all aspects of life with wonder and awe? Can we totally separate our attitude toward the justifiable taking of non-personal life in abortion from the other principles of protecting life that have become crucial to our survival as civilized human beings?

…

Although it would be unjust to place on women’s reproductive decisions the moral burden of upholding absolutely a presumption in favor of life, it is important that we express our belief that the ability to create and nurture and bring into the world new people should be exercised carefully, consciously, responsibly and with awe for our capacity to create life. That is one reason why we must commit ourselves to working to make abortion unnecessary, and be willing to use those words.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–>

Apart from my disagreement with Kissling’s philosophical notion that the unborn are non-persons, how can he say they are not persons in any theological sense ? If nothing else, Christian theology teaches that the unborn are persons. Even legally speaking, the unborn are considered persons. The only exception is when they are unwanted by their mother, and killed by a doctor. Then they purportedly cease to be persons.

The article is worth the read. While the author is confused and mistaken, there are hints of honest recognition about the evils of abortion.

Ben Witherington had a pro-Barack Obama post on his blog. In the comments section the issue turned to the question of his electability among Christian conservatives, given his stance on abortion. The following question was posed by a commenting blogger: “Will conservatives choose to ignore Obama’s otherwise fine character qualities because he dares to question the sacred pro-life cow?”

The way I answered his question gives me the opportunity to convey my thoughts on the primacy of abortion in the way we vote:

“Yes, Obama’s stance on abortion is justification to reject him from office. This is particularly so if the purpose of government is to promote justice. If killing innocent and defenseless human beings is a moral wrong, and Obama wants to protect the right of people to commit that moral wrong, then he is not fit for public office. A vote for Obama would be a vote for injustice.

“By no means is this analogy exact, but think of Hitler. Let’s say we had the opportunity to vote for him in an election. Would his stance on the killing of Jews disqualify him from being elected to office? Of course it would. He killed some six million Jews, the same number of people who are killed during a four year tenure of a President through abortion. I sure hope you wouldn’t vote for Hitler. He may have the best economic policies, the best foreign policies, etc., but his support for the killing of millions of innocent people trumps every other quality he may have. You might say, ‘But that is different!’ How so? The only thing that differs between the murder of Jews in Europe and the murder of babies in America is their size, location, level of development, and degree of dependency, none of which are morally relevant to their moral status as members of the human race. Abortion is the defining issue, particularly for the office of President.

“Abortion is not some ideological sacred cow that conservatives like to use as a wedge issue. We actually believe it is the slaughter of defenseless, innocent human beings. As human beings, the unborn are of no less value than are the born. If we had a situation in which 1.3 million 6 year olds were being murdered by their parents in this country, a Presidential candidate’s position on the topic would take front and center stage. But when the human being is tiny and hidden behind a veil of flesh, we are told to not be so concerned about the issue. Nonsense. Abortion is the decisive issue of our day, and while a candidate’s view on the issue may not matter for some levels of government, there is no office in which it matters more than the office of President. I don’t see how anyone who opposes abortion can vote for a pro-abortion candidate (assuming one of the candidates is pro-life). It’s not about party; it’s about valuing and protecting human life. That’s more important than the war, and more important than the economy. It trumps all other issues.”

Herod the Great’s tomb may have been discovered in Israel.

A view of morality I am hearing more and more about in the public circle is the social contract theory. Contractarianism holds that “morality rests on a tacit agreement between rationally self-interested individuals to abide by certain rules because it is to their mutual advantage to do so.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> There is nothing intrinsically wrong with murder, rape, or torture, for example, but since rational self-interested persons do not want these things being done to them, they agree to extend the same courtesy to others.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> Philosopher, Edward Feser, offers at least six helpful criticisms of Contractarianism:

1. It’s really not a moral theory at all. It is a truce from Hobbes’ “war of all against all.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–> It is a replacement of morality for practicalities. Ultimately, contractarianism is the opposite of morality because morality often involves the denial of one’s self-interest. Contractarianism is the enshrining of selfishness.

2. One need only pretend to abide by the social contract. Since one behaves “morally” only in their own self-interest (not because they have an objective moral obligation to do so), then if they can secretly behave in ways that are opposed to others’ self-interests and get away with it, they have done nothing wrong.

3. There is no moral justification for claiming one ought to abide by the social contract.

4. Cannot say anyone is immoral. At best, they are being foolish for breaking the social contract, for in doing so they are working against their own self-interest.

5. Cannot provide any meaningful boundaries/restraints for punishing those who go outside the social contract. Why not kill those who steal? Why not torture them? What would be wrong with these punishments? We may choose not to, but contractarian theory offers no reason why we can’t should we choose to.

6. Fails to invoke moral duties to those outside the social contract, such as the mentally retarded. These people cannot assent to the contract, and since they cannot harm someone else, there is no reason to make a contract with them. Why not just kill a retarded person because we had a bad day at work?

Just like moral relativism (a close cousin), social contract theory is bankrupt as a moral philosophy.

Moral relativists have the difficult position of grounding their moral persuasions. Why should one do x and not y, given the relative nature of morals? For example, why should person p not murder person q when it is not in their interest to do so? A standard response is that murder is wrong because society has collectively determined it is wrong. This response invites three questions:

(1) What if a majority of society determined murder was acceptable? Would the relativist change his position to affirm that murder is morally acceptable? If not, why not?

(2) Why is person p obligated to abide by the dictates of the majority? After all, morals are just personal tastes. A cultural consensus is nothing more than the sum of individuals’ personal tastes. Why should person p be concerned about the personal tastes of the group? Why not assert his own interests over those of the group? Where does the moral obligation to follow the dictates of the majority come from?

(3) If morality is determined by the collective majority, is the moral relativist prepared to acknowledge that all minority views are, by definition, immoral? This would include such views as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and cloning—all of which do not enjoy the support of a majority in society. A moral relativist cannot argue for the morality of homosexuality within a relativistic framework of morality in which society determines what is right.

The fact of the matter is that moral relativists have no grounding for morality. They try to ground it in the consensus of the public whole, but cannot ground the moral obligation to follow the public consensus in anything but thin air. Finally, they are inconsistent in their application of moral relativism. They try to argue that things such as same-sex marriage are good, even when the public consensus disagrees. They can’t have their cake and eat it too.

It’s no surprise that the Gospels are full of Jesus’ sayings since they are dedicated to telling the account of what Jesus said and did. But it is surprising that Jesus’ followers don’t quote Him but a few times outside the Gospels. Considering the many theological and practical issues the apostles addressed in their epistles, why didn’t they invoke Jesus’ teachings to settle the matters? As strange as I find the phenomenon, it actually serves as a good argument against those who assert the disciples freely invented many sayings of Jesus. If the disciples were in the habit of inventing sayings of Jesus, why not do so when it would be most convenient: to settle theological arguments or moral quagmires not addressed by Jesus? The fact that the disciples did not appeal to a saying of Jesus to solve such matters argues for the historical veracity of Jesus’ sayings found in the Gospels. If the disciples would not put words into Jesus’ mouth in the epistles, they were not likely to do so in the Gospels either.

Elaine Pagels—famous for her promotion of Gnostic Christianity—was interviewed by David Ian Miller for the April 2, 2007 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Pagels was discussing the Gospel of Judas. Miller asked her if this gospel would change the way people observe Easter. Pagels answered in the affirmative. She wrongly asserted that Luke and John give different portrayals of Jesus’ resurrection body (one spiritual, one physical), and then went on to say the following:

And what was important to the authors of Luke and John was not to decide between those stories—the important thing is that we know in some sense that he is alive. That the resurrection happened. And that is affirmed. But one thing we can see in these other texts [such as the Gospel of Judas] is that you don’t have to take the resurrection literally to take it seriously. One can speak about Jesus alive after his death with conviction without necessarily meaning that his physical body got out of the grave.

Yes, we could speak of Jesus being alive after His death without meaning His body got out of the grave, but we could not call it a resurrection. Resurrection, like apple, refers to something specific. It does not refer to any sort of life after death, but in the words of N.T. Wright, life after life after death. In the ancient world the word was always bound up with the return to a bodily existence after a disembodied existence following death. We are not free to redefine words to our own fancy, no matter how much Pagels might wish to do so. If Pagels wants to believe in a spiritual ascension she is free to do so, but she is not free to call it a resurrection, nor is she free to say that those who believe such a thing have satisfied the Biblical requirement to believe in Jesus’ resurrection. You can’t evacuate a term of its meaning, and then assert that any content one might choose in its place satisfies the meaning of the word.

If resurrection can mean whatever one wants it to mean, then why is it important that we affirm it? And what are we even affirming? How about I postulate that Jesus’ resurrection means He survived death only in the memory of His followers? Is that an affirmation of His resurrection? Hardly. “Resurrection” means something.

A spiritual resurrection of Jesus makes no sense. It could not explain the rise of Christianity. If Jesus’ spirit merely survived death, there would be nothing extraordinary about Him. Other people experience the same. What made Jesus extraordinary was that His physical body came back to life, and was subsequently glorified. That is what the early church preached, and that is why Christianity was so scandalous. No pagan would have had a problem with a disembodied spirit ascending to heaven, but they had a big problem with a man returning from the dead, never to taste of death again.

But that’s all icing on the cake. My real focus is on her statement that we can take the Biblical texts seriously without taking them literally. While this is a nice sounding catchphrase that is popular in liberal Christianity, what exactly does this mean, and how does it play itself out in the real world? If the context makes it clear that a text is figurative in nature, then we are taking the text seriously when we understand it in a figurative sense. But when the context gives us every reason to believe the author is presenting something as historical fact, we are not taking the text seriously if we assign it a figurative meaning. When it comes to the gospels, we have every reason to believe that the events recorded are intended as genuine historical events. As such, it is impossible to take them seriously all the while denying their historicity.

Is Pagels prepared to treat other purported historical accounts in this fashion? Can she deny the historicity of slave trade in the early Americas while taking the texts that tell us about this horrendous practice seriously? Of course not! So why treat the Bible any differently? She is free to argue that while the gospels present themselves as genuine history, they are not historical events, but she is not free to deny their historicity all the while claiming to take the texts seriously. It is highly disingenuous.

According to Matthew 28:17, when the eleven apostles saw the resurrected Christ in Galilee, some of them worshipped Him, “but some doubted.” In context, the “some” refers to the apostles. This account is important on two fronts.

First, it argues for the historical veracity of the claims made about Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. Many skeptics argue that the gospels were not penned by eyewitnesses to the events, but by later disciples who freely embellished or invented many of the sayings and deeds they attributed to Jesus. This is unlikely given the nature of their reports, including this one.

If later disciples were embellishing, or inventing history it is highly unlikely that they would include embarrassing details such as this one. What purpose would it serve to report that the very pillars of the church—the apostles—doubted the resurrection of Jesus even after He personally appeared to them? At best it could only detract from the witness of Christ’s resurrection. After all, if some of Jesus’ own chosen apostles were not convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead—even after having seen Him alive—how can those who have not seen Him alive be expected to believe on Jesus through the mere testimony of the apostles? If the author was writing historical fiction, we would expect the apostles to emerge as the heroes of unswerving faith. We find just the opposite.

(more…)

In the last post I addressed the argument that all religions must be human inventions because they are markedly different from one another, and tend to be limited to a specific culture and/or geography. A more common “argument” against religion comes in the following form: “You are only a Christian because you were born in America where Christianity is the cultural religion. If you would have been born in India, you would probably be a Hindu. You believe in the religion you believe in because you inherited it, not because it is true.”

I put parentheses around “argument” for good reason: this is not a valid argument against the truth of religion in general, or Christianity in particular. As an empirical observation, it is undeniable that one’s religious beliefs are largely determined by where they live, and/or the religious beliefs of their parents (an accident of history, not the result of critical examination and rational reflection). But does it follow from this that the object of all religious faith must be a human invention? No. It is non sequitur.

This sort of thinking commits the genetic fallacy (invalidating a view based on how a person came to hold that view). The fact of the matter is that the truth of a belief is independent of the influences that brought one to believe it. While I may be a Christian because I live in a society in which most people are Christians, it does not mean that my Christian beliefs are not true. The truth of Christianity depends on the veracity of the claims themselves, nothing more and nothing less.

It is not important how someone came to hold the view they hold; all that is important is the soundness of the reasons for which they hold the view they do. If I was born in India I would probably have been raised a Hindu, and might even be a Hindu today. But that would not change the fact that Hinduism is false, and Christianity is true. The empirical observation that people tend to inherit their religious beliefs tells us nothing about the truth value of those beliefs.

This argument is a double-edged sword that can be turned against the atheist as well. American atheists were born in America, and educated in a school system where scientific naturalism and secularism are the prevailing philosophies. Is it any wonder, then, why they believe in no god? If they had been born in Saudi Arabia they would probably be a Muslim theist. Does that mean scientific naturalism is therefore false? Of course not! The truth-value of scientific naturalism, Christianity, and Islam must be determined on the merits of those views themselves.

This “argument” also ignores the conversion factor: instances in which large numbers of people of one religion convert to a different religion. Think of Christianity. Christianity originated in a thoroughly Jewish culture. People who held Jewish beliefs abandoned them by the thousands in favor of Christian beliefs. Pagans did the same. Why? Because they found something to be true of Christianity they did not find in their own religion. The claims of Christianity were so compelling that they abandoned the religion of their parents/nation. It was a matter of truth, not inheritance.

Most skeptics and all atheists think of religion as a human invention because (1) religions differ greatly from one another, and (2) religious views are often culture-specific. Let me address each in turn.

Religions differ from one another

It is reasoned that if God exists and is knowable by man, everyone should be in basic agreement about who he/she/it/they is/are. Instead, religious views are often very different: God is one, God is many; God is personal, God is impersonal; Jesus is God incarnate, Jesus is a heretic; the world exists, the world is an illusion. Skeptics conclude that either God is unknowable by man (in which case the whole question of religious truth is irrelevant), or more likely, God does not exist to begin with. Religion is just a human invention, and the variegated expressions of religion reflect the variegated creativity of man.

Both conclusions are flawed in that they confuse epistemology with ontology. Just because people have different answers to the same question (epistemology) does not mean there is no correct answer (ontology), or that no one knows the correct answer. If ten math students give ten different answers to the same math problem, it does not mean there is no correct answer, or that none of the students possess the correct answer. Difficulty in knowing a thing does not translate into an inability to know that thing, or the lack of a thing to be known in the first place. At best, the existence of a multiplicity of religious beliefs only highlights a possible epistemological problem associated with knowing God. It is not a good argument against the existence of God/gods (an ontological issue).

If the Bible is to be believed, the problem is not so much with epistemology as it is corrupted volition. Deep down men know the one true God, but in rebellion they will to suppress that knowledge, making up religions that are more palatable to their tastes. Think Romans 1-3.

Religious views are culture-specific

This is the more important of the two reasons. When you look at religion on a global level it becomes readily apparent that religious perspectives are often specific to a particular culture or geographical locale. It is claimed that the most reasonable explanation for this phenomenon is that religions are mere cultural inventions passed on from generation to generation. They don’t spread beyond the culture because—as an invention—they are not the sort of things that are accessible to, and discoverable by men outside the community in which they arose.

The observation that religions tend to be isolated to a particular culture and geography is true. The question is why that’s so. Is it because they are human inventions, or is there some other reason? I think the atheist is largely correct when he concludes from the multiplicity of geographical and culture-specific religions that religion is a human invention. Indeed, because they are markedly different from one another, they can’t all be right about God. At best, only one of them can be right, relegating the rest to human imagination. Where the skeptic errs is in his conclusion that all religions must be mere human inventions. Indeed, one religion could be the correct one.

But how could it be that only one culture has the truth about God, and none of the others (this isn’t to say there is no truth to be found in false religions, but only that on the macro-level, one religion is true and the rest are false)? It could be that God only chose to reveal Himself to one people, or it could be that all but one people remained faithful to the truths God revealed to them about Himself. It could be any number of other reasons as well. The point is that we need not conclude all religions are mere human inventions because they tend to be cultural and/or geographical-specific. That conclusion does not follow from the premises.

My next post will address a similar argument against religion.