Is Believing in God Irrational? Ch4 - Relative Truth

This post is inspired by Amy Orr-Ewing's book "Is Believing in God Irrational?" Chapter 4. Please see all the chapters in the post "Is Believing in God Irrational?" for the full picture if you'd like. 

Ch4) Christians haven't tried out all the alternatives. They've never tried believing in something else. How can they then know the truth?
Here I think Orr-Ewing misses part of the question. She addresses six assumptions that often lie behind this question regarding relative truth (what's true or a good path for me might not be for you), which is a big issue, but does not mention its connection to the first chapter - what about the religions experiences of other faiths? This second aspect of the question could be phrase "If Christians have not legitimately tried out other religions for their experiential evidence , how do they know they are not false? I'll answer that question at the end of this chapter, but first we'll cover six assumptions:

a) Often the world puts religion in its own category, separate from the sciences or philosophy, something of cultural preference or self-help choice, so that people can pick and choose their own religions without reference to truth. Perhaps 'religion' can be defined that way, but not the way I've been using it in this post. Some who claim religion hope that it is seen as a scientific pursuit, on level with all the other sciences, subject to evidence and reason. This means that religion, like science, is also applicable to all people. The sky is blue and we argue that God loves you. You can argue back or ignore our questions, but do not dismiss it as something that should be left to the individual.

b) There is a philosophical school of thought called logical positivism whose main tenet states that if something can't be proved true, it isn't. People often state that God cannot be proved and so dismiss the matter, perhaps not even realizing the principle they are using. i) The principle does not withstand its own test. Because the tenet itself cannot be proved true, it isn't. ii) Morals, in general, cannot be proved and so, under this idea, must be done away with. Typically most supporters of positivism do not wish to discard morals. iii) I was slightly ashamed to see that Amy did not mention arguments for the existence of God. There are a number that are still being contested and may, in fact, prove God. In this way, setting aside the problems with the principle, God still withstands the test. iv) In what sense can anything be proved? (This may be brought up against arguments for God or anything else.) Science has never claimed to ultimately prove something in the correspondent sense, only in the pragmatic sense (which is quite limited). Under the correspondent definition, nothing is true by Logical Positivism.

c) Like with religion, there is another assumption about definitions. Tolerance, though perhaps defined well formally, is used politically as 'mind your own business' or 'have an open mind' or 'their way is equally right' or 'it doesn't really  matter so don't make a fuss'. NO. If you wish, you may use the word that way. However, I see two possible definitions of tolerance, the commonly used one is not imperative, but the calmer one ought to be. Tolerance in the quieter sense is not treating anyone with special deference or negativity due to their culture, views, etc. Of course if someone believes in killing, it is commonsense not to hire them, but that springs from a concern for yourself, not a special hate of the other person.

d) A common implication during conversations is that ones religion is merely determined by birth. You were indoctrinated by your parents and cannot be changed, pity you. You need to learn to tolerate other upbringings. i) Ones upbringing has nothing to do with what is actually true. After all, you were indoctrinated by your school to believe 1+1=2. Oh, well I believe 1+1=3, who are you to discriminate against me, you were only brought up to believe that. ii) If beliefs, even restricting them to religious beliefs, are a product of your childhood, do atheistic homes have the same treatment?

What follows is an attack on relativism based on its implications, followed by a very fundamental (or eye-opening) assumption behind some parts of relativism. Then I will get into my defense of the original question "How can you know the truth if you haven't explored other options?"
 
e) The logical result of relative or personal religion is relative morality. If anyone can choose his or her own beliefs, without question from others, there is no basis for law, morals, good manners, and all kinds of things. Do you wish your children do not swear or use drugs? Then you are imposing your personal values, your religion, on them. Nothing in formal science says that one should not cheat at card games, get drunk every night, or even murder. Now many will reply that these things are commonsense and not related to religion. Commonsense based on what? How you feel? How your were brought up? We already discussed how relative and unimportant that is. Some others may claim that good manners are good for society. i) What if they aren't? What if killing someone is the survival of the fittest? We don't know, we're just in the moment. Only time will tell. We can arrest them, claiming that a fit society that punishes people who kill tends to survive, but we don't know. ii) Good for society? What do you mean by good? People are happier? Whoever said we should try to make people happy? Nothing innate in the way the world is made suggests that we should pursue our own happiness, promote the survival of our species, or get up tomorrow morning. Anything you strive for, anything you seek, think about what good reason you have for pursuing that thing. After all, you've devoted your life to it.

f) Look at these assumptions. Religion is a product of upbringing, your personal desires, in it's own category. This is a picture of man deciding what his own religion is, it is man pursuing and inventing God. Even for New Age thinkers, they are pursuing God to solve their own aches through an assortment of loosely valued ways. However, Christianity does not work this way. Christ is not about mans attempt to satisfy self, to reach God. "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." This is God reaching down to man to give us what he has planned for us, which is far better than what we want.

Now we get to the question:
g) How can Christians discredit other religions if they haven't explored their experiential evidence? A large foundation for Christian belief is on a personal experience with God; how can Christians be so arrogant as to disregard other experiences?

i) There is one point that Amy makes to defend this question. This is the observation that many people use this argument to discourage all religion, because since it would be impossible to explore all religions, religious truth is unattainable. This is a minor point that could be brought up during a discussion to see the reaction of the questioner, however, it has no philosophical weight. So what if religious truth is unreachable? If that's the way the world happens to be, we have to deal with it. We can't plead our innocence because such a possibility discourages all truth.

ii)  A second idea that is not compulsory is that of terrible 'religions'. I define religion as a set of beliefs that drive actions, a set of values, desires, etc. Therefore, the idolization of the state and obsession to exterminate 'weaker' races, Nazi Facism, is a religion. If you disagree with my definition I still hope you see my point. If we have not given ourselves over the the thrill of being united under one all-controlling government, how do we know what it feels like, how do we know if it isn't the way? Obviously exploring such possibilities is both impractical and disagreeable.

iii) The one logical function that aids us here is that of truth exclusion. If you have found and tested that 1+1=2, then you do not need to test 1+1=5 or any other number. If somehow you can prove that all of the acceleration of an object can be accounted for by gravity, you do not need to search for others (well, there could be equal but opposite other forces that would change later due to position, but that's outside of the analogy). In the same way, if we have somehow proved that God exists, we know that no other religions are completely true because the idea of God logically excludes all others. We know "in the beginning God created" and major history afterward, so we can exclude all other creation stories, etc.  In this way, it is legitimate to exclude other religions once you believe you have found the truth.
Now, of course other religions can claim the same principle. Buddhist monks may claim to have reached some level of enlightenment which proves (at least to them) that Buddhism is true. Please see Chapter 1 for this.

Is Believing in God Irrational? Ch3 Psychological Crutch

This post is inspired by Amy Orr-Ewing's book "Is Believing in God Irrational?" Chapter 3. Please see all the chapters in the post "Is Believing in God Irrational?" for the full picture if you'd like.

Ch3) Is religion a psychological crutch to make the person feel better?
Some claim that, in need of comfort and protection, weak people project a God to fill the vacant father figure role, one in the image of man. Again, this idea has no psychological evidence. However, I will present a few thoughts Amy gave that came to my mind as well:
a) I suppose this concept of God makes sense from both ends. From the atheist perspective, of course God fills all the roles that weak human beings want him to, providing everything they need for comfort. This suggests man created God to fill his own void. From the Christian side, it makes sense that if God created us to be in relationship with him, he would create a need in us for him, such that he satisfies all our desires in the same way that women 'need' men and visa versa (though this desire is only a shadow and a foretaste deposit of our actual relationship with God). In fact, this intense desire that refuses to be satisfied by things of this world may be in itself and evidence for God. Because the facts (that the idea of God satisfies our desires) match both perspectives, there is nothing to be said here. This observation should have no weight to either side.
b)  It is simple to reverse this argument and say that atheists, or anyone who holds any position for that matter, has created their set of beliefs in order to avoid pain of some sort. Perhaps the atheist does not want to make the life changes that God would make necessary. Perhaps the atheist wants independence, a feeling of accomplishment without any help. Perhaps they have been scarred earlier by hateful religious people or had father, mothers, or friends who seriously let them down, and therefore the main images that reflect God. Whatever the belief, reasons can be suggested for creating a psychological crutch.
c) The same sort of arguments work for the nearly identical ideas that man invented God to fill the void of need and to create an orderly society (Ch2.d), that religion is only for the weak who can't realize that religion is just a reflection of our desires for society, a coping mechanism against the hard world, or a deluded escape from our failures.

Is Believing in God Irrational? Ch2 Science and Evolution-produced Religion

This post is inspired by Amy Orr-Ewing's book "Is Believing in God Irrational?" Chapter 2. Please see all the chapters in the post "Is Believing in God Irrational?" for the full picture if you'd like.

Ch2) Is the concept of God delusional? Isn't it outdated by science, based on no evidence, and an evolutionary leftover?
a) Has science dispensed with God? Orr-Ewing dismisses the idea (if someone gave it without evidence) by mentioning Christian scientists. I agree.

b) With scientific explanations for the universe, is God unnecessary? Amy says that science does not have the ability to say anything about God and the matter should be left to other disciplines. Two things come to mind for me: i) First, I believe there are a number of scientific arguments for the existence of God which have not been adequately shut down by atheists. Some of these (TSM in particular) rely on the fact that we cannot explain the universe with science only, namely due to the limits of time, space, and matter complexity. ii) Second, even if the natural universe could be explained (confining natural to that which is usually observed by science), other disciplines with other types of evidence may take their place and perhaps prove or disprove the existence of God. Personally, I tend to categorize science as anything that can be observed in any way, so I would include the inductive evidence of changed lives, miracles, and the like. These, especially miracles, are a sure front in the face of atheistic science.
 
c) Amy cites Dawkins, who says that many Christians present no evidence in their arguments, which rules out proper discussion and ends in violence, whereas people do not go to war based on an absence of belief. She defends the inference to the Crusades by saying that the logical end of Christianity is peace, while Atheists have no basis for it (e.g. Stalin). Here Dawkins is referencing normal, nonviolent atheists while Orr-Ewing is finding violent ones. Here I place a categorical distinction and a claim that everyone believes something. When Dawkins makes his statement, he suggests that all atheists believe the same (all have an absence of belief) and therefore do not go to war. However, atheists are defined only by their absence of belief in God, not as believing nothing, leaving every other belief open. Stalin believed in Marxism and that everyone richer than the common people must be thrown down. Dawkins behaves like a normal American and I have not met him personally, so it is hard to determine what he believes.
Let me go back to the impossibility of believing nothing and support this claim a little more. Perhaps people have different definitions of belief. I define it as whatever is most important to you. Romans 10:10 says "For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified." defining belief as a desire. Believed facts only support the desire. For Christians, we do not only academically believe in the existence of God, but more than that we know he is the most important, desirable person in the universe and so we pursue him at the cost of everything else. For Atheists, if it is not God, then perhaps it is comfort, power, leaving a legacy, knowledge, being seen as smart, family, money, affluence, etc. In Stalin's case it was the victory of the proleteriat.

d) i) Wasn't religion an evolutionary construct to help us form societies? ii) Is it now a disease that religious people indoctrinate their helpless children with?
Orr-Ewing handles this quite well by pointing out the lack of evidence or reasoning behind this idea. For me I see that in the first case, i) the evolutionary construct is merely a plausible explanation for how religion came to be. I accept that is a good explanation that does not seem to have obvious holes. To the mind of the Atheist, this is a good idea to have around, something that fits with the rest of their arguments. However, it does not disprove theism nor present any evidence that our evolutionary history (assuming we have one) did indeed involve the creation of religion. [I have a book that an atheist friend gave me on the subject which I hope to read soon. We shall see if it has evidence or just ideas]. Even supposing religion did evolve, it's evolution does not prove its falsity. In fact, scientists traditionally claim that evolved things tend to be helpful. [Dawkins in his Oct 2008 debate against Lennox used evolution to support the validity of the truth from our brains.] And again, even if they claim evolution did not find a true thing in this case, the fact that it evolved still does not rule it out. Perhaps it found the truth by chance?
ii) Again there is no evidence, no scientific studies on the brains of 'sick' religious people, to prove the malady. On the strain of indoctrination, is it not the same to tell your child something is true as to say it is not? I can see how this may be discouraged if religion was proved false, but again, even if it were proved false, do we not have the right of free speech and ownership of our children so long as we do not abuse them? After all, we tell our children that Santa exists, and would probably not take forceful action against a parent who taught that the sky was green. Though we would have every right handily put them down in books.

Is Believing in God Irrational? Ch1 Other Religions Experiences

This post is inspired by Amy Orr-Ewing's book "Is Believing in God Irrational?" Chapter 1. Please see all the chapters in the post "Is Believing in God Irrational?" for the full picture if you'd like.

Ch1) What about the religious experiences of other faiths?
 Amy defends this point by demonstrating that other religions, Buddhism and Islam in particular, do not claim a personal experience with a personal God. I might be led to believe that nearly all religions other than Christianity lack this point. However, I am not satisfied for two reasons: First, there may be existing religions (or we could invent a religion) that claims to have such an experience. Second, what if these other religions nonetheless claim to have some sort of experience that validates their faith, not necessarily a personal one with a personal God?

a) It is easy to invent religions and claim to have personal experiences. I think in the case of such claims, because it seems impossible to validate them scientifically (though I am open to suggestions), we must look at the results of the persons life. Do they actually live out (or try very hard to live out) what they believe? Does their life exhibit change that seems greater than would come from a fantasized psychological crutch, the effects of the religious institution, or a conscious deception? I would argue that Christianity alone exhibits this, though this point of evidence is of course quite debatable.

b) What we are dealing with here is my interpretation of the ontological argument. Is there evidence that we have been influenced by something greater than ourselves and the natural universe? One argument points to our concept of infinity, which has no reality in the universe, and so - assuming we cannot conceive of any concept we have not seen - suggests the touch of something infinite, namely God. The same argument may be applied personally from religious experiences. That heart tug we feel cannot be produced by psychological phenomena, from within ourselves, and so points to God. However, other religions may claim this argument as well.
First of all, I may ask if any do. I think there are a number of New Age type people who might volunteer for this, but for many main world religions, I don't know. Buddhism may claim a disappearing of desire, though that is rather an absence than a presence, and I would accept it as an effect of shutting down the brain partially, a common element of meditation many religions.
However, if some religions still claim experiences that seem to come from outside the natural world, then again I may have call in the test of that persons life again. Do they act as if they have been touched by something outside?