The Dilemma: Competing Truth Claims
Just because a Christian believes he has truth doesn’t mean that he has the truth, no matter how sincere he is. Many people believe things and are wrong. A Muslim blows himself up in a building for his cause because he believes quite sincerely that he is right. Perhaps a Christian may use arguments from personal experience, stating that Christ has changed his life straightened out his marriage, or given him inner peace But what does any of that prove? An adherent to Hare Krishna may claim a similar experience The subjective experience of personal satisfaction is an unreliable source to verify truth to someone else, because someone from an opposing view can claim the same thing. Personal experiences can also be misleading and can be explained by a variety of phenomena emotionalism, hallucinations, dishonest charlatans, easily deceived and uneducated people, drugs, depression, and etc.
Some attempt to solve the dilemma by saying. “All the religions are right, we just call God by a different name.” But this claim stems from ignorance of other religions. They are mutually exclusive if one is right the other has to be wrong! For example, forms of Buddhism believe that God is not a personal being. He is not distinguishable from his creation, but is the creation --- the trees, the ocean, all of nature including ourselves. That is not the God of the Bible, who is a personal being separate from His creation. The God of Islam is very distant from his creatures and capricious. It is blasphemous in Islam to call him “Father” - a much too intimate and familiar term. That is not the God of Christianity who is so involved with His creation that He visited our planet and died on the cross for our sins. Hinduism is polytheistic, believing in many gods. Christianity believes in one God. They cannot both be right at the same time; they are mutually exclusive.
Furthermore, Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but through Me.” This eliminates all the other religions, a very exclusive claim. That may sound very narrow, but the question isn’t which is narrow, but which is true? Truth is narrow by its very nature, because all opposing claims would then be false.
Atheism is a truth claim which says, “I know there is no God.” However, that is a rather unintellectual position to hold. The total knowledge any of us have, in comparison to all the knowledge there is to know, is only an infinitesimal amount. One would have to be virtually omniscient to make a statement like that. A more reasonable position would be that of the agnostic who says one cannot be sure, or the skeptic, who chooses to suspend judgment.
An agnostic may think it is more of an intellectual virtue to suspend judgment on all religion, but in reality he has not suspended judgment at all. Religion is defined by Webster’s dictionary as “a cause, principle, or belief held to with ardor and faith.” Therefore belief in a personal God is not necessary to qualify as a religion. Accordingly, atheism as well as agnosticism’s suspended judgment are both religious positions. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that atheistic belief systems, such as secular humanism, which believes in the evolutionary process to explain all existence, is a religion. My point is that the agnostic has suspended judgment on all religions except his own.
Furthermore, suspending judgment in this area is not an intellectual virtue. It is actually quite irrational when you consider that we are all going to die. Each day we get closer to the inevitable end. The ugliness of death awaits, as well as whatever lies hereafter. No decision is a decision. It is like sitting on the railroad tracks surrounded by paper mache doors, calmly playing a game of cards, unconcerned. You know there is a train coming, screaming down the tracks. The only thing you don’t know is the precise time of its arrival --- but arrive it will. One or two of the doors may lead off the tracks, but sitting there doing nothing is a decision in itself. The train is coming regardless, and will catch you in your decision of “suspended judgment.” Is it rational to continue to sit there? If there is any intellectual virtue at all, it at least lies in the search itself rather than the irrational position of passively sitting on the tracks in the path of an oncoming locomotive and not even investigating where the doors lead.
What if someone who was in a dungeon awaiting a death sentence found a few concealed tunnels, one of which he heard may lead to freedom. Would any rational person not investigate? And if he could only choose one, would he not gain all the information possible and then commit himself to the one with the most evidence that it was a true escape?
So the fact that an agnostic says that he cannot be sure is certainly no reason to reject Christianity; it is all the more reason to examine it. If he does not even make the effort, then, contrary to what he may claim, he really is not that concerned about the search for truth at all. It is far the more rational position to conduct a serious investigation.
This brings us right back to where we started. Given the rationality of at least the search for truth, how can we know which belief is true in the face of conflicting truth claims? Besides, if a Christian is trying to convince me of his position, does he not have a bias? He is not objective, so does that not discredit his position? Just because someone has a bias does not mean he cannot have truth. If someone’s beliefs are in fact true, he has a right to be biased against the other false claims! Atheism or agnosticism are belief systems with a bias, just as Christianity and all the other religions have biases as well. The question is not to be unbiased.. for that is impossible. The question is which bias is the best bias to be biased with. Some believe that saying one belief system is wrong in contrast to another is an example of intolerance. But this is not an appeal to be intolerant in an immoral sense. Tolerance when it comes to personal relationships is a virtue. Tolerance when it comes to truth is the act of a fool!
Is there an objective standard to determine truth? There most certainly is. Civilized societies use them all the time. What needs to be done is to take a recognized objective standard of truth and consistently apply it to someone’s “biased” truth claim, and see how well it stands up. [See the other sections of these blogs for the Recognized Methods of Determining Truth: The Scientific Method; The Legal Historical Method; the Bibliographical Test of Verification; the Historical Evidence; Core Facts Accepted by All Skeptics, the Resurrection; and the Case Before a Court of Law.].
1 From a booklet titled “CHRISTIAN TRUTH and It’s Defense for U.S. Marines” by David E. Bishop, First Sergent, USMC ret.)
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