“Science has disproved Christianity”
“How can a loving God send people to hell?”
“You can’t take the Bible literally”
It is common to find many religious people get defensive and even aggressive in the defence of their faith, often without really looking at the question and mostly without ever having found a satisfactory answer to the question themselves.
This page is dedicated to offering insight into some of the more “difficult” areas of faith in the message of Jesus. We don't presume to have an answer to every question posed, but we do want to look at the answers offered by the Christian faith.
"Every man believes something, trusts in something and serves something."
Investigating our truths and testing the assumptions we’ve built our lives upon are both noble and imperative. How pathetic the man who has spent all his life investing in something that turned out to be a figment of someone’s imagination!
The famous 20th century author, C.S. Lewis once said he believes in the sun, not because he can see it, but because by its light he can see everything else.
Are you able to say the same? Do your beliefs make sense of the world around you?
Whether you are a sceptic, a believer struggling with doubt or simply digging for deeper understanding, we encourage you to continue to wrestle through your tough questions until you are able to have a solid answer for what you believe.
Doubt can be your friend, listen patiently to your own doubts, then settle them through a process of reflection and probing. Struggling with hard questions, even your own ones, will deal with the ridiculous and offensive answers we inherit about our faith and help you see and know real, plausible reasons for your beliefs.
One more thought before we begin:
All doubts, however sceptical and cynical they may seem, are really only a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt belief A except for a position of faith in Belief B.
For example, to say that there cannot be only one true religion is a statement of faith just as much as saying there can only be one true way. Both require a leap of faith, not based on empirical evidence or accepted universal truth.
Special mention must be made of a resource used extensively in the preparation of this page: The Reason for God, belief in an age of scepticism by Timothy Keller. In many ways this page is a summary of the arguments presented in Keller’s book. The book is really an excellent work and there are many other external sources and references in it that will provide a huge amount of material for further study.
1. There can’t be only one true religion
A panel of religious leaders who recently met to discuss the differences among their religions were all able to agree on the following statement regarding the person of Jesus:
"If Christians are right about Jesus being God, then Muslims and Jews fail in a serious way to love God as God really is, but if Muslims and Jews are right that Jesus is not God but rather a teacher or a prophet, then Christians fail in a serious way to love God as God really is."
At least among some of the main traditional religions their claims about Truth cannot possibly all be true at the same time. By definition, truth is exclusive, without the truth there would be no lie and how can we know the lie apart from the truth. The truth makes the lie obvious, in that the lie is what the truth is not. Exclusivity is implied: contradicting statements cannot both be true at the same time.
So the question changes from “Can there be only one true religion?” to a more fruitful one: “Is it possible to have a multiplicity of true religions?”
Believing that there is only one true religion is as much a matter of faith as the belief that there cannot be only one.
We need to take a sober look at the foundations of our faith, whatever it may be and test each claim with the perspective it gives on the world: i.e. Does my set of beliefs build a worldview that can answer the difficult questions and which also allows for the current state of the world? If your beliefs have no way of explaining things like poverty, suffering, love, morals and music, I would suggest that your beliefs need a radical rethink.
2. Religion is the problem
It is widely claimed that religion is a major barrier to world peace. Religion informs its followers that they have the "truth" and this naturally leads its adherents to feel superior to those with differing beliefs. It becomes easy to stereotype followers of other religions. This can easily spiral into marginalisation of others and eventually active oppression, abuse and violence.
Let's take a look at some proposed solutions to the religion problem:
1. Outlaw religion:
Soviet Russia, Communist China all decided to tightly control religious practise to stop it from dividing society or undermining the power of the state. The result however, was not more peace and harmony but more oppression.
"The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practised by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence." - Alister McGrath
The secularisation thesis holds that religion was an instrument created by man to help him cope in a very frightening, incomprehensible world, and that as humanity became more scientifically sophisticated and more able to understand and control our own environment our need for religion would diminish. This thesis has been largely discredited and indeed, virtually all major religions are growing, even as science and scientific understanding is multiplying.
1.Condemn religion:
Is it not possible to find ways to socially discourage religions that claim to have the truth and who try and convert others to their beliefs? Couldn't we find ways to urge all of our citizens to admit that each religion or faith is just one of many equally valid paths to God and ways to live in the world?
This approach creates and environment in which it is considered unenlightened and outrageous to make exclusive religious claims. This is done by stating and restating certain axioms that eventually achieve the status of common sense.
Those who deviate from these axioms are stigmatised as foolish or dangerous. This approach is having some effect in the world but it cannot ultimately succeed because at its heart is a fatal inconsistency that will eventually lead to the collapse of this way of thinking. Here are some of those axioms and the problems with each:
i "all major religions are equally valid and basically teach the same thing"
Most people who hold this point of view have in mind the major world faiths, not splinter sects. Do we really want to say that the Branch Davidians or religions requiring child sacrifice are as valid and not inferior to some other faiths?
Another problem here is that in saying that individual doctrines are really not important is really a doctrine in itself! It holds a specific view of God which is touted as superior and more enlightened than other beliefs. The irony here is that the proponents of this view are doing the very thing they forbid in others!
i."each religion sees part of spiritual truth, but none can see the whole truth."
How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?
i."religious belief is too culturally and historically conditioned to be truth."
This is a paradox as the statement claims the truth of relativism but that in itself is not a relativistic statement, it claims the truth. Social and historical conditioning does affect our perceptions and claim of truth, but to be able to make the claim you are basically either exempting or disqualifying yourself from or by the same claim.
"Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would have been quite different. (But) the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in (Morocco) he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that ....his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?" Alvin Plantinga
ii.“It is arrogant to insist your religion is right and to convert others to it”
This again is a contradiction, as the person holding this view is doing exactly what they forbid others to do by the statement. It is no more narrow to claim one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, only in different ways.
2. Keep religion completely private
If religion is a set of beliefs that explain the meaning of life, who we are and what the most important things are for us humans to pursue, if it is a framework by which we make sense of the world around us, how is it possible to keep completely private. This framework, our world-view or master narrative, gives meaning to our lives and underlies every decision we make, how can we possibly leave behind the convictions we have about ultimate values as long as we’re in some kind of social context. Besides, the very call to keep religion private is itself religious.
3.“How could a good God allow suffering”
A columnist wrote in the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami that killed over 250 000 people: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
Although we can all understand the frustration, anger and pain the journalist was feeling after that terrible tragedy, there is fallacy in the argument he brings that is worth pointing out: Just because we can’t see or imagine a good reason why God should allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Using our perspective on a situation to judge things like the existence of God is an incredible expression of faith in our own cognitive abilities. If God does exist and if He is omnipresent and omniscient (big enough to be mad at because he didn’t stop the tragedy), it goes without saying that he sees and knows things that we do not!
The existence of evil is actually more evidence for the existence of God. Alvin Plantinga puts it this way: “Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness (if there were no God and we just evolved)? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live. A (secular) way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort, and this no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you really do think there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness, then you have a powerful argument (for the reality of God).”
Check back soon for more perspectives on ‘TOUGH QUESTIONS’....
