I received an email from a person who had heard me speak somewhere, and I had mentioned that I saw Christianity as being “a reasonable faith”. I’ve printed part of his email below, and my answer to him as an attempt to answer a long question in a short way.
Hi Graham,
I was quite interested in one particular point you made during your session…that Christianity is a reasonable faith…. How would you define reasonable, and would we classify the other ‘main’ religions like Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism as reasonable faiths as well? If not, what would make them ‘unreasonable’? In that light, is being a reasonable and ‘ancient’ faith a ‘good’ reason to consider Christianity? I am just trying to work around some of the conversations I have with my students. I really would prefer a very short answer if you could, as my students tend to have short attention spans!
Regards,
John (not his real name)
Great question, John. I'm challenged by your request for a short answer to a question that involves all the major world religions in the context of their reasonableness and their historicity. In the spirit of your request, I’ve limited myself to one A4 page only… (Please understand that a really thorough answer would need some significant expansion.)
1. Islam is a derivative, though more correctly a heresy, of Christianity which itself is a continuation of Judaism. Buddhism is a derivative, perhaps even a heresy, of Hinduism. It is better to go back to the original and consider their reasonableness first. If they fall over at the test of reason, then their derivatives probably will, too.
2. By ‘reasonable’, I mean that it is open to logical and philosophical investigation, and that at its core tenets it withstands rational enquiry.
3. Rational enquiry about religion does not preclude the existence of God. In talking about religion, this may be taken as an a priori assumption, following which other things will fall into place. It is not a requirement of logical thought about religion that we have to prove God, any more than we feel a need to prove concepts such as love or monetary value or time. They are reasonable postulates to describe something whose influence or effect we suspect to have real application.
4. Hinduism fails a rational test in that it does not provide a solution for the problem of evil, or for the existence of good. Its pantheon (i.e. its complete array of gods) is frequently internally contradictory and does not provide a coherent explanation for the existence of humankind as humankind. It even fails a test of there being a ground for rational enquiry, because everything in the human's world is regarded as meaningless until one escape from that world into a higher form of life.
5. Judaism provides a coherent explanation for the existence of humankind and the cosmos. It may not provide clarity around the ‘How’ or ‘When’, but it is certainly clear on the ‘Who’ and ‘Why’ of human life. It also provides a clear and rationally-acceptable concept of God. (Of course, God in any religion will always supersede any human rationalism and be known ultimately as a mystery - at least in part.)
6. Christianity is meaningless without Judaism. It never pretended to rest on any foundation other than Judaism. It was always promoted and described as the fulfilment or completion of Judaism. One of the many contributions of Christianity in a rational sense is that it presents Jesus as the incarnate son of God, i.e. the appearance of God in human form, so that we as humans might truly know him - and thus know God. Both Judaism and Christianity present a rational view of a coherent world which is other than God, and is capable of being investigated as a created entity, not as a divine or transcendent entity.
7. Islam is meaningless without either Judaism or Christianity. As such, it ought to have built on both and added to them. On the contrary, it reduced Christianity considerably, and denied a good deal of Judaism, while maintaining some core concepts. Its scriptures rest on the Old Testament, but at the same time, denies much of the Old Testament. It is not internally consistent at this point.
8. Part of a rational enquiry would require an examination of the likelihood (plausibility) of the core claims of a religion, e.g. for Judaism: the existence of God; for Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus; for Islam: the authority of the Koran and the authenticity of the Prophet; for Hinduism: the existence of the Pantheon; for Buddhism: the denial of all gods.
9. The question of ‘ancient-ness’ is relevant in that the history of humankind is the history of our search for truth and for God – though Christianity would argue that most of human history has been the wilful suppression of known truth about God. Any claim that millennia of humankind have been mistaken, while a recent discovery contains the truth will be suspect simply for reasons of chronological snobbery (i.e. we moderns are more likely to be right because we know more science). Mormonism is suspect, not only because it rests heavily on highly disputable foundations of magic goggles, disappearing texts, and the invasion of America by a Jewish diaspora, but because humankind had to wait till the 19th century before the truth was revealed. Even Islam, although an old religion (6th to 7th century) is certainly not ancient. Thus, when it denies the truths of Judaism or Christianity of which it is a heretical sect, it makes itself less intellectually reasonable.
10. If there is a God, then it is reasonable to assume that he would have made himself known long before now, to the earliest humans. That is precisely the claim of ancient Judaism and thus Christianity.
