I received many interesting responses to my post titled Is Your Religion True? That post basically made two arguments: (1) If there actually was compelling evidence for any of the world’s religions then one might expect a consensus to form in the same sense that a consensus usually forms in science. As it stands, there is no such consensus. Rather, the historical trend seems to be a move towards greater diversity and division among religions. (2) If the Creator of the Universe had a message for us iupon which our fate after death depends on hearing that message and accepting its instructions, then any God worthy of that title could have done a far better job of communicating it.  As it stands, humans cannot agree on what divine revelations are really divine - if any.

Here I would like to take the opportunity to comment on some of these responses:

you can’t understand people who are religious because you were never religious and they can’t understand you… sometimes, there’s not right or wrong but what’s practical to the person.

This is hardly a response but this kind of thinking seems to come up often enough that it is worth addressing again. The claim seems to be that there are elements of religion that don’t matter if they are true or not, rather, what matters is how those elements helps a person in life. But here I am not arguing about what is practical or not - I am arguing about what is likely to be true or not given the available evidence. Whether or not someone finds false beliefs practical to his or her daily life and whether or not that is useful or even desirable is an entirely different question. It’s also one that Daniel Dennet tackles head on in his book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Here, though, I think that it is enough to say this: Responses like this only serve to further the immunity from criticism that religion has long enjoyed, and it does so by deflecting the more important question of the truth content of religions to the less important question of in what sense can religoius beliefs comfort the lives of believers.

As a person who works in science, I know that empirical evidence only takes the ‘truth’ so far. For example, people were CONVINCED that the functions of T cells were limited to TH1 and TH2 up until the year 2000… now I’m working on TH17 cells which are still completely controversial. So com’on, while science is based on empirical evidence that ‘withstand the test of time’, it’s only relative to what sort of ‘test’ you keep doing to prove yourself correct or not.

“There is a good reason why there is a clear consensus among physicists concerning Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.” Sure, for now… until the next genius comes and ‘proves’ that it’s incomplete…

This is true. However, I would submit that empirical evidence of the kind that science regularly deals with takes us much, much further than any strictly religious claims can. Indeed, among some believers it is considered a virtue to believe a religious claim without any evidence at all!

By the way, we already know that General Relativity is incomplete because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics. But no physicist would deny that the theory works extremely well on larger scales. Now if we could only have that level of confidence about say, the virgin birth…

PEOPLE WHO CANNOT waive beyond their own understanding and experience of their own world is what breeds intolerance… and what do you think you’ve been speaking of when you cannot accept that people can have a different belief system than you… INTOLERANCE! Com’on!

… and keep telling yourselves that you are the only ones who thinks and anyone who belief in anything else is just an idiot… tell me how that works out for you

This is another diversionary tactic. Rather than facing the tough questions head on, like, do any religions make true claims that can be verified, this person suggests that we should just accept different beliefs simply because they are different. I might be willing to do that with harmless beliefs, but religious beliefs, in general, are not harmless. This should require no further explanation.

What I and other atheists are advocating here is what Sam Harris calls conversational intolerance. In other words, when a person makes unsubstantiated claims in a conversation we feel that we must challenge that claim. This is about being intolerant towards bad and unsupported ideas, not about being intolerant towards people. I am not saying that people shouldn’t have the right to believe what they want. I am only saying that they should not expect to be immune from criticism when they assert those beliefs without evidence.

Besides, the post was not about my own beliefs. I am not sitting here proclaiming to have the truth. On the contrary, I am simply calling out religious claims as being baseless.

That’s a pretty narrow argument and not one consistent with human behavior or not as it applies to large groups of people. I mean would you say the same thing about politics, governing bodies? That if one were compelling enough that the world would move to some kind of consensus?

No, I wouldn’t. The point is this. Religions make truth claims about the nature of reality and another “reality” that is supposedly beyond this one. Science also makes truth claims about the nature of reality. Believing these claims requires some kind of evidence, and the better the evidence the more people should be compelled to believe them. Governments do not make truth claims about the nature of reality. They are merely different ways in which humans can organize our society. There is no sense in which a particular government is “right” or “wrong” beyond some arbitrary criteria.

The argument about converging beliefs needs work. Having a splintering of religions doesn’t imply a weakness in the concept of God, but instead that people have accepted belief in God and adopted it to their own experiences and culture, as most of the world apparently does. Not that this means any Deism is necessarily right, but it is widely adopted, which is the criterion Tracy uses here.

Here is another variation:

I am drawing a distinction between religion and God. Just because religions may be wrong does not disprove the existence of God by any means; that is my point. Any religion worth it’s merit has no proof of its own, that would be a lie since it would be taking something humanly made and ascribing it’s existence to the divine.

I said nothing about the concept of God but was rather careful to say “religions”. There could be a god that actually doesn’t care what we believe about it and this would be quite consistent with the smattering and splintering of religions.

However, most if not all of the worlds major religions that include a supreme god claim that god has communicated a set of special instructions to humanity and that our fates after death depend on how well we carry out those instructions or even just what we believe about them. I am arguing that this is clearly false, because any supreme god would have communicated such a message much, much more efficiently than what we actually observe.

Lack of coherence among doctrine in the major religions arises from interpretations or applications of the basic assumptions of each. Christianity has hundreds (thousands?) of denominations that vary and sometimes disagree with one another, but they all hold to the basic assumptions of an all-powerful God who created the universe and man; man’s sinful nature; and Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection as God’s way to redeem man back to him because he loves us.

These are the core claims of Christianity, yes. But what about between religions? This goes back to my point. 2,000 years later, the majority of the worlds population are not Christians. Islam and Mormonism (Christian, but only loosely) appear to be gaining converts at a faster rate. If Christianity is true, then that’s a terrible PR job for a supreme being.

Frequently Tracy writes with the assumption that if God existed, his logic would be intuitive to us, his creation. I see absolutely no reason to believe this. Humans have trouble understanding the complex systems of their own creation and those of our physical world - how are all of God’s actions supposed to make sense to us? Many holy books say that God’s ways are more advanced than ours - this statement is more than a copout, it’s inherently true if God is who he says he is. Rejecting the idea of God because he’s hard to understand doesn’t make sense.

I am not making any claims as to god’s logic, I am merely taking what believers generally believe to be true about their god. Namely, that god exists and has a very important message for us but for some reason the world is hopelessly divided on what that message is, what book it can be found in, and how it should be interpreted. If this is what you consider to be “advanced” communication skills, then you need to re-consider.

I have at least one more response that I want to consider, but I will save that for another post.