Tuesday Morning God Blogging

Derbyshire speaking truth to power at the Corner:

Of course religious belief is relativistic. Religious people say it is! Suppose I line up a Christian, a Moslem, and a Hindu, and ask: "You guys all promote a different set of 'fundamental truths.' How can I figure out who's right and who's wrong? What external test can I apply? What can any of you point to in the beliefs of the others that doesn't square with observable facts about the world, or about human life?" What will they say? After a lot of babbling and pointing, it will boil down to: "You gotta have faith. You have to feel the truth within yourself." In other words, it's an interior, subjective experience. What's more relative than that? There is no objective test one can apply to confirm or falsify statements like "Jesus was the Son of God," or "Mohammed was the Messenger of God," or "Vishnu has four arms." You just gotta believe. How is that not relative?

Given that the Corner was basically US Weekly for Catholics while the Pope was in town, this went over like a fart in church (ha! puns!):

Derbyshire knows zilch about Catholicism or Vatican II, has not carefully read anything the pope has said about relativism, and is not interested in doing any of the intellectual work required to remedy his ignorance. His posts make these points pretty clear. You can't have a good-faith conversation with him on these topics, so don't try.

Yes, no need to debate religion versus reason; Derb simply doesn't know what he is talking about. If he did, of course he wouldn't dare equate Catholicism or Christianity in general to such heathen religions as Hinduism and Islam. The thing is Derb is largely right:

Careful enquiry, classification, and measurement; comparison with the inquiries of others; discussion and publication; test against observation and experiment; that is how we learn truths about the world. There isn't another way. The truths of religion are revealed … to individuals … as interior, subjective experiences … with different individuals receiving and interpreting thm differently. That's relative.

As he says, "Boy, how I love the Enlightenment!" Derb's thoughts largely track my own, as does Ramesh's response to my own born-again relatives.

I consider myself agnostic since, as Derb explains, it is literally impossible to reason out the correctness or wrongness of any particular religion. Taken as a whole (minus the burning bushes, hexapedal gods, and ascendant prophets), there is much that religion shares in common in philosophy which weighs in favor of giving them some creedance in those areas of common agreement. For example, most religions share the same basic 10 Commandment rules against murder and stealing and such, as well as some form of the Golden Rule.

This position is counter to those who reason against religion and come out thinking there is no god. While religion cannot prove the existence of a God (regardless of what St. Anslem said), science cannot disprove the existence of god (regardless of what the anti-Darwinists contend), only fail to verify. And for that reason, I will stick to my conservative belief in a god, but reserve to right to pick one.