Apologetics

Religious diversity is an obvious fact of American life and its healthy presence is a valuable indicator that our society truly values freedom. Americans have not departed in any appreciable manner from the pluralism celebrated by the influential philosopher William James a century ago. We are often wont, in fact, to boast that ours is one of the most, if not the most religiously-diverse nation in the world. And the empirical evidence seems to support this claim. (www.pluralism.org)

Religious pluralism, however, is more than just a cluster of largely indisputable sociological facts. It is, in fact, the position of some philosophers that pluralism is the necessary outcome of an unbridgeable epistemological divide between mankind and “the Ultimate.” This can be called a priori pluralism (before the fact) in contrast to the a posteriori (after the fact) pluralism that is the ongoing research subject of Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.

As a philosophy of religious epistemology (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/), pluralism is frequently illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the familiar tale, an elephant is examined by a number of blind men, each of whom feels a different part of the elephant and consequently draws different conclusions about the nature of the elephant, which of course, none except the story-teller actually knows as an elephant. The blind men, says the proverb, represent the epistemic status of the world’s religions: all have a part of the truth; none has the truth. The British philosopher John Hick, himself an influential pluralist, thus concluded: “If, then, we distinguish between the Real/ Ultimate/ Divine in itself [the elephant itself] and that Reality as humanly perceived [the parts of the elephant], recognizing that there is a range of modes of human cognition [the blind men], we can at once see how there is a plurality of religious traditions constituting different, but apparently more or less equally salvific, human responses to the Ultimate. These are the great world faiths.”

This “rainbow of religious expression” sounds great and liberal and broad-minded and all that stuff that is supposed to make non-pluralists feel like the knuckle-draggers they really are. But is religious pluralism as such actually a tenable philosophy? Even before I consult a religious text that might inform me otherwise, is it reasonable for me to embrace the idea that all religions are ultimately reconcilable with one another and all can be said to represent a small part of an even greater, ultimately unknowable truth? 

The Cambridge Dictionary of philosophy defines a worldview as “an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally” (Audi, 236). Another quotable source puts it: “A worldview is a philosophical system that attempts to explain how the facts of reality relate and fit together….a worldview shapes or colors the way we think and furnishes the interpretive condition for understanding and explaining the facts of our experience” (Geisler and Bocchino, 55).

The basic questions addressed by any worldview concern the nature and/or existence of God or gods, the nature and origin of the universe, the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind, the source of and solution to evil, and the basis and nature of ethics and morality. Based upon these criteria, it is safe to say, nuances aside, that there are three major and opposing worldviews colliding in the world today: theism, pantheism, and atheism. Put simply, theism says that God brought the universe into existence some finite time in the past, that man is the special creation of God who is morally accountable to his Creator, that moral evil is the result of the corrupt use of freewill, and that ethics are ultimately rooted in the nature of God. Pantheism teaches that God is impersonal and metaphysically indistinct from the universe, that man’s true self is God, that evil is an illusion caused by the errors of the mind, and that ethics are relative inasmuch as they transcend the illusion of good and evil. Atheism asserts that there is no God or gods at all and that the universe is all that is, that man is a product of evolution, ultimately reducible to matter, that evil is caused by human ignorance (especially religion), and that ethics are grounded in humanity alone.

Though this is of course a thumb nail sketch, I think it fairly treats the major worldviews in at least rough outline. Recently, however, the supposition was brought to my attention that atheism allegedly is not a worldview. This attempt to deny the “worldviewness” of atheism, I believe is fueled by what I call the atheist via negativa. That is, despite all appearances to the contrary, some atheists claim that they are not making any metaphysical assertions and therefore need not provide any proof of their beliefs.

No doubt you’ve heard someone emphatically claim, “The Bible’s full of contradictions.” This is a common objection raised by critics of the Bible for why Christian faith is unreasonable. But what is often left out of the discussion is any clear idea of what exactly constitutes a contradiction.

A contradiction should be distinguished from a discrepancy. A discrepancy is where there are seeming but reconcilable inconsistencies between two versions of the same story. For example, Matthew 27:5 says that Judas hanged himself, but Acts 1:18 says that he fell headlong, and “burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out.” There seems to be a discrepancy between these versions of Judas’ death. But is it a contradiction? Actually no. In this case, the answer seems simple. Judas hanged himself, and his body was left alone to bloat and rot until the corpse finally fell to the ground below.

On the other hand, a contradiction is saying two different and mutually exclusive things about the same thing at the same time: Judas hanged himself; Judas did not hang himself. I am typing at the computer and I am not typing at the computer at the same time in reference to the same thing. That’s a contradiction. But I could be typing at the computer and drinking coffee at the same time. To some, even that would appear as a discrepancy. But it’s not hard to explain, as you might suspect. This is the same kind of thing that happens with many so-called contradictions in the Bible – they turn out to be discrepancies easily reconciled with a little bit of context and thoughtfulness.

A few years ago a very specific question was posed to me in which a man alleged a particular contradiction in the Bible: Did Saul kill himself (1 Sam. 31:4), or did a young man kill him upon David’s request (2 Sam. 1:15)? Following is the answer I gave to him: 

This is a great question and one that just happens to bring up one of my favorite passages in the Bible insofar it reveals once again the depths to which men will often sink in order to advance their own selfish interests. If not for the light of God’s word, we would all remain blind to the sickness that resides in our own hearts (Jer. 17:9-10). In the first account (1 Sam 31:1-6), the Bible says that Saul committed suicide, but in the second passage (2 Sam 1:1-16) it records that a man from Saul’s camp took his life at the dying Saul’s request. While superficially this may appear a contradiction, the resolution is actually rather plain and simple.

The account in 1 Sam 31 is a straightforward historical account of what took place in the battle. Saul, upon recognizing his mortal wound and fearing humiliation and torture at the hands of the enemy, went ahead and took his own life. The account in 2 Sam 1, on the other hand, is the story made up by one of Saul’s men, who upon realizing that his lord was gravely wounded and knowing that David was God’s chosen heir to the throne, thought he could gain favor with the incoming administration by claiming to have personally ensured Saul’s death, thereby securing David’s immediate ascendancy. In other words, he lied about his role in Saul’s death thinking that his self-proclaimed act of heroism would impress David. The problem was that he grossly miscalculated how David would react to the fall of the Lord’s anointed, presuming that David would thereby rejoice and maybe even exalt the one who helped bring it about. But David himself had already passed up several opportunities to kill Saul with his own hands, so it is not surprising that he lamented over the news of Saul’s death, or that he was indignant over the young man’s vain attempt to exploit it for the sake of cheap political points.

There is no contradiction here; only illumination. It should be noted as well that the Scripture never says that the young man killed Saul at David’s request. David’s command in 2 Sam 1:15 is for the young man himself to be executed because of his admission, though evidently false, to have destroyed the Lord’s anointed.