Truth with a capital T.
(This and most of my blog entries are based on my own opinions and therefore could be wrong at any time. Please don’t assume that I’m stating my opinions as objective facts.)
Almost everyone who follows a religion claims that their religion is the truth. But what do they mean. Is it possible for them all to be right at the same time? What if they’re all partly right and partly wrong? Or could it be that they are all 100% wrong? That’s what I’m going to think about in this entry.
I’m not going to try to find that religion as that would be a much bigger project. I could spend my whole life doing that and still be completely wrong. Instead, I’m going to ask, if there even could be a religion of truth and if there were, what methods could be used to find it.
For a moment lets assume that there is just one religion in the world that is true and all the other religions of the world are false. To narrow it down a little lets say that the religion which is true is also still practiced today.
There are estimated to be around 4300 active faiths in the world today so if you picked one at random you would have a 0.023% chance of picking the right one. In other words, if we’re purely looking at probabilities without taking anything else into account there’s a 99.977% probability you are not following the religion of truth.
Not the kind of odd’s one would expect a benevolant all powerfull creator to leave us with if He really wanted us to get to heaven. Giid thing we’re not just working on probabilities then.
Could the number of followers have something to do with it then? Lets think about it.
If we assume this ‘True’ religion is true in an objective sense then it must be true regardless of whether anyone believes in it or not. This means that even if no one follows the religion of truth (lets call it religion x) then it would still be true. But this would also mean that if the whole entire world was unanimously following any other religion then their religion would not be true despite the universal following.
So, if we want to find out which religion is true we cannot therefore use the number of followers as a sole indicator of it’s validity.
How then do we figure out which religion is true?
I can think of three main ways:
What it claims.
- Look at the claims that the religion makes.
- From that list, extract the claims that are falsafiable and that can be proven to be objectively true or false.
- See how many of them agree with the evidence.
If 100% of the testable claims of a religion are proven to be objectively true then it might be reasonable to assume that at least some of the untestable claims are to, i.e the potential existence of God and the potential for that religion being the true one.
A phsychological look at it’s founders and original texts.
We could look at the original texts and the lives of the religions founders to see if their phsychological profiles line up with what they claimed both about themselves and about God and the world around them.
Historical Records.
Do the events in the narrative of the religion line up with history. Did history unfold how the religion portrayed it?
Rather than choose one of these methods, it would be much better to use all three and then if a religion passes all three tests then there is at least a probability greater than random chance that this religion is the true one. Greater than 0.023%.
However, determining whether or not a religion is true or false has nothing to do with determining whether it is good or bad. A religion could be true and dammingly evil, or it could be false and yet so profoundly beneficial that it transforms the world.
How then would we detirmine whether or not a religion is good or bad? You might have already guessed the answer. It’s not that simple. But looking at the original sources and studying the phsychology of the founders of the religion, the societies they lived in as well as what they considered to be morrally good might be a good start. The only time that there might be a problem with this approach would be if a religion claimed that it was morrally perfect and a guidence for all time. Such a religion would not adhere to the morals of any specific people but instead to what is objectively morrally good.
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