Here’s a question from our friend Jim Wilson:

Most people of faith will tell you their God exists, period!  That leaves me highly skeptical of any of their many claims of absolute certainty.  It seems to me our knowledge is limited by the best available evidence, and it is always changing.  As such, I find ‘absolute certainty’ a useless concept for all practical purposes.

Religious people tend not to accept this, and hold claims of absolute certainty in very high regard even when their claims are based on flimsy evidence. Often vague feelings, intuitions and completely subjective experiences are apparently more than enough to know beyond any reasonable doubt their God exists. Any claim based on a subjective experience is irrational. This phenomena has been reinforced over and over again, by childhood indoctrination and tradition. It is the basis for understanding ‘meme’s.

I have heard similar stories from Christians, Muslims and Hindus about vague experiences that a God is communicating with them; often calling them to engage in some sort of behavior or lifestyle change.  The stories are almost interchangeable, but you will never see a Christian or Hindu accept a Muslim’s story of God’s subtle communication with the Muslim as true, and vice versa. When Christians tell me they have experienced God’s presence, I tell them about a Hindu friend who says the same thing about the Elephant headed God Ganesha and I ask why I should consider the Hindu’s experience any more or less reliable than theirs? It seems stories one would dismiss in other religions are perfectly reasonable to believe when they come from your own.

The hardest thing for me is when religious people invoke faith to justify their claims of absolute certainty of God. Faith is not necessary to know something is true. Faith is what you adduce when you want to believe something but cannot justify it or back it up with facts.  It’s a ‘feeling’ often followed with “I can’t explain it, I just know”. It is the one way to rule out ever discovering that you are in error. It disgusts me when faith is seen as virtue in today’s scientific and technologically advanced society. I am in favor of doing the opposite. I am and others should be willing to admit we might be wrong about any of our most cherished beliefs. I challenge all of our readers to go out and find the most well written piece you can that argues against a position you hold important. If you cannot respond to its arguments perhaps you should withhold your belief.

So my question for believers is:

What evidence would need to be presented for you to acknowledge that you have been mistaken about all or some of your religious beliefs? What would it take to bring you to a position of uncertainty?

For some it might be proof of evolution, or evidence that the world is an too unjust a place to be governed by the omni-benevolent being.  For others it may be pointing to inaccurate statements or contradictions in one’s holy book or pointing out places where the God in your holy book does highly immoral things like condone mass-murder or slavery. I’ll ask again; what would it take for you to take the high road and say, “I could be wrong”?

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Biblical Inerrancy, Christian Self-Righteous Arrogance, Christianity, Clarity, Critical Thinking, Faith, Fundamentalism, God & Bible, Islam, Logic, Question of the Day!, Reason, Religion, Sanity, Science, That's Life!, Willful Ignorance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.