Religious Options

Erick Nelson
August, 1998

Posing the Question

I used to view "Religious Options" as a set of 200 groups, each one making the claim that it alone offered God's revelation to humankind. I envisioned this as a sort of religious Comdex, with 200 booths, each hawking its wares. Further, it seemed as if each group not only promised that it has the "goods", it threatened anyone with eternal torment who went to a competitor.

This was such a ridiculous picture that I didn't see how any of them could be right. Wasn't it more plausible that a good percentage were outright frauds, and the rest simply themselves taken in by their wish to be "right"?

Perhaps some of the groups had a better handle on the truth than others (if you include the Satanist organizations in these groups, I would hope at least some would be further from the truth than others!), but how could you tell? If you ever got to the point of trying to pick between these 200 comptetitors, nobody seemed to offer any solid reasons for making one choice over another. For instance, certain Christians said "believe and receive", meaning "take my word on it, and maybe later you'll have some experiences that confirm what I say." Or worse, many Christians would say "believe the Bible because it claims to be true." Or Mormons would say, "ask God whether our church is the right one, and you'll get a feeling in your heart that it is." Eastern religions were no better. They offered an inner light of some kind, but it all seemed pretty vague. As John Warwick Montgomery has wryly asked, which competitor should we believe? The one who shouts the loudest?

One Approach

Here's my idea. Let's look at the competiting positions once again, and first take Christianity out of the mix entirely. Let's pretend that Jesus of Nazareth never lived, Christianity never existed, and we are to choose between everything else. Of course, some of the views which depend on traditional Christianity (such as Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, liberal Christianity) would not exist either. Something else probably would have sprung up to fill the need. Who knows? Let's just say take Christianity out of the competition, at least abstractly, and deal with what's left.

The first thing I notice is that we don't really have hundreds of identical claims. What we do have can be divided into three main categories: Theism, Atheism, and Pantheism. I think this is a reasonable and fruitful distinction, especially (in our case) because the kind of claim is a bit different for each.

[Caveat: As soon as we have made this distinction, we have to acknowledge that each border is a bit fuzzy. For instance, the view "God exists but that nothing whatsoever can be known about him" lies on the border between Theism and Atheism. The view "God is everything in the universe, plus more" may lie between Theism and Pantheism. And the form of Pantheism where God is so impersonal as to simply be energy of some kind is probably on the border between Atheism and Pantheism.]

That having been said, I still think that we can classify most religious (and anti-religious) claims about Reality into these categories.



Revelatory Claims

I think that these are the sorts of claims made:

Here's what I mean. With Theism, we have some claim that God exists, and that he has revealed his Nature and Will to some person or persons. The group making the claim is the recipient of God's message, by way of vision, holy book, whatever. (It is certainly possible to be a theism without claiming much of a revelation - perhaps Deists are in that category - but Theism is normally characterized by revlation-claims.)

With Atheism, the proponent merely claims to have figured something out. Like Bertrand Russell or Jean Paul Sartre, he claims to have looked into the issue and to have established a cogent position. He claims to know something about Reality on the basis of insight.

With Pantheism, I think we have something sort of like Theism and sort of like Atheism. Essentially, the pantheist claims know God, seeking to reveal his nature and will, but claims to know that God is "everything", or to put it differently, that there is a spiritual essential nature to the universe as a whole. They don't claim "Here is God's message to you", but something more like "here is my insight into Reality - it is spiritual." Because Ultimate Reality isn't personal (at least in the sense of Theism), it doesn't have a message, as such, to communicate. It doesn't have specific attributes. Knowledge of this Reality is more like insight than like revelation. I call it "enlightenment."

Truth and Exclusivity

I present this model, in part, because of its relation to the charge of Exclusivity.

First, we should notice clearly than any truth-claim, no matter how mundane or how lofty, logically entails exclusivity. If I say it's raining right here and now, I am also implicitly saying that anybody who says it is not raining here and now is wrong. Betrand Russell is as exclusive in his truth-claims as Billy Graham. In a real sense, those who are offended at the exclusive nature of religious truth-claims are being illogical. What else would you expect of truth-claims? By nature, they always imply that their contraries are false, and therefore that those who affirm their contraries are in error.

But there is another element to this. While Atheism, Theism, and Pantheism all do indeed make truth-claims, only Theism claims to be the recipient of God's revelation. Atheism and Pantheism say "This is what I think I've discovered." Theism says "This is what God told me." The meta-claim, so to speak, is very different in these cases. It is this meta-claim (the claim about the source of knowledge, i.e. God) that makes Exclusivity really interesting.

Starting Point

If I am to start this journey of exploration, I must start as an Agnostic - literally, as one who doesn't know. I must start as an Optimistic Agnostic (I think I might find out) rather than a Pessimistic Agnostic (I don't think I can find out); otherwise, I'll never start. The Latin equivalent for "agnostic" is "ignoramus", one who is ignorant. It's a fair starting place, but not something to get all puffed up about.

[Aside: By the way, what alternately amuses and irritates me is the Arrogant Agnostic - the one who says "No one knows, and no one can know." The saying "There's nothing I hate more than a know-it-all agnostic" applies here. The Arrogant Agnostic seems to be doing one of two things. He either (a) makes the inference from his lack of knowledge to everyone else's lack of knowledge, which brings in the tacit assumption that nobody is smarter than he is, or (b) claims to know so much about the subject matter that he knows which facts can and cannot be known, in advance of research.]

Where to start, then? Which to explore first? It seems to me that the Atheist position is the least promising as a starting point. It is characterized almost exclusively by what it denies, not what it asserts. Everyone know that the world is there, and that there are certain physical laws, etc. What makes Atheism a position is its answer to the question, "But is there anything more?" It says, "No."

If you're mining, I assume you look for the gold, not the dirt. If you find no gold, then you have to say "There's only dirt here." But this is a fall-back position, an admission that there's "nothing out there." If the other searches turn up empty, I must content myself with Atheism.

Atheism

The only reason to start with Atheism might be to save oneself a lot of work - perhaps the philosophical or other arguments against the existence of God are so convincing that we do not need to look any further. And so I take a quick look at Atheism, reserving the right to come back to it later, if everything else falls through. What are the best arguments against God's existence? Here are the ones which come to mind (I'm sure there are others):

  1. Science and miracles
  2. Sociological/Psychological explanations
  3. Problem of Evil
  4. Refutation of individual revelation-claims

I will very quickly give my impression of each of these here:

1. Science and miracles: (a) Science keeps explaning more and more of the phenomena we see (such as crop failures and weather disasters, which used to be explained by God's intervention in nature), and thus the presumed evidence for God is steadily shrinking. (b) Additionally, God's physical intervention in the world is ruled out by the laws of physics.

Reply: (a) The inference from crop failures, etc. was never a major factor in affirming God's existence, (b) Physics says nothing whatsoever about whether God can be an agent in the world.

2. Sociological/Psychological explanations. We now understand why people would want to believe in a Heavenly Father, etc.

Reply: These explanations commit the fallacy of assuming X is false and then trying to account for its existence on other grounds.

3. Problem of Evil. A Good God could not produce a world with the type and amount of Evil we find. This is a powerful argument.

Reply: The best answer is a combination of (a) the free-will defense, and (b) posing the problem of evil to atheism and pantheism (which both entail that evil does not really exist).

4. Refutation of individual revelation-claims: I can prove that claims A, B, and C are all false.

Reply: (a) This wouldn't prove that all such claims are false, unless we've exhaustively examined every actual (and every conceivable) claim; (b) We can't look at this unless we've first examined Theism, so we'll table it for now anyway.

I really don't see anything which would make me stop here. We should take a look at the other world-views.

Pantheism

This view says that the universe as a whole is, in some sense, a living being, a spiritual entity, and that we are all parts of the One. We are like drops of water, finding their way to the ocean - or like the waves of the ocean. Individuality is an illusion, or at least not the ultimate truth. Our goal is to become one with the All. I presume that the most logical way to do this is to renounce ourselves as individual entities, and try to find our oneness by meditation and non-attachment.

Hinduism and Buddhism are the two world religions which claim that Pantheism is true. While, to my understanding, Hinduism's All has some positive nature (like the ocean) of bliss and wholeness, Buddhism's All is more of a void, nothingness. Perhaps this has always been more of a linguistic difference than anything else. Or perhaps Buddhism really belongs in the Atheism category - I don't know.

To me, there are promising and discouraging features to Hinduism and Buddhism. I see the religious trappings of each as accommodations to folk religion. The idols, incense, ceremony, and organization seem to me to be the institutionalizing of fairly simple insights. Attempts to bring in rules, regulations, and duties seem to be missing the point. Even spiritual disciplines, unless they are centered in meditation and personal experience, seem to be non-essential. On the other hand, perhaps they are valid guides to growth in meditation.

What seems promising to me is the experiential nature of pure pantheism, and perhaps the possibility that someone else (a guru) can guide me, based on his/her experience. Even so, what is the goal? It is dissolution, the total denial of the world and of the self.

But how can I know if Pantheism is true? Not by reasoning and evidence, not by becoming a better person, or by study, or by love - but only by experiencing the All by way of meditation and non-attachment.

A corollary of Pantheism seems to be that individuality is an illusion, or at rock bottom, not as real as the All. The All encompasses everything, both Good and Evil (as we call them). Either evil is not real (a difficult proposition to accept), or is as much a part of the All as is good (a more difficult proposition to accept).

Pantheism's answer to the problem of Evil bothers me. Combined with the fact that only personal meditation (over many many years?) could validate it, perhaps I should look at Theism first.

Theism

I would first say that I think there are some good general arguments supporting Theism. Among them are:

Without Christianity in the picture (we are imaging that Jesus never lived and that there is no Christianity), the only two major world religions advocating Theism are Islam and Judaism. Now, I have never seriously investigated either one, so I will just give my impressions here.

My impression of Islam (whether right or wrong) is that Mohammed was simply a false prophet. My impression is that he wrote a fake holy scripture and got people to follow him. The large set of rules and regulations seem to be man-made. I understand him (again, whether rightly or wrongly) to be a warlike person, trying to establish a theocracy with himself at the head. He profitted in many ways, including a large number of wives (like Brigham Young). And so, at the beginning I wouldn't have much of an interest in investigating Islam. Of course, this is based on ignorance, and if something promising came up I probably would want to pursue it.

It's hard to judge Judaism on its own, without thinking of it as the precursor to Christianity. I would probably see it as the national identity of an ancient people, with spiritual stories written and passed down to build up their spiritual practice (much as liberal theologians see them now). Not being racially Jewish, I would feel no need to investigate this. I would probably see it as irrelevant.

On the other hand, perhaps if I got around to studying the Prophets, I might be impressed. Perhaps I would think that a Messiah was still coming. It's hard to say.

All in all, I don't think I'd be very impressed with organized Theism (just as I'm not very impressed with organized Pantheism). This leaves me with disorganized Theism. Perhaps there is a personal God (using "personal" in an analogical way only, since God is not a human being). Perhaps this God has communicated with people. Perhaps we exist as individuals, and God loves us, and wants to communicate with us all the time. Perhaps God Encounter is possible. I would look for literature (the testimony of people) which tends to emphasize this. Perhaps I'd find someone, in person, to whom God has spoken, or who has felt God's presence in some way.

Again, the bottom line would probably be to pray and seek God myself. This puts me just about where I would be if investigating Pantheism. The difference is the goal. The goal here would be to seek the Living God rather than the Impersonal All. Another difference is that, seeking a Theistic God of love, I might put love into practice in the real world. I would also, presumably, be allowed to be an individual, but to become an individual more like God.

Conclusion

How much am I reading my Christian ideas into this search? I don't know. What is interesting to me is how unimpressed I must be with organizations, and how immediate experience of God would be at the heart of my search.

The bottom line is:

New Category

I specifically left Jesus out of the equation, to see how I would deal with all the rest of the claimants in a more impartial way. I see Jesus as being a member of an entirely new category. Remember I said that Theism claims Revelation, Atheism claims Insight, and Pantheism claims Enlightenment? There is a fourth category, similar to Theism but different enough to be its own category. I call it Incarnational Theism. This claims that there is a God, and that this God became an actual human, and lived and spoke - and revealed himself - in a definitive and unique way.

My proposal would be to take a serious look at the Incarnation claims made. The surprising thing is that the only serious Incarnational claim I know of was made about Jesus of Nazareth. The claim is simply worlds apart from the next strongest claim category ("Revelation"), because it not only says "This is God's message" but "This is God in action, before your eyes."

I'm not saying we should accept any such claim uncritically. Unless all such claims are obviously false, it would be wise to examine whatever claim seems to have credibility.

If an Incarnational claim stands up to scrutiny, we have the key to true revelation. If not, we may dismiss them as pompous assertions made perhaps by enthusiastic followers, and go on (at least I would) to considering mystical Theism.