A debate on religious pluralism

I had another debate with the same guy who debated me on whether Christianity was the one true religion. This time, he framed the debate as Religious Pluralism vs. Christian Exclusivism. He went first, defending religious pluralism. Here is my opening statement in response:

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That was a well-written opening! Let's pause and give that man a hand! Now let's sit back down and refute his arguments. :-)

This is my argument in a nut shell.

1. If religious pluralism is true, then all major religions are more or less true.
2. If all religions are more or less true, then Christianity is more or less true.
3. If Christianity is more or less true, then Islam is more or less false.
4. If Islam is more or less false, then not all major religions are more or less true.
5. Therefore, if religious pluralism is true, then religious pluralism is false.

In other worlds, religious pluralism is self-refuting. Now let me defend these premises.

1. If religious pluralism is true, then all major religions are more or less true.

This premise is true by the definition Pro gave of religious pluralism. He said all major religions are equally valid interpretations of the same divine reality. His use of the word "reality" implies that there is some truth behind these various interpretations. So all religious must be true under this definition of pluralism.

2. If all religions are more or less true, then Christianity is more or less true.

This second premise is true because Christianity is a religion.

3. If Christianity is more or less true, then Islam is more or less false.

One of the essential claims of Christianity is that Jesus is the unique son of God and is equal with God the father. One of the essential claims of Islam is that God has no equal and has no son.

Pro anticipated this argument when he said that "Religious Pluralism does NOT mandate that every part of every religion is true." The problem with his response is that he fails to make a distinction between essential teachings and non-essential teachings. Christians differ amongst themselves on a variety of issues, and so do Muslims. However, there are a few teachings that define what Christianity is and what Islam is such that if you remove those teachings, you no longer have Christianity or Islam, respectively.

For example, if Jesus doesn't return before the great tribulation, then Christianity could still be true. But if Jesus is not the son of God, then Christianity cannot be true because Jesus being the son of God is an essential teaching of Christianity.

The fact that Christianity and Islam differ in their non-essential teachings does not mean they can't both be true. However, the fact that they differ on essential teachings does mean they cannot both be true. Jesus is either God or he's not God. If he's God, then Islam is false. If he's not God, then Christianity is false. But under no circumstances can they both be true.

4. If Islam is more or less false, then not all major religions are more or less true.

This premise is true because Islam is one of the major religions.

5. Therefore, if religious pluralism is true, then religious pluralism is false.

This follows from 1-4 by the transitive property.

Now, I need not prove that Christianity is true since Pro subscribes to religious pluralism. To be consistent, he must already acknowledge that Christianity is true. If he denies that Christianity is true, then he must deny religious pluralism since Christianity is one of the major religions.

So the only question is whether Christianity is exclusively true.

Pro thinks that the only argument for the exclusivity of Christianity is the explicit statements of exclusivity in the Bible. But that is false. There is also the argument from the law of non-contradiction, which Pro unsuccessfully attempted to address. The essential claims of Christianity are these:

1. There is one and only one God.
2. God imposes moral obligations on people.
3. People disobey their moral obligations.
4. God punishes people for their moral violations.
5. Jesus is the Christ.
6. Jesus died to pay for our moral violations.
7. Jesus was raised from the dead.

If any of these are false, then Christianity is false. But since Pro agrees that Christianity is true (to be consistent with his pluralism), then he cannot deny any of these claims without giving up his religious pluralism.

If Jesus is the Christ, then Judaism is false.

If There is only one God, then Hinduism is false.

If God imposes moral obligations on people, then Buddhism is false.

If Jesus died to pay for our moral violations, then Islam is false.

And those are all the major religions. It follows that if Christianity is true (which Pro must agree it is), it follows that it is the only major religion that is true, and therefore Christian exclusivism is true.

Now let me address one last argument Pro made against the exlusivity of Christianity. He claims that it violates the concept of an all-loving God.

As a side note, In Islam, God is not all-loving. Pro stipulated that "For the purposes of this debate, we'll be assuming the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God." That very stipulation refutes religious pluralism.

Anyway, the reason Pro thinks Christian exlusivity violates the concept of an all-loving God is that it entails that billions of people will be damned through no fault of their own since they had no control over where they were born or what religion they were born into.

This argument fails for two reasons. First, it fails because the damnation of all these people is not an essential claim of Christianity. He already acknowledge earlier that religious pluralism does not entail that every part of a religion is true. The Catholic Church denies the claim that all non-Christians are damned. So Pro's premise is false.

But even if Pro's premise (that all non-Christians are damned), it would still not follow that people are damned through no fault of their own. Notice the essential claims of Christianity I listed above. The claim of Christianity isn't that people are damned because they didn't convert to Christianity. Rather, the claim is that they are damned because of their moral violations. One does not need to be a Christian (or to even have knowledge of Christianity) in order to know right from wrong. So it isn't true that non-Christians in various parts of the world are damned throug no fault of their own. They are at fault because they know right from wrong, and they do wrong. Everybody violates their moral obligations. Nobody is perfect. If there WERE a perfect person out there somewhere, then that person would not be damned.

So Pro's argument against Christian exclusivity is fallacious on two counts.

Christianity is the one true religion: a succinct argument for Christianity

I recently finished writing a book I'm calling A Quick and Dirty Argument for Christianity. It's a short and truncated version of a larger book I'm still working on that I plan to call An Argument for Christianity. Actually, the quick and dirty book still needs editing, so I guess it's not really finished. I'm just finished with the first draft.

Anywho, I have thought about writing an even shorter book I might call A Quicker and Dirtier Argument for Christianity, or An Argument for Christianity In a Nutshell or something. Anyway, I was looking on The Wayback Machine for a debate I had on debate.org a long time ago, and I stumbled across a debate where my opponent wanted me to try to prove that Christianity is the one true religion. In this debate, I gave an even shorter argument for Christianity than what I planned in that quicker and dirtier book. This is about as succinct as I think I've ever made the argument for Christianity. Here's my opening statement.

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This is probably an impossible debate for me to win because it requires me to prove so much and for Con to prove so little. But I thought it would be fun.

My argument in a nutshell:

1. If Christianity is true, then it is the one true religion.
2. Christianity is true.
3. Therefore, Christianity is the one true religion.

1. If Christianity is true, then it is the one true religion.

According to the law of non-contradiction, two claims that contradict each other cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. All religions contradict each other, which is how we distinguish them. So if Christianity is true, then all other religions must be false. So if Christianity is true, then it's the one true religion.

2. Christianity is true.

What is Christianity?

This is what I take Christianity to be essentially:

i. There is a god.
ii. The god imposes moral obligations on people.
iii. People violate those moral obligations.
iv. God judges people for violating their moral obligations.
v. Jesus is the Christ.
vi. Jesus died for sins.
vii. Jesus was raised from the dead.

I said earlier that my burden in this debate is far greater than Con's. While I've got to prove all seven of those points, Con only has to disprove one. If all seven are true, then Christianity is true. If just one of them is false, then Christianity is false.

The reality of morality

Whether we affirm or deny morality, we all percieve it as if it were real, which is evident in the following observations:

We all judge others as if others are actually obligated to keep the moral view that we hold to.

When judged, our first instinct is not to deny the reality of the standard we are being judged by, but to give excuses for why we didn't violate that standard.

We struggle with moral dilemmas. Moral decision making is difficult because there really are correct answers to moral questions, and we have to find out what they are.

Moral non-realists are rarely consistent. People generally live consistently with what they actually believe, so people who deny morality are just kidding themselves.

We all find moral non-realism to be counter-intuitive. We all think it's prima facie absurd to suggest that morals could have been radically different. For example, it's absurd to think it could've been the case that mother stabbing and father raping are morally right, and kindness and generosity are evil.

Now, consider a person who does not percieve a difference between right and wrong at all. Would we not consider such a person to be mentally ill? Would we not attach such lables as "sociopath" to a person like that? Well, if there isn't really a difference between right and wrong, then such people are seeing the world more accurately than we are. While we all percieve a difference between right and wrong that isn't actually there, the mentally ill are percieving the world as it actually is. If that is the case, shouldn't we consider them sane and ourselves as mentally ill?

If a correctly working mind is a mind that percieves things that are really there and doesn't percieve things that aren't there, and if sociopathy really is a mental illness, then it follows that morality is real. There actually is a difference between right and wrong, and it isn't just in our heads.

The implication of morality

Rules of right and wrong are prescriptive. That is, rather than merely describe how people behave, they prescribe how people ought to behave. Prescriptions cannot exist without prescribers because without some authority, there are no rules. Since it's possible for there to be unjust civil laws, it follows that the moral law transcends human authorities. That means there is a transcendent authority who imposes moral obligations on us. We will come back to this shortly.

The argument from contingency

The only way it's possible for anything contingent to exist is if something necessary exists. To be contingent means it possible for it to have not existed. Since contingent things don't exist by necessity, they depend on something outside of themselves for their existence.

But consider the borrower/lender analogy. Suppose you need to borrow something from your neighbor, but he doesn't have it. So he asks his neighbor who doesn't have it either. The only way it's possible for you to get what you're after is if somebody has it who doesn't have to get it from somebody else.

In the same way, the only way it's possible for anything at all to exist is if there's something that exists that didn't get its existence from something else. Such a thing would be a necessary being.

Since obviously lots of things exist, then it must be the case that a necessary being exists, and everything else owes its existence ultimately to the necessary being.

Consider the two arguments together

Now, consider these two arguments. One shows that a necessary being exists, and the other shows that a transcendent moral law-giver exists. It may not be obvious that these two beings are the same being, but when you consider how nicely they compliment each other, it seems reasonable to believe they are the same being.

We know that no mere human is sufficient to impose moral obligations on us, nor is any concievable alien that exists in the universe. But if there were a creator who existed necessarily and was absolutely autonomous, then it's hard to think of a better candidate for a being that is sufficient to ground morality. This would literally be that being's world. So it makes a lot of sense to think that the transcendent moral law-giver is one and the same as the necessary ground of the rest of existence.

If there is a necessarily existing person who is the ground of morality, then we are clearly justified in referring to such a being as a god. But we have still not proven that it is the same person as the Christian God.

Jesus

That brings us to Jesus. Jesus was a Jewish man who lived in the first century, claimed to be the Christ, and got crucified. Now, any Jew in his right mind would've taken Jesus' crucifixion is absolute proof that Jesus' claim to be the Christ was false. After all, the hope for a Christ was a hope that God would fulfill his promise to David, and that promise was that there would always be a man on the throne of David. So the Christ was to be a king of the Jews, and that meant national sovereignty, and that meant no Roman occupation. That's why messianic hope was so high in the first century. The hope was in deliverence from Roman occupation. So if the Romans killed the supposed Christ, that proves he isn't the Christ.

Yet Christianity survived the death of Jesus. The only possible way Jews could've continued to believe Jesus was the Christ is if they had some reason to think he was still alive and could therefore fulfill all the messianic promises. And that is exactly what Jesus' early followers claimed. Moreover, they claimed to have seen him alive after he had died. These appearances are apparently what caused them to believe since the record shows that they lost hope after Jesus died, which is what we would expect them to do. Also, Paul and James both converted because they saw Jesus resurrected. When you consider these appearances along with the empty tomb, it becomes apparent that Jesus really did rise from the dead. Without the resurrection, we have no viable explanation for the survival of Christianity.

Now, either Jesus really was who he claimed to be, or else it's just a big coincidence that he would rise from the dead by some freak of nature after making such unusual claims. So the more rational conclusion is that he really was the Christ sent from God. And that entails that the Christian God exists.

It also entails that Christ died for sins, which entails that God judges people for their sins and that people do in fact sin.

3. Therefore, Christianity is the one true religion

Since all the essential claims of Christianity are true, and since all other religions contradict Christianity in some way, it follows that Christianity is the one true religion.

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There are a lot of points I made in this opening statement that I've discussed in more detail in earlier posts, so I thought I'd provide some links in case you're interested.

The Arrogance Fallacy - This is about the mistake a lot of people make in critizing some claims because it's arrogant to believe them as if that had something to do with whether they are true.

I'm right, and you're wrong - This post is similar to the one before. It explains why making exclusive truth claims is logical and has nothing to do with arrogance.

The law of non-contradiction - It may seem silly to have to defend the law of non-contradiction, but I wrote this post because of having to defend it in some of my philosophy classes in college.

What is Christianity? - This is an explanation of how I came up with the seven points I thought captured the core of Christianity.

A quick and dirty argument for moral realism - This post goes into my argument for moral realism in more detail but also provides links to even more detail on the various points.

Why theism is necessary and sufficient to ground objective moral obligations - Just what the title suggests, plus links to more detailed posts.

The god of the philosophers vs. the Abrahamic God - This post goes into more detail about how various philosophical arguments for God compliment each other in such a way as to point toward the Abrahamic God.

Is the universe contingent? - This post explains why I doubt the universe itself is necessary, which is why we have to look to something beyond the universe to explain why anything at all exists.

A quick and dirty argument for the resurrection of Jesus - Just what the title suggests.

How does the resurrection of Jesus prove that he is the messiah? - This post explains how.

Misconceptions about the pro-life position

I've been watching Breaking Points since Krystal and Saagar left Rising to start it. I watched them on Rising before that. Although I do disagree with them pretty often, I find their commentaries refreshing sometimes. A big part of what they are about is shunning the divisiveness and lack of fairness and objectivity of legacy news organizations. Krystal is a liberal/progressive, and Saagar is a conservative, and they sometimes disagree with each other. But at least they allow both sides to be heard. Each of them will also critize politicians who happen to be on their side, which I also appreciate.

One issue Saagar is not conservative on is abortion. He's pro-choice. My suspicion is that most republican politicians are probably either secretly pro-choice or they just don't care about the issue. They're politicians, so they just do what politicians do, which is to support the team and say whatever they must to get elected. Although I disagree with Saagar's pro-choice stance, I appreciate that he's honest about his position.

The pro-life position has never, as far as I've known, gotten a fair hearing on their show. Today, Ryan and Saagar put out a video clip where they were talking about a video clip where Bill Maher said he agrees with pro-lifers that abortion is murder, but he's okay with that. After commenting on the video, Ryan and Saagar began to perpetuate two myths pro-choice people have about the pro-life position. I left comments about both.

One myth is that the pro-life position is strictly a religious point of view. I've met a lot of pro-choice people who are under this impression. Here's the comment I left about that:

Ryan and Saagar are both perpetuating the myth that the pro-life position is strictly a religious position. If it were, there wouldn't be such a thing as the Secular Pro-Life organization. While most pro-lifers probably are religious, and many of them have religious reasons for being pro-life, the primary argument made by the movement is entirely secular. The argument is simply that (1) It's wrong to take the life of an innocent human being, (2) abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, (3) therefore, it's wrong to have an abortion. Almost everybody agrees with that first premise (except maybe Bill Maher), so the issue comes down to whether or not abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, and THAT depends on whether or not it's a living human being to begin with. The primary defense of the fact that the unborn are living human beings is biology, not theology. There is so much ignorance on the part of the pro-choice community on this issue.

The second myth is that the pro-life movement is about controlling women, supporting the patriarchy, etc. Here's the comment I left about that:

3:44 "It [the pro-life position] is a fundamental part of upholding the patriarchy. And I think even most pro-life supporters would acknowledge that." Where on earth does he get that idea? I've met a ton of pro-life supporters, and I've never met a single one who would acknowledge that. Being pro-life has absolutely nothing to do with the patriarchy, or controlling women, or anything like that. It has simply to do with the life of the unborn. Until pro-choicers stop making stuff up and motive-mongering, they're not addressing the real issue. You can't persuade somebody of your point of view if all you're doing is making up motives and attributing them to those you disagree with. The other person always knows you're full of it when you do that.

Here's some other stuff I've written on this subject:

A quick and dirty argument against abortion - Here, I made the pro-life argument about as succinctly as I could. See if you see anything religious in there.

What is the unborn? - The humanity of the unborn is the primary reason people are pro-life. Many pro-choicers think the idea that life begins at conception is a religious point of view. See if there's anything religious in my argument.

Motive-mongering in the abortion debate - This is a complaint about the irrelevance of motive mongering both pro-lifers and pro-choicers engage in.

Two pro-choice myths - Here are two other myths pro-choicers believe.

Is it anti-semitic to say that Christ is king?

I don't know much at all about Candace Owens other than the fact that she used to work at the Daily Wire and was recently fired for some disagreement having to do with Israel and the current war. I don't think I've ever listened to any of her commentaries. So this blog post is not intended to be a defense of her.

What I want to address, instead, is some buzz I've been hearing around the internet that she recently tweeted that "Christ is king," and a bunch of people interpreted that as being anti-semitic. Now, I understand politicians and "journalists" say stupid things when politics or political talking heads are involved, but this seems to go beyond that. Browsing through the comment section of this video I saw that there were a lot of people who actually agree that saying, "Christ is king," is anti-semitic. It isn't just politicians or "journalists" saying it. It's every day people.

Besides being wrong, this strikes me as being downright stupid. It just makes me shake my head because it seems like our whole society gets dumber every year. There's always some new stupid idea that goes viral, then becomes normal. I always wonder what's next, so I want to speculate a little on where this might be going.

First, let me say something about the claim that Christ is king. This is somewhat of a tautology. All the kings of Israel were anointed king. One example is in 2 Samuel 2:4 where, "the men of Judah came, and there they anointed David king over the house of Judah." In Europe, people used to be crowned king, but in ancient Israel, people were anointed king.

The Hebrew word for one who was anointed was mashiach, from which we get the word, Messiah. The Greek word, christos, means the same thing--one who is anointed. It is from the word for anointed that we get Jesus' title, Christ.

Jesus was called the Christ, aka Messiah, because he was thought to be the fulfillment of God's promise to always have a man on the throne of Israel. Jesus was also called a son of David. He was thought to be an heir to the throne. That is what messianic expectations was all about. To call Jesus the Christ just is to say that he was king. Calling him Christ is essentially the same thing as calling him king.

In fact, that's what got him crucified. He was crucified for claiming to be "the king of the Jews," as all four gospels tell us.

Christianity gets its name from Christ. The fact that Jesus is the Christ is absolutely central to Christianity. It's the one thing all Christians agree on, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, or whatever. Even the fringe groups, like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, agree that Jesus was the Christ. In Revelation, he is called "king of kings, and lord of lords" (Revelation 19:16).

Since Jesus being the Christ means the same thing as Jesus being king, the claim that Christ is king is definitional to Christianity. If you do not believe Christ is king, then you are not a Christian. A Christian who does not believe that Christ is king is like a husband who isn't married.

If saying that Christ is king is anti-semitic, then merely being a Christian is anti-semitic. I wonder if that's the insanity we are going to have to deal with in our culture next--that people will be called anti-semitic merely for admitting to being Christian. After reading a lot of the comments on that youtube video, it would not surprise me if that's where we're headed.

We live in silly times, and it's only getting worse.

I should add that there may be context to the Candace Owens drama that sheds light on the situation, adds a twist, or something. I haven't familiarized myself with it, and it isn't my intention to address it. I'm only addressing the belief a lot of people on the internet seem to have that saying, "Christ is King," is anti-semitic. All I know is that this subject came up because of a tweet Candace Owens made.