Topics Religion

Question All major religions have miracles in their sacred texts, presumably to prove their divine origins. Don't these alleged miracles cancel each other out, and can this be extrapolated to religions as a whole?

Accepted:
June 23, 2006

Comments

I remember once posing the following question to a class I was teaching: if we take the religions of the world, isn't it true that at most one can be right and that perhaps none are right? Every single student in the class answered in the negative, holding that all can be right. When I pointed out that such an option would violate the principle of non-contradiction in the sense that it would mean that both X is true and X is not true (where X is a religious doctrine, for example that Jesus is God). To my amazement, every student was comfortable with tossing out the principle of non-contradiction.

At the time I figured that the event showed that people are more interested in moral and political practices of tolerance and even simple manners than with logic. But I later thought to myself that my students might be onto something about the curious way "truth" plays out in religious discourses. There may be a sense in which it's wrong to use ideas of truth and falsehood as they appear in the sciences, philosophy, law, etc. But if one takes that option, one does have to accept, I think, a set of consequences that most religious believers would be loathe to tolerate (for example, that believing in Jesus may have little to do with salvation).

In short, by common standards of logic and truth, the occurrence different sets of miracles can't be evidence for inconsistent religious doctrines. The miracles might have all occurred (though I follow Hume in thinking we can't have good reasons for thinking that they have); but even if they have, under standard meanings of truth, at best they can give evidence for one truth.

Question All major religions have miracles in their sacred texts, presumably to prove their divine origins. Don't these alleged miracles cancel each other out, and can this be extrapolated to religions as a whole? Accepted:June 23, 2006

Question All major religions have miracles in their sacred texts, presumably to prove their divine origins. Don't these alleged miracles cancel each other out, and can this be extrapolated to religions as a whole?

Accepted:
June 23, 2006