They Can't All Be Right

 

Bahai Temple, meant to express architecturally the concept that "all religions are one."

One line of attack beloved by atheists is to point to the multiplicity of religions, and argue that since at a minimum all but one must be false, the obvious and only rational conclusion is that they are all false.

Most people are Christian, they will go on to say, simply because their parents were Christian. They have no better reason. Were they born in India, they would be just as certain that Hinduism was true; born in Japan, they would be Buddhist; in Egypt, Muslim.

Perhaps fair—for those who are only nominally religious. For those who are actually religious, the question is never whether you are Christian or Hindu, but whether you are devout.

But why limit this argument to religion? There are a multiplicity of governmental systems. Aside from liberal democracy, there is absolute monarchy, Communism, Fascism, oligarchy, aristocracy, military junta, anarchy, dictatorship, syndicalism, and so forth. All but one of them must be wrong. So the obvious conclusion is that they are all wrong. Most people in Canada or the US believe in liberal democracy only because they happen to live in a liberal democracy, and do not know any better.

Somehow, when applied to anything other than religion, this argument does not sound convincing. We do, most of us, feel confident that we have all the information necessary to make an objective judgement on any other matter: for example, that liberal democracy is the best of these systems. Others, of course, may opt for one of the others.

The argument works only if you start from the presupposition that religion is false.

And perhaps from the false presupposition that “no religion” is an option. Just as “no government” is not a realistic option, we cannot really live without some rules imposed on our behaviour. That is what “religion” means: a “binding.” We need, in the end, to have a purpose. “Atheists” simply find their purpose in some god they do not call God: “Nature,” or “Science,” or “Psychology,” or Marxism  and dialectical materialism, or Freudianism, or Ecology, or Climate Change, or Evolution. Or self.

The question is whether their formulation is better than any of the traditional ones.

There is, after all, far greater consistency among conceptions of God as Yahweh, Allah, Brahman, Gitche Manitou or Ahura Mazda, mostly only the words for “personal supreme being” in different languages, than there is among the various faiths and gods worshipped by atheists.

They can’t all be right.