Morning Reading

I’m trying to finish up reading Reason for the Hope Within, which is a collection of essays on Christian philosophy, written on a variety of topics in that area. This morning, I came across the following passage, which deals with the nature of religious diversity as an argument against the truth claims of Christianity:

No one can deny that religions are diverse. Nor should we put much weight on responses of the sort ‘Well, they are all basically saying the same thing — that there is something out there.’ To suppose that they are all ‘basically saying the same thing’ is to purge religious doctrine of the details that its own proponents live by and find important and compelling. … But let us remember that atheists and theists alike hold and feel justified in holding conviction on a variety of topics where diversity abounds. Consider the diversity of moral convictions, or the diversity of opinions about economics, about politics, about philosophy, about certain aspects of civil war history, and so on. Conviction in the face of diversity is fairly commonplace in our epistemic lives. We Christians ought to thus say to the atheist: “Why do you choose to sneer at religious belief on the basis of facts about diversity, when you yourself cling tenaciously to certain convictions in the face of diversity with commonplace frequency?’

My point in posting this quote is not meant as a side-step of an objection or a dangerous descent into a tu quoque logical fallacy. No, it is to point out that a fairly common objection to Christian claims by the atheist or the agnostic is an inconsistent approach on his own part: he accepts the diversity of opinions within his own view seemingly uncritically; why do the rules of the game change when it comes to Christianity?

This is not to say that we should be thrilled with different opinions within Christianity. Certainly there will be adiaphora, matters of indifference, about certain things (whether I choose to wear a black or gray suit when I preached yesterday, for instance). But there are more serious matters that God speaks about clearly in His word. The effects of sin grip us all, and the Christian, who is not under the power of sin because of Christ, should not fall into the same errors as the unbeliever. When we do not submit to the authority of Scripture, though, such diversity will be an inevitable consequence of sin (see this article, for instance, which takes a biblical and confessional approach to economics). If we do not think God’s thoughts after Him on matters which He has revealed to us, then Christians can equally be guilty of hopeless inconsistency.

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