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A Religion Worth Following

The final area of truth I will write about is the area of religion. As with my posts on the other areas of truth, I will start by establishing a definition of the topic at hand.

One definition of "religion" in Webster's Dictionary is as follows:

"A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices."

And here's a necessary definition of "religious":

"relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity."

I will reference these two definitions in the rest of this post. Notice that the definition of "religious" refers to a deity (i.e. God) OR an ultimate reality. This definition indicates that religion says something about the world as a whole, whether a single divine agent is part of that world or not. 

With that point in mind, what kind of questions does religion attempt to answer? Since religion is a system of attitudes, beliefs, and practices about some sort of ultimate reality, the questions tend to encompass everything about life. The questions can be about specific things, such as how to properly respond in a certain situation. However, the central questions asked by religion have this all-encompassing quality to them.

Some examples of these types of questions include:

1. How did the Universe come into existence? (if it did in the first place)

2. Is there something/someone in control of what happens in the Universe?

3. Is there life beyond this current life (i.e. after death)? How does one enter that life?

4. What is the standard by which someone ought to live?

These questions are broad in the sense that the correct answers would be true for all people on Earth, at all times of the Earth's existence. This point, however, assumes that there is objective truth, where two contradictory claims about the same topic cannot both be true, and thus there is only one truth about a particular topic.

A person's answers to these questions, among others, forms that person's worldview. Someone's worldview affects the way that person views the world and life overall. It also affects the person's motivations and actions stemming from those motivations. Thus, even if someone does not believe in the existence of a deity, the questions asked by religion are important because a person's beliefs about those questions affect much of his life. 

Since these questions do have a large impact on our lives, getting the right answer to them is important, and perhaps urgent if the answers impact any potential life after death. However, there are so many religions in the world, not to mention atheism and agnosticism. How can we possibly choose between all these different sets of answers? For the purpose of this post, I will expand on one main consideration in deciding whether a particular religion is worth following or not.

We should follow a religion if the main claims that the religious system makes are true. The truth of the religion's claims should be able to be verified to some extent by the other areas of truth.

Again, if religious questions are important, and if there is only one set of correct answers to them, then following the correct religion (or correctly denying all religions) is important. In order to have more confidence that we are following a true religion, we would want to have the ability to verify that the claims a religion makes are true.

These claims typically involve some sort of divine revelation, where a deity directly reveals a truth. For example, Mormonism claims that God directly gave Joseph Smith true statements about the world that Smith wrote down word-for-word. Religious claims can also come through experiences, such as the concept of Nirvana in Hinduism, where one can experience a state of being that is essentially apart from the current life.

Verification of a religion's truth claims is difficult if only divine revelation or only experience are considered. If a revelation of truth is actually coming from an all-knowing deity, then we have better reason to trust that truth then any other in the world. However, just claiming that some writing came directly from a deity does not give us any reason to believe that claim. The big question to ask is, what reasons do we have to believe that a truth (i.e. a religious system) has come from an all-knowing deity?

To answer that question, other areas of truth can help us. If we view science, history, and philosophy as reliable for discovering truth about the world, then a true divine revelation should at the least not contradict these other areas, and most preferably should fit with these areas. A way we can test if a "divine revelation" is true is to determine if its claims describe the way reality actually is. To do so, we can take all areas of truth into consideration to see how much the claims match up with reality.

This idea can be extended to all religions, whether its truth claims come primarily through revelation or experience. An issue with a religion's truth claims coming solely through experience is that it results in an all-or-nothing test. If one does not experience what he is suppposed to experience, then the religion fails, and there is little opportunity to verify its truth otherwise. Asking others about their experiences could help. However, since experiences are personal in nature, the only way that you could be certain that someone actually did have an experience as they described would be though an external event.

For example, two people say that they feel like they are flying. One is just standing there in front of you, and the other is actually floating around in mid-air. Of course, you have more reason to believe that the second person is in fact experiencing the feeling of flying. You can see the external results of that person's claims to feel a certain way.

A religion can make a truth claim through an experience, and there are ways we can determine if that claim is legitimate. But a religion with truth claims solely based on experience is more difficult to verify than one that is based on other types of truth claims. We should prefer a religion that can be verified by other areas of truth to at least some extent.

There are other reasons to follow one religion over another. One might choose to follow a religion because it provides comfort, a sense of purpose, or other admirable qualities. While these factors should be taken into consideration, I think that the truth of a religion's claims is the main factor in choosing the best religion to follow. A religion based on falsehoods is not worth basing our worldview, motivations, and actions on.

This point also extends to worldviews, which include atheistic-type views. The worldview that someone ought to hold is the one that is true... the one which overall fits the way the world actually is.

And that ends this post, as well as this "From the Ground Up" blog. In the next post, I will merge my "From the Ground Up" and "Viewing Out" blogs, and summarize what has happened in this blog thus far.

The Philosophy of it All

Philosophy is a subject that we can use to discover a lot of truth about the world we live in. There are several reasons why it is so important:

1) Philosophy has a broad definition

One definition of philosophy that I thought fit philosophy pretty well is "the love of knowledge", or as Webster's dictionary defines it, "the pursuit of wisdom". These definitions fit as a general definition of philosophy because almost any type of knowledge that we have involves philosophy in some way. Another simple way to describe philosophy is, "using reason to ask questions and draw conclusions about the world we live in."

2) Philosophy separates good arguments from bad arguments

One way we engage in philosophy is through arguments. I do not use the word "argument" in reference to a back-and-forth verbal fight with another person. I refer to the definition, "a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion."

This definition flows into a logical aspect of philosophy, where we can use logic to draw conclusions about the world. A logical argument involves premises that lead to a conclusion. A premise is basically a statement that claims certain things within itself, but is also part of a series of claims that lead to a conclusion. In order for an argument to be sound, all of the premises must be true and the form of the argument must "follow" to the conclusion.

An argument follows when the first premise leads to the next premise logically, and that premise leads to the next premise logically, and on and on until the last premise leads to the conclusion. If an argument does follow logically, then the truth of individual premises need to be proven false in order to prove the entire argument false. 

The easiest way to understand how an argument works is through an example. Take the following example:

1. All cats are not dogs                     (1st premise)

2. Felix is a cat                                 (2nd premise)

3. Therefore, Felix is not a dog          (conclusion)

This first premise involves a subject, cats, and claims something about that subject. To follow up that premise, the 2nd premise establishes that Felix is that subject. Thus, what is true about that subject is also true about Felix. Felix, like all cats, is not a dog. The argument flows logically, and the premises follow to the conclusion. 

In order to refute the argument, you would need to show that #1 or #2 are false. For example, you could get Felix and show that he is actually a mouse. If that were the case, the entire argument would be invalid. The conclusion may still be true, and the argument still would follow, but the means to reach the conclusion would be improper. 

This next example shows an argument that does not follow, and is basically non-sensible:

1. When I wear shoes, they are always red

2. I am wearing shoes

3. Red is a color of the rainbow

Assuming #1 and #2 are true, the argument seems to work until you try to transition from #2 to #3. There is nothing that connects premise #2 to the conclusion. There is some sort of breakdown in the argument; you cannot follow the argument from premise #1 to the conclusion in a way that makes sense. 

Using this logical form is one way we can determine if an argument holds up (a good argument) or breaks down (a bad argument). Arguments can have fallacies that show that the argument is a poor one. But why does the entire argument have to be false if one of the components of the arguments is shown to be false? 

That question leads to a situation where assumptions need to be made. In this case, we need to assume that logic can be used to discover truth about the world. If an argument in not logical, it is not true.

There is not an argument that can be made to "prove" logic works; it is just an assumption that we need to make in order to form arguments in the first place. If there was a way to show that logic exists, it could be simply through personal experience. We obviously seem to be able to draw conclusions about our world in this logical way.

 Once you establish the assumption that you can use logic, then the idea of making an argument and verifying its truth works. And this idea of assumptions leads to the final important aspect of philosophy I will discuss.

3) Philosophy establishes assumptions that are necessary to make conclusions using other areas of truth

Philosophy's penetration into all knowledge becomes evident when you consider that the assumptions we use every day are based in philosophy. The assumption that we can use our mind to form reasonable conclusions branches out to every other area of truth. If that philosophical assumption were not established, any truth claim a person makes would be meaningless and untrustworthy.

This basic assumption is called an axiom, or a self-evident truth. Other axioms include the continuity of nature, the existence of time, and the existence of truth. All other areas of truth are dependent on philosophy to some extent because of these necessary assumptions. One example is science, since the scientific method is built off certain philosophical assumptions. 

So does that mean that philosophy is self-sustaining, where it does not need to involve the other truth areas I discussed in this blog? Even if that is the case, I do not think that is an important issue. The question that is more important is "does philosophy cover all truth about the world?" I think the answer to that is no. When you focus on one area of truth and ignore the rest, you miss many opportunities to discover truth about the world. Philosophy is no exception. You can make logical arguments that follow perfectly using philosophy. However, if those arguments are not supplemented by history, science, religion, and other areas of truth, they will be much more difficult to prove. 

That ends this little introduction on the area of philosophy. This blog is almost done with "building" a foundation for what I am going to talk about next. My next post will be about the truth area of religion.