The Fallacies of Religious Clerics by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Choosing the Bad over the Worse

We may say that one reason for believing in our religion is that a simple rational calculation leads us to believe that keeping our faith is the safer choice.

The reasoning goes like this.

Suppose our religion is not really the true religion of God. Suppose it was created by someone who only claimed to be a prophet.

What would we lose by following it?

We would spend part of our lives doing what we wished and another part following religious rules and worshipping.

Then we would die.

If there were no afterlife, everything would simply end.

Our loss would not seem very great. We would mainly have lost some of the time and freedom that we spent following religious rules and worshipping.

But now consider the other possibility.

What if our religion is true?

Then by believing in it and following its rules, we may go to heaven and escape eternal hell.

So the safer choice seems obvious:

Keep your faith.

If the religion turns out to be false, you lose relatively little.

If it turns out to be true, you may escape eternal suffering.

Here, our standard is common sense—the common sense that tells us to choose the bad rather than the worse.

We seem to face two possibilities.

If we have no religion, the possible consequence is the suffering of hell.

If we remain religious, the cost is only a little suffering in this life caused by following religious rules.

So we choose the smaller suffering.

This way, we can feel safe. If what our religion says is true, we will be saved.

At this point, we may think that our chance of salvation is 50 percent.

But there is a problem.

Someone may ask:

“Why do you think your chance of salvation is 50 percent?”

There are not just two possibilities.

There are many religions and religious denominations in the world.

Let us make a very generous assumption. Suppose there are only 100 religions and denominations in the world—far fewer than a general look at books on religion would suggest.

Now the calculation changes.

You consider only one of these religions or denominations to be true.

You either reject the others or believe that they have been corrupted and should not be followed.

But the followers of those other religions may think exactly the same thing about yours.

You follow the rules of only one out of these hundred possibilities.

So, according to the same kind of calculation, your chance of having chosen the true path is no longer 50 percent.

It is:

1 percent.

But there is a second problem, and it is even more important.

Let us continue using exactly the same standard.

There are 100 possibilities.

One is your religion.

Let us count having no religion as another possibility. By this, we mean the possibility that no god—or perhaps the God you believe in—has actually sent any prophet.

That leaves 98 other religions.

Now suppose your own religion is true.

You have chosen correctly, and you escape hell.

That gives you a 1 percent chance of having chosen the true religion.

Now suppose the “no religion” possibility is true.

In that case, you simply die. There is no hell. You have only spent part of your life following religious rules that turned out to have no purpose.

But what if one of the other 98 religions is true?

According to the reasoning we started with, you have a serious problem.

You did not believe in that religion.

You did not follow its rules.

And if that true religion threatens unbelievers with hell, you may be sent to the hell promised by that religion.

So the same calculation that was supposed to protect us from hell now gives us a very different result:

1% — our present religion is true.

1% — no religion is true, and there is no hell.

98% — one of the other religions is true, and we risk its hell.

Therefore, using exactly the same standard we began with, remaining faithful to our present religion appears to leave us with a 98 percent risk of going to hell.

The standard we chose to protect our belief has now begun to work against our belief.

What happens next?

If I am simply a religiously biased believer, rather than a religious cleric, I may immediately move to another argument.

But I may not admit that I have changed my argument.

I may even present the new argument as though it were simply a continuation of the first one.

For example, I might say:

“But the God of the universe knows that my intention was to worship Him. Even if I chose the wrong path, He would not consider it fair to send me to hell.”

Notice what has happened.

My first argument was based on a simple calculation of risk.

I chose that standard myself because I thought it supported my religion.

But when I followed the same standard further, it began to work against my religion.

So instead of accepting its result, I changed the argument.

There are two important things to notice here.

First, I do not want to admit that my original common-sense argument has failed.

In fact, according to the standard I myself chose, I did not use that same common sense when choosing my own religion.

Admitting this may make my original thinking appear superficial.

So I now offer another reason to show that my religious belief has deeper foundations after all.

Second, my new argument actually destroys my previous one.

If God cares mainly about my sincere intention to worship Him, even when I have chosen the wrong religion, then it no longer seems very important which religion I follow.

What matters is that I sincerely and humbly obey the God or gods I believe in.

But religions do not all describe God or the gods in the same way.

They do not all describe the source of creation in the same way.

And they certainly do not give people the same commands.

Yet according to my new argument, these differences would no longer determine whether a sincere person is saved.

So I have escaped the problem only by giving up the foundation of my first argument.

As I said, however, this kind of response is more likely to come from a religiously biased believer who is not a cleric.

If I am a religious cleric, I am less likely to use it.

Why?

Because religious clerics generally know that their traditions have regarded only one religion—or sometimes one denomination—as the true one.

They also know that these traditions may describe a painful fate for those who reject that religion, even when those people are good and devoted followers of another faith.

The idea that the God of a religion would not treat good people from other religions harshly may be accepted by some ordinary believers, mystics, or intellectuals within that religion.

But the scholars and clerics of the religion may not agree with them.

This becomes especially important when they believe that a person has learned about the true religion and still refused to accept it.

In that case, religious clerics may believe that the person’s destination will certainly be the hell promised by that religion.

So, as a religious cleric, I still need another answer.

My first common-sense argument has failed to show that my belief is rational.

What can I do?

Depending on the extent of my knowledge, I may turn to other examples of what is called common sense and present them as proofs.

I may turn to miracles as evidence for my religion.

Or I may claim that my religion is based on logic and supported by a very deep philosophy.

But before we turn to miracles and philosophy, we will examine some other examples of common-sense reasoning.

Holding On to Belief for Fear of Injustice in the Universe

Sometimes, as a religious cleric, I may say to ordinary people—not to scholars or experts in religious debate:

“How can anyone live without believing in religion?”

After all, if a person stops believing in religion, they may also stop believing in reward and punishment in the afterlife.

And then a troubling question appears:

What happens to justice in the universe?

If there is no reward and punishment after death, what happens to people who suffer terrible injustice in this life?

And what happens to those who commit terrible wrongs and are never punished?

I may therefore say:

“You are telling me not to believe in my religion and to leave it. But if I do that, what will you give me in its place?

“If I no longer believe in the heaven and hell described by my religion, how can I continue to believe that there is justice in the universe?

“And how can I deal with the fear that after death, everything may simply come to an end?”

As a religious cleric or believer, I may sincerely see this as a matter of common sense.

I may feel that I should hold on to my religious beliefs because giving them up would force me to face two frightening possibilities:

perhaps there is no justice in the universe,

and perhaps there is no life after death.

This argument is not generally used by more highly educated religious scholars or clerics who are seriously engaged in study and debate.

But some people do seriously present it as an argument.

So let us examine it.

What am I actually doing when I reason in this way?

I am taking my psychological need to hold on to my belief and using that need as a reason for thinking that the belief itself is justified.

From the point of view of epistemology, this is a mistake.

To understand why, we first need to understand what epistemology, or the study of knowledge, is concerned with.

Suppose I believe that something exists in the world outside my mind.

The important question is not simply:

“Do I believe it?”

The question is:

“What justifies my belief that it is really there?”

Consider a simple example.

Suppose I believe that I have 100 dollars in my pocket.

That is my belief.

But is the belief justified?

How can I find out?

I can put my hand into my pocket, take out the money, and count it.

If I count 100 dollars, I now have a method for justifying my belief.

In this case, the method is direct observation through my senses.

Now suppose I go into a store and spend 20 dollars.

How much money do I believe I have left?

80 dollars.

This time, I do not need to count all the money again in order to reach that belief.

I began with 100 dollars, which I had already counted.

I spent 20 dollars.

So I calculate:

100 − 20 = 80

My new belief is therefore based on two things: the sensory observation that justified the original amount and the mathematical calculation that followed.

Now let us change the situation.

Suppose I see something that costs 200 dollars, and I desperately want to buy it.

My friend asks:

“Do you have 200 dollars?”

Can I answer:

“I desperately need this item. Not having it would cause me serious psychological distress. Therefore, I must have 200 dollars in my pocket”?

Of course, my need for the money does not tell me how much money is actually there.

My desire does not put another 120 dollars into my pocket.

And my psychological distress does not turn my belief into a justified belief.

The question remains:

Does what I believe about the money in my pocket correspond to what is actually there?

Now let us return to religion.

Suppose losing my belief in my religion and in a Day of Judgment really would cause me serious psychological distress.

Perhaps I deeply need to believe that justice exists in the universe.

Perhaps I deeply need to believe that death is not the end.

But do these needs show that my religion is true?

Do they justify my belief that its description of heaven, hell, God, or the afterlife corresponds to reality?

The fact that I need a belief to be true is not evidence that the belief is true.

That is the central problem with this argument.

Hundreds of millions of people in the world do not believe in any religion, and there is no evidence that the absence of religious belief itself necessarily causes psychological problems.

And even if some nonreligious people do experience psychological distress, that would not by itself show that a particular religion must therefore be true or that everything it teaches must be correct.

For someone who is genuinely seeking the truth, another question is more important:

What method can I use to discover whether my belief actually corresponds to reality?

The answer may sometimes be emotionally difficult.

But many people would rather know the truth, however unpleasant it may be, than hold on to a comforting belief simply because it makes them feel better.

They measure the value of their beliefs by how closely those beliefs correspond to reality—not simply by how comforting the beliefs are.

Religiously biased believers usually acknowledge this as well.

For this reason, many believers—especially those seriously engaged in religious study and debate—do not accept the argument described above.

They do not regard a psychological need for a belief as evidence that the belief is true.

And they do not consider this argument common sense at all.

Holding On to Religious Belief to Prevent Immorality

Here is another argument that is sometimes presented as common sense.

It is not usually used by highly educated religious clerics, but it is common among less educated clerics and religious believers.

As a believer, I may say:

“Religion is necessary because without it, society will become immoral.”

If everyone loses their faith, I may argue, society will morally fall apart—or at least become much worse.

Common sense therefore seems to tell us that if we want to protect society from immorality, we should all believe in religion.

But when I say religion, I actually mean my own religion.

After all, I do not consider other religions to be true or complete.

There is another question we need to answer:

What do I mean by morality?

I may actually have two different kinds of behavior in mind.

The first is morality in the general sense accepted by people around the world:

“What you would not want for yourself, do not do to others.”

The second is different.

It simply means behaving according to the rules of my own religion, even when those rules do not fall under the first definition of morality.

Consider stealing.

Stealing is an example of morality in the first sense. It is regarded as wrong almost everywhere—by people of different religions and also by people with no religion.

Now consider eating pork.

Islam considers this wrong.

Or consider eating meat at all, which is considered wrong in many Hindu traditions.

These are examples of the second kind. They are considered wrong because they violate the rules of a particular religion.

Now suppose I claim that people who do these things have become immoral because they do not follow the rules of my religion.

My critics can ask a simple question:

“If these people do not consider the action immoral at all, how can you conclude that their morality has become corrupted simply because they do it?”

Before I can make that claim, I must first establish that my own religion is true.

Until I have done that, I cannot point to the violation of one of my religion’s rules and say that something terrible has happened.

Other societies may engage in such behavior without seeing any disaster resulting from it. The people in those societies may not consider themselves immoral because of it at all.

So calling such behavior immoral is simply the result of looking at morality through the eyes of my own religion.

Let us therefore put this second kind of morality aside and examine the stronger claim.

Suppose I mean morality in the first sense:

We should not do to others what we would not want done to ourselves.

Stealing was our example.

Now I claim that abandoning religion will cause behavior of this kind to increase.

There are two answers to this claim.

The first answer is based on evidence.

I have claimed that abandoning religion causes crime and immoral behavior to increase in society.

And I have used that claim as a reason why religious belief is necessary.

But suppose someone shows me statistics that contradict my claim.

Perhaps they show me societies where most people follow another religion.

Perhaps they show me societies where many people have no religion.

Or perhaps they show me societies where religion exists but does not play a major role in shaping social morality.

Now suppose the statistics show that crime and other behavior that counts as immoral under our definition are actually less common in some of those societies than in my own religious society.

What should I do?

If I remain faithful to the standard I chose, I must take this evidence seriously.

In fact, according to my own argument, I should abandon my religion and recommend that others do the same if doing so would lead us to a higher moral level.

Why?

Because a higher level of morality was the standard I chose for my argument.

But as a religious cleric or believer, I may not want to accept this result.

I may instead point to every crime I hear about in a less religious society.

Each time something terrible happens there, I may tell my fellow believers:

“Look! This is what their lack of religion has led to.”

But at the same time, I may ignore the overall statistics.

This creates a problem.

The important question is not whether crime exists in a society.

Crime may exist in both societies.

The important question is:

How common is it?

What matters is the difference in crime rates.

Suppose someone insists on looking at those rates and shows that a particular less religious society still has a lower crime rate than mine.

I may then change my response:

“That is because we have abandoned our religion and are not good believers, while they have studied our religion and have begun to follow its teachings.”

But now the critic can point out another problem.

My original claim was:

People need to believe in religion in order to become moral.

Now I am saying that people can learn moral teachings from a religion and practice them without believing in that religion or its God.

If that is possible, then belief in religion is no longer necessary for the purpose I originally gave.

People may learn a moral rule, understand its value, and follow it without accepting the supernatural beliefs of the religion in which that rule also appears.

So my new answer has once again changed the argument.

I began by saying that morality requires religious belief. I ended by admitting that moral behavior may not require religious belief at all.

That is the first answer.

Now let us consider the second.

For the sake of argument, suppose that only religion can preserve morality in human beings.

Even then, another problem remains.

Why does a person believe in a religion in the first place?

A believer normally believes because they have become convinced that what the religion says corresponds to reality.

They may believe that following its rules will bring salvation in the next life.

They may believe that it will save them from punishment after death.

Or they may believe that supernatural powers will help them in this life—providing for them, protecting their health, or giving them other benefits.

Different believers may have one or more of these reasons.

Now suppose religious belief prevents a person from committing crimes or other immoral acts.

What has happened?

First comes the belief.

Then comes the behavior that results from that belief.

The person believes that the religion is true.

Because they believe it is true, they try to live according to its moral rules.

Now imagine something unusual.

Suppose that in the final moments of a believer’s life, the prophet of that religion appeared and said:

“Everything I told you about heaven and hell was a lie. I only told you those things so that you would behave morally.”

How would the believer react?

They would probably consider the deception itself immoral.

After all, people do not want to be led down a particular path in life—even a moral path—by being given hope for something that does not actually exist.

This reveals an important distinction:

A belief may have good consequences without being true.

Making people behave morally does not, by itself, prove that the beliefs used to produce that behavior correspond to reality.

So the truth of a religion must be established by some method other than fear that society will become immoral.

Fear of immorality cannot serve as a common-sense reason for us to believe in a religion.

At most, it could become a reason for us to make other people religious in order to control their moral behavior.

But then we face another problem.

Would we want someone else to do that to us?

Would we want another person to change the way we live by giving us false promises or frightening us with false threats—even if their goal was to make us behave better?

According to the very moral principle we discussed earlier, we would not.

So we arrive at another important distinction:

The usefulness of a belief is not evidence for the truth of that belief.

A religion may encourage moral behavior.

That may be valuable.

But whether it does so is a different question from whether its claims about reality are true.

Morality itself, however, can also be used in another way.

Religious clerics may use morality as a standard for deciding whether a religion is true.

That is what we will examine in the next section.