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

Referring to the Hidden Meaning of Religious Rules

Sometimes, when the apparent meaning of a religious rule or teaching seems troubling or unconvincing to an audience, religious clerics suggest that it has a deeper, hidden meaning.

They may say that what people see is only the outward appearance of the teaching. Those who actually follow it, they say, will gradually discover deeper meanings that cannot be seen by people who look only at the surface.

Of course, such a claim could be true about any teaching or set of instructions. But it could also be nothing more than a claim.

An important feature of this kind of argument is that it can distract people from examining whether the religion is true or false according to the standards they already use.

A person may have different standards for judging whether a religion is true—for example, reason, morality, or a miracle that he has personally witnessed.

But when a religious cleric claims that the real truth of a religious teaching lies in a deeper meaning that can be understood only by practicing it, the person's attention may shift away from those standards. He now becomes occupied with a different question:

“How can I know whether there really is some deeper meaning in these teachings that I can discover only by following them?”

Sometimes religious clerics go even further. They may present the matter in such a way that the listener begins to feel that if he does not want to accept the religion, it is his responsibility to prove that these deeper meanings do not exist.

The listener may then forget a basic principle of reasoning:

The person making a claim is responsible for providing evidence for it. It is not the responsibility of others to prove that the claim is false.

We human beings often become passive when religious clerics or believers approach us in this way. We may begin to think that because we cannot disprove every claim they make, it is perfectly reasonable to believe what they say.

This way of thinking can become so deeply rooted in us that we may even imagine that the God of the universe reasons in the same way.

We may think that if we abandon our faith before we have carefully disproved all those religious claims with sufficient evidence and argument, God will consider us stubborn and hostile toward Him and therefore deserving of punishment.

But in thinking this way, we forget that the world is full of such claims.

Every child, just as each of us was once a child, is born into a family and a society that may claim that its own religion and religious tradition are true. And if we believe in God, then the God we believe in must know that the world He created is full of competing claims.

Suppose someone does not simply accept the first claim he hears or the first religion into which he happens to be born. Instead, he waits for the person making the claim to support it with strong reasoning and evidence, in a way that leaves no serious weakness in the argument.

From the point of view of the God of the universe, would this not be more reasonable than simply accepting the first religion that happened to be placed before him?

We sometimes forget that if we believe in God, we usually believe in a God who is wise and all-knowing. Deep down, we believe that such a God would not punish someone for acting in a more rational and thoughtful way.

Why, then, do we so easily forget this—or fail to look at the question from this point of view at all?

One reason may be the reversed logic that religious clerics often teach people from childhood. Instead of accepting their own responsibility to demonstrate that their religion is true, they may shift that responsibility to everyone else. The listener is then expected to prove that all the claims made by religious authorities are false.

As a result, claims can be made that the clerics themselves cannot prove, while their opponents may sometimes be unable to disprove them either.

But the inability to disprove a claim is not evidence that the claim is true.