But aren’t all religions the same? Part 2
14 April 2008
Uncovering Assumptions
Dickson says Pluralism also has a number of underlying assumptions. Firstly, world religions don’t take credit for revelation rather they insist that a power greater than themselves revealed the truth to them. This is opposed to the pluralist who takes credit for their insight in “discovering” the greater macro truth.
Secondly, people who believe in world religions make their claim to truth in the context of large numbers of believers. For example 1 billion Muslims or 2 billion Christians. This contrasts with the small number of western intellectual pluralists who have discerned this macro truth.
Thirdly pluralism makes it claim without justification of its premise. Pluralists insist that world religions are “perceptions of a reality” that is unknowable. This begs the question.
How do you know that no particular religion grasps reality itself? And secondly how do you know that reality is unknowable and out of reach.
The Existential Excuse
At this point an often-offered response is that believing that one religion is right and others are wrong is unbearable because it consigns too many people to error. This thinking is not only flawed but hypocritical because the pluralist position consigns most religious traditions to large scale error.
Secondly Dickson points out that bearableness is a poor indicator of whether something is true. (The example Dickson uses is that 90% of the worlds wealth is in the hands of 10% of the words population). In other words just because something feels intuitively wrong doesn't always mean that it is wrong.
tags christian, ministry, thinking
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