Minute with a Muslim #140 – How Can We Know If Religion Is True

Some people say well, how can we know that a religion is true or not? Or how can we know that a religious text is true? We have no metric. Like when it comes to science, for example, we have empiricism we can go measure, right? We can say, well, this scientific theory of corresponds reality or not somebody they're going to talk about metaphysics or metaphysical truths, how can we determine whether religion is true or not? There's no, it's unfalsifiable. And therefore, we can't you know, it's not valid knowledge. It's just all speculation or whatever, that's not true. And this person, they're underselling the logical component of it, right, because there's much more to epistemology,

and there's much more to knowledge than just the census, right? Anybody would admit that? Nobody, nobody, nobody lives their life just as a strict empiricist only believing the things that they can see touch, taste, smell these sorts of things. No, we use logic, right? We talk about so there's, there's different criteria that we can subject religious texts to, to determine the likelihood that their divine guidance or not one of these is coherence, there needs to be coherence within a religious text. If we're assuming that there's an author or divine author that communicated of a divine message, we can fairly assume that that message has coherence, right? If the creator is

telling you that human beings are generally good, but they make mistakes, and then on the next page, he's telling you that human beings are evil, and they're horrible. And there's no saving, though, right? That's a contradiction. And so that's incoherent, right? If we're telling you in one religious texts that God is, you know, or the creator is a transcendent God, you know, who has all these sorts of qualities. And then on the next page, they're telling you that he actually became a human being and died on a cross that's incoherent, right? So we can reject that. Right? The second thing is, is plausibility, right, plausibility is another criteria that we can use the things that

I'm being told, is it is it plausible, right? So other people, people talking about, okay, atheists will talk about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and pass the foreign ism, okay. And they'll act as if this kind of mock God that's made to to make fun of sort of God and the idea of God or the idea of a creator, they'll act as if these two things are on the same level. Okay, well, how plausible is it really, that the Creator is made of spaghetti or made of anything like physical at all? And the all these sorts of attributes that you're attributing to these things? It's not it's not plausible, right? And that's actually the location of the mockery is in its implausibility. Right. So

plausibility is something that's very, very real, that is can be used as criteria to determine whether okay, like, is this thing possible or not? Right. And then the final thing, if we have a divine text that's telling us that, you know, everybody has to live a celibate life, you know, go out into the woods and live a life of poverty and you know, abstention from every single thing that doesn't adhere to our experience as human beings. Why would we have these things that are so important for our survival, and then it's just, it's all evil, that's all bad, we have to stay away from all of it, you know, that that doesn't adhere to our experience and the opposite, right? If we

adopt some sort of hedonistic attitude that everything that's there, you know, you can touch, taste and smell, everything, every experience is just completely open. And then we see the harms that come from it, whether it's heartbreak, or whether it's, you know, certain diseases or things like that, it doesn't adhere to our experience as human beings, right? We see it like that there's great harm in this right. And these are not obviously they're not absolutely foolproof, and there's there the edges of them are, are open to interpretation, but we can't, you know, it's a posture, somebody stands and they have and they say, well, all religious claims are the same. They're just claims

you've got no proof. There's no evidence. This is a posture and it's not real, right. There are criteria there is logic, there are things that you can look to a religious text and you can assess and evaluate. Does this make sense? Is it possible that this came from a creator, a divine creator?