Borrowing (and modifying) a theme from Sam Harris’sThe End of Faith, suppose a generation of children grows up on an island without any contact from the rest of the world. They are raised by people who teach them how to provide for themselves (the island is abundant with food and shelter that requires the most minimum of effort) and how to read in a variety of languages, but they do not answer any questions of a philosophical nature, and then they leave.
On the island is a library filled with all of the great books of civilization including the Holy books from every major religion past and present as well as books of mythology, drama, great novels and epic poems, etc… Among them of course is The Bible (any translation you want), occupying shelves along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Holy Quran & Hadiths, the Illiad, the Talmud, the Baghavad Gita, Anna Karenina, etc etc… Lacking are commentaries written on these books (save for some works of ancient history describing the times in which they were written).
So question, the children (who can be of any race or ethnicity and who are all above average in intelligence and intellectual ability) read all of these books. How would they know which ones are true? What would make the tales of Jesus’s conception and birth more believable than the conception and birth of Helen of Troy, or the Revelation at Sinai more divine and relevant than the Code of Hammurabi, or the words about G_d found in the Quran more true than the words in Hesiod’s Theogony? In short, like Indiana Jones in the Hall of Chalices, how would they choose wisely, and how would any religion present itself as self-evidently truer than any other religion or than works of professed fiction?
I’m not being argumentative and I won’t criticize anybody’s answers; I’m just curious to what degree you believe religion is obviously true.
I really don’t like the term Holy Book, but that’s a whole 'nother topic, and I want to participate in the spirit you intended.
I suppose that if I were one of the children, what would “ring true” to me is something that says I am worth as much as anyone else, that I am loved unconditionally, that I ought to love others, that I am redeemable, that I am useful in whatever grand plan there might be, and that I am an eternal being. I think that I would find morsels of these in quite many of the books. But in John, I would find it in droves. Even so, I would also find it in Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus the Son of Man, and wouldn’t need to read John at all. And in some other parts of the Bible, I would find it conspicuously absent or contradicted.
It’s pretty much just like what I run into right now.
Forget religion - is there any real way to tell the difference between truth and a competantly-designed fiction? I doubt it. Nothing is ever “self-evident”.
It all depends on what you’ve been disciplined to believe, I guess. IMHO, I’ve been taught (whether or not it’s true is moot in this debate) that Christianity is for real and the myths about Helen of Troy and Hesiod’s Theogony are pure mythology. So when I read the Bible, I go, “OK, religious stuff, this is a holy (divine, inspired) book,” and when I read my copy of the Odyssey I go, “Wow, what a great fictional epic”, because I know one pertains to religion and the other pertains to myth.
The children in your hypothetical haven’t been brought up to believe anything–they would lack the foreknowledge of distinctions between religion and myth. So they’d probably believe that the Bible and the Qur’an were just as true (or false) as the Theogony.
Wizard: *Elphaba, where I’m from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call it history. * (from the song Wonderful in Wicked)
Books on science are certainly testable and provable, as would books on geography be if the children could build a boat. Books on history could to some degree be proven by travel as well, though not so much on the island itself.
How would a book on dinosaurs, or atoms, or the Big Bang, be testable and provable by children on an island? I’m having a hard time thinking of anything, whether religion, science, history, or whatever, that could be called obviously true, except what relates to direct personal experience—and even then we can be misled (e.g. the earth is flat, and the stars are tiny lights in the sky).
Would the children on the island even know what “truth” was?
The New Testament writers appealed to fulfilled prophecy and the evidence of their own changed lives (particularly Paul’s) to support what they wrote.
Now, I know that some would contest (misguidedly, IMO) that Jesus fulfilled no prophecies, etc. That’s another issue altogether, though. My point is that the NT writers pointed to these matters as evidence for their claims. They didn’t expect people to simply search their hearts or contemplate their navels, as some would purport.