That’s my point (perhaps after you posted this) about “established fact” in science. Our scientific system is so good and so big now we have a ton of established facts that we accept as true.
History is trickier, but not impossible
I’m glad you used the word “histories” because I do feel this is - or should be - an historical debate based on historical claims, evidence and evaluation.
But where I differ with you is that I’m not presently concerned with the contents of those books, those are details and as other posters have pointed out, even the fundamentalist adherents to those books argue and even kill each other over their interpretations. And even though there may be several versions of the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, AFAIK they differ only very slightly. The real issue is: where did these books come from?
Personally, I feel that the Christian position is the weakest, because unlike the other two, they don’t even claim that their book (or books) were revealed in the same way that the other two claim theirs were revealed. At least as far as I’ve seen. I’ve never seen or read anything that indicates that the Pope himself or any theologian ever believed that the Christian Bible was dictated by God to a prophet. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can comment on this.
I suggest you come back when you decide what exactly it is you want to talk about. The way it is now it’s going to be 15 pages before we even get the definitions down(if we’re lucky).
However these three things are not independent. And this case illustrates a common fallacy in how we evaluate probabilities.
Say the base belief set of Judaism is J, that of Christianity is C, and that of Islam is I. Now, both Christianity and Islam accept J, since the “Old Testament” is considered holy. Thus they have unique beliefs C -J and I - J (which have some amount of intersection) beyond J. Given that there is some probability of any belief in this set is incorrect, it is mathematically impossible for I or C to be more probable than J.
QE flippin D.
There have been studies where people have been asked to rate the probability that a person has certain characteristics. For instance, they are asked what is a chance that a person is a nurse, and then, elsewhere, asked if she is a nurse and middle aged. People consistently rate the second choice as being more probable, which is absurd if you think about it for a second. People like more information, and rate situations with more specificity as more likely than ones with less.
Oh, and Judaism stopped accumulating basic tenets long before 0 CE. That Jesus is not the Messiah is no more a basic tenet than that all other claimants to the role aren’t. So J is a strict subset of I and C.
Yes- and? I would say all three of these religions make historical claims that have been demonstrated to be false or vanishingly unlikely based on historical evidence (and they also make other claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny). I’d look at it this way: don’t the scriptures and prophets and “keepers” of all three religions generally take the Old Testament to be factual? So if there are myriad errors in that text - and there are, although they’re not only errors of history - all three have to be considered completely unreliable?
Or to put it another way, if I made the following claims:
a) Yesterday I flapped my arms and flew to the moon.
b) Yesterday I flapped my arms and flew to Mars.
c) Yesterday I flapped my arms and flew to Uranus.
It’s not particularly useful to conclude that (a) must be the most likely to be true because the moon is the nearest destination.
Even if the “truth” of a religion/religious book could be distilled into such a simple statement, which obviously it cannot.
The difference is you don’t have to take the scientist word for it. You can run your own experiments and judge the evidence for yourself, and if you have run the experiments correctly, you’ll be seeing the same thing as the other scientists. This is quite different than having faith in something.
Have you read “Who Wrote the Bible?” There is lots of history around this subject. However this doesn’t have a lot to do with the truth of the religions. Judaism could be just as true if God inspired the historical Jermiah to write the Torah, rather than Moses. For instance, we know the details of the origin of Mormonism pretty well, but that doesn’t mean the Book of Mormon is true.
Does it really matter if Matthew mistranslated young girl as virgin, or if someone writing as Matthew did it?
Of the three, Christianity makes the most sense to follow, as both Judaism and Islam have provisions for those who do not adhere to their religion. Plus, Judaism doesn’t have any real consequences for not adhering to their religion, as there’s no heaven or hell. I thought Islam was that way, too, but then the whole 72 virgins thing made me revisit it.
Unfortunately, that does not make it more true, just less likely to be a problem. And it leads to the logic that one must follow the most restrictive least contradictory religion, something many find distasteful.
This is false. Heaven and Hell barely get an explicit mention in the Torah, true enough. But the afterlife gets thoroughly discussed in the Talmud. I’m sure we’ve done threads on Judaism and the afterlife where others have covered the subject better than I can.
It is unnecessary to assign any truth-value to any of the religions for this logic to work. Since Christians and Muslims accept Judaism (while insisting on additional details), Judasim is the ‘most probable’.
Judaism (or at least, many varieties of it, and certainly traditionally) had an afterlife it is true, but you aren’t excluded from the good aspects of it by not being Jewish. Judaism has also traditionally held that non-Jews who adhere to the “Noahide laws” are fully as righteous as the most observant Jew. In Catholic Christianity, traditionally you could not get into heaven unless you were a believing Christian; dunno what the modern position on that is. Thus, if having a good afterlife was your goal, your best bet would be to be a good Catholic - you’d qualify under both traditional Judaism and traditional Catholic beliefs.
IIRC Al Quran teaches that Jews and Christians are “people of The Book”. They both have valid covenants with Allah. These covenants aren’t bad. They’re just incomplete. A Jew or Christian who follows the laws of their faith is deemed righteous and can enter paradise. Outside of the other two Abrahamic faiths, there is debate on who if any one are “people of the Book”. Hopefully, some Muslim (or is it spelled Moslem- I mean no offense if I got it wrong) Doper will stop by and enlighten us.
I sorta see what you mean, but I think the non-overlapping model of the OP is what the OP intended: no two of the major Abrahamic religions can be “true.” They all accept that God spoke to Moses; but two of them have gone on to set aside what God said to Moses.