Chapter 9:

The
Conflicting
Truth Claims
of Different
Religions
Michelle Boca, Dyanne Garibay, Caitlin Fenton

• Sept. 24, 2018

MANY FAITHS, ALL CLAIMING TO BE TRUE

Interactions of different religions around the world, in the cases of Christianity and Islam,
became conflicts rather than dialogues; they did not engender any deep or sympathetic
understanding of one faith by the adherents of another. It is only during the last hundred years
or so that the scholarly study of world religions has made possible an accurate appreciation of
the faiths of other people and so has brought home to an increasing number of us the problem
of the conflicting truth claims made by different religious traditions.
These different religions seem to say different and incompatible things about the nature of
ultimate reality, about the modes of divine activity, and about the nature and destiny of the
human race.

● Is the divine nature personal or non-personal?

● Does deity become incarnate in the world?
● Are human beings reborn again and again on earth?
● Is the Bible, or the Qur'an, or the Bhagavad Gita the Word of God?
● If what Christianity says in answer to such questions is true, must not what Hinduism
says be to a large extent false?
● If what Buddhism says is true, must not what Islam says be largely false?
 The skeptical thrust of these “Any ground for
questions goes very deep; for it believing a particular
is a short step from the thought religion to be true
that the different religions cannot must operate as a
all be true, although they each ground for believing
claim to be. every other religion to
be false.”

-pg.110

● David Hume laid down the principle that “in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and
that it is impossible the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam, and of China should, all of
them, be established on any solid foundation.
● Hume refers to the subject of religion as “the established superstition.”
● Even if a miracle were in principle possible we could never have sufficient evidence for believing that
any phenomenon is indeed a miracle and not simply an anomaly.
● Argued that various religions all appeal to miracles in support of their different claims, and since
incompatible claims cannot all be true, the rival claims based upon such alleged miracles have a
mutually canceling effect.
David Hume: Miracles
CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF “A RELIGION”
The Meaning and End of Religion - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Challenges the concept of “a religion” where most of the

problems of conflicting religious truth claims rests.

Emphasizes that what we call a religion - an empirical entity

that be traced historically and mapped geographically - is a
human phenomenon.

States that Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam,

and so on are human creations whose history is part of the
wider history of human culture,
● Smith traces the development of the concept of
a religion as a clear and bounded historical
phenomenon and shows that the notion, far
from being universal and self evident, is a
distinctively western invention which has been
exported to the rest of the world.
● Various “religions” today were invented in the
18th century and before they were imposed by
the influence of the West to everyone else
around the world, no one had thought of
themselves as belonging to a set of competing
systems of belief which it is possible to ask,
“Which of these systems is the true one?”
● Instead of thinking of religion as existing in mutually exclusive systems, we should see the religious life of humanity as a
dynamic continuum within which certain major disturbances have from time to time set up new fields of force, of greater or
lesser power, displaying complex relationships of attraction and repulsion, absorption, resistance, and reinforcement.

● These major disturbances are the great creative religious moments of human history from which the distinguishable religious
traditions have stemmed. Theologically, such moments are seen as intersections of divine grace, divine initiative, divine truth,
with human faith, human response, human enlightenment.
● They have made their impact upon the stream of human life so as to affect the development of cultures; and what we call
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, are among the resulting historical- cultural phenomena.

● Christianity has developed through a complex interaction between religious and nonreligious factors. Christian ideas have been
formed within the intellectual framework provided by Greek philosophy; the Christian church was molded as an institution by the
Roman Empire and its system of laws; the Catholic mind reflects some- thing of Latin Mediterranean and the Protestant mind
something of northern Germanic culture, and so on
● This means that it is not appropriate to speak of a religion as being true or false, any more than it is to speak of a civilization as
being true or false. For the religions, in the sense of distinguishable religio cultural streams within human history, are
expressions of the diversities of human types and temperaments and thought forms.
A Philosophical Framework For Religious Pluralism
● To reconcile the conflict of many different religions claiming to know the truth, there is a hypothesis
creating the philosophical framework for all religious beliefs to be able to coexist.
● The hypothesis has its base in the idea held among many religious traditions that there is the True
Divine an sich (in him/her/itself) and the Divine that humans experience.
○ Some examples of this are nirguna Brahman is without attributes and saguna Brahman and
Jewish Kabbalist En Soph or a divine reality beyond human distinction and the God of the
bible
● Taking these assumptions, that there is the True Divine and the divine through the lens of human
experience, lies the framework for different religious experiences representing the same limitless
transcendent reality
A Philosophical Framework Cont.
● Immanuel Kant helped influence this with his distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal
world. The noumenal world being the world as it truly is and the phenomenal world being the world
as it appears to us, influenced by how we experience it.
● This was applied by stating there could be one divine noumenon and many diverse divine
phenomenon.
○ This then leads to the discussion on how different religions experience divinity, namely the
personal versus the impersonal god. With a personal interpretation of God for example
Judaism or Hinduism. Yahweh and Krishna exist separate of each other as different persona
of the True divine. They are different images of God. Then with the non-personal, the same
limitless reality is being experienced, though through forms of the concept of the Real as
impersonal
● The more mystic religions which don’t appear to suffer from any distortion by the human mind are
still susceptible to varying interpretation, and would still fall under the purview of the hypothesis
A Philosophical Framework Cont.
● This then helps establish the possible hypothesis that the great religious traditions are the different
human perception of and in response to the same infinite divine Reality
Man & Religion
● Human has been described as a naturally religious animal, displaying an innate tendency to
experience the environment as being religiously as well as naturally significant and to feel required
to live in it as such
○ Universally expressed in the cultures of early peoples in things such as belief in sacred objects
and worshipping spirits
● Sometime after 100 B.C.E - Marked as golden age of religious creativity
○ This consisted of a series of revelatory experiences occurring in different parts of the world
that deepened and purified people's conceptions of the divine
○ Because of the lack of communication of the different parts of the world, it created different
religions
Making Sense of the Religions
The different religions are different streams of religious experience

● Each having started at a different point within human history and each having formed its own
conceptual self-consciousness within a different cultural milieu/environment

Consider the hypothesis that

● All religions are in contact with the same divine reality but b/c of differing experiences of that reality
over many centuries of different culture forms, it has led to different interpretations of the same
reality
● Different elaborations of the same divine reality
3 Main Difference- Conflicting Truth Claims

● Differences in modes of experiencing the divine reality

● Differences of philosophical and theological theory concerning that reality or concerning the
implications of religious experience

● Differences in the key or revelatory experiences that unify a stream of religious life
1st Main Difference
● Differences in modes of experiencing the divine reality
○ In Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the theistic strand of Hinduism, the Ultimate is
apprehended as personal goodness, will, and purpose
○ Under the different names of Yahweh, God, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva

● On the other hand, in Hinduism as interpreted by the Advaita Vedanta school, and in Theravada
Buddhism, ultimate reality is seen as nonpersonal

-Argues that this difference makes them complementary rather than incompatible
2nd Main Difference
● Second type of difference is in philosophical and theological theory or doctrine

● The history which makes up the differing philosophical and theological theories are in a
continuum of change
○ Culturally conditioned aspect of religion

● As the religions meet and communicate more freely there will be an increasing influence of
each faith upon each other
3rd Main Difference
● Constitutes the largest difficulty in the way of religious agreement

● Each religion has its holy founder or scripture, or both, in which the divine reality has been revealed
(i.e Christianity-Bible)

○ Wherever the Holy is revealed, it claims an absolute response of faith and worship,
which thus seems incompatible with a like response to any other claimed
disclosure of the Holy
Possible Solutions/Theories
Today the religious traditions are consciously interacting with each other in mutual observation and
dialogue, and it is possible that their future developments may move on gradually converging courses

● Each group will continue to grow and thus mesh together

● If the tension at the heart of the traditional Christian attitude to non-Christian faiths is to be resolved,
Christian thinkers must give even more radical attention to the problem than they have as yet done
Kahoot!