One common faith

I wonder if anyone will read this, considering its been so long since I posted, but here goes anyway.

A conversation with a friend over the weekend threw up a few points I found myself disagreeing on with her completely. I'd like to discuss here three of her main theses. The first point she made was this - there is nothing absolute in this world, and one can never be 100% sure of anything at all. Therefore there is nothing that can be considered objective truth, as everything involves taking leaps of faith, however tiny. This, she contended, included rationality, logic and such, commonly considered beyond subjective opinion.

Assuming the above point is true, this leads us to her second contention - that as there is no way to prove, beyond doubt, the existence of an absolute reality, there is no basis for suggesting that one person's beliefs about the nature of reality are any more correct than another's.

The third and final claim was this - to truly accept and love another person, we necessarily need to accept all their beliefs to be true. Putting the above three statements together, we come to the particular argument she made - given the multiplicity (and seemingly glaring contradictions) of religious faiths in the world today, the only way to really reconcile them and accept everyone without question was to accept that each of those claims about the nature of reality is actually true. In particular, she believed that attempts to unify religions by claiming they come from a common source, but attributing their apparent contradictions to historical corruptions/misinterpretations (as claimed, for example, by the Baha'i faith), were both hypocritical and unfair to those holding these beliefs, and just a convenient gesture to find some minimum common ground.

Phew, that took me a while to write - and its probably still not clear. Anyway, lets go ahead and dissect each of the above claims, and maybe things will get less murky and confusing as we go along.

Lets tackle the first claim - that of the inherent subjectivity in theorizing about the world. In general I think skeptical arguments about the nature of reality - such as the one she presented - are impossible to refute due to their very nature. While, in the strictest sense, one can be absolutely sure of nothing, for all practical purposes, one can be sure of many things. There is, for example, some finite probability that at this very moment, all the atoms in my body will suddenly, due to their quantum uncertainty, rearrange themselves into an elephant - but that probability is so infinitesimally small that I can basically assume it to be zero. I could wake up tomorrow to find the world completely changed, and realize that the last 25 years of my life were actually a dream - but the possibility is so remote that I can basically ignore it. The earth might not be revolving around the sun - but given the wealth of data and analysis that show it is, the chances are very remote that it isn't. I could give many other examples - but the point I'm really trying to make here is that based on our experiences (both personal and communal), there are a lot of things that can basically, for all practical purposes, be assumed to be absolutely true.

Taken to the extreme, her argument really degenerates into solipsism - the belief that one can be sure of nothing except one's own thoughts, and the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist. As I said earlier, such theories are of course impossible to disprove - but the critiques of such a viewpoint would fill a book, so let me not even get into it. One thing you can muse about, though, is whether you can ever convince someone about solipsism - for that would involve convincing them either that they are a figment of your imagination and aren't real, or that you are a figment of their imagination (which of course, you yourself don't believe!). If you go down that line for a while, you'll come up with all sorts of interesting philosophical contradictions.

Getting back to the point, apart from just the surety one can have in certain things based on probability, there are also certain realms that I do believe to be beyond subjective opinion, such as rationality, logic, mathematics etc. Of course, there is no way to prove this from first principles - but I must admit that it does seem obvious to me that 2+2 equals 4 whether or not I believe it is. It seems obvious that if A=B, and B=C, then A must equal C - irrespective of my subjective opinion. And therefore I believe there is an absolute nature to these realms that goes beyond just human comprehension. It is true that we are limited by our subjectivity - but I don't see why that should necessarily mean that reality cannot be absolute. Our subjectivity would only mean that we have a limited access to reality - not that reality itself is subjective.

I think one can also avoid the trap of solipsistic views of the world by not undervaluing some of these:

1. Human experience: I think there is great value in human experience that is often neglected. True, our perceptions are limited and can sometimes be fooled - nevertheless, rejecting all the sensory input we get from the world as flawed and possibly all wrong is taking things a bit too far. Much of what we see, hear and sense in the material world can be taken at face value.

2. Occam's razor: Very often the simplest theory that fits the data is the right theory. If I see what looks like an elephant, it probably is an elephant. So why come up with an elaborate theory that rejects all the observations I make about the world?

3. Rationality: Humans have access to rational thinking and reasoning which I also believe to be quite valuable. Something that seems to inherently be irrational/illogical is probably irrational/illogical and untrue.

To conclude this section, I do believe there are things we can say absolutely about the world around us, based on rational thinking and unbiased observation of the world around us. These, in the strictest sense, might be challenged, but only with a viewpoint that borders on solipsism.

Now let's take the second claim - that there is no way we can say one person's views of reality are any more right than another's. Now based on our rejection of the first claim, we can go ahead and challenge this one as well. As there are things we can say absolutely about the world, we can most certainly reject at least certain kinds of beliefs about reality with almost complete certainty. This is also confirmed by our own experiences - most things that we sense in the world have an essential nature to them - and we can usually say what they are, and what they aren't. I know that this is a computer, and not an elephant. And so I can attach a definite truth value to the statement "This is a computer". And consequently I can reject as at least partially false, a theory of reality that says that this is actually an elephant. Note that when I talk of computers and elephants, I'm talking not of the words, but the concepts - I could create a language where elephants were called computers and computers elephants, but they would conceptually still be what we think of today.

When considering theories of reality, we also have access to other criteria of judgment - ethics, for one. A claim about reality that allows for rampant killing of other humans is clearly false. Fundamentalist terrorist claims about the will of God are clearly false. And so I think there are enough examples of situations where one can reject certain views of reality as false on the basis of common sense, reason, morality and observing the world.

Finally moving to the third claim - that to truly accept someone you need to accept as true all their beliefs - this, just based on our own experiences, seems false. After all, do we ever agree completely with anyone? And yet we love our families, our friends, we accept them for who they are, and agree to disagree with them, right? So there is no reason to believe that this could not be extended to everyone in the world. You can of course disagree with people and still accept them for who they are, as part of the same reality that is yours - and there really is no contradiction/hypocrisy in that.

So now, what can we say about different religious claims about reality? If we were to take all these claims as they are made today, there appear to be blatant contradictions amongst them. Now what are the different possible cases that could exist?

1. None of them are true
2. All of them are true, as they are today
3. Only one(some) of them is(are) true
4. All of them have some grain of truth to them, but a lot of what they say is junk too

I think that is the complete set of possibilities. Lets examine these separately.

1. None of them are true - the Atheist stance: I think there are enough reasons why I believe this position to be false, a lot of which can be found in previous posts. Of course, one cannot prove this with certainty (for if one could, why would there be atheists in the first place?!).

2. All of them are true as they are today - the Relativist stance: All these contradictory theories being true at the same time seems to defy logic. If the fundamentlist Christian stance is right, all non-Christians should go to hell. If the fundamentalist Muslim stance is right, all non-Muslims should go to hell. And therefore the Christian should go to hell because he is non-Muslim, and the Muslim should go to hell because he is non-Christian. Makes no sense, right?! So the only way out here is to say that all theories are true because each person has his own reality, that exists independent of others'. Therefore to the Christian, his belief is his reality.

This approach at least prevents imposition of one's theories on others - each of us just lives our own separate realities, and there is no one common reality. But this still has numerous problems. What of someone, for example, who converts from Christianity to Islam - does his reality suddenly change to match that of another Muslim? And what about historical facts - at one point, there was just one Church, and so all Christians had similar realities. Then the Protestants and Catholics split - and now we have numerous denominations, each with minor variations on the Christian theme - so now do they all have their own realities? And when do you develop a reality - when you are born into a family espousing a particular religion, or when you become old enough to develop a set of beliefs? And if the former, what of families where parents believe in different things?

I could go on, but I think the point is made.

3. Only one of them is true - the Fundamentalist stance: Just one or some of the religious stances could be true - but such a reality would be so unfair, wouldn't it? Let's assume, for example, that only Christianity is true - what then, of all those people who lived and died before Christ ever came on earth? And even after he did, what of all those people who never even heard of him as there was no global communication network? Shouldn't absolute truth (assuming there is one) be accessible to everyone at all times and places?

4. All of them have some grain of truth to them - the Baha'i stance: This, really, is the only one that seems to make sense to me. And it fits the data available too - it seems reasonable that at all points in time there were Prophets who came down with the word of God to give humans access to knowledge and truth. It also seems reasonable to believe that over time these truths get eroded, as we are all imperfect beings, and prone to selfishness and carelessness. And therefore it seems reasonable that this truth needs to constantly be renewed and reinforced. Additionally, as we evolve, it also makes sense that things that made sense at some point in humanity's evolution no longer make sense.

The final stance, therefore, makes sense to me logically - and I hardly see it as trying to create some convenient common minimum ground. It is not that a group of people came together to decide that for the sake of unity, they would try to come up with a set of teachings that were common to all religions - rather, an individual who claimed to be a Prophet came and gave a set of teachings for today - and then went on to show how the essence of those teachings was actually available in every religion.

If you actually got to this point, and understood everything I said, you must be both incredibly patient, and a genius.

Of course, all this could be an illusion, and reality and truth could be something totally different.

But do you really believe that???