Defense Laboratory / Does religious disagreement undermine religious certainty?
1. The objection
“There are thousands of Christian denominations, and billions of people in other religions, each convinced that they are right. They have read the same sort of evidence and reached opposite conclusions. Sincere, intelligent, prayerful people disagree about God, Christ, salvation and the Bible. Given that, how can anyone claim to be certain? If you had been born in India or Arabia you would hold a different faith with the same confidence. The honest response to this much disagreement is doubt, or at least humility, and not certainty.”
2. Investigation
Assumptions
- That disagreement among people shows that no one has reasonable grounds for confidence.
- That the number of denominations is a fair measure of how many real disagreements exist about central teachings.
- That religious belief is formed mainly by the place and family a person is born into, and that this settles whether it is true.
- That certainty means the absence of any doubt, and not a settled commitment held for reasons.
- That all the disputants are equally informed and equally honest.
Evidence and historical claims
- How many Christian bodies are there, and what do they agree about? Look at the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed as a record of what the large majority of Christians hold in common.
- On what points do Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians disagree (for example, authority, the sacraments, the role of Mary), and on what points do they agree (the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection)?
- What does the New Testament itself say about disagreement and error? Look at Galatians 1:6-9, 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, Acts 15 and Philippians 3:15.
- How do other fields handle expert disagreement, such as medicine, history, economics or philosophy? Does disagreement among experts in those fields lead people to stop holding any view?
- How do religions differ in their central claims, and how much of the disagreement is about core questions as opposed to practice or custom?
Philosophical and theological claims
- If an equally informed person disagrees with a person, does that give that person a reason to lower my confidence? How much, and under what conditions?
- Is the argument from the place of birth (the genetic fallacy) a good argument? Does the origin of a belief decide whether it is true?
- Is there a difference between being certain and being dogmatic? Can a person be confident and open to correction at once?
- Does the argument from disagreement apply to itself, since people also disagree about whether disagreement undermines belief?
Logical structure
- Premise 1: Informed and sincere people disagree widely about religion.
- Premise 2: When informed and sincere people disagree widely about a matter, no one has good grounds for certainty about it.
- Conclusion: Therefore no one has good grounds for religious certainty.
- Test each premise separately. Premise 1 is true, though how wide the disagreement is depends on which questions are counted. Premise 2 is the weak point: ask whether it holds for every subject, including science, history and ethics.
3. Christian responses
Response A: Disagreement does not by itself defeat belief (many philosophers, including Christian ones)
Many philosophers of religion argue that disagreement among experts is common in every serious field, including philosophy, history and politics, and that people do not conclude that no view is better supported than another. A person may have reasons that others lack, such as a particular experience, a particular argument or a close study of the evidence, and may hold a view with confidence while acknowledging that others differ.
On this answer, what disagreement should produce is care and humility in how a view is held and in how others are treated. It does not require giving up the view, and the question of how much confidence is reasonable depends on the evidence, not on counting heads. Philosophers disagree about how strong this reply is, and the topic is called the epistemology of disagreement.
Response B: The church as the guide that settles disputes (Catholic and Orthodox emphasis)
The Catholic and Orthodox traditions hold that Christ did not leave his people to settle the meaning of the faith by private judgment alone. The Catholic Church holds that the teaching office of the bishops, with the pope, guards the faith, and the Orthodox hold that the faith is preserved in the whole church, especially in the councils and the tradition they accepted. The early church dealt with disagreement through councils, as in Acts 15 and in the later ecumenical councils.
On this view, disagreement among Christians is a result of the break from the church’s teaching, and certainty is grounded in the church’s authority more than in each person’s reading. The traditions disagree with each other about which church that is, which is what the objector will press.
Response C: Central teachings are held by most Christians, and disagreement is at the edges (many Protestants)
Many Protestants argue that the count of denominations makes disagreement look larger than it is. The great majority of Christians in all branches affirm the Trinity, the divinity and resurrection of Christ, and the authority of Scripture in some form. C. S. Lewis described this common core as mere Christianity, and the phrase has been used by many Protestants to name the shared faith. On this view, certainty should be held in proportion: firmly on the central teachings in the creeds, more loosely on the matters where serious Christians differ.
The Reformed tradition often adds that the assurance of faith rests on the work of the Holy Spirit and not on settling every dispute. Critics note that this answer can be hard to test from outside, since the believer’s confidence comes from a source that others cannot inspect.
Response D: The sceptical and secular reading
A sceptic may hold that persistent disagreement with no agreed way to settle it is exactly what would be expected if religious claims are not well supported. In the sciences, disagreement tends to narrow over time as evidence accumulates, but in religion it has not. A sceptic of this kind does not have to claim that God does not exist, and may say only that the right response to the evidence is to withhold certainty.
A Jewish thinker may add a different note: that religious traditions can differ in what they ask of people, and that Judaism has historically emphasized practice and argument within the community, treating disagreement as part of the tradition’s way of seeking truth.
4. The strongest counterargument
The strongest reply to Responses A and C is that science and the other fields differ in one important way: in those fields there are agreed methods for settling disputes, and over time a consensus forms. In religion, no comparable method exists, and the same disagreements have continued for centuries. If a person believes that her reasons are better than those of the equally informed person across the table, she needs a reason to think that, and the reasons she gives tend to be the very ones the other person has also considered. It is also not clear how to tell a central teaching from an edge, since each group draws the line where its own view puts it.
The strongest reply to Response B is that the claim to a teaching authority that settles disputes only moves the problem back one step. A person must first decide which church has that authority, and that decision is made by private judgment, using the very faculties that the argument says cannot be trusted. The three great traditions each claim to be the true one, and none can show this in a way that all the others accept.
5. Your independent defense
- Write the objection in one sentence in your own words, and say whether it is an argument about evidence or about how people form beliefs.
- List the premises hidden in it using the logic outline above, and mark the one you think is weakest.
- Make two lists in your notebook: the teachings that Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians all affirm, and the teachings on which they differ. Use the creeds as a check.
- Think of a subject outside religion where informed people disagree (for example a historical question). Write down how you decide how confident to be about it, and then ask whether the same method applies to religion.
- Read Acts 15:1-29 and Galatians 1:6-9. Write what each passage shows about how the early church dealt with disagreement and error.
- Choose your own position and write 300 to 500 words defending it. State what you hold with confidence, what you hold more loosely, and why you draw the line where you do.
- Write the strongest objection to your own position. Make it as strong as you can, then answer it.
- Finally write one sentence on what would change your mind.
- Keep this in your own notebook or document. Do not send it anywhere.