Will this article convince any non-abrahamic religious believer?
Does any non-Abrahamic religious believer need to be convinced that religious claims are still subject to ordinary principles of reasoning?
The claim that religion is nondisprovable is not usually used to defend, say, Buddhism. But when e.g. Catholics talk about it, they don’t usually say “Catholicism cannot be proven or disproven”, they say that religions in general, or spiritual matters, or the existence of god(s), or etc cannot be proven or disproven.
We could respond by pointing out reasons that their faith specifically ought to be falsifiable, but this makes it seem like that one faith is an exception to the general rule of religious unprovability, that it fails to qualify for the religious immunity by some technicality. Really, the whole rule is wrong to begin with.
So on the one hand, I agree that it’s kind of dishonest to present this as a mistake of religions in general. But on the other hand, the claim being argued against is a claim about religions in general, even though most proponents of the claim belong to a specific handful of religions.
Maybe my thought of ‘religion’ is different than yours, but I think of ‘religion’ as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn’t have claim to some ‘extra-normal’ normal, I wouldn’t consider it a religion.
This may be the christian god’s rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism’s rules on what you come back as.
Does any non-Abrahamic religious believer need to be convinced that religious claims are still subject to ordinary principles of reasoning?
The claim that religion is nondisprovable is not usually used to defend, say, Buddhism. But when e.g. Catholics talk about it, they don’t usually say “Catholicism cannot be proven or disproven”, they say that religions in general, or spiritual matters, or the existence of god(s), or etc cannot be proven or disproven.
We could respond by pointing out reasons that their faith specifically ought to be falsifiable, but this makes it seem like that one faith is an exception to the general rule of religious unprovability, that it fails to qualify for the religious immunity by some technicality. Really, the whole rule is wrong to begin with.
So on the one hand, I agree that it’s kind of dishonest to present this as a mistake of religions in general. But on the other hand, the claim being argued against is a claim about religions in general, even though most proponents of the claim belong to a specific handful of religions.
Maybe my thought of ‘religion’ is different than yours, but I think of ‘religion’ as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn’t have claim to some ‘extra-normal’ normal, I wouldn’t consider it a religion.
This may be the christian god’s rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism’s rules on what you come back as.