WIth Due Respect-- If you were born in India, you would have been Hindu!

A personal account

I recall in months of May and June 2010, I was posted to Silwood park, a rural campus of Imperial College to do my final year project. In that campus, I made good friends with some of the students there, and I am proud to say we became fast friends.

We were having dinner together when one of my new friends, seeing that I brought a book to the table asked me why I was reading a book on religion. (The book was Can a Darwinian be a Christian?, written by atheist philosopher Michael Ruse.) Innocently, I replied that I wanted to understand more on how non-Christian academics viewed Christianity. With sudden aggression, my friend replied that people are only religious because they were born in that environment. To use the exact same words, he used, "If they were born in India, they would be Hindu!"

The many forms of the argument

This arguments comes in many forms:
"If you were born in Japan, you would be Shinto Buddhist."
"If you were born in Morocco/ Malaysia/Turkey, you would be Muslim."

The basis of the argument suggests that people largely believe what they do due to their social environment.

Or to make it more understandable I'll put it like this:
1) The individual would like to think for himself/herself.
2) However, all individuals belong to community which reinforces some beliefs and discourages others.
3) Hence we are all locked into our social and cultural histories, and therefore there is no way to judge rightness and wrongness of beliefs.

Yup, that sounds reasonable, right?

It does, provided that the moral relativists can exclude themselves from their own qualifer. Berger (1969) argues that if everything we believe is socially constructed and therefore no belief is universally, that that is true for the moral relativists too. In Berger's own words, "Relativitism relativises itself." in a way that you cannot have relativism all the way down (Siegel, 1987).

That's not to say I disagree totally with my friend. Our social and cultural biases make assessing competeing truth claims difficult, and of course I agree. Such conditionedess of belief is a fact, but it cannot be used to confirm all truth is relative, or such a claim refutes itself on its own merits. However, we cannot avoid analysing spiritual and religious claims by proposing "there is no truth", or we would be intelluctually lazy (Keller, 2008).

We must do the hard work of searching and checking claims of what we know about God, human nature and reality to determine what is true and false. And if we are being honest with ourselves, we base our lives on some answer to those type of questions (Keller, 2008).

We have heard stories of people converting from one belief systems to another. There are people who have reasoned themselves into atheism For instances, converts from Christianity to atheism include Ken Livingstone (former Mayor of London), John Loftus (former pastor) and Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist). That's not to say people have not reasoned themselves out of atheism to Christianity. Francis Collins (geneticist), Alister McGrath (theologian) and C.S. Lewis (writer).

Conclusion

I guess in a way what my friend was really saying that unlike religious people like me whose beliefs are socially and emotionally constrcuted, his beliefs are intelluctually constructed. However, if we are being honest with ourselves, we believe what we believe for intellectual, emotional and social reasons (Plantinga, 1998).

Don't get me wrong-- it doesn't prove there is a god or disprove one.I just want to encourage us not to be lazy and hide behind relativism.


References

Berger, P. (1969) A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

Keller (2008) The Reason For God

Plantinga, A. (1998) The Defense of Religious Exclusivism. In The Analytical Theist

Siegel, H. (1987) Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary Epistemological Relativism