An Excerpt From Chapter 2, From "The Outsider Test for Faith", pp. 33-44

Chapter 2: The Fact of Religious Diversity

This chapter supports my first contention—that people who are located in distinct geographical areas around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and justify a wide diversity of mutually exclusive religious faiths due to their particular upbringing and shared cultural heritage. This is the Religious Diversity Thesis (RDVT), and it is a well-established fact in today’s world. The problem of religious diversity cries out for reasonable explanation, something that faith has not provided so far. Attempts to mitigate it or explain it, as we’ll see, either fail to take it seriously or explain religion itself away.

There has been a wide diversity of religions since the dawn of human civilization, with the development of different religious cultures. According to the sociological (or demographical) facts, this is easy enough to see with regard to some of the major religions in today’s world (listed below with the number of worldwide adherents).¹

Christianity: 2.1 billion

Islam: 1.5 billion

Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion

Hinduism: 900 million

Chinese traditional religion: 394 million

Buddhism: 376 million

Primal-Indigenous: 300 million

African Traditional and Diasporic: 100 million

Sikhism: 23 million

Juche: 19 million

Spiritism: 15 million

Judaism: 14 million

Baha’i: 7 million

Jainism: 4.2 million

Shinto: 4 million

Cao Dai: 4 million

Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million

Tenrikyo: 2 million

Neo-Paganism: 1 million

Unitarian-Universalism: 800,000

Rastafarianism: 600,000

Scientology: 500,000

Disregard for the moment that the “Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist” group is ranked as the third largest “religion” in the world, although this ranking is indeed noteworthy. Members of this group do not believe in supernatural forces (like animism or reincarnation) and/or supernatural beings (like gods, goddesses, and demons), so they do not represent a religion in any meaningful sense. They are nonreligious people by definition. If believers think atheism is a religion, then they need to provide a definition of religion that applies both to supernaturalism and to its denial. Any definition of religion that includes atheism will either deny the inherent supernaturalism of religion or end up describing religion as a social grouping of some kind. Nonetheless, we’ll return to this demographic later in this chapter.

Within each of the major religions there are a plethora of sects with a wide diversity of beliefs and rituals. And the major religions are just the tip of the iceberg. There are probably somewhere around forty-five thousand religious sects, depending on our definitions and calculations. Professor of anthropology David Eller tells us that “there are many religions in the world, and they are different from each other in multiple and profound ways. Not all religions refer to gods, nor do all make morality a central issue, etc. No religion is ‘normal’ or ‘typical’ of all religions; the truth is in the diversity.”² When it comes to belief in god(s), Eller writes,

Many or most religions have functioned quite well without any notions of god(s) at all, and others have mixed god(s) with other beliefs such that god-beliefs are not the critical parts of the religion. . . . Some religions that refer to or focus on gods believe them to be all-powerful, but others do not. Some consider them to be moral agents, and some do not; more than a few gods are downright immoral. Some think they are remote, while others think they are close (or both simultaneously). Some believe that the gods are immortal and eternal, but others include stories of gods dying and being born . . . not all gods are creators, nor is creation a central feature or concern of all religions. . . . Finally, there is not even always a firm boundary between humans and gods; humans can become gods, and the gods may be former humans.³

Eller tells us: “Ordinarily we think of a religion as a single homogeneous set of beliefs and practices. The reality is quite otherwise: Within any religion there is a variety of beliefs and practices—and interpretations of those beliefs and practices—distributed throughout space and time. Within the so-called world religions this variety can be extensive and contentious, one or more variations regarded as ‘orthodox.’”⁴ Among theists, for instance, there are Reformed Jews, Orthodox Jews, and Hasidic Jews. There are Shi’a Muslims, Sufi Muslims, and Sunni Muslims. In fact, polytheism is a form of theism, and as Eller informs us, “the vast majority of theisms have been polytheistic.”⁵ Historically there was a Mesopotamian pantheon of gods, an Egyptian pantheon of gods, a Greek pantheon of gods, a Roman pantheon of gods, a Norse pantheon of gods, and a Hindu pantheon of gods, to name just a few. 

Eller concludes that,

Religion is much more diverse than most people conceive. . . . “Religion” does not equal “theism” and certainly not “Christianity,” let alone any particular sect of Christianity. Indeed, there is no specific religion or type of religion that is really religion, the very essence or nature of religion. . . . Not only that, there is no central or essential or uniquely authentic theism but rather an array of theisms . . . . “Christianity” consists of a collection of Christianities including Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. And there is no central or essential Protestantism: it is a type of Christianity/monotheism/theism/religion with many branches. No one Protestant sect is more Protestant or more religious than any other. . . . In fact, there is no “real” Christianity at all, only a range of Christianities.⁶ 

Not only is there religious diversity, it’s also clear that religions are situated around the globe in mostly distinct geographical locations. The reader can see this in the Modern Distribution of World Religions map included in this book. Muslims are concentrated in the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the islands of the Indian Ocean. Christians are predominantly concentrated in Europe, North and South America, and regions that experienced European colonialism. Hindus are concentrated in the Indian subcontinent. Buddhists are concentrated in India and Asia. While Jews are spread all over the world, Israel is the only nation with a majority Jewish population.⁷

     If we contrast this diversity to the conclusions of scientifically literate people seen in the World Distribution of Modern Science map found in this book, there is a very stark contrast. We don’t find scientists in one part of the world agreeing about the existence of a geocentric (or earth-centered) solar system while scientists in another part agree about the existence of a heliocentric (or sun-centered) one. We don’t find scientists in one country agreeing that astrology can predict the future while scientists in the country right next to it reject astrology altogether. We don’t find scientists arguing for bloodletting in one nation and scientists arguing against it in a different one. That’s because science is not culturally specific to one region of the earth, as is religion. Science isn’t forced upon people through the threat of violence either. It proceeds by convincing other scientists of the evidence. It progresses because of the evidence. Astronomy replaced astrology; chemistry replaced alchemy; and the germ theory replaced the theory that evil spirits cause disease. Science is based on the idea that scientists in one part of the globe should get the same results from an experiment as scientists in another part of it. But the religious map shows that what religionists believe depends on where they were born and raised. If you live in Tibet or Thailand, you are most likely to be raised as a practitioner of Buddhism, which teaches that we are to suppress our desires in order to cease our sufferings and reach nirvana. If you live in Yemen or Saudi Arabia you’re more likely to be Muslim; Islam teaches that we are here to submit to Allah. Scientists ask the most profound questions of all, and the answers are not location specific.

What Does Religious Diversity Show Us?

The main problem religious diversity presents us with is that not every religious faith can be true. In fact, given the number of mutually exclusive religious faiths in the world, it’s highly likely that the one that you inherited in your respective culture is false (given the odds alone). Like the prince in the Cinderella story who must question forty-five thousand people to see which girl lost the glass slipper at the ball, the believer must therefore be skeptical of his or her culturally inherited faith. After all, each of the forty-five thousand girls questioned by the prince claimed that she was the one who lost the slipper. Therefore, an initial skepticism until shown otherwise would be warranted whenever the prince arrived at yet another girl’s doorstep. This problem is intensified because, unlike the Cinderella story, where an empirical foot match could solve the issue, religious faith has no method apart from the OTF to solve it. At best there can only be one religious faith that is true. At worst they are all likely to be false.

Robert McKim tells us that it “is clear, therefore, that large numbers of people have held, and now hold, false beliefs in the area of religion . . . at most one of them can be true. . . . And since so many people hold false beliefs in the area of religion, it would seem, therefore, that all groups need to consider the possibility that their beliefs in this area may be mistaken.”⁸ McKim concludes, “To fail to examine your beliefs when you ought to examine them is to fail to be rational in an important respect.”⁹ For “when there is disagreement, it is parochial and unsatisfactory to fail to take other perspectives seriously.”¹⁰ To believers who are sure they have the correct religious faith, McKim cautions that this is “simply a poor guarantee that you are right, at least in the area in which there is disagreement, including the area of religious belief.”¹¹

It has been argued that the mere existence of disagreement between rational people does not automatically lead us to be skeptical about that which we think is true. On the contrary, I think it can and it does. As I said, the amount of skepticism warranted depends not only on (1) the number of people who disagree, but also on (2) whether the people who disagree are separated into distinct geographical locations, (3) how their faith originated, (4) under what circumstances their faith was personally adopted in the first place, (5) the number and nature of extraordinary miracle claims being made that are essential to their faith, and (6) the kinds of evidence that can be used to decide between the differing faiths. My claim is that a high degree of skepticism is warranted about religious faiths when compared to the objective results of science precisely because of these factors.

Richard Feldman, professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, New York, argues that when there are two “epistemic peers” who have a “genuine disagreement” about “shared evidence,” the reasonable thing to do is to “suspend judgment” about the issue. Under these conditions, “one should give up one’s beliefs in the light of the sort of disagreement under discussion.” If, however, “one’s conviction survives the ‘confrontation with the other’ . . . this seems more a sign of tenacity and stubbornness than anything else.”¹² By contrast, the more that rational people agree on an issue, the more probable it is that their shared opinion is true. Even though we know that everyone can be wrong, this is still the best we can do. The presence of rational disagreement between epistemic peers should be a red-light warning requiring skepticism.

Disagreement, a book edited by Feldman and colleague Ted Warfield, deals with these issues. When considering the debate between internalists and externalists about epistemic justification, Hilary Kornblith is an externalist. While this particular debate need not concern us, what Hilary says about the debate is important: “That my epistemic peers disagree with me on this question is surely relevant evidence that I ought to take into account. It is indirect evidence . . . but it is important evidence nonetheless. And it surely seems that the proper way to respond to evidence of this sort is to suspend judgment, to suspend belief about the proper resolution of the debate.”¹³ Then she says, “I am thus forced to conclude, very reluctantly, that the opinions I hold on most philosophical matters—and I have a great many of them—are not epistemologically justified. Given the current state of the field, no one’s opinions on these matters, it now seems to me, are epistemologically justified.”¹⁴ In this same book Catholic philosopher and apologist Peter van Inwagen says he is unable to accept the conclusion that because he maintains his faith despite peer disagreements he is not rational about his own beliefs. However, he admits that he is “unable to answer” the type of arguments Feldman has put forth.¹⁵

Christian Attempts to Mitigate Religious Diversity

In the book True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism, Christian apologist David Marshall has a chapter on the Outsider Test for Faith. Marshall claims that the diversity of religious faiths “is genuine, but deeply ambiguous.” And he notes that G. K. Chesterton has said that religions around the world commonly include four beliefs: God, the gods, philosophy, and demons. Then Marshall comments, “In years of studying world religions, I have found his observation to be largely true. Peel away labels, and many beliefs seem to be universal or at least very widespread. This could be called the ‘lack of religious diversity thesis,’ and should be kept in balance with its alter ego.”¹⁶ 

    I’m not sure what philosophy has to do with this, but since a necessary component of a religion is the belief in supernatural forces and/or beings, this agreement among religions cannot be considered in any meaningful sense to be a “lack of religious diversity.” Even if there are a few other similar beliefs among several religions there is just too wide a gap in what they believe to think the similarities are God given. They are culturally given and were mostly created by males in an ancient, superstitious, barbaric age. Just consider that almost all ancient cultures sacrificed human beings—mostly children and virgins—to their deities. If Marshall were living in that day, he would be pointing to this similarity as evidence of the “lack of religious diversity,” too. So even the similarities don’t show us anything positive about the truth of religious faiths.

Some similarities show nothing except that concepts about god have gravitated toward monotheism because such a concept is a simpler one. This is how religions evolve. They either evolve or die. For no religion in our world community could hope to have a big enough god unless that god is the only God. As people became more aware of other city-states, they realized that their god(s) had to encompass those religions. So god concepts grew bigger as the world got bigger. There is nothing problematic about this at all because religions evolve.

In any case, Marshall is dead wrong, as we previously learned from David Eller. Robert McKim concurs, saying, “There is not a single claim that is distinctive of any religious group that is not rejected by other such groups, with the exception of vague claims to the effect that there is something important and worthwhile about religion, or to the effect that there is a religious dimension to reality and that however the sciences proceed certain matters will be beyond their scope. Obviously even claims as vague as these are rejected by nonreligious groups."¹⁷

Marshall goes on to say that “the first premise of Christianity is that Judaism is true. After all, the Bible has two halves, and the first half is longer. . . . That makes at least two true religions. This principle can be extended, to some extent, to the deepest truths in other spiritual traditions as well.” He claims: “Either God is one, many, or not at all. But one doesn’t need to choose between Yahweh, Elohim, theos, Allah, and Shang Di: the one only-existing Creator God is recognizable under many aliases.” Christian philosopher Victor Reppert made this same claim about Allah. He said, “I believe that Allah exists. Allah is the Arabic word for God, just as Dios is Spanish for God, and Dieu is French for God, and Gott is German for God. I am a theist, therefore, I believe that Allah exists. No problem.”¹⁸ Christian philosopher Thomas Talbott agrees. To say otherwise, he opines, is “sheer nonsense,” since “more than a few Muslims, I presume, would be the first to insist that “Allah,” “Yahweh,” and “God” are merely different names for the very same individual.”¹⁹

But all of this is simply empty rhetoric with no substance at all. None of these writers believe in Allah, for instance, because Allah revealed himself in the Koran. If Allah is the same deity as the one worshipped by Christians then that deity duplicitously revealed two different religions. This means God, by whatever name is used, helped to instigate the wanton slaughter of Muslims by Christians and Christians by Muslims because of his conflicting revelations. It also means God duplicitously promised salvation to believers in one of them who will end up being condemned to hell for not believing according to the others one’s creed(s). These are two different gods, each of whom denies doing some of the things the other one claims to have done, especially with regard to the resurrection of Jesus. What Marshall, Reppert, and Talbott should say instead is that they agree with Muslims about the existence of an omnipotent creator god, and so forth, not that they believe in the same deity.

Marshall finally argues that some religious diversity may not actually reflect the true beliefs of people around the world. He writes, “Of course most people in Saudi Arabia are Muslim, because converts from Islam are killed. Even non-Saudi Christians, such as workers from the Philippines, are sometimes imprisoned and tortured.”²⁰ This is very unfortunate. Under these regimes it can be hard to determine what people would believe if they were not forced to believe. But it’s clear that in democratic countries Islam is growing very rapidly, so surely many Muslims would still believe if they did not live under an Islamic theocracy. It’s also clear that in democratic countries there is much more religiously diversity. When people from former communist countries, like the Soviet Union and its satellites, were granted religious freedom, a great deal of religious diversity developed within them. Democratic freedom simply produces more religious diversity, which is the problem that the OTF is trying to solve. 

Christian Attempts at Explaining Religious Diversity

Christians try to reasonably explain geographically situated religious diversity by incorporating this fact into their faith. William Lane Craig’s explanation for religious diversity basically tries to explain it away. He represented what many evangelical Christians believe when he argued, “It is possible that God has created a world having an optimal balance between saved and lost and that God has so providentially ordered the world that those who fail to hear the gospel and be saved would not have freely responded affirmatively to it even if they had heard it.”²¹ Craig argues that if this scenario is even possible, “it proves that it is entirely consistent to affirm that God is all-powerful and all-loving and yet that some people never hear the gospel and are lost.”²² However, there are many things that might be possible, and apologists like Craig seem to resort to that standard far too often. This is an example of what I mean when I say Christians demand that I prove their faith is impossible before they will consider it to be improbable, which is an unreasonable reverse standard. The probability that not one of the billions of people who have never heard the Gospels would respond if they did hear them can probably be calculated, if missionaries kept such detailed records of their efforts. To claim what he does against the overwhelming evidence of missionary efforts belies the facts. When we look at the billions of people who have never been given a chance to be “saved” because of “when and where they were born,” Craig’s scenario seems extremely implausible, to say the least, and it depends not only upon God having foreknowledge of future free-willed contingent human actions, but also upon his knowing what the future would’ve been like if every single free choice had been different throughout history.²³ No wonder Craig only wants to talk about what is possible. He argues that God has “Middle Knowledge” such that he knows “what every possible creature would do under any possible circumstances . . . prior to any determination of the divine will.”²⁴ So, despite his protests to the contrary, isn’t it obvious that if Craig’s God has this kind of foreknowledge he could simply foreknow who would not accept his offered salvation before they were even created? He could then have avoided the trouble of creating them in the first place. If he had done that, “hotel hell” would never have had even one occupant.

Christians try to offer other reasons why there is such a geographically situated religious diversity. They will argue that those who don’t accept their particular religion are ignorant of the truth (or willfully ignorant), unenlightened, irrational, or deceived by Satan. Or they’ll argue that God has unknown good reasons for permitting this state of affairs. But the adherents of the various other religions all have their explanations for religious diversity, too. And their explanations are similar in kind, if not exactly the same.

When religious believers actually do grapple with the cultural basis of religious faith, they will respond in the same manner against what I have been arguing for here. Whether they are Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Orthodox Jew, or Christian, they will argue against the sociological data that clearly show that people overwhelmingly believe based upon when and where they were born. William Lane Craig responds, just as most every defender of a different religion might do, when he asks, “Why could not the Christian worldview be objectively true? How does the mere presence of religious worldviews incompatible with Christianity show that distinctively Christian claims are not true? Logically, the existence of multiple, incompatible truth claims only implies that all of them cannot be (objectively) true; but it would be obviously fallacious to infer that not one of them is (objectively) true.”²⁵ 

    Craig is correct about this, even if it’s a mere possibility when probability is all that matters. But defenders of every other religion could argue the same exact thing, just by echoing Craig’s words in defense of their own particular religion. Then, after making such a statement, other believers could proceed all over again to argue that they have the true faith, just like Craig does. Whether or not people accept these arguments will depend upon whether or not they are insiders to that particular faith in the first place. Is this not viciously circular? The bottom line is that there is a huge difference between having the evidence of religious diversity separated into geographical locations on one side and trying to explain away the evidence, which is what Dr. Craig is forced to do. When Christians, or any other believers, have to explain away the evidence, they are admitting that the evidence is not on their side. They’re arguing that it’s merely possible their faith is true and can be known to be so rationally. Again, probability is what matters.

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Endnotes can be found in the book. Get'cha one now!