Justified True Belief

(P1) The world's religions cannot all be true. + The religions are often said to be different paths up one mountain. But two claims contradict when one denies what the other affirms, and then at most one is true, though both may be false. (1) They disagree about whether the ultimate is a someone or a something. - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam say a someone: a personal God who knows things, wants things, does things, and can be spoken to in the second person. - Advaita Vedanta, the school of Hindu philosophy shaped by Shankara in the eighth century, says ultimate reality is Brahman, which has no personality and no qualities, and no real line divides you from it. - Theravada Buddhism, the oldest surviving Buddhist school, says there is no creator at all. - Somebody is either home or not home, and there is no third thing the words could mean. (2) They disagree about what has gone wrong with us. - Christianity says the trouble is moral and runs deep: real guilt before a good God, and a condition no effort repairs. - Islam agrees that it is moral and denies that it goes that deep. Every child is born in a state of natural soundness, called fitra, so a person needs guidance rather than rescue, and mercy is granted directly by God (Qur'an 30:30). - Buddhism puts it elsewhere again: craving and ignorance, which keep a person turning on the wheel of rebirth, and underneath the turning no permanent self. • Anatta, "no-self," is the teaching that what you call "I" is a stream of changing experiences with nobody standing behind it, the way a river names moving water rather than a thing the water belongs to. Responsibility survives, since actions carry consequences; the somebody who could stand guilty before a personal God does not. - Diagnosis decides treatment, and these three do not prescribe the same thing. (3) They disagree about one plain fact of history. - The Qur'an says Jesus was not killed and not crucified, but that it was made to appear so to those who said they had killed him (Surah 4:157), and Muslim interpreters have overwhelmingly read that as a denial of the crucifixion. - The New Testament says he was crucified, and the whole Christian claim runs through that death. That is a question about what happened on a Friday afternoon outside a city wall, in public, under an occupying army that kept records. - Somebody has to lose, and evidence decides it. Historians treat the crucifixion as one of the most securely established facts about Jesus, non-Christian historians included. (4) Real overlap is not the same as agreement. - Some version of "treat others as you would want to be treated" turns up almost everywhere, as do prayer, charity, and fasting. - A Christian does not have to say other religions are wrong from top to bottom, and the historic Christian position never has said so. - But tell a devout Muslim, a Theravada monk, and a Christian that they are describing one reality in local accents, and all three will say you have misread their faith at the point they care about most. The Muslim confesses that God has no son and never had one (Qur'an 112:1-4). The Christian confesses that he does. - "All religions are equally valid" rules something out as well: every religion that denies it, which is every one of them. That rule is not a Christian import. Therefore, the religions contradict one another at the center rather than at the edges, and at most one of them is right about God.

(P2) Whether a religion is true does not depend on the character or the upbringing of those who hold it. + Christian exclusivity, the claim that Christ alone saves, usually arrives at a kitchen table from a brother-in-law, as something to be embarrassed about rather than weighed. (1) An attack on the believer's character is not evidence about the claim. - An ad hominem argument, Latin for "to the person," goes after the character of whoever holds a position instead of the position. - Whether a claim is true depends on how things are, not on the manners of the man saying so. If a conceited researcher cured cancer, nobody would refuse the treatment because he was insufferable. - Grant the moral complaint fully. Christians have been smug about this and a good deal worse: conversion at swordpoint, missions riding in behind conquest, contempt aimed at people who asked for none of it. Repentance answers that, not argument, and reaching for the logic before the apology has the order wrong. (2) The charge disqualifies everybody who holds an opinion. - The man making it believes all religions are equally valid, believes this is true, and so believes that billions who hold an exclusive faith are wrong about what matters most. That is the same shape as the belief he objects to. - If holding a view that many sincere people reject is arrogance, nobody is left standing: not him, not the atheist, not the agnostic. A test that fails every candidate who sits it is broken, not demanding. (3) Where a belief came from is a different question from whether it is true. - The second accusation runs like this: born in Pakistan you would probably be a Muslim, in Thailand a Buddhist, so your Christianity is an accident of geography. - That is the genetic fallacy, the mistake of settling whether a belief is true by pointing at how the believer came to hold it. - Think of a nine-year-old who believes the earth goes around the sun because her father told her so, and has never checked. She believes something true, got it by an accident of birth, and it is still true. (4) The serious form of the charge goes after method rather than character. - Philosophers have pressed a sharper version that is no fallacy. If the process that handed you your religion would have handed you an incompatible one four thousand miles away, then it tracks your surroundings rather than the truth, and what it produces deserves less confidence. - Run that over anything else people disagree about. Politics moves with birthplace, and so do many moral intuitions, the sense of what religion is, and quite possibly atheism itself. - The argument does not stop at the church door, because nothing inside it could make it stop. A standard no belief on any disputed subject could pass has stopped working, not set the bar high. - So stop asking where a belief came from and start asking what supports it. Whether a man was executed in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, and whether people who knew him said they had seen him alive, does not change with your passport. (5) What survives all this is a fair warning. - The honest residue is not "your religion is false." It is "you did not pick it, so go and find out whether it is true." - Nobody should hold a religion the way he holds a preference for his father's football team. That request produced the whole tradition of Christian evidences, and it has never been unwelcome. Therefore, neither the character nor the birthplace of a religion's believers settles whether it is true.

(C1) Therefore, whether Jesus is the only way is a question of evidence. + "All roads lead to God" is not the humble position, and the two charges people bring against Christian exclusivity have not laid a finger on whether it is true. (1) Nobody gets a seat above the disagreement. - The religions contradict one another at the center rather than at the edges (P1), which means that at most one of them is right about God. It also means the possibility that none of them is right stays wide open the whole way through. - Say "all of them are right" and you have contradicted every religion that denies it, and they all deny it. Say "all of them are wrong" and you have just made the most exclusive claim on the table, the one that rules out every option but your own. - There is no available position that rules nothing out. So being exclusive, all by itself, cannot be the complaint. (2) The usual reasons for rejecting the Christian claim never reach it. - Arrogance is a charge about a character. Birthplace is a fact about a biography (P2). - The sharpened version that genuinely is about belief, the charge that a culture-shaped process is unreliable, turns out to apply to every contested belief anybody holds, the objector's own included. (3) Both steps run on the plainest piece of reasoning there is. - Logicians call it modus ponens. If it rained, the street is wet. It rained. So the street is wet. Nobody needs training to use it, and everybody uses it a hundred times a day. - Here it is twice. If the religions contradict, then "all roads" is not the modest middle position. They do contradict. So it is not. - And again: if the usual objections are about the believer, or fall on everyone alike, then they do not settle whether the belief is true. They are. So they do not. (4) Neither link has to be certain for the chain to hold. - That is what a deductive argument is, and it works like a chain: if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out of the bottom. - A premise earns its place by being more believable than its denial, which is a much lower bar than proof and the right bar for an argument about anything real. Both of these clear it comfortably. (5) What is left is the ordinary question anybody asks about any claim. - Is there good reason to think it is true. That is a modest result and it is a real one. - It does not show that Christianity is true, and it was never built to. It shows that the question has not been settled by good manners, and that a man who declines to look into it because looking would be impolite has not declined for a reason. Therefore, the question is still standing, and it is standing the way any question about what is actually the case stands: waiting on evidence.

(P3) Salvation comes through Christ alone, which is a claim about who saves rather than about how many are saved. + Two claims travel under "the only way": who does the rescuing, and how many get rescued. The New Testament pulls them apart itself. (1) The texts name a person and never set a number. - "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). - "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). - "There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all" (1 Timothy 2:5-6). - Each names a person as the means; none sets a figure. (2) Scripture already applies the claim to people who never heard the name. - Abraham never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Neither did Moses, Ruth, David, or Isaiah. Christians have always said they are saved, and saved by Christ. - Hebrews says it outright. Christ is "the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant" (Hebrews 9:15). - Paul makes the same move: God had "passed over former sins," and the cross is where the account was settled (Romans 3:25-26). - If "only through Christ" meant "only for those who hear the name in this life," Abraham would be outside. No Christian has ever said he is. (3) Christians hold four distinct positions on this. - Pluralism says the religions are equally valid roads and none is uniquely true. Particularism, also called exclusivism, says salvation comes through Christ alone. - Inside particularism, restrictivism holds that conscious faith in Christ is required, so the unevangelized, those who never hear of him, are lost. - Inclusivism holds that Christ's work can be applied to someone who responds to whatever light he has, the way it was applied to Abraham. - Pluralism denies what Christianity claims, so it stands outside. Restrictivism and inclusivism are both held by orthodox Christians, who hold the historic creeds, and have argued for centuries. - They agree completely about who does the saving. Their whole disagreement is about the reach. (4) The claim has edges, and they can be named. - A man wakes in a hospital bed and is told his bill has been paid. Whether he learns who cleared it changes nothing about who paid. - "One person cleared this debt" is definite, and false if somebody else paid or if the debt is still sitting there. - The Christian claim has that shape: it rules out being saved by your own record, some other go-between, a different god, and the idea that nobody needed saving. Most religions deny at least one. (5) On the numbers, the texts pull in both directions. - Jesus speaks of a narrow gate and a hard way, "and those who find it are few" (Matthew 7:13-14). - Somebody asked him point blank whether the saved would be few. He gave no figure, and turned it back: strive to enter through the narrow door (Luke 13:23-24). - John's vision counts the redeemed as "a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Revelation 7:9). - Serious Christians read those together and reach different totals. Jesus declined to give a figure, a reasonable model for anybody tempted to supply one. Therefore, "Christ alone" fixes who saves and leaves how far his work reaches as a separate question.

(P4) Guilt, unlike ignorance, admits of only one remedy. + The complaint inside the question is that one road is stingy, as though God had picked a policy. What counts as a remedy depends on what is wrong. (1) Guilt is not a shortage of information. - If the human problem were ignorance, many teachers could fix it and many roads would make sense. - Christianity says the problem is a wrong done to a person, which is not that kind of trouble. - You can stand in your neighbor's driveway and explain for an hour how your car went through his fence. Every word true, every word understood, the fence still lying in his yard. Explanation is not repair. (2) The debt is owed by the one who cannot pay it. - Anselm settled this in 1098, nine centuries before anyone called exclusivity bad manners. His question: given what has gone wrong, what fixes it? - The debt is owed by man. Human beings did the wrong, so if paying puts it right, a man must pay. - No man can, and this is the step people miss. Obedience, sorrow, a lifetime of trying harder: every item was already owed before the debt was run up. Paying what you already owed does not reduce it, any more than this month's rent settles last year's. - God can pay, because God owes nothing, so whatever he gives is his to give. - The payer has to be a man and has to be God, so has to be both at once, which is what the incarnation claims. Athanasius reasoned the same way in the fourth century, that only the Word through whom everything was made could remake what had gone wrong inside it. Neither was arguing against anybody's religion. (3) Things that happen, happen once. - A boat comes out for a man in the water and pulls him aboard. Afterward, there was one way off that water because one boat came. - Christianity claims God became a man, lived, died under Roman execution, and rose. If that occurred, it occurred once, the way everything that ever occurred did. - Complaining that there was only one incarnation is like complaining there was only one Normandy landing. The number was nobody's policy; it is what it means for something to have happened. (4) Every true account of anything excludes its rivals. - A doctor who says the infection needs this antibiotic and not that is not closed-minded. He is right or he is wrong. - Once a subject has a fact of the matter, exclusion arrives with it. Religions claim things: whether there is a God, what he is like, what has gone wrong, what was done. Some of those claims are wrong. - So the alternative to exclusion is not humility. It is that religion is not talking about anything, which is less respectful than saying it might be mistaken. (5) The whole thing stands or falls on the event. - None of this shows the diagnosis is correct or the rescue happened, only what would follow. - If Jesus of Nazareth did not rise, the exclusivity is not offensive, it is false, and Christianity goes into the ground with it. Paul said as much: if Christ has not been raised, the faith is worthless and Christians are still in their sins (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17). - It is a strange arrogance that names, in its own founding documents, the fact that would sink it. Therefore, if the human trouble is guilt rather than ignorance, one remedy is what the trouble allows, not a limit somebody imposed.

(C2) Therefore, Jesus can be the only way. + If the human problem really is guilt, and if Jesus rose from the dead, then what the phrase describes is a rescue and not a boast. (1) Three complaints stand behind the question, and none of them survives. - The first says the religions are all true at heart. They are not. They contradict each other about God, about what has gone wrong with us, and about whether a particular man died on a particular Friday (P1). - The second says the Christian claim is disqualified by the character or the birthplace of the people holding it. A charge about character is a charge about believers, and the charge about birthplace, once it is sharpened into the form that actually bites, bites everyone who picks it up (P2). - The third says that exclusivity means a small God with a short guest list. That misreads the claim from the start. It is a claim about who does the saving, and how far his work reaches is a question orthodox Christians have genuinely disputed with each other for centuries (P3). (2) What is left is a definite claim with a definite shape. - The human problem is guilt. Guilt is not the sort of thing information fixes. And the repair was carried out by one person, at one time, at his own expense (P4). - Uniqueness is not an extra insult bolted onto the story afterward. It is the story. (3) None of this shows that Jesus is the only way. - It shows what the phrase means, what would have to be true for it to hold, and where the weight finally comes to rest, which is on the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. - Showing that the usual objections fail (P2) clears the ground and does nothing more than clear it. The question is left standing open, and only evidence closes it. - So the honest form of the answer is not "Jesus is the only way because Christians say so." If there is no God and Jesus stayed dead, then Christian exclusivity is false, and no amount of humility on one side or offense taken on the other changes that by a hair. (4) Somebody once paid for the word "only." - In AD 203 a young mother named Perpetua, about twenty-two and still nursing her baby, was killed in the arena at Carthage. What she refused to do was a small thing. She would not offer the sacrifice made for the emperors' welfare. - Rome would have let her keep Jesus. Roman religion took on gods the way a growing city takes on streets, and one more would have cost the empire nothing at all. What the empire could not allow was the word "only." - She thought "only" was true. And if it is true, she was right about what it was worth. Therefore, if there is a God and Jesus rose, the question was never whether one road is narrow, but whether a rescue happened. See also: • CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) • CE / Resurrection: Core Facts Argument (Craig) • World Religions / Islam: The Islamic Dilemma • Philosophy / Logic: Deductive Arguments