How should we respond to the claim that all religions are basically the same? 

Audio

Transcript

It's common today to hear people say that all religious ideas are equally valid. You probably see the statement maybe once a week when you are sitting in your car and at a stoplight and you look forward and you see the car in front of you has a “coexist” bumper sticker. That person is making a statement that “all religious views are pretty much the same, they are all equally valid. None is better than another. They are all just ideas about God and we should treat them all the same way.” 

Well this idea is also what's at play in the recent controversy about the Evangelical, Wheaton University trying to remove a professor for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. This offended a lot of people and I think this offense is rooted in the idea that all ideas about God are equally valid. We can't say someone else idea about God is wrong.

Well let's analyze this claim. It seems that you don't have to be very knowledgeable about religions to say that all ideas about God are not equally valid. There are some wrong ideas about God or at the very least everyone cannot be right. Everyone could be wrong but everyone cannot be right. If I say that Florida is south of Washington DC and you say it's north of Washington DC. Well we have a problem. We both can't be right. There is a correct answer because the location of Florida relative to Washington DC is a feature of reality. It's something that can be verified and so the true idea about the location of Florida is the one that corresponds with reality. Namely, that it's south of Washington DC.

What about religions? Well they make competing claims. Some religions say that God is everything, or that God is in everything. Some other religions like Islam would say that God is one: One being; one person. Christianity says that God is one being but 3 persons. Instantly you just have a conflict within the theistic religions, between Islam and Christianity. We say different things about God. Christianity says he is 3 persons and Islam says no, he is only one person. 

Well that's irreconcilable. We both can't be right. Either God is 3 persons or he is one person. When Muslims say that Jesus is not God and Christian say that he is God, that's an irreconcilable difference. Either Jesus is God or he is not but we are both not right. That's incredibly important to understand. There is a wrong answer here and we should actually care enough about the idea of knowing God to say that something is wrong and say that something else is right. Today, it seems like the tolerance is still the big buzz word, especially in terms of religions and religious tolerance and this causes us to say things we would not say in other areas.

There is no other area of life, practically speaking, where we consider the similarities more important than the distinctives when it comes to treating things as if they are the same or not and I'll give you some examples. You often hear that humans and monkeys share a remarkably high percentage of their DNA but no one is saying that a human is a monkey. Now some people might say we are really close and we evolve from them but nonetheless we are not the same. We are not marrying monkeys (yet) or that sort of thing. The fact that we are remarkably similar on a molecular and DNA level, doesn't mean we are the same. We have, perhaps, less than 1% of difference but it's that “less than 1% of difference” that makes all the difference in the world because it is really the distinctives and the differences that make things what they are.

We are all made out of the same types of stuff. Electrons and neutrons and protons and how those things come together is remarkably important. It doesn't matter…