One common tactic in many debates about religion and God is to point out that an evil person believed in God. From this it is inferred that religion is somehow defective.
To use an extreme example:
Premise 1: Hitler was a Christian.
Premise 2: Hitler was an evil man.
Conclusion: So, Christianity is flawed.
This sort of reasoning is rather flawed. From a logical standpoint, the qualities of a person who professes to accept a set of beliefs has no relevance to the correctness of such beliefs. To think otherwise is to fail victim to an ad homimen fallacy. That this reasoning is flawed can easily be seen by the following example:
Premise 1: Hitler was a vegetarian.
Premise 2: Hitler was an evil man.
Conclusion: So, vegetarianism is flawed.
Or, to make it even more obvious:
Premise 1: Hitler believed 2+2 =4.
Premise 2: Hitler was an evil man.
Conclusion: So, the belief that 2+2=4 is flawed.
Thus, it is quite evident that making such an inference is an act of poor reasoning.
A matter of further concern is based on the fact that a person can profess a belief in something (like Christianity) and not actually accept the doctrines of that system of belief. For example, some people claim that some rather bad people (such as Hitler) were Christians because they used Christian terminology and professed a belief in that faith.
However, the fact that a person claims to believe in something does not entail that the person actually believes what is professed. For example, George Bush uses conservative rhetoric and claims to be a conservative. Yet, his actions as President seem to directly violate the central principles of American conservative thought. Conservatives are supposed to be opposed to massive federal spending and are supposed to be for small government. One might infer that conservatives are for big spending and big government because George claims to be a conservative. But that would seem to be a mistake. A better inference is that George is claiming to be something he is not.
Turning back to religion, if someone evil (like Hitler) is said to be a Christian, it is reasonable to consider that person’s behavior in terms of how it stacks up to Christian doctrine. On the face of it, Hitler does not appear to be much of a Christian. But, one might wonder, what exactly does it mean to be a Christian? After all, as critics point out, the Bible and other religious texts seem to endorse rather immoral actions (rape, genocide, torture, the stoning of children and so on).
This is an excellent question and a difficult one to answer. The same problem applies to most belief systems as well. The problem is this: who defines what it means to be an X (Christian, Democrat, liberal, conservative, radical, etc.)? For example, someone could claim that although George Bush seems to grossly violate standard conservative principles, he is still a conservative because George says he is and he is the President. So, he must be a conservative. Others might disagree and point to classic writings on conservative political philosophy.
In the case of human made belief systems, we end up in quite a mess. Since people essentially make up the meanings of words and create belief systems, we have to rely on such things as common usage, appeals to authority and so on. Naturally, this runs us in a circle back to the problem we started with (namely determining who gets to set the meanings of terms).
In some cases there might be an objective matter of fact to appeal to. In the case of Christianity, the central claim is the claim that God exists and He sent his only son to die for the sins of humanity, etc. If God exists, presumably He is the authority who decides what it is to be a true Christian. Laying aside the problem of God’s authority, there remains a rather serious problem: in order to be able to know what is to be a true Christian, we need to know that God exists and that He sent his son, etc. Without knowing what the truth about this, people are likely to be mistaken in this matter. We can assume that most are mistaken-after all, all (alleged) Christians endorse views that contradict those of other (alleged) Christians). If God does not exist, then the notion of being a true Christian seems to go out the window-for obvious reasons. Thus, in order to settle this matter all we need to do is determine whether God exiss or not and what the truth is about Jesus. Simple enough. Whoops, I’m out of time. I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader. 🙂
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