This from a piece in guardian.co.uk:
According to the Pew survey, 85% of humanity is religious in some way, and that's probably a low estimate, since nobody knows the true figures about China. This doesn't mean that religion is true (it can't, because religions contradict each other), but that there are strong cognitive and motivational factors that give religions an evolutionary advantage in the market of ideas. A scientific worldview is cognitively and emotionally more difficult, and hence at a disadvantage.
This passage cries out for logico-philosophical analysis. One of the claims that the author is making is that religion cannot be true because religions contradict each other. What this presumably means is that no religion can be true because every religion contradicts every other religion. If so, we are being offered the following argument: (1) Every religion contradicts every other other religion; therefore, (2) no religion is true. I grant the premise arguendo. In any case, it is plausible. To supply an example, Christians affirm what both Jews and Muslims deny, namely, that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. So there is no question but that some religions contradict other religions in respect of some doctrinal propositions. (But it is also true that some religions agree with other religions in respect of some doctrinal propositions. For example, the three Abrahamic religions all agree on the proposition that God exists, and on plenty of others.)
Generalizing, we can say that every religion contradicts every other religion in the sense that no two religions share all the same central doctrinal commitments. (I will refine this in a moment.) So even though Christianity and Islam agree that there is but one God, they disagree on whether this one God is triune. And although Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians agree on much, they disagree on the filioque. To make this a bit more precise, I suggest the following definition:
Religion R contradicts religion R* =df there is some central doctrinal proposition p which is affirmed by the adherents of R but denied by the adherents of R* or vice versa.
If this is what we mean by one religion contradicting another, then most religions contradict most other religions. But consider a religion that affirms the existence of an immortal soul and another that takes no position on this question -- neither affirming nor denying an immortal soul -- on the ground that worrying about this doctrinal point merely distracts one from the unum necessarium, namely, working out one's salvation with diligence. Assume further that these two religions are otherwise completely alike as to doctrine. These two religions do not contradict each other by the above definition.
So one may wonder about the truth of (1). For the sake of argument, however, let's grant it. Our main question is whether (2) follows from (1). It obviously does not. Consider Christianity and Islam. They contradict each other by the definition I just gave. But it doesn't follow that both are false. For it could be that one is true and the other false.
Our author has committed an egregious logical blunder. The logical mistake is not confined to the context of religon. Suppose you and I disagree on any sort of point at all. Suppose you affirm that anthropogenic global warming is taking place and I deny it. It does not follow from our disagreement that we are both wrong. What follows is that one of us is right and the other wrong. This follows from the Law of Non-Contradiction according to which, necessarily, one member of a pair of contradictory propositions is true and the other not true.
The rest of the article is equally pisspoor as you may discover for yourself.
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