Posted by
Andrews on Monday, October 13, 2008 10:54:57 PM
As it appears today is my day for
finding fault with atheists and anti-Christian polemicists, let me argue against one more common "refutation" of Christianity, and sometimes Judaism. Many times I have heard those who would refute religions point to the fact that a doctrine, story or some other aspect of a religion is shared with either a concurrent, or, more often, an earlier religion.
For example, people will point to other resurrection stories and argue that they show that Christianity is invalid as it stole these elements from some earlier faith. Or they will show that the flood story or the first few chapters of Genesis came from Babylonian or Sumerian models. If you search the internet you will find thousands upon thousands of lines of text devoted to such treasure hunts, finding cognates to elements of the Christian and Jewish faith in earlier religious documents.
My problem with this argument is that, quite simply, it proves nothing.
One could easily refute it by adopting nothing more than the argument of early Christian church fathers, and dismiss the similarities by saying that they are the work of the Devil, who mimics Christian beliefs in other faiths in order to mislead the unwary. However, one does not even have to go that far. One could argue the opposite and say that all religions show a common striving after truth, and the fact that a true faith is mirrored in other faiths proves nothing but that all faiths try to achieve the same goal, and so follow the same course, even if some come closer to truth than others.
Or, one could adopt an even more abstract view. One could take the Ioan Couliano perspective and say there are only so many ways any given religious question can be answered. Given a limited set of binary responses, of necessity all religions can be represented as a similarly limited set of possibilities. And so, given that relatively small number of possibilities, it is not surprising that many religions would have similar elelments. So it neither proves nor disproves anythign that two faiths have the same elements. In fact, it doesn't even prove that one "stole" from the other, simply that they faced the same questions and answered them in similar ways.
All of which is an excessively elaborate way of saying, though it may seem important to those looking to "disprove" a given faith, such arguments really prove nothing. They neither show that a given faith is false, nor that it even adopted its beliefs form some earlier faith. They really do show absolutely nothing.