Truth, Pluralism, and Absolutism

There has been a rather interesting, if somewhat confused, discussion over on Locusts and Honey about pluralism and truth. The reason I’m not commenting there is that most points have already been made in that thread and I want to go off on a tangent.

I believe there’s a substantial problem with many discussions of Christian apologetics, and also of many subjects within religion. It is that the word “proof” is much overused. Questions such as whether one can prove the existence of God or not, whether one can prove one’s religion is true, whether one can prove a particular event took place, or even whether some specific doctrine is true.

Since this issue is addressed by a book I publish, let me simply quote:

The second conclusion that we can draw from a worldview definition of religion is that the concept of absolute proof has no real meaning when comparing differing religions. This is because concepts of proof are very closely related to the evaluation of evidence.

A distinction needs to be made here between proof and evidence. When we state that a certain position cannot be absolutely proven, and therefore must to some degree be accepted on faith, it does not mean that there is no evidence for that position. Faith is not necessarily blind and unsupported by evidence, nor is it, as H. L. Mencken described it, “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.