God's Existence, Science and Faith, Suffering and Evil, Jesus' Resurrection, and Book Reviews

Showing posts with label Hinduism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hinduism. Show all posts

What's Your Problem?- Part 2: Hinduism


Last week we started looking at humanity's problem. We established the possibility that a problem does exist, but left the identity of the specific problem open. This week we will begin looking at a few different proposed problems and solutions. The problem from the Hindu worldview is first.

Hinduism is a pantheistic worldview. That means that everyone and everything is God, and God is everyone and everything. We are all the same essence as each other and as God. The foundation of the problem proposed by Hinduism is that man is suffering from a type of self-induced and self-perpetuated amnesia- in which we have forgotten our "Godness". We no longer understand that everyone and everything is God, and God is everyone and everything- including ourselves. The official problem that man suffers from is a cycle of life, death, and reincarnation called Samsara, that is the result of the "amnesia". 

Can You Trust Your Senses and Reasoning?

This is quite the interesting question. If we can't trust our senses and/or our logic then we're in deep trouble. We would not be able to trust anything that we experience (not to mention the entire scientific enterprise), nor would be able to trust that we would be able to find any form of truth.

I'm going to look at three different worldviews and what they say about this. (Due to the desire to be brief, this post is in no way a comprehensive or nuanced understanding or treatment of these worldviews or the challenges I raise.) Let's start with the eastern worldviews.

Book Review: "The Illustrated World's Religions"



The Illustrated World's Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions
By Houston Smith.

This book was given to me by a friend a couple months ago. I had other books ready to read, but I decided to put this one ahead of the others because I had heard that Houston Smith was the "go to" guy about the world's religions. A few different versions of this book have been published; this one is the illustrated one. It includes a lot of art inspired by the different religions and contains many photos of adherents "in action".

What Is "Hope" and Who Has It?

I was reading through the Q&A's on Reasonablefaith.com and came across one in which a reader took issue with William Lane Craig's claim that the atheistic worldview is one without hope. The reader believes that the atheist does have hope. Craig recognized the unique argument then went on to defend his statement. Please read the Q&A here (may require registration, I don't remember) for the complete context of this post.

It appears that the validity of Craig's statement stands on what the hope is in. All hope requires an object of that hope, otherwise it is an empty, meaningless word. If someone tells me that they offer me "hope", my first question is, "okay...hope for what?"

When we're talking about what comes after death, the "hope" that people refer to is the same hope that everyone has- to escape the pain and suffering of this life. Everyone has different forms of this hope, but it boils down to that. Let's look at some of the different "hopes" offered (these are greatly simplified for the purposes of this post, please don't flame me about it):

The atheist's hope is to go immediately into nonexistence after death. That would mean no experience of anything, including pain and suffering and even punishment or reward (more on this specifically in a future post "Atheism And The Escape From Responsibility"). Nothing good is experienced either, as a result of the nonexistence.

The hope offered by many eastern religions is that one will eventually (after many lives) be either absorbed into everything and not experience anything individually or be totally extinguished and not experience anything. Either way, the individual escapes the experience of pain and suffering, however neither is anything good experienced.

The three major theistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) offer hope of living without pain and suffering. The experiences of pain and suffering are gone while only the experiences of good remain. (See my post "Suffering Sucks...or Does It?" (specifically, the audio clip from Hugh Ross) for why pain and suffering are required to even recognize experiences of only good).

I would like to submit that the hope offered by the theistic religions is much more desirable than those of atheism or the eastern religions. Here's why. Life is full of many wonderful experiences and emotions. Life is also full of much painful suffering. I do not know a single person who would not want to leave all the painful stuff behind and only experience the good stuff. That is the hope offered by the theistic religions. But...

...What differentiates these is the method to obtain that hope. In Judaism and Islam the person must earn their hope by their behavior. If they are not more good than bad, they don't have the hope offered by their religion. In Christianity, it is recognized that the standard of "good" can not (can: the ability to; not: the negation of) be obtained by us humans. Jesus Christ offers himself in our place of having to meet the standard of "good"; He even takes it a step further and takes our place for everything bad that we did, so we don't have to endure the punishment. In Christianity, all we have to do is recognize that what Christ has offered to us is the only possible way to obtain the life promised (that does mean swallowing our pride and recognizing that we are not as independent as we would like to be) and accept that offer.

This post is starting to get a little on the longer side, so I want to make a couple quick statements and recognitions of what might be going through your mind.

To keep the flow of the post somewhat smooth, I did not mention explicitly anything about the realities of two competing hopes being able to coexist. I affirm that two realities described by two competing hopes can not coexist (the realities described by the eastern hope and theistic hope cannot both be true). As a theist (Christian specifically), I deny the "truth" offered by the eastern religions.

I recognize that "desirable" does not equal truth. Please read other posts in my blog for other reasons for my theism and how I reconcile different harsh realities of life.

Books
Without a Doubt
A World of Difference

Websites
Reasonable Faith
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

Podcasts
Just Thinking
Let My People Think
Reasonable Faith
Defenders
Without A Doubt
Straight Thinking
Stand to Reason

The "Eastern vs. Western Thinking" C(t)rap

Here's my problem with the "Western way of thinking" vs. "Eastern way of thinking" debate:

With Western thinking, opposite propositions are "either, or" (the lights are either on or they are off). With Eastern thinking, opposite propositions are "both, and" (the lights are both on and off).

Some people will argue that you can only use one of them. However, that insistence is depended on Western thinking- "You must choose to use either Western thinking or Eastern thinking." If you answer and say, "Western thinking", you make sense. But if you answer and say, "Eastern thinking", you are either denying Western thinking (used to make the determination) or you are accepting Eastern thinking, which accepts all paradoxes including both Eastern and Western thinking. But, the problem here is "how do you determine which way of thinking to use in reference to what?" Not only that, "which way of thinking do you use to arrive at your conclusion of which way of thinking to use in your original situation?"

In order to accept Eastern thinking you must deny that it is superior to any other way of thinking. Since that must be accepted, you must show how you know (why, not that) it is the correct way of thinking to be applied in the situation that you wish to use it in.

Keep in mind that there are many situations when using "both/and" is perfectly logical. But the trick is to look at the details of the claims. Specifically the context. If I were to say, "I am moving and not moving," I would be correct if I specify what I am talking about in each situation. In the first "I am moving" I'm talking about my hands typing this text. In the second "I am not moving" I'm talking about my body setting in my chair. Notice that my two statements "I am moving" and "I am not moving" aren't really related to each other at all.

When someone tries to use the Eastern way of thinking "both/and", press them for the details of the two things they are saying exist at the same time. You will discover that either the two are not actually opposites or they have little to nothing to do with each other.

Ravi Zacharias puts it this way, "Even in India we operate on the Western way of thinking. When we go to cross the street, it is either the bus or us!" If the Eastern way of thinking were used, "the bus AND we cross the street at the same time..." ....uh, yeah.

Eastern thinkers like to say that reality is full of paradoxes. They make a claim similar to the one I made above about my moving and not moving, and they say it is a paradox. (For definition, a paradox is a situation in which two opposites appear to be true at the same time, in the same context.) Eastern thinkers (Buddhism, Hindu, New Age, etc...) utilize this type of argument to show evidence that ultimately reality and everything in reality (including contradictions and opposites) are all true in the same context. When someone believes that this has been demonstrated, then they are free to believe any slew of ideas, even if they directly contradict each other. This removes the need for consistency between beliefs and between belief and practice.

The problem is that just because something appears to be a paradox (my example) does not mean that it is a paradox. In fact, I would go as far as to claim that there is no such thing as a true paradox. The only reason a situation can be called a paradox is because the information is limited. When one probes for more information the paradox can be resolved, and it can no longer be called a paradox.

Unfortunately, as humans our ability to gain knowledge is limited, so some paradoxes will stand. This is not to be taken as evidence of reality being a paradox (as the Eastern thinkers would have you believe), but of our limited knowledge. The limit of knowledge I am specifically referring to is our knowledge of things outside our three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

The Christian worldview accepts the existence of something beyond the natural realm. So do the Eastern thinkers. The difference between the two is that Christianity aims to resolve the paradoxes, while the Eastern religions aim to create more paradoxes, without ever resolving any of them.

Unfortunately, with all worldviews, paradoxes do show up. Two paradoxes that currently stand in the Christian worldview are the doctrine of the Trinity and the belief that God is closer to us than even we are. In two later posts I will tackle these paradoxes, and show why they are paradoxes to us, but can be resolved with knowledge of things outside our existence.

Ravi Zacharias discusses this on the second episode of Just Thinking here (Part 1 is provided for context):

Understanding the Spirit of the Age- Part 1
Understanding the Spirit of the Age- Part 2

For more on this topic, see these podcasts:

Just Thinking
Let My People Think
Stand to Reason