This is part two of a series. Part one is here. Part three is here. Part four is here. Part five is here.

Last post, I talked about the great benefits that have come from religion, but also about how many of the great religions’ cosmological claims have been proven false. In this post, I’ll talk about the problem with adopting a literal approach to religions’ claims.

Much of what our ancestors believed about cosmology is plainly contradicted by what we have discovered about the universe. When the teachings of the great religions are based on the premises of a false cosmology, then the teachings themselves should be suspect – there is no reason to believe a conclusion based on a false premise.

Religious believers who take a literal approach to their religion’s sacred books or to the teachings of their religious leaders may appeal to authority and argue that the words of god, as contained in their scriptures (or as transmitted by their holy leaders) are the ultimate authority and therefore modern cosmological claims must be wrong. There are two problems with this approach.

First, believers base their claims about a text or leader’s divine authority on circular and subjective arguments. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority merely because the leader or the text says so is circular: we have no reason to believe in the leader or the text’s claims unless we already believe in their claims – there is no external reason to believe in their authority. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority because of our subjective emotional responses to them is almost equally problematic. As I have discussed before, spiritual feelings are very subjective.¹ People from wildly different religions – religions with contradictory and mutually exclusive teachings – describe the same sorts of spiritual feelings confirming their belief in the religion. Some followers may isntead place their trust in stories about a teacher’s or a leader’s miraculous or supernatural abilities. Such stories invariably lack objective verification and are nearly always told second or third hand; I have never seen such stories stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Things like a religious text’s or leader’s own claim to authority, pleasant feelings, or stories of dubious veracity are not be enough to validate the claims to authority of religious texts or teachers, especially when some of their claims are directly contradicted by our modern observations of the world.

Second, it is a logical fallacy to believe in a statement’s truth merely because it was uttered by an “authority.” None of us can know everything. There is nothing wrong with relying on experts. And there is nothing wrong with arguing that a statement made by an authority is true. The problem arises when we argue that something is true because it was uttered by an authority. If something is true, then it is true whether or not it was uttered by an authority. Any statement made by an authority, therefore, should be able to stand up to criticism and independent verification. If an authority’s statements are true, it should be consistent with our knowledge of reality.

As alternatives to the literal approach to religious teachings, I present four reasonable approaches to religious claims beyond just relying on statements from purported authorities: 1) the gaps approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the practical approach. Next post, I’ll talk about the first three.