True for You, But Not for Me by Paul Copan

Author:Paul Copan [Copan, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Apologetics / Evangelism, Apologetics, Relativity, REL067030, REL030000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

22

“IF YOU’D GROWN UP IN THAILAND,

YOU’D BE A BUDDHIST.”

If you’d been born in a largely non-Christian nation, is it at all likely you’d be a Christian? What about Thailand, which is 95 percent Buddhist? John Hick says: “When someone is born to Buddhist parents in a Buddhist culture, that person is very likely to be a Buddhist and to be related to the Real in ways made possible by Buddhist understanding and practice.”1 Hick thinks religious exclusivism is arbitrary in that adherence primarily “depends upon the accidents of birth.”2 Well, not so fast.

Eric looks back at his family—devoutly Christian for four generations in Europe and America, twelve pastors among his relatives, an inner-city schoolteacher and a Christian writer for parents—and readily acknowledges that his environment made it easy for him to believe. Still, his faith was exposed to severe challenges as he rose to the top of his university class and as he lived in Asia as a student. He knows it took a series of conscious, wrenching decisions in his teens and early adult years for him to hold on to his faith. One of his biggest influences came from outside his culture, through Chinese Christian friends.

Statistically speaking, Hick is correct. But what exactly follows from his scenario? Earlier we saw that the bare fact of individuals holding different views about something doesn’t make relativism the inevitable conclusion. Similarly, the phenomenon of varying religious beliefs hardly entails religious pluralism. Here are some other options:

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