How much do your surroundings shape what you believe? Turns out, the culture you grow up in has a drastic impact on which worldview you will live by. People are, in many ways, the product of the culture they were born into. Knowing this, skeptics will claim, “you only believe in Christianity because you were raised in a Christian household. If you were born into a Muslim family, then you would believe Allah was the true God.” While it is true that you are more likely to believe in Christianity if you are raised in it, it is not guaranteed. People have free will and sometimes rebel against their upbringing. Nonetheless, the principle remains true that someone is more likely to believe in a religion if they were born into it. The issue, though, is not the claim itself but what is being implied through it. Oftentimes, people make this claim to delegitimize religion. It delegitimizes religion by displaying it can only be relatively true instead of universally true. In other words, any religion can be true if the majority agrees to it.
The fatal flaw of this claim is it assumes a religion is validated, or proven true, by the number of people who agree with it. But truth does not rely on people’s opinions. For example, there may be millions of people who all believe that the earth is flat. However, their opinion does nothing to validate the claim. It is only the evidence and coherency of the argument which can verify it. So, although the state of Alabama has a high concentration of Christians, it does not validate the claims of Christianity. Similarly, although Morocco has a high population ofMuslims, this does not verify the religion. Instead, people must evaluate the claims which each religion makes and determine which is more coherent, which has more evidence, and which corresponds to reality. So, Christians claim that Jesus is God incarnate while Muslims claim that he was a prophet. While it is true that someone may be more likely to believe he is God depending on where they were born, their opinions do not change the reality of who Christ was. He either is God, or he is not.
Perhaps an even more powerful point, though, is to display how this argument is self-defeating. Through attempting to discredit religion, it uses inconsistent and improper logic. In essence, the skeptic is trying to dismantle religion by saying individuals are brainwashed by their surroundings to believe something. However, couldn’t this also be true of the skeptic? Everyone is raised in a culture; it is the lens through which someone views reality. Moreover, the only reason the skeptic raises this argument is because of the culture that brainwashed him while growing up. So, if the argument contends that all culturally influenced beliefs are false, then even the skeptics claim is skewed. The claim defeats itself. It is logically inconsistent and a classic example of the genetic fallacy. So, while people may have opinions which are shaped by cultural norms, religion remains unaffected. Christianity is true because there is historical evidence for the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. These facts are true for all people, in all places, at all times.
Written by Luke Radtke