Keith Johnson used to fight with his friend Billy when they were kids. After they were too tired to throw punches, one would always try a new strategy: “Well, my dad could beat up your dad.”
But religion isn’t about spreading belief by force or accepting all faiths as true, Johnson told about 100 students Thursday night in Coon Forum.
With a series of defined arguments, Johnson answered the question asked in the title of his speech, “Do All Paths Lead to the Same Destination?”: No.
“Comparison is nice, but evaluating traditions makes you nervous,” said Johnson, regional director for theological development of Campus Crusade for Christ.
After explaining the history and principles of five religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam — Johnson gave four reasons why he believes religions are a matter of truth rather than taste.
Faiths claim to be true but contradict each other, Johnson said. Also, zealous beliefs do not justify all faiths because sincerity does not replace truth. Tolerance discourages people from evaluating the claims of each religion, he said.
To show how different religions reach contradictory conclusions, he told a story about three blind men who try to identify an elephant. The man who feels the trunk thinks the elephant looks like a hose. The man who touches the sides says the animal is built like a wall.
And the man who feels the leg believes an elephant looks like a tree trunk.
“But how do we know the blind men are actually touching the elephant?” Johnson asked. “What if the first blind man had his arm around a telephone pole and the other one was in downtown Chicago with his hands on the Sears Tower?”
Nor does sincerity of belief prove that the belief is true, he said.
If two chemistry students experiment with sulfuric acid, and one says he thinks it’s water and drinks it, the strength of his faith won’t save him, Johnson said.
Faith isn’t a question of taste, he said. Religions such as Christianity make direct factual claims, such as the crucifixion of Christ and his rising three days later.
“One of those (religions) could be eliminated fairly easily by the kind of claims it makes and the criteria by which its truth claims could be evaluated,” he said.
Some students said they appreciated Johnson’s academic approach to religion.
“I was waiting to see if he’d say, ‘I’m a Christian, follow the one true way,’ but he distanced himself adequately,” said Gaurav Verma, a McCormick freshman. “It wasn’t preachy.”
Others said that factual questions aren’t the most important ones.
“There’s a lot of value in the Christian religion, but what’s useful is not whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead,” said Tim Barounis, a Weinberg sophomore. “It’s to inform how we think about spirit and how it addresses the problem of truth.”
