Is it defensible to claim that religion is a personal relationship with God and therefore contains no claims?

Question

It is a common line of argumentation against religion that it includes dogmatic claims without evidence and that the resistance to change that is peculiar to religion and stems from its dogmatism forestalls all progress towards truth. Religion is, according to some, by its very definition, a set of fixed, immutable claims it regards as revealed truths, paired with the requirement that all adherents (or even all people on Earth) uphold these claims. But if religion is wrong, it can never correct itself.

My aunt, who is a deeply religious person, rejects the above vehemently. She upholds that this is a very fundamental misunderstanding of religion. She says that religion cannot be considered as a way to explain the world or as any set of claims or propositions, whether opposed to science or not. Religion, according to her, indeed cannot be falsified or verified, but this is not because its propositions are ill-posed or in any other way unsound, but rather because religion is not a set of propositions in the first place.

Religion, according to her, is the personal relationship between God and a believer. It is the invitation sent by God to all people to enter a personal relationship with Him, and the will of some people to enter that relationship. To attempt to 'falsify' religion, therefore, is as absurd as to ask a child to falsify their relationship with their mom. To condemn religious people for their irrationality and dogmatism is as absurd as to condemn a child for their irrationality and dogmatism when that child cuddles with their mom and says "Mom, I love you".

Is the above position defensible?

Religions, especially those like Catholicism, do indeed seem to contain a set of propositions, don't they?

Answer 1

This is a striking example of a question that boils down to the ambiguous meaning of a word. Yes, if you mean religion in the sense intended by your aunt, you can say it need not involve any other claims. No, if you mean a religion such as Catholicism, it would evidently wrong to say it makes no claims.

Answer 2

• "God exists"
• "God loves you"
• "God sent an invitation to all people to enter a personal relationship with Him"
• "God sent Jesus to die on the cross"
• "People who accept Jesus will go to heaven when they die"
• "God did this thing for me"
• Etc.

These are all truth claims about reality.

So as long as you deem any of these things to be true, then no, you cannot say that your religion contains no claims.

There are also people who view Christianity as metaphoric. I'll keep all my many objections to that aside, but depending on what exactly they mean, that might not involve truth claims.

Religion versus a human relationship?

The question compares attempting to falsify religion to asking a child to falsify their relationship with their mom.

Putting aside the curious comparison between religious people and children...

We can, roughly speaking, break religion down into 3 parts:

1. Religious claims that are truth claims about reality: This is already addressed above (and below), and much of this could also fall under the 3rd point.

2. You loving God: This isn't a particularly noteworthy claim. I'll trivially grant that a theist might love the image of God that they have, and that part might be comparable to loving a person. If you love a person, you love who you think they are, and sometimes that isn't who they actually are, or you might even love someone who doesn't even exist at all.

3. God loving you: This we can also compare to human relationship, i.e. we can compare it to another person loving you. If you believe someone loves you, you should be able to give some reasons you believe that, e.g. how they look at you, them wanting to spend time with you, them doing things for you, and so on. And you should also be able to give reasons why you think that person exists at all, e.g. you can see them, speak to them, hear them, touch them, other people also see them, and so on.

So yes, you can certainly ask someone for evidence for a human relationship, and you can certainly ask someone for evidence for religious beliefs (and that may include falsifiability).

See also: my previous answer on what I consider "sufficient evidence" for a relationship with God, where I touch on similar points (and I also compare that with a human relationship). And I also mention the possibility of hallucinations and what would be required to dismiss that possibility.

Falsification of religion?

The religious commonly object to people objecting to religion because there aren't falsifiable claims and we can't apply science to it.

Falsification, and science generally, is a very reliable method for gaining knowledge, but it's not necessarily the only one. Skeptics do mention falsification a lot, but mostly what we're looking for is for religious claims to be evaluated positively by any method for determining truth that can be demonstrated to be reliable (meaning the method often tells you that true things are true, and false things are false).

Many religious claims also seem like science should be able to evaluate them. If some being is listening to our prayers, you would expect prayers to work more often than random chance, yet studies on the efficacy of prayer produced mixed results at best, and concluded that prayer had no discernible effect at worst.

I don't think what I detailed in the answers I linked to above would be falsifiable (but maybe you can find something falsifiable there), but it would nonetheless be sufficient evidence, for me, at least. That's because it's based on reliable methods for determining truth. Note that what I said in those answers is probably far less evidence than what you'd have for the typical human relationship, and yet we still don't have that evidence.

Religion demands that you discard any and every reliable method you have for evaluating truth when it comes to evaluating certain claims, because none of those methods would tell you that those claims are true. Rather than accepting that those claims may just not be true, theists instead commonly say religious claims should be evaluated by their own standard, of questionable reliability, or no standard (and you probably also shouldn't look too much into other religions, that may also meet that standard). Skeptics don't see the justification for doing that.

Answer 3

No, it is not defensible

Religion, according to her, is the personal relationship between God and a believer.

If so, then according to her...

• Hinduism it not a religion
• Buddhism is not a religion
• Shintoism is not a religion
• Scientology is not a religion

...and so on.

By her definition, any denomination that does not involve belief in the Christian deity, is not a religion.

I disagree, all of the denominations enumerated above are religions, therefore she is wrong, by contradiction.

Also, I disagree with her, in that I hold that personal faith does not equate religion. Religion, is when you organise around your faith.

Personally, I go by the following definitions...

• A belief is an assumption about reality

• Fact is belief with evidence for its veracity

• Faith is belief without evidence for its veracity

• Science is the organised and methodical pursuit of facts

• Religion is the organised and methodical pursuit of faith

Answer 4

When the meaning of a word like "religion" is ambiguous, I like to make up new words to distinguish each of the ways someone may use the term. :P

Personally, I do think the term "religion" is most proper to the relationship with the divine, either personal (like your Aunt suggests) or communal (like worship in a church). In this sense, I agree with your Aunt that "religion", properly understood, is an experience, rather than a logical framework with axioms and truth claims, and I don't suppose it can be falsified.

Meanwhile, we might use the term "theology" for the science of the divine. This refers to the body of knowledge (ie. a set of propositions), and also the tools for gaining that knowledge, including but not limited to Sacred Scripture and philosophical reasoning. Like any science, it can be done well or poorly: the conclusions one makes about reality may be well-supported or not, they may be falsifiable or not, and they may be correct or not. And, like any science, there may not be as much correlation between these as we'd like to think. I think criticisms in the vein of "dogmatic claims without evidence" are proper to theology, rather than religion.

But of course, we need at least one more term, let's say "Church", to refer to an institution oriented to the divine, which among other things gives guidance on what constitutes proper religion (ie. a proper relationship with the divine) and proper theology (ie. a set of endorsed truth claims). Arguments against, say, Catholicism as a "religion" are, in this framework, probably usually criticisms against the theology endorsed by the Catholic Church, and may not have much to do with religion at all. This is probably your Aunt's point of view. Note that arguments against religion generically are probably just not well formulated, since it's rather too vague a term to mean anything.

Of course it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be religious and not theological, at least to some degree. But some relationships just don't depend on knowing things about the other person all that much. So I do think your Aunt's position is defensible.

Answer 5

Religion is on one hand an attempt to understand the world. Religion provides a series of answers to important question about the real world. Giving explanations is always connected with the claim or at least the conjecture that the answer is true. Insofar religion makes truth claims.

On the other hand, religion also offers a way of salvation to its believers. In this context Christian religion invites to live in relation with the Christian god and with the saviour Jesus Christ. This component of religion is illustrated by the personal example from the OP's question. Here religion does not emphasize an explanation but makes an offer in form of a promise. Nevertheless the content of the promise is a truth claim too.

To restrict a religion to its salvific component I would call spiritually. Here you have the free choice to paint the relationship as you like most.

Answer 6

The answer by @JoWehler was excellent. This answer should be viewed as expanding on that. Religion, first and foremost, is an attempt to answer a set of fundamental questions that plague mankind. Among these questions are

1. Where did the world come from?
2. Where did I come from?
3. Is there anyone in charge?
4. What is going to become of us?
5. Is this it? When I die, do I just end or is there something more?
6. Why is life so hard/painful/full of misery?
7. Why do I do things that I later regret?
8. What is the right thing to do?
9. Why is there injustice?
10. What is the purpose for me to go on living?

The Christian answers to these questions revolve around a creator God, an intelligent being who is self-existent, who exists outside of space and time, who knows all and can do all, and who cares about us. Many other religions in the West have the same God or a similar one to help answer the questions, although the answers are often different. Since religion in the West has resolved around God, God has come to be closely associated with religion in the West, although I maintain that ultimately religion is not about God but about the questions.

If I'm right about what religion is, then your aunt is necessarily wrong. Religion is all about answering questions, so it is all about propositions. The notion of a personal relationship with God is a consequence of a certain set of answers to those questions.

The Enlightenment attack on Christianity consisted primarily of three prongs:

A. An attempt to answer the questions via a materialist pseudo-religion we might call scientism. (The main characters in this prong were Marx, Freud, and Darwin. Many people today don't realize Marxism and Freudianism were once considered sciences.)

B. An attack on the Christian answer by demanding that God and the various tenants of Christian answers be held to the same sort of demands for evidence that is used in (an idealized view of) science.

C. An attack on Christian culture by criticizing failures of Christians to live up to their own principles and by going beyond Christian ethics so that the critics could claim to be more ethical than Christians who were at one time admired for their ethics.

Your aunt's position is a variation on one of the Christian responses to attack B. There is no direct response to attack B because God is an immaterial being outside of space and time, and so cannot possibly be investigated by methods designed to investigate material objects in space and time. However, there are some oblique responses; among them are:

1. Attempt to show that the scientistic answers to the questions equally fail to meet these standards demanded for propositions about God. (The ID movement can be seen as a part of this effort)
2. Deny that knowledge about God and his actions requires the same sort of evidence that scientific theories do (this is my approach).
3. Opt out of the argument by declining to defend any propositions against the critique (this is your aunt's approach, and probably the most common one by a wide margin).

Answer 7

Is it defensible to claim that religion is a personal relationship with God and therefore contains no claims?

No.

If you argue that ...

[religion] includes dogmatic claims without evidence and that the resistance to change that is peculiar to religion and stems from its dogmatism forestalls all progress towards truth.

... then interpreting that argument in terms of a significantly different definition of "religion" than you mean, in order to argue against that, is an example of the straw man fallacy.

Perhaps your aunt feels the need to argue against the negatives you are attributing to "religion" applying to her, personally. In that case, she might have said something along the lines of "I would claim to be religious, but I don't accept that my personal beliefs are dogmatic, that I am peculiarly resistant to change, or that my beliefs and others like mine impede progress toward discovering truth. My essential religious beliefs are [...]."

I do note that her description of religion, as presented by you, does contain some claims, including:

• that God exists and it is possible to have a personal relationship with him
• that God invites all people to such a relationship, and that some people form such a relationship by accepting that invitation.

These are fundamentally unverifiable claims, but also unfalsifiable ones. It is indeed absurd to try to falsify them. And it is equally unverifiable and unfalsifiable that anyone is wrong or should be condemned for accepting claims that are neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

Religions, especially those like Catholicism, do indeed seem to contain a set of propositions, don't they?

Religions, in the sense in which Catholicism is an exemplar, absolutely do make many claims, some of them in the category of those that are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Indeed, that is the category of claims that I am personally inclined identify as "religious", regardless of the contents of those claims.

Answer 8

My aunt, who is a deeply religious person, rejects the above vehemently. She upholds that this is a very fundamental misunderstanding of religion. She says that religion cannot be considered as a way to explain the world or as any set of claims or propositions, whether opposed to science or not. Religion, according to her, indeed cannot be falsified or verified, but this is not because its propositions are ill-posed or in any other way unsound, but rather because religion is not a set of propositions in the first place.

Religion, according to her, is the personal relationship between God and a believer. It is the invitation sent by God to all people to enter a personal relationship with Him, and the will of some people to enter that relationship.

The claim that X and Y are in a relationship is, of course, a claim. In fact, if we were to press your aunt to provide more concrete details about her purported relationship with God, she will most certainly end up making her claim more specific and complex, which would allow us to break it down into a more detailed set of claims. So it is not the case that no claims about reality are being made.

On the contrary, examples of obvious claims that come to mind include:

• God exists
• Your aunt exists
• God has some characteristics [your aunt would need to provide these]
• Your aunt has some characteristics [these can be provided by you, I guess]
• God and your aunt interact in some specific ways [can be made more specific by your aunt]
• God affects reality in some specific ways and under some specific conditions/circumstances [can be clarified/made more specific by your aunt]
• Etc.

To attempt to 'falsify' religion, therefore, is as absurd as to ask a child to falsify their relationship with their mom. To condemn religious people for their irrationality and dogmatism is as absurd as to condemn a child for their irrationality and dogmatism when that child cuddles with their mom and says "Mom, I love you".

You can certainly interview a child and develop a theory about how the child interacts with their mother, and then put this theory to the test. For example, if the child claims that they meet their mother everyday, you can have a detective follow the child everyday for a whole month and track down every single adult woman that they get in contact with and gather statistics about all the interactions. You can also run DNA tests with the most likely candidates to verify if anyone of them is the mother. Assuming that the child claims to live with their mom, and provided that you know their address, you could also place hidden cameras to record their private interactions and have a psychologist see the videos to provide their opinion on whether the relationship appears to be loving (assuming the child claimed that their relationship with their mother was loving). Etcetera.

Applying this analogy to your aunt's claim of relationship with God, this would require separating the aspects that are testable from the aspects that are not, depending on the degree of granularity of the description of the relationship that your aunt provides. Vague descriptions are less verifiable than more concrete and specific descriptions. This reminds of the accepted answer to Is Christianity testable?

Consider, for example, if your aunt claims to be a vessel for God's miracles, healings, and revelations. At a minimum, you should be able to approach the situation with an investigative journalist mindset, conducting interviews with numerous individuals who have experienced the effects of her spiritual gifts, in order to gather corroborating testimonial data. If you fail to encounter this, or if the testimonial data is very inconsistent, that would be a failed prediction in my estimation. In fact, there have been people who have tried to do this. Two books that come to mind:

• The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural by Lee Strobel.
• Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World by Craig S. Keener.

Is the above position defensible?

I don't think so, since it's very easy to come up with claims being made that serve as counterexamples.

Answer 9

Suppose that my aunt claims to have a lifelong imaginary friend, and also claims that her personal relationship with her imaginary friend is a personal relationship which makes no claims about reality. Then she still makes two claims: that the imaginary friend is perceivable to her, and that the imaginary friend communicates with her somehow.

Isomorphically, your aunt has made two claims.

Answer 10

Your aunt can claim whatsoever she wishes about her internal mental state (which includes, amongst others, believes about religion, God, or anything else she cares about).

With our current technology, as well as philosophical and scientific understanding, there is no way whatsoever to find out anything more about the internal workings of her brain than what she tells us, with the usual communication problems that entails (i.e., different implied definitions of terms, and so on and forth). So her statements about her beliefs cannot be challenged, cannot be falsified, and it also would make little sense to do so. In German we have the quip "Die Gedanken sind frei" (literally, "thoughts are free") - everyone of us is free to think whatever they wish to.

So, one thing you can do is to add an implied "I believe that ..." in front of every one of her sentences; and in this case all questions are moot. You gain little from trying to change her believes, and it is very hard to do so, so it is perfectly fine to allow her to believe what she will. After all, you very likely are claiming the same right for yourself.

Adding "I believe that..." or "In my worldview..." or something like that to each of her statements is exactly what it means that the whole is a personal thing, and not up for falsification.

Up to here, this is all perfectly defensible. From experience, it is eminently clear that the worldview, lacking a better word, of a person, has immense influence on their behaviour and well-being; having a very clear-cut and profound religious base (no matter which religion it is) can clearly make a person very "grounded" and stable, emotionally. Especially if the person themselves considers this "personal", for example by including interactions with their God as an important part. Obviously, as always, this does not mean that everyone should be religious or believe in anything, but obviously for many people religion does in fact have that beneficial role. This also does not say anything about whether those beliefs are "good" or "true" or anything along those lines.

It becomes more interesting as soon as she starts to make claims that would influence your reality in a measurable way. I.e., if she starts making rules how you have to behave to conform to her believes. Case in point - when she starts telling you to go to church on Sunday, or that you must conform to some yearly fasting period, or that you must clothe in a particular manner, or that you must not use make-up as a woman, or whatever it is. Especially if she has power over you and forces you to do this against your will.

Or it becomes problematic if she starts behaving herself in a way that clashes with non-religious society. I.e., if she starts breaking laws or important customs; if she starts denouncing or killing people who do not profess her believes; and so on and forth.

TLDR: treating religion as something personal, not up for falsification and not based on "propositions" is perfectly defensible, valid and a very healthy way to approach this issue. In fact it is the only way to handle this - simply based on the fact that not a single religion has ever brought up any scientifically falsifiable propositions. As long as the religious person claims this for herself only, and does not then go on to use their religion to enforce your circumstances.

Answer 11

Just so it's said, your aunt (though I don't know what religion she adheres to) seems to be echoing Transcendentalism, a form of Protestant mysticism developed in the US. It's worth looking into for more information…

But to the question, we should keep in mind that religion is inherently a matter of relationship, not facticity. When a religion specifies 'rules' or 'truths' these are invariably statements about how one ought to relate to the world, leading to a hermeneutic process in which one tries to understand the true essence of that relationship beneath the given text. It's effectively a development of trust. One cannot falsify or verify trust, because the very act of questioning trust implies trust does not exist.

Without putting too fine a point on it, if we had access to an actual, verifiable, observable god, it would not change the essence of religion. It would merely give us a concrete, visible being (as opposed to an abstract, unseen one) which whom we would have to develop the same relationship of trust. God could hang out at your local pub turning water into cocktails, and there'd still be plenty of atheists bellying up to the bar.

Now, it is worth noting that claiming a personal relationship with God and developing a personal relationship with God are very different things. The first is name-dropping meant to satisfy one's ego, the second is an arduous process of becoming the sort of person an ideal being would have a relationship with. Many 'personal relationship' Christians don't put in the effort to truly be better people. They expect God to forgive them for every wrong they do (given enough begging and pleading) and just go right on behaving badly. Such people would benefit from a more structured faith, but that's as may be; the point is that there's no sense trying to analyze faith the way we would analyze material objects because it's an inherently social, interpretive process.