Hi Bradley. Thanks for this question. Hope it raises some good discussion.

This is really an empirical question, answers to which you would have to go to religious adherents. It does, however, raise philosophical questions of the relationship between faith and reason. I have a paper on this, 'Faith and Reason in a Post secular age'. It is on my home page if you would like to take a look. I would welcome any views you have on it.

It may be argued that religious people can believe anything that they like including contradictory positions, as long as this does not cause harm to others. They may simply accept them as part of the mystery and the challenge to their rational understanding. If they are concerned to justify their beliefs to those outside the faith then they have to find some common ground on which to reconcile those contradictions. I am not sure what you mean by 'smooth out' contradictions. You might mean try to obscure them or make them seem less important than they are. From a logical point of view you cannot sensibly hold two contradictory view - this would be to contravene the law of excluded middle, so when two propositions contradict one another then they cannot both be true.

Mike.

@Mike,

Thanks for sharing. I will have to take a look at your paper. I'm sure I will find more resources in your footnotes.

I think the more aggressive a religious faith tradition is in attacking other worldviews (e.g. arguing that their religion makes sense and other worldviews are philosophically problematic) the more such traditions remove the option of creating an intellectual environment where religious adherents can comfortably hold contradictory views.

Conservative evangelicalism for example, with its aggressive discipline of apologetics and eagerness to always be debating people holding other positions, seems to create an intellectual environment where contradictions are a sign of weakness in one's views, not something to be embraced as "mystery." Inevitably, however, even conservative evangelicals will appeal to the notion of mystery in the face of apparent contradiction.

It seems likely that all religions have contradictory elements that must be either "smoothed out" (made to seem as though they are not contradictory) or else embraced as a normal part of faith. If the latter option is chosen, it would seem that religion would forfeit the "right" (for lack of a better term) to criticize or critique other worldviews on the basis of reason or logic. How can one hold everyone else to a standard of logic and reason that one knows is violated in his or her own faith?

In any case - thanks for your thoughts. I will have to check out your paper and follow the footnotes carefully for more research.

Pax,

Bradley

It is as you say, we religious folk tend to have elements that can be argued and defended with veracity, others that can be topics of endless speculation especially when it comes to certain moral principles and thus are a source of intellectual discord at times but not always, and also there is an element of mystery or mysticism when it comes to the spiritual side of things, which of course is experiential and requires the acceptance of a testimony. I prefer the mystical side which does not follow conventional wisdom, especially because the coherence to grasp the idea requires a pre-existing faith in some other concept (take a look at theology, it is not necessarily limited to the believing community, but makes sense to it the most).