Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Debate’

On some Internet forum a while back, I encountered a poster who declared his (or her) utter hatred for Shakespeare. From the forum’s demographics, it was clear that this person was a Canadian high school student who was most likely from Ontario. The poster ranted about how Shakespeare was boring, archaic, obsolete, and stupid.

I knew exactly what this person meant. We read Twelfth Night in grade nine, Julius Caesar in grade ten, Macbeth in grade eleven, and Hamlet in grade twelve, and that was more than what I needed to confirm that Shakespeare’s perceived value in high school English education is far from the actual value it brings to the students who had to study it as a mandatory topic. See, the value of Shakespeare in the educated world is almost treated like a religion – everybody acknowledges Shakespeare’s brilliance, everybody says that we must learn Shakespeare; everybody agrees that Shakespeare is a genius, and one who does not know Shakespeare must be uneducated. Yet it seems that nobody could actually put forth a convincing argument on the real practical values of Shakespeare for people who aren’t English majors.

At least, if there is a convincing argument, it certainly isn’t well known – at the very least the high school students themselves have never heard of it. So, I will dedicate this post to examine this subject.

The Godlike Status of Shakespeare

Some people consider Shakespeare to be the best writer in the history of the world. Actually, I think this is quite a popular view. The problem with convincing anyone with this kind of view, though, is that the view itself is highly personal. Consider this: for me to value a piece of writing, the author doesn’t matter, what matters is the text itself – what words are used, in what order, to give what meaning, on both the local (crafting sentences) and the global (overall coherence and impression of the entire work) scale. And even then, it only matters in what images it triggers in my mind and how it affects me, and this is often the result of both the text itself and my own imaginative associations. Different people obviously have different life experiences causing them to make different associations, so ultimately, this basically means the reader interprets the meaning. If the value of a piece of writing is so subjective an idea, then how do you objectively gauge Shakespeare’s “good-ness” as a writer? You can’t. There is no such thing as an objectively best writer in the history of the world. When we’re talking about “best” writers, it’s always somebody’s opinion.

But opinions, of course, count if there exists a large, authoritative common opinion among the millions of individual opinions out there. Is this the case for Shakespeare? Well, there is certainly authority, but the authority isn’t large. University professors, English graduates, novelists, or other elite members of the literary society make up this authority. They’re often well-respected people, and because of this, their values somehow become the social norm despite the fact that they themselves make horrible samples of the general population. Most of them have high respect for Shakespeare, probably because they’ve scrutinized Shakespeare endlessly and found oodles of meaningful literary connections while doing so. Are they untrustworthy people? Of course not. Although academics have a tendency to get stuck in their own values and their own thoughts, they’re at least honest in that whatever they claim is indeed backed by lots of academic work. So, from this we can see that Shakespeare probably is superior to other texts in ways academic in nature. Perhaps the language and composition of a Shakespearean work offers far more interpretation potential than any lesser works, or perhaps Shakespeare’s use of literary devices are incredibly consistent and beautiful. I don’t doubt this, but this only justifies Shakespeare’s position on an academic ranking of literary works, it doesn’t justify Shakespeare’s position in a high school curriculum.

The important thing to realize here is that when we’re talking about Shakespeare in a high school classroom, then lots of things change. Academics analyze Shakespeare because they want to, they analyze Shakespeare of their own free will, and they usually have plenty of background to allow actual progress and work to come out of their analysis. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is mostly forced on high school students with little background. What the teacher usually does is to give a quick lesson on the context of Shakespeare, which is never really enough. This misfit between Shakespeare and the high school students who tries to analyze it certainly yields lots of wasted time with very little benefits. Yet, Shakespeare continues to persist as a central topic of high school English education. The bottom line is that the reputation of Shakespeare himself should not matter, if it’s a misfit, then it is a problem.

What Education Tries To Achieve

English education obviously doesn’t teach English. Everybody who grew up in the English-speaking world knows English by heart because they practice it every day as their only method of verbal communication. The very basic role of English education is to fine-tune people’s English skills, to work out the little bugs and errors caused by bad habits. This would be the reinforcement of grammar rules, fixing awkward sentences, discouraging passive tense, etc… Past this, English education tries to achieve two key goals: to make people understand and appreciate literature of all kinds, and to build critical thinking and communication skills. Literature may include short stories, poetry, play scripts, novels – basically any literary arts. Given a piece of literature, English education builds critical thinking and communication skills by having people analyze the literature and present the results in essay, debate, or presentation format. For this reason, it makes more sense to call the English class a “Literary Arts and Reasoning” class, and it’s only called the English class due to historical and cultural reasons. A high school English class, of course, has one more function – it must prepare college-bound students for college-level materials. Thus, we have a focus on essay writing as well as literary analysis.

Based on these goals, we can set a number of qualities that a high school student must meet, and thus the role of English education is simply to help students meet those qualities.

• A successful student in English should have complete mastery of rules and styles of the English language.
• A successful student in English should have good general knowledge on various aspects of literature.
• A successful student in English should have the ability to think critically about any issue and form ideas.
• A successful student in English should be able to communicate the aforementioned ideas to others through various formal or informal ways with clarity and efficiency.

Mastery of the English language will allow a person to talk and write well. Being able to think critically about issues will allow a person to develop ideas that have value. The last point about communication is merely connecting these two things together, and thus allow a person to easily show other people their ideas. And lastly, general knowledge on literature puts all these skills in the context of an English classroom. If a student meets all these qualities, then he would write essays with thought-provoking content and flawless language, deliver oral presentations with charisma and good material, he should be able to tell you the rules of writing a limerick or haiku, describe the general flow of a short story, and, of course, if you ask him who wrote War and Peace, he should easily respond Tolstoy. Now, an excellent English student should not only be able to do all of the above, but also create art by being able to compose all sorts of writings, whether it be a personal reflection, a poem, a satirical piece, or a newspaper article. Unfortunately, this requirement of creativity doesn’t exist in most English classrooms. “English” is usually separated from “Creative Writing.” I don’t know what kind of pessimistic philosophy is behind this, but until things change, English classes usually don’t require artistic creativity.

Where Does Shakespeare Fit Into All This?

The idea, of course, is that Shakespeare is a piece of literary text. Students ought to read it, understand it, appreciate it, analyze it, gain insight from it, and do presentations and write essays on it. This is all fine except for the misfit I mentioned a while back. If we want a piece of literary text for students to read, understand, appreciate, analyze, gain insight, and do presentations and write essays on, Shakespeare is not the optimum choice. In fact, it’s a horrible choice. Shakespeare is much too mature, too archaic, and too mentally inaccessible for the high school students’ psychology.

When a person is in high school, he generally does not know what he wants to do in life. And in cases where he does, it most likely will not be anywhere close to literary analysis as an academic. Over the past decades, interest in science and engineering fields increased and interest in humanities and the liberal arts continued to decrease. And even within humanities, pure English is not the dominating option. In a high school discrete mathematics classroom, an informal poll showed that more than 90% of students were Engineering-bound (self-report), can similar results be said about English classrooms? Do most people in an English classroom want a career that deals with pure English and literature? Of course not. English is a mandatory subject that everyone must take, so it would not be surprising if the students in it are quite diverse in their interests.

Why is English a mandatory subject? Because education experts believe that the skills and knowledge taught by an English class is useful in a wide spectrum of careers and academic subjects. This is certainly true, but we’ve gotta look at exactly which skills are useful in this manner and which skills aren’t. To survive as an educated human being, having critical thinking skills and decent writing skills is a must. Presentation skills are also very important to someone’s success in both career and social situations. However, a chartered accountant would never need to know any literary work in detail. We can argue that he needs some general knowledge on literary works in order to qualify as an educated human being, but merely knowing a few titles, their authors, and (possibly) their importance would be enough by most people’s standards. Basically, the useful skills that apply to everyone are the non-English specific skills like critical thinking and communication, while non-English specific stuff is only important in that they serve as general knowledge.

If the students in an English class have diverse interests, then most likely most of them would not be inherently interested in literature, not to mention literary analysis. Give them a good poem, some would like the poem because it truly spoke to them, some would subconsciously force themselves to like the poem just because they’re supposed to, and the rest would probably see no point in a bunch of words put together in a (as they’re told) beautiful and meaningful way. If you ask them to do literary analysis on a piece of literature, some would love the idea of analyzing anything, but the vast majority would find that their appeal depends heavily on what it is that they’re analyzing. Basically, if the subject is interesting, then writing an essay on it is much more enjoyable, and if the subject is boring, then nobody likes writing an essay on it. Since the English class at its roots is about literature, most of the raw materials students analyze should be literary works. The question here is which literary work we should choose for analysis.

Writing an essay or doing a presentation are ultimately what builds the student’s critical thinking and communication skills, so therefore we must encourage essay writing and making oral presentations. Encouraging an activity, of course, means finding ways to make the activity more appealing and enjoyable. Previously, we’ve noted that the appeal of these activities in an English classroom depends a lot on the intrinsic interest of the subject matter. Shakespeare lacks this intrinsic interest, and this is what makes Shakespeare a horrible choice of subject for literary analysis, essay writing, and doing presentations.

There are actually two reasons for what makes Shakespeare a horrible choice. To begin, Shakespeare is bland and dry. I once heard of a defense on Shakespeare that went something like this:

Why Shakespeare? Because it is amazing! Full of love and life, humor, fantasy, and tragedy.

Though this may be true to an academic, it certainly does not hold water for high school students. To them, The Simpsons has way more humor, Harry Potter offers way more fantasy, and movies like Titanic are way more tragic. Shakespeare is written for the old Victorian audience and whomever pompous or old fashioned enough to still say they greatly enjoy Shakespeare in later times. If we’re talking about sheer entertainment value (what makes high school students interested), Shakespeare is much too outdated. The modern context renders whatever humor Shakespeare tried to create into corny bad jokes that nobody gets. Twelfth Night is supposed to be a comedy, yet despite having heard an audiocassette version and watched a video version with the rest of class, I did not remember a single moment where the class burst into laughter (heck, I don’t even remember anyone laughing by themselves). The modern “taste” for fantasy is also vastly different from what fantasy is common in Shakespeare’s time. When we look at Tolkien’s middle-earth, for example, we see a cool and mature world where characters involve themselves in passionate struggles where the future of the world is at stake. Meanwhile, if we look at something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we see corny faeries talking in strange language, and already we feel the squickiness. Lastly, Shakespeare’s known for his tragedies, yet how many people honestly cried when reading or watching the most famous example – Romeo and Juliet? Certainly I haven’t heard stories where a classroom was silenced by the sadness that emanated from the book, and if I have, no doubt people would have considered it strange. It is clear that in the modern context, Shakespeare has lost most of its entertainment value, thus making it bland and dry.

Of course, we do not read things in English purely for entertainment, but if the goal is to get students interested in analyzing and writing an essay on a literary work, then that literary work has to be at least somewhat entertaining. This is not the only problem with Shakespeare, however. Let’s pretend for a minute that value of entertainment is to be completely ignored. We would then judge texts based on their ability to inspire thoughts. After all, the whole point of literary analysis is to read a piece of literature, have it inspire thoughts within our minds, which turns into connections between ideas – our interpretation of the text, and our last task would be to present this idea in some manner.

Shakespeare is also horrible at inspiring thoughts in all except for the academic because its intended audience does not include modern laypeople. Few people can understand original Shakespeare text. I consider myself to have been a relatively good English student, yet when confronted with Shakespeare’s original text back then, it was impossible to derive anything except for bits and traces of surface meaning, which I can then try to string together to get a plot so basic that it’s not good for anything. The difficulty of understanding Shakespeare lies mostly in the fact that the characters talk much too differently than how modern people talk, and therefore it’s difficult to tell which parts are important and which parts aren’t. If you consider all parts to be important, then you lose the flow of the play, and of course, regarding any important parts as unimportant would certainly cause confusion as important plot points would be missed. Shakespearean text is also filled with metaphors everywhere, such that any attempt to really get what the characters are trying to say is like trying to find a needle in a sea of metaphors. Each metaphor in turn has a million possibilities of what it could symbolize and how it can be interpreted. Faced with all these difficulties, what laypeople like me (and probably the vast majority of high school students) must do in coping is to ask the teacher or a help text (i.e. a “modern translated version”) for explanations. However, once that happens, any of the student’s interpretation would be an interpretation of some interpretation of Shakespeare. It is no longer a direct analysis off the text, so thus it becomes a practice much less meaningful and valuable.

So, Shakespeare lacks entertainment value, which means it doesn’t generate interest in high school students for literary analysis. On top of that, Shakespeare’s archaic language and outdated plot situations makes it so that any quality, original literary analysis is excruciatingly difficult for high school students. So not only are high school students forced to do a task that is boring to begin with, the task is a difficult one too. This inevitably leads to half-assed essay attempts, students trying to make themselves sound knowledgeable in presentations when they know all they’re doing is regurgitating what they’re told, and months of wasted class time that could’ve been spent on something much more constructive.

Popular Defenses for Shakespeare

One popular defense goes something like this:

Shakespeare is undeniably one of the greatest authors/playwrights in history. How could students receive a quality education without studying someone so influential to the English language?

This argument makes no sense. Maxwell’s equations are incredibly influential to modern theory of electromagnetism, all of mathematics ultimately come from the axioms of set theory, history is mostly dominated by the social and economic aspects of society, yet it would be crazy to expect beginners to start with them. We don’t start off our learning in a field by diving straight at the “most influential.” Instead, we find an easy entry point, build up our knowledge and interest with easy things, then we take baby steps toward more and more difficult things. In electricity, we start with simple concepts like voltage and current. In math, we learn basic operations like addition and subtraction. In history, we begin by treating history as a story of “what happened.” Similarly, just because “Shakespeare is very influential to the English language” does not mean Shakespeare fits the high school level.

Note that, it may be a good argument to say that Shakespeare is indeed important, so therefore people should know Shakespeare, his works, and their importance. But note that this doesn’t have to come from literary analysis. A fact-based research project is more than enough to establish Shakespeare’s place in the literary world. For critical thinking and literary analysis, choose other easier, more effective texts.

Here’s another popular defense:

All reading is good for your brain, but reading something as syntactically complex as Shakespeare’s writing is especially good for your brain. It’s difficult for many to comprehend at first because you’re basically learning an entire new way of reading. It is strengthening your mental capacity.

This is, of course, based on the assumption that the brain is like a muscle that can be worked for strengthening. This assumption itself is sketchy enough, but even if we assume it is true, is it worth it? High school English is filled with difficult analysis, even for works that are deemed interesting. So I can easily make the argument that even if Shakespeare is “especially good” for your brain, without Shakespeare the curriculum is already good enough for your brain. There’s also the problem that Shakespeare can prove to be too difficult. An obese man cannot lift the entire stack of weights on his first exercise. For a good deal of learning to occur, the student should be able to read the text and form his own ideas, and any interaction between student and teacher should start with the student putting out his idea for discussion. If at any time the teacher is telling the student what this and that means, then it is no longer a mental exercise any more than merely memorization and regurgitation, yet this almost always happen. In weightlifting metaphor, this would be akin to somebody cheating by letting someone else manually lift the weights as he push the levers – the point of lifting that much weight would be lost. You see the result when students often will be able to put up a decent presentation, but if the presentation is interrupted by a knowledgeable person who attempts to debate the presenters on their points, then chances are they wouldn’t be able to put up a good debate. This would show that their grasp on the material is really thin.

There’s also an inherent problem with the sequential design flow here. The design flow of learning presented by this defense is that learning is threefold:

1. Learning comes from understanding the text
2. Learning comes from developing ideas through critical thinking
3. Learning comes from communicating ideas through writing essays or making presentations

Of course, if you don’t finish 1), you’re barred from even starting 2) or 3). Any crappy Shakespeare essay is likely the result of not being able to finish 1) and then half-assing 2) and 3), and there are certainly lots of crappy Shakespeare essays. This design flow, though sequential in nature, is still worth it if the benefit from 1) is large enough to offset the weight of losing potential gains in 2) and 3). We know how important critical thinking and communication skills are, and I’m pretty confident in saying that the potential (unlikely) gains in 1) is not enough to offset the potential (likely) losses in 2) and 3).

What we should use the Shakespeare time for instead? Simple. Looking at how horrible the logic structures are in many students’ essays, more critical thinking certainly wouldn’t hurt. We could use the time to offer more chances for critical thinking, bring up more varieties of topics, hold live or written/online debates, and write opinion pieces (good opinions must be supplemented by logic). We could also use the time to offer chances for students to develop their creative side by incorporating creative writing elements into the class. Works of creativity, of course, should not be graded, but instead should be published, displayed, and reviewed by peers. This way, people wouldn’t frustrate at the inherent subjectivity of marks, and instead try their best at writing for the incentives of publication and positive reviews.

Here’s another popular defense:

Not everything that we learn in school is meant to be used in daily life. Of course, very few people find general Shakespearean knowledge to be useful. However, sometimes the value in learning something is not literal, but can be found in the experience and how it affects our mind. Someone who studies and really learns Shakespeare will develop mental synaptic connections that someone who doesn’t study Shakespeare will not have. To say that more simply, learning something that you find difficult will make you an overall smarter person.

If not for the last sentence here, I would’ve said that this defense is the “Shakespeare is magic” defense, but the last sentence makes it more respectable. Mental synaptic connections, however, are developed by any kind of learning. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, thus making this argument moot. There are plenty of texts to choose from that have a similar degree of difficult (albeit in other ways) that are more likely to be enjoyed by high school students.

Next defense:

Once you get past the difficulty of the writing-style (which DOES become easy to read, after awhile) there are great stories and lessons to be learned in the works of Shakespeare.

My first contention is with the assumption that Shakespeare becomes easy to read after a while. From a student’s perspective, this is not enough. Of course, when I read Hamlet in grade twelve, it was easier to read, but not to the point where I can understand every word and meaning and weigh their importance in the story. And it seems that unless I’m able to do that, I will not be able to write good analysis on it. Other students don’t seem to have done a better job than I had. So although it becomes easier to read after a while, the degree of change is not enough to make Shakespeare’s language any less of a problem.

My second contention here is with the assertion that “there are great stories and lessons to be learned in the works of Shakespeare.” I may agree with it if this is limited only to a literary context – as in, all the “lessons to be learned” are literary lessons (i.e. how to craft words to create meaning). However, if we take this literally, then the defender here is basically telling us that:

1. Shakespeare has good story
2. We can learn lessons from Shakespeare’s story (sorta like a “the moral of the story” kinda thing)

And these two assertions are subjective. My subjective position is that we have way better stories that can be considered “good” that “teach us lessons.”

Next defense:

Shakespeare, probably more than anyone else, is responsible for so many of the word nuances, figures of speech, and the word abstracts of the English language. I would feel less articulate if I didn’t study Shakespeare in high school. Sometimes reading his plays may have seemed very tedious but the end result was a more erudite you.

This is a defense that I find quite logical. The idea is that Shakespeare has so much influence in the English language that lots of other works, sayings, and random little things in life make references to Shakespearean works. However, in the same vein of thought, why not teach Greek Mythology? Why not teach the Holy Bible? Meanwhile, I wonder if this defender’s experiences can be generalized as the norm. I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard of a reference to Shakespeare in everyday life. I know they pop up every now and then, but they seem to be so rare that the effect of not recognizing them is negligible.

Here’s another one:

Shakespeare’s themes, characterisations and beauty of language are beyond comparison in my opinion and I think everyone should be given exposure to the master.

Another wholly subjective argument.

To me, “beauty” is a quality that appeals to the emotions. I was never emotionally affected in an impressive way by Shakespeare’s plays. To me, Shakespeare’s themes are poorly portrayed, Shakespeare’s characters are corny and difficult to relate to, if only because I wasn’t trying to become King or avenge a ghost. The characters do not impress me. Instead, I pity their absurdity and extraordinary weakness. Heeding superstitions, cannot let go of a duty that does nobody good… undeserved but stubbornly respected family values… how are these in any way beautiful? Yes, they’re understandable given the context, but the context itself is not very beautiful to begin with.

And Shakespeare’s writing style being beautiful? For a writing style to be beautiful, it either has to be succinct and efficient, or artistically written in such a way that it moves my emotions. Shakespeare is certainly not the former, and it has never accomplished the latter.

The last argument is something that many people says, so I generalize it as follows:

Shakespeare is a valuable piece of art that everyone should read and appreciate.

I’ve admitted that Shakespeare probably has academic value. Value as art? Very debatable. Where is value in a piece of art? Usually, people agree that the value of art comes from two aspects:

1. Art’s ability to entertain people
2. Art’s ability to inspire thoughts in people

A piece of art is better at entertaining people if:

1. People are entertained quickly (i.e. if it’s a joke, people get it quickly)
2. People are entertained greatly (i.e. people are emotionally affected on a deep level)
3. Lots of people are entertained (i.e. it’s not just the crazy pompous professor is affected)

A piece of art is better at inspiring thoughts in people if:

1. People can easily understand it (because confusion does not generate ideas)
2. People can relate other things in life to it (because thoughts are made of connections between ideas)

Clearly, Shakespeare passes none of the above criteria for most people. Shakespeare can be entertaining to people who mentally live in the old times (mostly academics who work with that context a lot), and it can easily inspire thoughts in people who have the experience and background to easily understand it and relate things to it (mostly academics, again). So, if most people can’t see the value, then does the value exist? Yes, but such esoteric value would be rendered insignificant in magnitude.

Ending Thoughts

Well, I’ve presented my case for Shakespeare to be scrapped from high school curriculums and replaced with other material that brings more efficient learning. As for what those other materials are, that’s outside of the scope of this post. It’s pretty obvious that Shakespeare isn’t the best choice for its slot of time, so logically it’s definitely possible to find a better alternative. Leave Shakespeare to the academics, give students something within their abilities, and then maybe they’ll actually learn things from it instead of regurgitating cliched information to pass the essays and waste time in doing so.

Originally posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Recently, I’ve been seeing fliers and posters everywhere. They’re all about some “Does God Exist?” debate between some foreign theistic prof and a UofT atheist prof. After quick glances at the website of this debate, it became clear that once again, we have a debate that tries to go into every detail to answer a question that is of questionable importance in the first place.

“Does God Exist?” certainly sounds like an important question. I too once believed that this is the central, unanswerable question that allows reason to let pass religious extremist militants and religious fundamentalist idiots. I too once believed that because we can’t answer such a question, therefore our prejudice against such behavior are merely individual, subjective, opinions. I mean, certainly, if God doesn’t exist, then nobody would be right in using God as an excuse to perform undesirable actions, whether creating murder in the world, or messing up educational systems, or just being plain idiots. On the other hand, certainly if God does exist, then it doesn’t matter how evil or stupid of actions we perceive them to be, they must be right actions if they are required by God.

As it turns out, the whole topic of religion is one huge unorganized and complicated mess. The question of “does God exist?” is like a figurehead – everyone think it represents the topic, but it’s nowhere near the real important questions we should be asking when dwelling in the topic. In most “Does God Exist?” debates, what ends up happening is that the defenders and attackers of God constantly makes arguments towards various principles of philosophy and science – they go anywhere from evolution to philosophy to thermodynamics and high-energy physics, talking about topics like probability, chance, the Big Bang theory, the beginning of the Universe, etc… It takes people who are well-versed in many disciplines in order to hold ground in such a debate, but for what? Usually, the final goal of the theistic side is to prove that some “intelligent, immaterial, powerful, changeless being existed in a timeless, eternal state beyond the beginning of the universe,” and the atheists obviously want to argue otherwise.

So yea, all that effort, and regardless of which side wins, in the end all we can conclude is that “some entity” with “a few stated properties” exists or does not exist. Very useful… very useful indeed. Of course, this is not to mention the implied uncertainty with terms like “timeless, eternal” which are concepts that theists themselves admit to be absurd and not found in observable reality, and thus only attributable to God, who thus by definition lives in an environment outside of our observable reality (and maybe only in our imaginations). But nonetheless, even if we can answer “Does God Exist?” What good would it do for us to know that some entity of certain features exist or doesn’t exist?

See, a much more relevant question is not whether this “entity” with “a few properties” exists, but rather the question of “What exactly is this entity?” What if I say that “yep, God exists, but is a badass-looking dragon, or a girl named Suzumiya Haruhi.” How would a theist respond? “Absurd?” Maybe, but can you prove that it’s definitely false? Obviously not. Nothing is definitely proven, you say, I’m fine with that, but can you prove that it’s significantly less likely than any of the dominant religions in the world? That becomes much more complicated. Note that I did not ask whether it’s just less likely, I asked whether it is significantly less likely, and many theists fumble here; they either lose reason, or create an argument so large and complicated that few people can truly prove the argument’s validity or falsehood. This question of “Which God?” is much more difficult to answer, and much more relevant than “Does God Exist?” Yet, when I type in “Does God Exist” into Google, I get numerous debate sites, discussion articles, and the like, and when I type in “Which God is Real” or merely a more generic “Which God,” the results are much more ambiguous and random, clearly the less popular of questions.

Why is it that I never see a debate between Christians, Jews, Islamists, Hindus, etc… over whose religion is more likely to be true? Perhaps they can compare evidences and miracles and argue over things like whose holy scripture is more internally consistent. Although, a proper debate would be large and complicated indeed. The world isn’t divided between atheists and theists. The world is divided between atheists, theists of belief 1, theists of belief 2, theists of belief 3, etc… and every gradient in-between. Even within Christianity there are over 38,000 denominations of which many take dramatically different interpretations for how one should behave. And let’s not forget the religions like certain Chinese traditional religions that treats itself more like a philosophy (some “guide to life”) rather than divine, absolute truth. Certainly not all religions adopt a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude. Surely some religions openly encourage the belief in any religion, and surely there are other religions between these extremes as well.

Now, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that all religions in the world does in fact claim a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude, this logically leads to the conclusion that if any religion turns out to be right, all the rest would be automatically wrong. So then, all we have to do is compare evidences, find the most likely religion, and that’ll be our best bet, right? Not likely. Let’s remember what God at this point is. The people who debate “Does God Exist?” tend to define God as some sort of entity that has a few generic properties (e.g. intelligent, immaterial, powerful, etc…), and that’s all we know about God. With such a vague definition of God, we are not very certain about anything as there are endless possibilities. So therefore, even if some possibilities are judged to be more likely than others, we still do not have the ground to say that any possibility is sufficiently probable to make believing in it worthwhile.

Remember, even though religion A might have more evidence than religion B, it does not mean religion A has sufficient evidence to justify belief. In fact, if all we know about God is that God must fit a few general properties, then the possibilities for potential Gods are endless, and the more potential Gods we have, the smaller the “truth probability” of each God becomes. So therefore, if everyone adopts a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude, then the world is screwed, for every single person would have only a tiny probability of ending up in a good afterlife.

It seems that if God exists and is judgmental, then either God has to tolerate other religions, or we’re all pretty much screwed.