Religions and Mathematical Sets

A friend called Supraj posed me a question: once you suppose that it's valid to take a leap of faith, how do you know for sure which religion deserves our faith?

Each religion usually says it has and represents the ultimate truth. Mathematically, I would try to represent each one of them as a given set of rules/beliefs. Some of these sets have intersections (like Buddhism talks about decreasing suffering by not being attached to physical stuff, just like Christianity does in many ways).

Your life's mission would be to choose which set of rules to consider as your ultimate truth.

That is where things start to get interesting.

Some of these sets are more "complete" than others.

Buddhism, for instance, doesn't really try to explain the ultimate cause of the universe. It has metaphysical beliefs—karma, rebirth, different realms of existence, etc.—but the question of what ultimately caused everything to exist is not answered.

So the answer to this will still rely on you—and do you know what ultimately caused the universe to exist? No. You may defend that the Big Bang is the answer, but why did the conditions for it exist? Yeah, you don't know.

And the point of taking a leap of faith is exactly to cover the things we cannot know for sure. Otherwise, there's no need for a leap of faith in the first place if you can arrive at every conclusion only based on reasoning and our knowledge of the physical world.

But some religions seem to offer something much broader: once you accept the leap of faith they require, their set of beliefs seems capable of explaining basically everything—why the universe exists, what ultimately caused it, why we exist, what is right and wrong, whether there is something beyond the physical world, and what happens after we die.

Those are the religions I think we should focus our attention on. If we're already accepting that a leap of faith is valid, then it makes sense to look first at the belief systems that use that leap to build the broadest possible explanation of reality.

A rough and definitely non-perfect mathematical analogy would be this:

Imagine a worldview concerned only with questions accessible through ordinary experience as something analogous to the set of real numbers, ℝ.

Real numbers can often be mapped intuitively onto physical quantities.

3 can be represented by three apples.

1/2 can be represented by half an apple.

√2 can represent a physical distance.

Then mathematics extends this system to complex numbers.

We introduce:

i = √(-1)

Imaginary numbers do exist mathematically, but they cannot be represented as directly by ordinary physical quantities in the same intuitive way that three apples represent 3.

That doesn't mean imaginary numbers aren't real mathematical objects. They're completely coherent and extremely useful. They just require us to extend our conceptual framework beyond what is immediately concrete.

And I think religion can be viewed, very imperfectly, through a similar lens.

A religious worldview may extend beyond what can be established through observation alone, making claims about the ultimate cause of the universe, God, the afterlife, or realities outside the directly observable world.

That doesn't automatically make those claims true. It just means we're now dealing with questions that cannot necessarily be settled by looking at the physical world alone.

If I narrow the search to religions that offer an account of the ultimate cause of the universe, the Abrahamic religions seem to be a very complete set of rules/beliefs: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Their sets have huge intersections.

They believe in one God. They believe that God created the universe. They share prophets, stories, moral ideas, and a substantial part of their religious history. 

And then their sets start diverging. Christianity says Jesus existed and is the Messiah—and, in mainstream Christianity, God. Islam says Jesus existed and was the Messiah and a prophet, but not God. Judaism also accepts Jesus as a historical person, but does not accept him as the Messiah or give him the theological role that Christianity and Islam do.

So now we do have a more restricted set of religions to choose from that actually require a leap of faith in answering these ultimate questions.

There is a finite number of religions out there, unless you yourself start trying to invent one—and I can talk about it in the future.

The problem now seems to become:

How do you choose between, for instance, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism?

How do you know which one deserves your leap of faith?

I will write about it in the next article because I'm hungry and need to eat.