Christianity Makes Knowledge Impossible

By Ajit Krishna Dasa

Christian presuppositionalists claim that the Christian worldview must be presupposed for knowledge to possible. Unless you accept Christianity, they say, your worldview cannot provide the necessary preconditions of human knowledge and intelligibility.

Here is why they are wrong, and why Christianity cannot provide the necessary preconditions of human knowledge and intelligibility:

-The Christian conception of God is self-contradictory, since it teaches that an all-loving God will punish some of His children for eternity in hell. An all-loving God would never do this. He would always give His children a second chance.

Christians claim that their God is the greatest conceivable being. But we can easily conceive of a greater being, namely a being with similar opulences Who does not send His children to hell for eternal suffering, but Who keeps the door open for His children to chose heaven if they at some point wish to reestablish their loving relationship with Him.

-It therefore follows that the Christian conception of God is not that of an omni-benevolent God, but that of an immoral and evil god. Such an immoral and evil god cannot be trusted to provide the necessary preconditions for truth and knowledge.

I am not claiming that Christians do not accept the Supreme God. My point is that they misunderstand God, and that the logical implications of this misunderstanding is that they end up with a conception of God that is quite the opposite of what they profess to believe about Him.

Christians can still make progress in their love for God, if they are sincere, and thus gradually become purified and attain to the true Krishna conscious understanding of God. But their irrational idea that they alone have the Truth, and that everyone else will go to hell forever is absurd and dangerous.

Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura writes:

“Thinking about the virtues and faults of the world, some moralist monotheists concluded that this material world is not a place of unalloyed pleasures. Indeed, the sufferings outweigh the pleasures. They decided that the material world is a prison to punish the living entities. If there is punishment, then there must be a crime. If there were no crime, then why would there be any punishment? What crime did the living entities commit? Unable to properly answer this question, some men of small intelligence gave birth to a very wild idea. God created the first man and placed him in a pleasant garden with his wife. Then God forbade the man to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Following the evil counsel of a wicked being, the first man and woman tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, thus disobeying God’s command. In this way they fell from that garden into the material world filled with sufferings. Because of their offense, all other living entities are offenders from the moment of their birth. Not seeing any other way to remove this offense, God Himself took birth in a humanlike form, took on His own shoulders the sins of His followers, and then died. All who follow Him easily attain liberation, and all who do not follow Him fall into an eternal hell. In this way God assumes a humanlike form, punishes Himself, and thus liberates the living entities. An intelligent person cannot make sense of any of this.”