Are there rational justifications for belief in a specific religion?

I’ve had this idea percolating in my head for some time, and a Twitter interaction with Randal Rauser has forced me to finally put words down in support of it.

My thoughts are fairly ambitious as far as Counter Apologetics goes, though I’m not yet certain the argument will work.  So consider this a request for rebuttals. 

The idea is that jumping from mere theism to belief in a specific religion is not rationally justifiable. This concept isn’t necessarily new.  

Even if someone is a classical theist, I’m not sure that they can rationally make the jump from a mere theism to belief in a specific religion, like say Christianity. This would entail belief in a whole subset of contingent facts about god and how that god reveals themselves to humanity: 

• God is a Trinity
• Jesus is the “Son” in that Trinity, being fully man and fully god.
• While in human form, Jesus performed miracles and was resurrected from the dead.
• The Christian Bible’s claims about god’s divine commands to humanity are accurate.

The question I have is “What rational basis does a Christian have for moving from theism to belief in these specific doctrines?”

Typically, the argument to go from theism to belief in a specific religion revolves around an argument to believe in certain historical miracle claims. For Christianity this is the argument for the resurrection of Jesus – the central belief of Christianity. 

I’m thinking that this kind of argument is not only unsuccessful, but is utterly unsupportable as a general argument given the facts that we have about the world. 

This is because the argument for the resurrection is an argument for belief in a historical miracle, which is belief in a miracle where the only evidence we have is that of testimony.  But why believe in the resurrection of Jesus when we have other eye witness testimonies of other miracles.  Sathya Sai Baba is a contemporary example of a mystical figure who died this past decade where we can still find living people who claim to have witnessed his miracles.  This is to say nothing of other miracle or supernatural claims of a host of other world religions, the truth of which would contradict the exclusivist claims of most other world religions.

This kind of historical method objection to establishing rational belief in a specific miracle isn’t really new, but it’s not an a-priori objection to belief in miracles in principle.  After all, given the historical method, belief in historical miracles could well be justified if we had a wealth of contemporary evidence for verifiable (to the extent that anything is verifiable) miracles.  

Before I continue I should lay out what exactly would be the difference between “verifiable miracles” as opposed to “unverifiable miracles”. 

Unverifiable miracles are a cheap kind of miracle. Something along the lines of being in a tough but mundane situation, and then having something improbable happen to get you out of that situation after you’ve prayed for deliverance.  The problem with this kind of miracle is that it’s indistinguishable from such a mundane event happening anyway, and it also happens to be commonly reported among believers of mutually exclusive religions like Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, and Hinduism.  After all, if the same kinds of unverifiable miracle stories could be used to justify belief in a host of world religions, it can’t suffice to establish belief in one specific religion over the others. 

These kinds of miracles are also quite a far cry from the kinds of miracles we read about in holy books, particularly the bible.  We have reports of god sending fire from the sky to incinerate drenched offerings and altars.  We get plagues, resurrection of the dead, walking on water, immediate healing of permanent disabilities (lame walking, the blind seeing), etc.   

Another facet of biblical miracles was that they continued to happen.  Jesus and his disciples weren’t a “one and done” type deal when it came to working miracles. These things continued to happen and were witnessed by contemporaries, often multiple times by the same people.

Consider for a moment if the contested end of Mark 16 was actually true, and the way others could know Jesus was risen was that true believers could drink poison without being harmed, or be bit by poisonous snakes and be fine.  Or let’s go with something a bit less dramatic: What if Catholic priests, and only Catholic priests in good standing with their god (ie. no rapists/pedophiles) could actually transubstantiate a bread and wine into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus Christ?  I’m not talking about after eating, I’m talking about having the bread and wine on an altar, praying/ritualizing, and then having it transform into actual flesh and blood.  Let’s assume this material is not actually consumed to keep our thought experiment more palatable. 

Imagine if that had been happening since 33 AD? And over the years as science and technology advanced we would have seen that transubstantiated flesh and blood across the world ended up all having the exact same DNA and genetic markers. It wouldn’t matter if rye and merlot were transubstantiated or wonder bread and a box wine were used.  So long as the priest truly believed and was sanctified as they believe they are now, BAM we get some flesh and blood on Sundays. 

Imagine no other religions could perform a similar kind of feat. Repeated tests in laboratories in controlled conditions always show the sanctified priests can do the job, but the same motions/words by non-believers doesn’t do anything. 

In this case, we would have the kind of inductive evidence required by the historical method to believe in the Christian-specific miracle claims of Jesus’s resurrection.

But of course we don’t have that, nor anything remotely close to it in the actual world. 

The point is that there isn’t anything specific about the historical method or rationality that excludes belief in miracles a-priori, the point is that they could support belief if facts about the contemporary world were different. It just so happens that the world doesn’t support this. 

Note that this is different from an argument from Divine Hiddenness against the existence of a god. After all, perhaps a god exists and it doesn’t want there to be a rational basis for believing in any given religion over another.   

All I’m arguing for is that theists lack a rational basis for believing in a specific religion over others.  

I also don’t think that Plantinga style arguments related to properly basic beliefs are going to save specific religious belief. After all those kinds of arguments are typically advanced in defense of theistic belief, but I don’t think they can easily extend to cover Christian-theistic belief over say Islamic-theistic belief.  After all, once believers are aware of the fact that such an epistemology just as equally covers belief in Islam or Hinduism, how can they trust their intuitions about such complex contingent matters like those involved in specific religious belief to be a reliable guide to the truth?   

This would be compounded by problems posed by the geographic distribution of religious belief. It seems odd to say that the intuitions I formed in a specific culture just so happen to point me to the dominant religion in my area, therefore I’m justified in believing that religion when the same justification is used to justify belief in a contradictory religion on the other side of the world in a different culture.

I think some additional arguments against individual religious beliefs could be leveraged here as well, like the idea that they lack unique practical utility to justify one over the others. This could be fleshed out some more, but it’d only be relevant if the theist was forced to rely on non-rational justifications for specific theistic belief. 

Or I could well be wrong about all this, or perhaps such a demand for rational justification would force me to abandon atheism or naturalism in favor of a metaphysical agnosticism.  Those are bullets I may well have to bite.

I’d just like to hear from those who think I've gone wrong here.