Do its core claims fit together without contradiction?

Yes. The Qur'an invites the test — "had it been from other than God, they would have found in it much contradiction" (Qur'an 4:82) — and fourteen centuries of challenges have not produced one.

The core is a single denial, so internal contradiction is hard to find; the real test is whether full naturalism can carry everything else. Critics name three pressure points — objective morality, consciousness, and the reliability of reason on a purely physical basis — and atheist philosophers respond that these are open research problems within the view, not contradictions of it. Whether that response satisfies is the heart of the theism–atheism debate.

The core is small and holds together: one rule — proportion belief to evidence — applied to one question. The strain falls on strong agnosticism: 'no one can ever know' looks like exactly the kind of confident claim about the unknowable that the method forbids; weak agnosticism escapes the trap, critics and defenders agree, but only by claiming much less.

The pressure points are the Trinity (how is God one and three?) and the Incarnation (how is Christ both God and man?). Christian thinkers answer that these are mysteries, not contradictions: God is one in essence and three in person — one and three in different respects — and the Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as one person in two natures. Analytic philosophers such as Swinburne and Plantinga have defended the formal coherence of both; critics remain unconvinced that 'mystery' is not a polite name for paradox.

Its core — one God, covenant, law, freedom — is coherent, and the tradition flags its hardest tensions instead of hiding them: providence versus free will ('all is foreseen, yet freedom is given'), a universal God bound to a particular people (answered through the Noahide covenant), and above all innocent suffering — from Job to the post-Holocaust debate, where Fackenheim urged defiant faithfulness while Rubenstein rejected the God of history. Judaism keeps these as open wounds rather than contradictions resolved on paper.

Mostly — at the price of great subtlety: rebirth without a self, moral consequences without a fixed agent, and nirvana as neither existence nor non-existence all require the tradition's careful distinctions, such as the «two truths» of conventional and ultimate reality. Buddhist philosophers spent two millennia sharpening these answers; critics reply that the puzzles are managed rather than dissolved. Both the sophistication of the answers and the persistence of the debate are part of the record.

Within each school, yes — Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita are each rigorously argued systems; across them, no, and they said so themselves, debating one another for centuries. The tradition's harmonizing devices — two levels of truth, teachings graded to the seeker — turn the contradictions into a curriculum, but a critic can fairly say that "all paths are true" and "the schools contradict each other" cannot both stand unless one description is demoted.

Largely, yes: one God, one light in all people, ego as the disease, the Name as the cure — a compact system. The strains its own thinkers work on are a strictly formless God who nonetheless speaks in human words; everything happening by God's order while people are commanded to choose; and devotional gentleness beside the sanctioned sword — answered by grace working through the Guru's word, and by the strict last-resort conditions on force.

Mostly, with one live strain — whether neutrality itself can be neutral. Deciding what counts as 'religious,' what counts as 'public,' and where the boundary sits is not a viewless act, so critics call the framework covertly substantive. Defenders answer that the claim was never to stand nowhere, but to give no citizen's creed legal power over another's — a procedural fairness that need not pretend to be a view from nowhere. Whether that answer fully succeeds remains one of the sharpest open debates in political philosophy.

Largely, yes: naturalism plus an ethics of welfare is a simple, stable pair. The pressure point its own philosophers name is affirming objective human dignity while denying any cosmic order that confers it; realists (Wielenberg) and constructivists (Kitcher) resolve it differently, and the tension is acknowledged rather than hidden.

There are admitted tensions: liberty and equality pull apart, and a state that claims neutrality still enforces distinctly liberal values — which critics call a hidden partisanship. Berlin's answer is that ultimate values genuinely conflict and no honest system pretends otherwise; Rawls's is that a 'political' liberalism can be affirmed from many rival creeds. Liberals present these tensions as honesty about a plural world; critics read them as cracks in the foundation.

The core holds together: equal dignity, therefore equal rights. But there are admitted tensions: demanding identical treatment while also valuing women's difference; speaking for 'women' while intersectionality splinters the category; calling gender a construction while grounding claims in women's shared experience. Feminist theory treats these as open problems, debated in print rather than hidden.

Mostly, with one known strain: if every nation deserves its own state, but peoples are intermingled and potential nations far outnumber viable states, the principle cannot be satisfied for all — one people's self-determination can mean another's minority status. Defenders answer with federalism, autonomy, and minority rights short of statehood; critics reply that the tension has repeatedly been resolved by force instead.