Religious pluralism PDF

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Explain John understanding of religious pluralism. Answer: John Hick in his work titled, begins with highlighting the development in epistemology of religion of the problem of conflicting of different religions which has led to emergence of different approach to rationality of theistic belief which ...

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Explain John Hick’s understanding of religious pluralism. Answer: John Hick in his work titled, ‘Religious Pluralism’, begins with highlighting the development in epistemology of religion of the problem of conflicting truth-claims of different religions which has led to emergence of different approach to rationality of theistic belief which centers upon religious experience as putative cognition of God, like sense of divine presence in moments of worship, mystical experiences of direct awareness of God, etc. But Hick questions if such modes of experience count as good grounds for belief in reality of God. Hick states the shift in apologetic as the old apologetic involves an external or third person use of religious experience to an internal while asking if it is rational to infer God from the reported religious experience of others. The new apologetic shifts that experience internally and asks if it rational to believe in reality of God on the basis of their own religious experience. In this manner, the new apologetic invokes the ‘principle of credulity’ and ‘principle of critical trust’ according to which it is rational to trust our experience as corresponding to reality except insofar as we have reason to distrust it, e.g., we do not need a reason to trust sense experience in general but rather a reason to distrust it on particular occasions, and this same principle applies to religious experience as a form of apparently cognitive experience, prima facie it is an awareness of a non-physical divine reality, the critical task is to examine and assess possible overriding considerations. This approach has been presented by William Alston. Hick argues that distrust for religious experience and trust for sense experience can be founded on the following reasons: 1. Sense experience is universal and compulsory, religious experience is optional and confined to a limited number of people, thus, sensory reports can in principle be confirmed by anyone, religious experience reports cannot. 2. Sense experience produces a universally agreed description of the physical world, religious experience within the different traditions produces different and often incomparable descriptions of the divine. The replies for the above objections have been in the following manner: 1. First objection reply: Our basic freedom as persons is not undermined by a compulsory awareness of the natural world, it would be undermined by a compulsory awareness of an unlimitedly valuable reality whose very existence lays a total claim upon us. Thus, the objection’s foundational difference is matched by a corresponding difference between the putative objects of sensory and religious experience. So, appropriately, consciousness of God is not forced upon us as is our consciousness of physical world, as it is possible for many people, due to upbringing or other circumstances, to shut it out. 2. Second objection reply: Alstom claims that as it is rational to base beliefs on religious experience, Christian religious experience entitles those who participate in it to hold distinctively Christian beliefs, similarly for Buddhist and Islamic beliefs. For Alston, this is ‘the most difficult problem for my position’, equally difficult is the claim that core Christian beliefs require no justification because they are ‘properly basic’. His response is based upon the traditional assumption that there can be only one true religion, in the sense of a religion that teaches the truth.

Thus, this reply shifts the debate to the question, ‘What is the true religion?’ According to Alston, as beliefs of each major world faith are equally well based in religious experience, and there are no neutral grounds on which to choose between them, he must rely on his form of religious experience and presume that other forms are delusory. But, the problem arises in Alston’s definition of the situation. For the assumption that only one of the competing sets of religious beliefs can be true conflicts with Alston’s basic principle that religious experience, like sense experience, gives rise to true beliefs. Thus, Alston reverses this basic principle by making religious experience within one’s own tradition the sole exception to the general rule that religious experience gives rise to false beliefs. Hence, the fact of religious diversity undermines the entire argument that religious experience has prima facie parity with sense experience in producing true beliefs. Hick moves on to provide a solution to the above problem by a relation between religions. He begins with the naturalistic point of view which states that all forms of religion is a delusory projection upon the universe of our human hopes, fears, etc. and the truth-claims of the different religions are all false and their conflict with each other does not present a problem. But the problem is acute from a religious point of view regarding the religious experiences and their truth-claims due to which Hick offers a variety of interpretations, which are as follows: a. Truth-claims exclusivism According to this widely held view, there can be only one true religion and that this is one’s own. Others are false as their beliefs are incompatible with the home religion. But a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ is provoked as mostly, one’s religion is selected by accident of birth. Thus, there is a certain non-rational arbitrariness in the claim that the tradition within which one happens to have been born is the one and only true religion. Addition to which are the saving truths of salvation, et al, which seems unfair that this is known to only a group through good fortune. This has been rebutted by an appeal to middle knowledge, which is God’s knowledge of what everyone would do in all possible circumstances, made by some Christian philosophers who propose that God knows every individual who didn’t have chance to respond to Christian gospel and they would’ve rejected it upon hearing. Now, this suggestion can be made from every religion and some Christians can argue that divine grace will count non-Christians as ‘anonymous Christians’ who may receive Christian salvation but the question here is whether there is not still an arbitrary privileging of one’s own religion as the sole channel of salvation. But other religions who are not focused around one religion only are described pluralistic, which are described further. b. The transcendent unit of religions Hick begins with a distinction between esoteric and exoteric religion. Th former, in its core is identical across different religions while the latter consists of culturally conditioned concepts, doctrines, imagery, etc. differ and are indeed at many points mutually incompatible with maintenance of its own unique individuality as each is uniquely individual due to the valid

expression of the ultimate reality that is directly known by the mystics in an experience constituting the transcendent unity of religion with mysticism being the core of religion. For pluralists, it is inadequate that it requires no reformation of the historical religions. Now, given that the discussion has centered upon the question whether unitive mysticism constitutes a direct, unmediated awareness of the ultimate divine reality or if this experience is conditioned by thought-forms of mystic’s tradition as some unitive mystics report union with a divine person and others report union with a non- or trans-personal reality. Based on this, Hick poses 2 questions, which are as follows: 1. Are these differences due to different theological interpretations of a common ineffable experience, or the reports are accounts of genuinely different experiences? Or, 2. Should we hold that a pre-conscious interpretative activity enters formation of conscious experience, so it may be true that mystics of different traditions are encountering the same reality while their actual conscious experiences are characteristically different? c. Multiple aspects and complementarity pluralism Hick notes the merging by stating that Peter Byrne held that there is an Ultimate Reality with various aspects, some personal and non-personal and each of great world faiths arises from awareness of these aspects resulting in ‘different religions with complementary insights into one reality, thus, a fuller account of that reality can be given if these insights are set alongside each other’. Ninian Smart and Keith Ward also stresses the idea of the complementarity of the world religions with Ward affirming a ‘Supreme Spiritual Reality’, different but complementary aspects of it have been revealed within the different world religions and through their friendly interactions, each seeking to learn from others, a ‘convergent spirituality’ may emerge in forms that cannot be known in advance leading to the question if these different ‘aspects’ are that they can coherently be attributed to same reality. This question is addressed by John Cobb in another version of complementary pluralism based on metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead who stated 3 equally ultimate realities, Creativity, God and Cosmos. The focus of theistic religions is God; focus of Buddhism is its stress on transitoriness and ‘emptyness’ is Creativity; focus of primal and contemporary North American religion is cosmos, the physical environment. Cobb states that different religions embodies ‘diverse aspects of totality of reality’. Hick believes it to be a comprehensive proposal with its limitation being that it depends on prior acceptance of Whitehead’s philosophy. d. Polycentric pluralism Hick believes complementary and multiple aspect forms of pluralism to be ‘polycentric’ but Mark Heim offers more explicit version, viewing each of religions as different paths to different ends both in this life and afterlife, e.g., Christians live a Christian life and then eternally in Christian heaven. According to Heim, each person freely chooses the path and the end that they desire for their satisfaction and totality constituting a variety pleasing to God. But Heim’s case is not a version of pluralism as he explicitly holds that Christian heaven is highest and best end state, others being less good. Hick highlights the problem of polycentric theory which is that it is unrealistic to think that each person freely chooses the religion to which they adhere, with its distinctive path in life and afterlife because humans inherit their religion, hence, it is unfair with any idea of just loving God.

Stephen Kaplan offers a theory which uses Bohm’s holographic model and Kaplan states that religion’s different appearance are the different God figures of the theistic traditions and this is the explicate order of reality providing the diversity of deities with Buddhist conception of an ever-changing flow of events while implicate order is unitary, corresponding in religion to nondual Brahman. All these different ‘ultimate realities’, theistic & non-theistic are equally real and valuable. But in usual philosophical terms, these are not different ultimate realities but different aspects, implicate and explicate, of a single ultimate reality. It is to be noted that Kaplan also believes that each individual chooses his or her preferred path which has been found to be unrealistic. Hick poses the question: in what sense are they all equally valuable? e. Kantian-type pluralist hypothesis This hypothesis of Kant is based upon a Kantian-type distinction between the Real (or Divine or Ultimate) in itself and the Real as variously humanly conceived and experience. Kant had introduced the modern consensus that the perceiver always contributes to the form in which the environment is perceived. He sought to identify the concepts in terms of which we order and give meaning to our experience in the activity of bringing it to consciousness. This method can be applied to religious experience with the pluralistic hypothesis being that the Real in itself impinges upon us all the time and when this impingement comes to consciousness it takes the form of ‘religious experience’ or ‘awareness of a moral imperative’. Such experience is diverse depending upon set of religious concepts in terms of which it is constructed. The 2 basic concepts are as follows: 1. Deity, or the Real as personal and the absolute (issued in theistic forms of religion) 2. Real as non-personal (issued in non-theistic forms of religion) But we are not aware of deity in general or of absolute in general. These concepts are schematized or concrete in terms of filled time of history and culture and not in Kant’s system, in terms of abstract time. Hence, human are aware of Vishnu worshipped within the Hindu traditions, etc. Such God figures are personae of the Real, each jointly formed by its universal presence to humanity and conceptualities and spiritual practices of different theistic traditions while the trans- or non-personal Brahman, Niravana, etc. are impersonae of Real are formed similarly but by means of different concepts. The basic Aquinas epistemological principle being, ‘Things known are in knower according to mode of knower’. This hypothesis presents nature of Real beyond the range of our human concepts with western, eastern, and Kantian terms defining it as ineffable, formless, and noumenal Real is humanly experienced as range of divine phenomena, respectively. The criterion for religion judgement for this hypothesis arises within a circular argument which is entered through acceptance of religious experience of one’s own tradition as purely imaginative projection simultaneously, a cognitive response to a transcendent reality, and extension of this principle to other religions, their moral and spiritual fruits being on par with those of one’s own. Such fruits provide a common criterion to recognize salvific transformation of human existence from natural self-centeredness to a new orientation centered in Real, a transformation which takes different concrete forms within different religious cultures. This hypothesis addresses conflicting truth-claims by proposing that they do not conflict as they are claims about manifestations of the Real to different human faith communities, each operating with its own conceptuality, form of life, etc. Hick states the question, if in reducing distinctive belief-systems of different religions from absolute truths to reports of one human perception amongst others of divine reality, it does not

contradict the self-understanding of each, then, is it not inherently revisionary rather than purely descriptive? Hick concludes by stating that in philosophy of religion, the subject of relation between religious traditions present a challenge to a dominant contemporary form of confessional religious apologetic making it inevitable that it will be increasingly widely discussed further....