Abstract
John Hick has famously argued that the spiritual and moral fruits displayed by adherents of the great religious traditions should compel us to think of these traditions as more or less equally salvific – where Hick understands ‘salvation’ to be “an actual change in human beings from self-centeredness to a new orientation centered in the ultimate divine Reality.” Yet Hick acknowledges that his pluralist intuitions are challenged by the fact – and it is a fact – that many adherents across the spectrum of these traditions claim a privileged status of some sort or other for their respective tradition. This privileged status, it is often believed, is the inevitable result of propositional commitments essential to one tradition that are either not endorsed or explicitly rejected by other traditions. Clearly, this way of privileging one tradition over others proceeds along an epistemic route, as opposed to a practical or ethical route. The attempt to privilege one tradition by arguing that its adherents display significant moral gains over adherents of other traditions, is, according to Hick, a futile one. But Hick takes seriously the logical and epistemic implications of religious diversity and attempts to meet this challenge by offering a Kantian, split-level view – where the central beliefs adopted by the major religious traditions are phenomenally true but noumenally false.
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Notes
- 1.
Hick in Quinn and Meeker (2000, p. 58).
- 2.
For example, he says that “[e]ven if we bracket off all of the religious points of difference between, say, a Christian and a Buddhist, there will be enough shared religious beliefs such that the two parties have grounds to consider themselves epistemic peers” (p. 8). This claim will no doubt strike some readers as hard to sustain. One can imagine a classical Buddhist saying to a Christian, “You’ve got a long way to go towards reaching enlightenment, for you have not yet overcome the illusion of permanence (viz. your belief in an eternal God) when all is impermanent. So I respectfully deny that you are my epistemic peer.” And we can likewise imagine a Christian saying to a classical Buddhist, “You insist that all is impermanent and thereby deny the eternal and immutable Author of all things. Since you fail to grasp a rather essential piece of the storyline here, I must respectfully refrain from taking you to be my epistemic peer.”
References
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Feldman, R. 2007. Reasonable religious disagreements. In Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on atheism and the secular life, ed. A. Louise, 194–214. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hick, J. 2000. Religious pluralism and salvation. In The philosophical challenge of religious diversity, ed. P.L. Quinn and K. Meeker, 54–66, 58. Oxford University Press, New York.
Quinn, Philip L., Kevin Meeker (eds.). 2000. The philosophical challenge of religious diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.
White, R. 2005. Epistemic permissiveness. In Philosophical perspectives, xix: Epistemology, ed. J. Hawthorne, 445–459. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
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Thune, M. (2013). Introduction to the Diversity of Models of Ultimate Realities. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_73
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