Realism

Abstract

Pluralism entails a realist view of religion, but what in turn that view consists in and what it implies for our understanding of religion is hard to determine. At its crudest a realist conception of religion states that there are real things corresponding to religious concepts. Michael Devitt initially defines realism about common-sense and scientific discourse in ontological terms: ‘Realism Tokens of most common sense, and scientific, physical types objectively exist independently of the mental’ (1984, 2). This is to say that realism about common-sense discourse maintains the extra-mental existence of things corresponding to most commonsense concepts. Of science it maintains specifically that there are extra-mental things corresponding to most concepts of unobserved, hypothetical or theoretical ntities. The non-realist in science is one who regards such concepts as having no correspondence with extra-mental reality. Do we want to define religious realism in a precisely similar fashion? Does the religiou realist want to say that most religious concepts have tokens extra-mental reality that correspond to them? Many realists in religion would balk at this, because of the difficulties in supposing that most of the entities spoken of in religious myths exist outside the human imagination, even that there is a one-to one correspondence between them and facets of the transcendent as it anifests itself. The lush on tologies of religious mythology are thought worth pruning by many contemporary adherents of the traditions themselves. Religious realism is more properly a minimal realism, affirming that an extra-mental entity or state corresponds to the fundamental concepts of the ocus of religion, with less fundamental concepts (of angels, spirits and so forth) at best indirectly corresponding to this thing.