Post 2: The Elsewhere, Elsewhen Objection (John Hick, “The Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism”

In this post I will discuss the merit behind John Hick’s “The Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism” and pose a question to which I have no answer.

Here is the segment of Hick’s argument which was provided by my Philosophy of Religion Professor, Tomas Bogardus:

“Religious allegiance depends in the great majority of cases on the accident of birth: someone born into a devout Muslim family in Pakistan is very likely to be a Muslim, someone born into a devout Hindu family in India to be a Hindu, someone born into a devout Christian family in Spain or Mexico to be a Catholic Christian; and so on. The conclusion I have drawn is that a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ is appropriate in relation to beliefs that have been instilled into one by the surrounding religious culture.”

Professor Bogardus formats the argument like this:

“Your religious beliefs were instilled in you from childhood.
And/so, if you had been born and raised elsewhere, elsewhen…
Therefore, you don’t hold your religious beliefs because they’re true. You hold them (primarily) because of factors irrelevant to their truth.
Therefore, your religious beliefs aren’t knowledge.”

First, let me say that Calvinists may simply say that premise three is not true: that where/when one grows up is not an accident and instead one is placed in a Christian family because they were predestined to heaven. However, as a non-Calvinist, I do not support this counterargument.

Here is one counterargument that was discussed in class:
“1 and 2 don’t entail from 3. It’s possible to hold a belief for TWO reasons, one good, one bad. Like if you believe in climate change BOTH because you like to fit in AND because you’ve correctly evaluated the evidence. Either one could be ‘primary’. Or they could be equal.”

I have a few problems with this counterargument, that as a Christian, I hope can be proven wrong. I want to side with the counterargument, but this specific counterargument does not seem true. First, I am inclined to believe that most of the time, people do not believe in Christianity for the “good” reason, but rather simply because they grew up in a Christian home. I think this is a problem, because it casts doubt on the truth of Christianity. I may not be a Christian because I believe Christianity is true, but instead because I have been conditioned to believe that it is true.

This leads me to my second problem, which is that many people, including myself, say that they genuinely believe in Christianity because they have experienced it and reasoned through the logic behind the religious beliefs themself, not just because they grew up as a Christian. In other words, I believe in Christianity in part because that is how I grew up, but more so because I think my morality must come from somewhere, and this is evidence of the truth of Christianity. However, couldn’t Hindus or Muslims make the same argument as to why they believe their religion is true? If this is the case, this makes one’s religion entirely dependent on the where and when one grows up, as long as they have a religion that makes some sense of their morality, and generally makes sense. This casts extreme doubt on my faith as a Christian.

There is one argument for Christianity that has circulated my brain, but I think it is weak. First, I always responded to this doubt of other people growing up in non-Christian families by saying “this is why God calls us to spread the Gospel”. However, I realize now that this response isn’t even an argument. It just avoids the problem altogether.

The question I would pose, with Hick’s argument in mind, is why does the Christian God put certain people in situations where they are not exposed to Christianity? Does this mean Christians must accept that people are predestined? Additionally, I am questioning if what I believe really is because I believe it. How much is simply due to the environment I was raised in?

All roads lead to Rome? Maybe not!

Tim Toady? Yep, that fits like a glove.

Religions, what unites them all?

In my humble opinion the Platonic Form of religion, ignoring Content,

1. Code of ethics
2. Creation story
3. Metaphysical lattice (souls, gods, laws e.g. karma, etc.)
4. Prophecy

All religions have this Form/essence, but differ wildly with respect to their individual contents. So, yeah, a case for pluralism can be made at the level of Form, not so at the level of contents though for the simple reason that they're mutually contradictory.

I think it's more fair to include all religions we've had (and maybe all possible ones). The major religions are around because their truth order is really high. An example is the early christians who took on philosophers then supplanted them (the conception of God by christians was placeholdered by Plato's form of good and aristotle's prime mover in a very pagan society). These stoics, skeptics etc could choose which philosopher to follow and yet they all ended up choosing christianity (with the neoplatonists being the last group of pagan western philosophers).
This phenomenon happened throughout milennia through the burial cult stage, animist, pagan, axial age etc so we can say these aren't just "good true" but they have a universalness of explanatory power that informs diets, ethics, law, politics, economics, ontology, science, math etc. It's a modern perversion to solely assume relative truth to their society they grew up in (and that doesn't really come off as fully accurate anyways, clearly people have disliked their city they've grown up in and cities pay consequences for being wrong regularly).

The first can be rewritten having orders of truth and then a proof of convergence is necessary but I don't think that's hard.

Well, W L Craig has ditched most of them (by far): How Can Jesus Be the Only Way? (Nov 19, 2019; 5m:19s)

^{• Religious Disagreement (IEP)
• Religious Diversity (Pluralism) (SEP)
• Philosophical Implications of Religious Pluralism (Vibha Chaturvedi; 2016)}

It seems like figurative speech or text reading is necessary

^{• pluralism (≈ disjunction) necessarily includes contradictions
• perennialism (≈ conjunction) necessarily shrinks to all-but nothing}

I guess some sort of non-specific deism, or "spiritualism", or whatever, might work (technically) in some way, but you're not going to get all the elaborate religions under one roof like so.

I've been interested in John Hick and often quote from his online article Who or What is God? I'm religiously unaffiliated although I have a long interest in Buddhism and have practiced meditation along Buddhist guidelines. I'm from an Anglo and nominally Christian background although my birth family was religiously indifferent. I'm drawn to what I suppose could be called spirituality in a general sense.

However, couldn’t Hindus or Muslims make the same argument as to why they believe their religion is true? If this is the case, this makes one’s religion entirely dependent on the where and when one grows up, as long as they have a religion that makes some sense of their morality, and generally makes sense. This casts extreme doubt on my faith as a Christian. — Jonah Wong

I think the one aspect of Christianity it casts doubt on is the usual interpretation of John 14:6, "I am the truth, the light and the way', which is generally taken to mean that Christianity is the only true religion and that, therefore, followers of any other religion(s) must be considered damned or at least on the wrong track.

But maybe it's not necessary to intepret it in this way. What if it means, not that Christianity is the only true religion, but that only those who follow 'the truth, the light, and the way' - in whatever form it manifests or incarnates - are 'saved'? That is one of the interpretations of John 10:16 'other sheep that are not of this flock'. (Of course this kind of interpretation is much more intuitively obvious to Hindus than to Christians.)

The alternative - that there is literally only one opportunity for salvation - leads to interminable conflicts as to who or which is 'right'. History is a testimony to that.

@Wayfarer

I am the truth, the light and the way. No one comes to the father except through me. — Jesus (John 14:6)

:fire:

Of late, I've been noticing that my ship seems to have drifted into the gravity well of Christianity. I'm left-handed and so the sign of the cross I do is the mirror image of the standardized way it's supposed to be done. It feels so natural to go right, left, forehead, heart and go the father, the son, and the holy ghost sotto voce...as if I've done it my entire life. Not a Christian here!

Anyway, pluralism seems to imply that the goal is the same (union with Allah/God/the Tao/Brahman/nirvana), the difference being only in the yana (vessel/ship/vehicle). So, different religions are like different employees at Google HQ commuting to office on cycles, bikes, cars, buses, trains, chopper, private jet, you get the idea. The all-knowing Google Rinpoche!

Hey don’t put those words in my mouth!

Hey don’t put those words in my mouth! — Wayfarer

I heard it from you. Imprinting, sorry!

I would be pleased if you re-attributed that quotation to the original source.

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. — Jesus (John 14:6)

thank you.

An excerpt from John Hick's essay Who or What is God?

(The) distinction between the ultimate divine reality and its humanly thinkable and experienceable form (or forms) is...found within each of the...great traditions. To refer to these very briefly, Advaitic Hinduism distinguishes between nirguna Brahman, which is the totally ‘formless’ or transcategorical Ultimate Reality, and saguna Brahman, which is that same reality as manifested within human experience as the realm of worshipped gods and goddesses. The trikaya doctrine of Mayahana Buddhism distinguishes between the utterly transcategorial dharmakaya and its manifestation in the realm of the heavenly Buddhas (the nirmanakaya), one or other of whom becomes incarnate on earth from time to time. The Jewish mystics of the Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbala distinguished between Eyn Sof, the Infinite, and the God of the scriptures. The Sufi mystics of Islam distinguished between the ineffable ultimate reality, Al-Haqq, usually translated as the Real, and the revealed God of the Qur’an. Thus al-Arabi says, ‘God is absolute or restricted as He pleases; and the God of religious beliefs is subject to limitations, for He is the God contained in the heart of His servants. But the absolute God is not contained in anything . . . Thus, He is not known [as Allah] until we are known’ (The Bezels of Wisdom, 92).

Now I want to suggest that this generic distinction within the mystical strand of religion worldwide between, on the one hand, the transcategorial – or if you prefer the older term, the ineffable – Godhead or the Real and, on the other hand, the form or forms in which that ultimate reality is manifested within our human conceptual frameworks and modes of experience, makes possible a religious interpretation of the data of the history of religions.....

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.

What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. — John Hick, Who or What is God?

So god, nirvana, brahman, etc., are simply various ways of talking about the same thing or even different aspects of the same thing, this thing being some kind of transcendent truth/force/principle/being/the divine/the sublime/The One.

What puzzles me though is this: The common ground, as you've described it and as I've outlined above, has been identified to the extent possible with our minds (limited as they are to only the evident, the obvious, the stuff that hits us in our faces), but we haven't been able to pinpoint why exactly religions are so different from one another. Does it have anything to do with culture, race, gender, perhaps geography?

I think the answer is, of course. The 'Axial Age' is identified as the centuries from around 8th to 3rd BC. At that time, of course, the civilizations of China, India, and the Middle East had developed completely separately from one another, although there might have been trade along the Silk Road and so on. But Buddhism, for example, had no exposure to Biblical culture and vica versa, they dwelled in separate worlds, to all intents. One of the features of the modern period is that now all of these collide, it's a melting pot of global cultures, but that happened very, very recently in historical terms.

Also it's a mistake to fall for 'lazy syncretism' - and I don't think John Hick would do that. Lazy syncretism says that all religious and philosophical cultures are somehow the same, when they're really very different and unique in their own inimitable ways. They may have much in common and in some sense a common core of ideas but it ought not to be over-stated.

Rewind to 10,000 BC and we were small fry, just a handful of homo sapiens tribes that slowly split into different groups and settled in different locales. Over millennia, each of these, in isolation, began to evolve unique cultures. The question was the same: What on earth means all this? The answers, however, were very different, so different in fact that when we looked at the answers, we get the impression that more than one question was asked.

The only sense I can make of it is this: lacking an objective answer to such a difficult question, the only alternative left was to do it subjectively; hence the rich variety of replies to the same query. I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that religions are, by and large, perspectives offered by different peoples to the question of all questions, to reiterate, what means all this?

Religion again! Ill be damned! What's all the talk about religion the last two weeks? Every religion is part of the total religious jigsaw picture. Every religion is part of the heavenly truth.

Mix all of them together, and the full syncresis is realized. It will be too much for one person to bear. Maybe a new abstract will do.

So god, nirvana, brahman, etc., are simply various ways of talking about the same thing — Agent Smith

Question is: what is that same thing? Having taken a look in the eternal heavens? Do we know the plans the gods had in mind when they created the worldly realm? Are they the moral imperators? Why should they create a universe for us to morally conform and act as they want? Did they create the universe in the image of their own and the diversity of the gods, reflected by the multitude of universal species? Are we just mortal and recarnatable creatures acting out the eternal heavenly games in universal realms? Is the universe a carbon copy of heaven but devoid of the power of creation? Are we here for their enjoyment? Do they just watch us, laying on their backs in heavenly pastures, eternally enjoying their creation projected on the heavenly heavens? Are the homonoid-gods hiding for their fellow gods?

"And then the clouds break. A ray of sunlight, Gloria!
As if a promise, some strange kind of Euphoria!
And in my darkness, a ray of sunshine, Gloria!
Some strange kind of Euphoria!

Like Orpheus don't look back
Best years are waiting for us!"

But maybe it's not necessary to intepret it in this way. What if it means, not that Christianity is the only true religion, but that only those who follow 'the truth, the light, and the way' - in whatever form it manifests or incarnates - are 'saved'? That is one of the interpretations of John 10:16 'other sheep that are not of this flock'. (Of course this kind of interpretation is much more intuitively obvious to Hindus than to Christians.) — Wayfarer

No, this is still a Christian rendition of a Hindu view.

A Hindu view would be something like: God is the source of all religions. People are born into a particular time, place, and religion according to their spiritual acumen (as developed in previous lifetimes). God gives people a particular religion according to their spiritual acumen.

Which is why in Hinduism, among other things, preaching to outsiders and religious conversion are unintelligible concepts.

Too many questions. :smile:

What I can say is this: In the dark, the mind loses control; the unknown is flooded with possibilities. It's like an MCQ exam, only the choices are so many, infinite some even say, that we're unable to finish reading the question, forget about answering it.