Mark Brown A Religiously Ambiguous World
Many undergraduate philosophy teachers
have encountered a certain kind of bright student. She was raised in a small,
mostly evangelical community where fundamentalist Christianity was taught from
the pulpit and practiced in school and in her own family. For as long as she
can remember she has accepted Christ as her savior and tried to live a good
Christian life. In philosophy class, she discovers that scholars disagree about
whether the traditional arguments for the existence of God are any good; and
that the arguments against religious belief, including the problem of evil and
the arguments for accepting a competing apparently incompatible scientific image
of the world, while disturbing to a believer such as herself, are themselves
inconclusive. She learns to apply Wainright’s criteria for comparing worldviews
and concludes, with Wainright, that neither naturalism nor theism is clearly
superior in explanatory power, simplicity, or fruitfulness.
As far as she can see the world may be an expression of the love of God as she
has always believed, or the world may be like that philosopher Bertrand Russell
says, “a product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving.” Her world
has become religiously ambiguous.
The ambiguity does not end there.
Advaitic Hindus, she learns, marshal impressive but inconclusive arguments
against both naturalism and theism. Their philosophy strips the world of its
natural properties and personal characteristics, leaving only the infinite
being-consciousness-bliss of Brahman. Her understanding of the Buddhist
critique of Hinduism calls into question the idea of Brahman, and the idea of a
personal god, and the idea of a natural world; and puts in its place a
startlingly fresh worldview in which all elements of experience, including her
sense of self, are aspects of an interconnected whole which can be apprehended
only in an altered state of consciousness known as nirvana. The more she learns
of the world’s religions the more she sees the Christianity learned in
childhood as just one way to interpret the world religiously.
Her
world now is doubly ambiguous: She can avail herself of the best scientific
theories available to interpret the world naturalistically, or she can adopt
some kind of religious philosophy. Both make sense of her experience; neither
can demonstrate the falsehood of the other. If she opts for a religious
worldview, she confronts a second ambiguity. Now she must choose somehow from a
bewildering array of religious philosophies. Each provides a coherent worldview
in its own terms; all promise a better life; and none is demonstrably true or
false.
I
Her philosophy teacher can supply three
responses to her quandary. She could retreat into an informed Exclusivism,
insist that the faith of her fathers is mostly true, and that other religious
philosophies are false except insofar as they overlap with her own religious
orientation. She may feel entitled to such a position by Swinburne’s Principle
of Credulity: One is entitled to trust one’s apparent epistemic experience in
the absence of defeating conditions.
Since she experiences the presence of the Lord, and she has no reason to think
she is insane or that the Lord does not exist, she is within her epistemic
rights to believe the Lord is present.
Her philosophy professor may remind her
that she must play fair with the Principle of Credulity. If it is rational for
her to believe in Christ on the basis of her Christian religious experience,
then it is rational for a Muslim to believe in Allah or the basis of her
Islamic religious experience and rational for a Shaivist Hindu to believe her
religion on the basis of her experience of Shiva. Our bright student’s own
religious experience may be so compelling that she believes that these other
people must be mistaken in some unnoticed way, but if she also rejects the
image of an infinitely loving God condemning the vast majority of humanity for
an honest mistake, her philosophy professor might suggest an ecumenical
Inclusivism in which true belief is a sufficient but not necessary condition
for salvation.
She could regard good Hindus,
Buddhists, Moslems and Jews as “Anonymous Christians,” saved by the Blood of
the Lamb, even while they believe in the false gods of Shiva, Allah, Amida and
Yahweh. The situation may be like the one described by that Catholic theologian
Karl Rahner. Imagine, her
philosopher teacher suggests, a small town in which every citizen receives a
large monetary gift from an elderly lady who wishes to remain anonymous. Some
people know who she is and may approach her for special favours, others mistake
their benefactor’s identity but gratefully do their best to use their gifts
well. The lady is like the Inclusivist’s Christ, a benefactor known to some but
not all; the people who know are Christians; those who guess wrongly are
Anonymous Christians. Everyone is benefited by the lady, and saved by Christ, whether
they know it or not.
The
ambiguity returns full force when her philosophy professor tell her of a
parallel Buddhist Inclusivism which accepts eighty-four thousand religious
creeds and practices as skillful means to achieve Enlightenment; and of an
Islamic Inclusivism which holds that Allah sends a prophet to every people; and
of a Vaishnist Hindu Inclusivism in which Vishnu incarnates himself from age to
age whenever chaos threatens. If she can be brought to see Christian
Inclusivism as an unacceptably arbitrary expression of ethnic pride, her
philosophy professor may suggest some form of religious pluralism as an
attractive middle ground between an external, naturalist interpretation of the
history of religion as the history of an illusion and an internal Exclusivist
or Inclusivist interpretation of religion from the standpoint of a particular
faith community.
II
Even a cursory survey of the world
religions reveals a widely held distinction between a transcendent reality
exceeding all human conceptualization and the human experience of that reality.
Meister Eckhart’s distinction between the Godhead and the Living Christ,
Sankara’s contrast between Brahman Nirguna and Ishwara and the gap in Mahayana
Buddhism between the Emptiness of Sunyata and the Pure Lands of the Bodhisattva
Amitaba are parallel expressions within major religious traditions of the
pluralist impulse identified most closely with John Hick in contemporary
philosophy of religion.
Hick argues that the great religious traditions make contact with the same
transcendent reality, each encountering the divine through culturally
conditioned forms of thought and ways of life but all offering alternative and
equally effective paths to a limitlessly better life. Hick designates the
inexperiencable religious ultimate the Real, a postulated divine noumenon that
serves as the focus and intended common referent of Christ, Ishwara, Amitaba
and other culturally shaped religious phenomena. Religious traditions are
understood as vehicles to a limitlessly better life, whether this is
interpreted as personal immortality in a world without evil, timeless communion
with God or mystical apprehension of the unity of the deepest self with a
universal divine reality. In each case, religiously mediated contact with the
Real leads to freedom from the futile search for personal fulfillment and to a
new life centered upon phenomenal manifestations of the transcendent, and
suffused with a deeper and more profound happiness than can be found in the pursuits
of ordinary life. In contrast to this cosmic optimism, Hick argues that
naturalist ontologies fall into an unintended elitism in which only a tiny
fraction of humanity achieve the moral and spiritual growth of which they are
capable while the vast majority of people lead lives of unremitting hardship,
leavened by just enough happiness to make possible grief and tragedy. If the
natural world is all that there is, then the radically defective character of
the lives of many human beings is not and cannot be redeemed by any
compensating good.
The pluralist response to the
ambiguities experienced by our bright student occurs in two stages. First, our
student must resolve the Naturalist Ambiguity: Should she take a skeptical
stand outside religious belief and practice; or should she adopt a religious
worldview in which the natural world is conceived as the expression of an
independently existing divine reality? Assuming she can justify somehow a
religious world view, she now faces the Ambiguity of Religious Diversity:
Should she stick with the Exclusivist Christianity on which she was raised, or
should she try to switch to one of its Exclusivist competitors, or perhaps try
out some form of or Inclusivism, maybe Christian, maybe something else
entirely?
How can the Pluralist help her to make
the call? Hick deploys both a Perceptual Ambiguity Model of religious ambiguity
and a Gestalt Shift Model, the first appropriate to the Naturalist Ambiguity,
the second to the Ambiguity of Religious Diversity. On a Perceptual
Indeterminacy Model, the reality of the purported referent and the aptness of
the descriptions are crucial. For example, as seen from a boat offshore on a
stormy night, a flashing light on the horizon might be the beacon of a lighthouse
on the shoreline, or sheet lightning in a cloudbank. Further experience might
tip the balance in favor or one or another interpretation: The rumble of
thunder supports the cloudbank hypothesis; periodic flashes favor the
lighthouse. As the boat approaches, the dark outline on the horizon will turn
out to be a cloudbank or the shoreline or perhaps something completely
unexpected, but one interpretation or another is and always was the right one.
In this case, the ambiguity dissolves once the right kind of information
becomes available.
Similarly, intimations of an unseen
presence may be experienced as the guiding hand of the Heavenly Father or as
the internalized voice of dear old Dad. How might the Perceptual Ambiguity
Model be applied in such a case? Specifically, what possible evidence could tip
the balance in favor of the Real? Hick proposes two forms of confirmation:
religiously mediated human transformation in this life, and eschatological
verification in the next. Eschatological verification is central to the
worldview of our bright undergraduate. It is the idea that after death human
beings might endlessly experience a perfected state of such complete
fulfillment and powerful sense of connection to ultimate reality that the
plausibility of the naturalistic hypothesis diminishes to zero. In such a
state, the truth of the religious worldview would be so overwhelmingly evident,
to erstwhile atheists as much as to theists, that the Naturalist Ambiguity
would simply vanish.
We all must await the eschathon for
decisive confirmation of the religious hypothesis, but Hick suggests that there
may be indirect evidence in this life. Indeed, given the inexperiencable
character of the Real, only indirect evidence could be available. It is a
striking fact, calling for an explanation of some kind, that all over the
world, culturally shaped religious phenomena enable millions of people to make
the transition from a morally flawed self-centered life to a deeply fulfilling
life centered upon what they understand as the Transcendent. Since all
religious phenomena are the products of specific cultural and historical
conditions, the pluralist urges that the most likely common source of
transformation is something that transcends the particularities of the human
condition. The best explanation for the pragmatic success of the major world
religions as vehicles of self-transcendence, according to Pluralists like Hick,
is that they effect an alignment of the human person with an independently
existing divine reality.
Both
forms of evidence for the Real are open to telling external objections. Many
philosophers argue that life after death is a conceptual impossibility; and a
number of sociological, psychological and philosophical theories more economically
explain the psychological effect of a religious form of life; but rather than
enter into the philosophical thicket of the conditions of personal survival, or
attempt to adjudicate competing explanations of the origins of religious
experience, we should look at the other half of Hick’s response to the problem
of religious ambiguity. Religious pluralism, it turns out, falls victim to
internal objections that render the external objections moot.
III
Hick clearly wishes to avoid the
subjectivist implications of the Gestalt Shift Model for the Naturalist
Ambiguity. Is a zebra a white animal with black stripes, or a black animal with
white stripes? Is the drawing a duck or a rabbit? When the duck’s beak is
interpreted as rabbit ears the eye realigns the line drawing as an image of a
rabbit. If the religious interpretation of the world is optional in this way,
depending not upon the way of the world but upon the choices and attitudes of
human beings, the ontological status of the religious ultimate loses significance.
The existence of the Real, or God, or Brahman Nirguna would make no difference
to anyone because the life of the believer and the life of skeptic are governed
by social and linguistic practices internal to a chosen form of life. Religious
life would continue just the same in a natural world in which religious
practices enable some people to achieve a form of self-transcendence.
A Gestalt Shift Model of the Naturalist
Ambiguity is incompatible with the more robust realism of Religious Pluralism.
The Real must exist independently to perform its unifying function as common
object of devotion, ultimate source of human transformation and final guarantor
of the cosmic optimism of the world’s religions. Matters are different when it
comes to the Ambiguity of Religious Diversity. A Perceptual Indeterminacy Model
leads directly back to an Exclusivism or Inclusivism in which religious
traditions attempt to demonstrate their superiority to one another. Hick argues
at length that this is a hopeless task, Summa Contra Gentiles
notwithstanding.
Religious traditions advance three
principal kinds of claims, historical, metaphysical and soteriological, none of
which is open to decisive confirmation or falsification. The paucity of data
regarding the founding and key events in the history of each of the world’s
religions generates interpretative ambiguity, despite centuries of intensive
scholarship. The metaphysical claims are settleable in principle, but as a
practical matter the conceptual, ontological and empirical issues at stake are
so complex and interdependent that a final resolution is nowhere is sight.
Finally, the paths to salvation, enlightenment or liberation staked out by the
world religions all are embodied in mythic, metaphorical and multiply ambiguous
texts that defy definitive readings. Hick concludes, not unreasonably, that the
world religions offer alternative, and so far as anyone can tell, equally
effective vehicles of human self-transcendence.
Non-realist philosophers of religion
such as D. Z. Phillips and Don Cuppit embrace this conclusion.
Non-realists interpret religious language as an expressive network of symbols
that gives meaning to daily life, or evokes a vivid awareness of spiritual and
moral ideals, or enables people to transcend their limited and egocentric
standpoint and achieve the perspective of eternity. The choice between Buddhist
or Christian or Moslem or Hindu faith communities is entirely pragmatic, an
unforced Gestalt Shift among religious worldviews, each a self-contained form
of life, none commensurate with the others, and all functioning as effective
vehicles of human transformation. Our bright student might recall William
James’s advice: Genuine choices in religion are live wires, making an electric
connection in the mind of the person.
She can, it seems, go back to her small town church, sing the hymns and bow her
head in prayer all the while translating the pastor’s literal meaning into the
mythological language of religious non-realism.
A
pluralist like Hick, who puts something called “The Real” at the center of the
world, cannot rest content with the metaphysical neutrality of Gestalt Shift
religious ambiguity. A Religious Gestalt may bring in its train profound
psychological consequences, but it does so without metaphysical commitment to a
religious ultimate. If Hick is to establish the ontological claim that the Real
mediates religious experience and bestows upon alternative religious traditions
their transformative power, he must somehow bring the Perceptual Indeterminacy
Model to bear upon the Naturalist Ambiguity.
IV
Recall that the Perceptual
Indeterminacy Model of the Naturalist Ambiguity rests upon two kinds of
disambiguating evidence: the explanatory power of the pluralist hypothesis that
the Real inspires and empowers religious phenomena, and eschatological
verification of the existence of the Real. Eschatological verification
represents the Realist impulse in Hick’s thought; the pluralist hypothesis
reflects his broadly Wittgensteinian orientation; together they make an
unstable mix, each undercutting the other. Consider first the fit between
eschatological verification and the pluralist hypothesis. The Pluralist
Hypothesis defines the Real as the transcendent source of religious experience,
itself beyond all human experience, whether conceptual, perceptual or mystical.
This implies that if the Real were experienced in linguistic, or perceptual or
mystical consciousness after death, the experience might convey information about
a phenomenal manifestation of the Real—about Krishna, or Allah, or Amida, or
the Holy Trinity—but the experience could not have as its object the Real
itself. A heavenly encounter with the Risen Christ would be just one more
experience of a phenomenal manifestation of the divine and no more resolve the
Naturalist Ambiguity than do similar earthly visions. Indeed, the Naturalist
Ambiguity would be duplicated in Heaven. Numinous, apparition and mystical
experience might be commonplace in the afterlife, but they would provide no
more direct evidence for the existence of the Real than their rare counterparts
on earth.
Neither
would the experience of a limitlessly better life in itself resolve the
Naturalist Ambiguity. One might interpret this state of affairs as evidence of
benevolent design but one might just as well conclude that the natural world
was more benign than one had previously believed. Even if injustice, disease,
accidental death and other forms of humanly experienced evil had no place in the
next life, there is no evidence that religious consciousness becomes more
compelling in nearly just, safe and healthy societies. On the contrary,
societies such as Medieval Europe and Brahmanic India combine nearly universal
religious fervor with systemically unjust social institutions and harsh
material conditions of life. It is in affluent liberal democracies with
functioning systems of public health that the churches are empty and the
pulpits vacant. Assuming that eternal bliss leaves human curiosity intact, post
mortem inquiry into the laws governing the afterlife would give rise to
competing (super)naturalistic theories of the world which make no mention of an
unexperienced religious ultimate. To her dismay, our pluralist student, now
face to face with Jesus Christ, is confronted with the same ambiguities that
troubled her in philosophy class.
Notice also that the explanatory power
of the pluralist hypothesis is inconsistent with the Hick’s theistic model of
eschatological verification. A religious ultimate revealed in an afterlife
would discredit many religious forms of life, including such important
traditions as Theravadan Buddhism and Advaitic Hinduism. The Buddhist doctrine
of anatta directly challenges the Western theories of personal identity
upon which eschatological verification depends, as does the Advaitic Hindu
doctrine that the Atman, one’s deepest self, is and always has been identical
to the infinite being-consciousness-bliss of Brahman. For both traditions, the
notion of a separate and continuing self who confirms in the next life the
religious interpretation of the world constitutes a barrier to enlightenment,
not its culmination. Hick’s Perceptual Indeterminacy Model of the Naturalist
Ambiguity presupposes a theistic Exclusivism or Inclusivism at odds with the
metaphysical neutrality of the pluralist hypothesis.
The
Pluralist response to religious ambiguity as developed by John Hick thus
confronts a dilemma. Pluralists can interpret The Ambiguity of Religious
Diversity from within a Gestalt Shift Model, or Pluralists can interpret the
Naturalist Ambiguity from within a Perceptual Indeterminacy Model, but
Pluralists cannot deploy both models simultaneously. If the Pluralist applies a
Gestalt Shift Model to religious diversity, then no perceptual, conceptual or
mystical experience can confirm claims about the religious ultimate. Religious
Pluralism becomes metaphysically indistinguishable from Religious Non-Realism.
If, on the other hand, the Pluralist applies a Perceptual Indeterminacy Model
to the Naturalist Ambiguity, in the form of eschatological verification of some
identifying feature of the religious ultimate, then the Pluralist implicitly
rejects the metaphysical neutrality of the Gestalt Shift Model. Either way, Pluralists
fail to stake out middle ground between Exclusivism, Inclusivism and
Naturalism.
V
What’s a bright undergraduate to do? I
think the failure of this most sophisticated version of Religious Pluralism
implies that there is no neutral posture between rival comprehensive worldviews
and no alternative to the rough and tumble of substantive philosophical
argument. The trouble began with a misapplication of Swinburne’s Principle of
Credulity. One may be entitled to trust one’s epistemic experience in the
absence of defeating conditions, and one should extend the same courtesy to
others, but doing so implies only that other people are justified in their
beliefs, not that everyone’s beliefs are equally true. Given different initial
information, people can be justified in believing contradictory things, but
logic dictates that at least one of them is mistaken. If religious experience
provides the same evidential weight to a number of religious traditions, then
one must look to the positive arguments, objections and replies to objections
for and against naturalistic and religious philosophies; adjudicating their
explanatory power, simplicity, fruitfulness and coherence in an uncertain
search for a tentative and provisional reflective equilibrium. This is probably
not what our bright undergraduate wants to hear, but the best advice might be:
Get used to it. Philosophy is drenched in ambiguity. All anyone can do is
grapple with competing concerns as honestly, thoroughly and creatively as she
can.
William Wainwright, The
Philosophy of Religion. (New York: Wadsworth, 1988).
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography,
vol. III (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 47.
Richard Swinburne, The
Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).
The expression
“Anonymous Christian” comes from Karl Rahner, The Foundations of Christian
Faith (London: Longman and Todd, 1977).
The definitive source
is John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989). Hick responds to his critics in John Hick, Disputed Questions
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Harold Hewitt, Jr., ed., Problems
in the Philosophy of Religion, Critical Studies of the Work of John Hick (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
The lighthouse example
is drawn from Peter Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience (Sidney:
Sheldon, 1979).
D. Z. Phillips, “Faith,
scepticism and religious understanding,” in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Faith and
Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Don Cuppit, Taking
Leave of God (London: S.C.M., 1980).
William James, The
Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York: Longman’s, Green & Co.,
1910).
Gavin D’Costa describes
this implication of Hick’s thought as “Transcendental Agnosticism” in “John
Hick and religious pluralism: yet another revolution,” in Hewitt, ed., Problems
in the Philosophy of Religion.