(Published: Kai-man
Kwan, “Is the Critical Trust Approach to Religious
Experience Incompatible with Religious Particularism? A Reply to Michael Martin
and John Hick,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 20 no.2 (April 2003), pp. 152-169.)
Kai-man Kwan
In contemporary philosophy of religion,
many philosophers, e.g., William Alston, argue that we should treat religious
experiences as prima facie reliable unless we have reasons to doubt them. I
call this a Critical Trust Approach to religious experience. John Hick and
Michael Martin have argued that this approach is incompatible with a
particularist solution to the problem of religious pluralism. I argue that this
is a misunderstanding of the Critical Trust Approach. I further explore how a
religious particularist who accepts this approach can deal with conflicts
between presumptive data, and argue that the particularist approach to religious
experience is not necessarily inferior to atheistic and pluralist approaches.
The Tension between the Critical Trust Approach and
Religious Diversity
In recent years, there is a revival of the argument
from religious experience among analytic philosophers of religion. John Hick
was one of its early defenders. Richard Swinburne gave it epistemological
sophistication by propounding and defending the Principle of Credulity which
says that if it seems (epistemically) to one that x is present, then probably x
is present unless there are special considerations to the contrary.[i] While William Alston does
not agree with Swinburne on many (minor) points, his Doxastic Practice Approach
to religious experience is structurally similar to Swinburne's. His Perceiving
God is an impressive work which elaborates and defends this approach
by arguing that it is practically rational to regard all socially established
doxastic practices as prima facie reliable.[ii] I will call this kind of
approach the Critical Trust Approach (CTA). The Principle of Credulity
is renamed The Principle of Critical Trust (PCT). The name highlights
two major and interdependent components of this epistemology: 1) initial trust
of our experiences; 2) critical examination of those experiences to see whether
they are subject to defeaters. (The latter component is worth emphasizing
because many tend to associate Swinburne's Principle of Credulity or Alston's
Doxastic Practice Approach with uncritical blind trust.)[iii] According to John Hick,
"Many of us today who work in the philosophy of religion are in broad
agreement with William Alston that the most viable defense of religious belief
has to be a defense of the rationality of basing belief (with many qualifying
provisos which Alston has carefully set forth) on religious experience."[iv]
The most
serious problem that the CTA faces is religious diversity. Four major
approaches to account for the variety of religions and religious experiences
are:
1) Religious Exclusivism/Particularism: only
one world religion[v] is correct, and all
others are mistaken. I prefer the name “particularism” here because the word “exclusivism” has negative connotations. Furthermore, exclusivism
is often defined by Hick and others primarily in terms of salvation: “exclusivism asserts that salvation is
confined to Christians.”[vi] It needs to be emphasized
that religious particularism or exclusivism, as defined here, does not entail
the above view. It is even compatible with the most inclusive interpretation of
salvation, universalism, e.g., a particular interpretation of Barthianism.
2) Religious Inclusivism: only one world
religion is fully correct, but other world religions participate in or
partially reveal some of the truth of the one correct religion.
3) Religious Pluralism: ultimately all world
religions are equally correct, each offering a different, salvific path and
partial perspective vis-a-vis the one Ultimate Reality.[vii]
4) Atheism: all religions are mistaken; there
is no God and no transcendent realm.
What are
the theological implications of the CTA, if any? Does it lead to some
particular theological positions, e.g., pluralism? Is it compatible with, say,
Exclusivism?--- this is an urgent question because in endorsing the PCT, initially
all religious experiences have to be accorded equal weight. Isn't it then
difficult to maintain that only one world religion is correct? As Hick points
out, the challenge is that "the same epistemological principle establishes
the rationality of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc in holding beliefs
that are at least partly, and sometimes quite radically, incompatible with the
Christian belief-system. Belief in the reality of Allah, Vishnu, Shiva, and of
the non-personal Brahman, Dharmakaya, Tao seem to be as experientially well
based as belief in the reality of the Holy Trinity."[viii]
Of course Alston has been keenly
aware of this problem but he maintains two things: 1) although the problem of
religious diversity will reduce the rationality of participating in the
Christian Doxastic Practice, it does not destroy it altogether; 2) the solution
of this problem does not necessarily lead to a pluralist hypothesis like Hick's
theory; his approach is compatible with the rationality of a religious
particularist position.[ix] In a Festschrift
for Alston, several philosophers also advocate a particularist position.[x] In the July 1997 issue of Faith and
Philosophy, Hick attacks these "conservative Christian
philosophers" and a spirited debate between Hick, on the one side and
Alston, Mavrodes, van Inwagen, Plantinga, and K. J. Clark, on the other,
ensued. Hick's main purpose is to show that "we do not yet have any
adequate response from conservative Christian philosophers to the problem of
religious diversity."[xi]
A main argument of his is
that Alston's experience-based apologetics for religion is incompatible with
his exclusivism: "For if only one of the many belief-systems based
upon religious experience can be true, it follows that religious experience
generally produces false beliefs, and that it is thus a generally
unreliable basis for belief-formation": this is then “a reversal of the principle, for
which Alston has argued so persuasively, that religious experience constitutes
as legitimate a ground for belief-formation as does sense experience."[xii] In other words, Hick
thinks that the combination of CTA and religious exclusivism is
self-undermining. This is also a very common objection raised against the
argument from religious experience by atheists. For example, Michael Martin asserts
that the deliverances of religious experiences are so contradictory that as a
whole they are shown to be unreliable. As a result, the Principle of Critical
Trust shouldn't be applied to religious experiences.[xiii] While both Martin and
Hick concur with the incompatibility of the CTA and religious exclusivism, and
thus the untenability of the first approach, they draw different conclusions.[xiv] Martin does not seriously
consider the pluralist hypothesis, and thinks that the conflict between religious
experiences tends to support the fourth approach, atheism. Hick maintains that
a religious interpretation of reality is still possible in the face of the
conflict between religious experiences. However, only his religious
pluralism (the third approach) can save the day for those who do not accept
atheism.
Hick also has other reasons for thinking that the CTA
should lead to religious pluralism rather than particularism, e.g., the latter
is arbitrary and unable to explain the roughly equal soteriological efficacy of
the world religions. In this essay, however, I will concentrate only on the
alleged incompatibility between the CTA and religious exclusivism[xv] which is regarded by D.
Z. Phillips as a devastating criticism of Alston.[xvi] I argue instead that it
is the result of a misunderstanding of the CTA. Alston has already briefly
indicated this misunderstanding: "even if most beliefs based on religious
experience were false, that would not contradict the epistemological claims I
make for religious experience" which is that "its seeming to one that
some Ultimate Reality (UR) is presenting itself to one's experience as phi
makes it prima facie justified that UR is phi."[xvii] However, in view of its
persistence, this objection deserves a fuller treatment. I argue below that the
CTA is indeed compatible with particularism, and also that it is more
consistent with particularism than with Hick’s pluralism.
Applicability of the Principle of Critical Trust to
Conflicting Experiences
The first question we should settle is whether the
existing contradictions between religious experiences make the PCT inapplicable
to them. It is a totally different one from the question: "if we grant
some evidential force to religious experiences, will such conflicts cancel
this force?” Let us first distinguish the PCT from the
following Probable Inference Rule (PIR):
PIR If it seems to me that x is
F, then probably x is F in the sense that it is more often than not the case
that x is F.
A type of experience has type-reliability if more than
half of its tokens are veridical. The applicability of the PIR to a type of
experience is tied to its type-reliability. If it can be shown to be
type-unreliable, then the PIR can hardly be applied to it. In the case when the
tokens of that type grossly conflict with one another, the type-reliability
would be greatly in doubt and hence the PIR is not applicable. So the presence
of massive contradictions do debar us from applying the PIR. However, the
applicability of the PCT is not thereby endangered. To apply the PCT to some
experiences is to have initial trust in them and, if they are defeated,
to salvage as much as possible from them. The PCT does not entail the PIR.
There is no contradiction in saying that we should have initial trust in
conflicting experiences. There is no contradiction even between legitimately
having initial trust in a type of experience and the fact that most tokens of
that type turn out to be unveridical! Since the PCT is often compared to the
presumption of innocence in law, let us consider the following legal analogy.
Suppose in a certain democratic country both the common people and the legal
authority are very cautious in prosecuting others. They will not do so unless
overwhelming evidence is available. So it turns out that 99% of the suspects
were convicted and not even one such verdict was found to be wrong. On the
other hand, the legal procedure adheres strictly to the presumption of
innocence as well. That the above scenario is obviously possible shows that
there is no contradiction between these two statements: 1) each and every
suspect was legitimately presumed to be innocent in the beginning; 2) the
overwhelming majority of the suspects were in fact not innocent. Let me further
illustrate this with the Parable of the Survivors.
Suppose a
nuclear holocaust occurs and the survivors are badly hurt by radiation.
Mutations occur such that during their seeing the proximal stimuli produced by
external objects are always blended with internally generated noise. The
result is that the apparent size, shape and color of a nearby object can vary
for different individuals and can also vary from time to time for the same
individual. The saving grace is that the noise level does not exceed the
threshold which would destroy altogether the capability of object recognition.
So the people can still, with difficulty, know that certain object is
around. The result is a kind of "vision" which can roughly locate a
medium size object nearby but everything else is blurred and unstable. Notice
that the erroneous perceptions are always integrated with the roughly correct
identifications. Phenomenologically speaking, we can't separate these two kinds
of perceptions: the bare recognition of object versus the more detailed
perception of color, shape and size. In this case should those people accord
some evidential force to their perceptions? Suppose they don't and instead they
adopt initial scepticism towards their “perceptions.” Namely, they insist that their perceptions have to be
treated as "guilty until proven innocent." Can they demonstrate the
reliability of their 'perceptions' by another means? Hardly! What about the
availability of tests? There may not be effective tests which have consistent
results. Scepticism results and would rob the people of the only information
they still possess! This consequence seems to be counter-intuitive. Instead it
is plausible to say the PCT is applicable here. By applying it, the survivors
will come to trust their ability to locate medium size objects while not giving
undue confidence to their color and shape perceptions. The PCT is
"charitable" enough here without being unduly uncritical. The idea
here is that although the “perceptions,” described at the highest level of
description, are grossly inconsistent, they do convey information about the
reality at a lower level of description. Indeed the parable is suggestive. It
shows that it is quite conceivable that even though religious experiences as a
whole are not entirely accurate, they can be reasonably informative at a lower
level of description. There is no a priori reason for believing that
contradictions of experiences would entail their total unreliability.
Furthermore,
almost all sorts of experience or doxastic practices produce conflicting
beliefs sooner or later. Empirically speaking no experience which we commonly
regard as reliable is completely free from this problem. (Just think of the
empiricists' "argument from illusion.") So why do we think that the
presence of contradictions in religious experience should debar us from having
initial trust, at least to a small degree, in religious experience? We must
have set a threshold amount of contradictions such that if any epistemic
practice produces an amount of contradictions beyond this threshold, it will be
subject to initial scepticism. In other words, there is a minimum degree of
consistency before a kind of experience can be treated as prima facie reliable.
Unfortunately, it is not clear how this absolute threshold can be
determined. (It is not clear how degree of contradictions can be precisely
measured.) To draw the line with sensory experience alone on the clean side and
the rest on the dirty side seems arbitrary and unduly restrictive. On the other
hand, suppose we take into consideration various experiences and epistemic
practices which do produce contradictory judgments to different degrees, e.g.,
memory, introspection, moral experience, aesthetic experience, logical
intuitions, historical investigation, philosophy, literary criticism,
"revolutionary science" (in Kuhn's sense). It then seems implausible
to assert any absolute threshold of tolerable contradictions. We have yet to
see a good argument for not granting some defeasible evidential force to
religious experiences sheerly because of their alleged contradictions.
However
the degree of contradictions in a type of experience does have epistemic
relevance: it serves as a possible defeater of the prima facie justification of
experiences. If a kind of experience has absolutely no stability and
recognizable consistency, surely we can discount it. Here John Baillie's
comments seem to be judicious. He admits that, in discussing moral judgments,
"if there were no degree of consensus as to what is right and what
is wrong, we might well come to feel that our moral judgments were no more than
individual seeming."[xviii] However he contends that
"when we pass to the higher regions of our experience, to what we have
called our subtler and more delicate awareness, we do not expect universal
agreement.” The middle way he adopts
is that "some considerable measure of agreement, though it is still
not a ‘test of truth,’ is normally a necessary condition of the security of
individual judgement."[xix]
Dealing with Conflicts: Critical Trust versus Absolute
Scepticism
If the above argument is correct, then the PCT is
applicable to conflicting religious experiences, and there is no logical
incompatibility between the CTA and religious particularism. However, the
atheists may still insist that religious particularism is still incongruent or
incoherent (in a broad sense) with the PCT. Unless the particularists can offer
a plausible explanation of how the two go together, they maintain, the
atheistic approach seems superior. The following is a response to this possible
query.
First of all, it is
important to note that the PCT does not license the irrationality of swallowing
a grossly inconsistent set of beliefs. To have initial trust in contradictory
experiences does not commit one to accepting all of them. On the contrary, this
is only the first step to ensure a proper initial base on which we can then
exercise our critical faculty rigorously. When conflicts between our
presumptive data occur, there is a need for critical sifting. (That is why this
approach is called the Critical Trust Approach.) However, in line
with the spirit of the PCT, we should choose the consistent subset of the
presumptive data which has maximum weight. Moreover, even when a token experience
is defeated, we should strive to preserve the elements of truth in it. Before
exploring this process of critical sifting in more details, in this section I
want to defend the rationality of the above way of dealing with conflicting
experiences vis-à-vis
the atheists’ alternative, which seems to presuppose the Sceptical Rule (SR):
SR When experiences or claims
conflict with one another, we should reject all of them.
Should we adopt the SR instead? I don't think so.
Consider the conflict of eye-witnesses’ accounts of a certain event. It would
indeed be irrational to reject all their accounts just because they conflict!
(Contrarily it's ironical that perfect match between independent witnesses may
sometimes induce suspicion.) It seems to be a rational strategy to try to
reconcile their reports as much as possible. For example, a common core[xx] can be identified.
Another example: suppose a fleeting phenomenon led to conflicting reports:
Peter reported seeing a plane, Paul a spaceship, and Mary an air-balloon. It is absurd to suggest that we should reject
all their statements and think that nothing has happened. It is possible that
one of them may be correct. At the very least we should accept the common
content of their experiences. Unidentified flying object (UFO), vague
though it is, is not a completely uninformative term. Moreover, if the SR is
adopted, history would also be imperiled. It is well known that historical
documents are liable to massive contradictions. However, we don't deduce from
this that historical enquiry is utterly pointless and can tell us absolutely
nothing. The job of the historian is to utilize all these materials to
reconstruct the past by harmonizing them without producing too much strain in
the overall interpretation. Consider the
conflicting descriptions of a historical personality. These can sometimes be
reconciled by the idea of perspective. A personality can be multi-faceted and
manifest itself in different ways to different people. However, each person
will usually accord an unduly high degree of ultimacy and immediacy to his
encounter with that historical personality. Removing this aura of ultimacy,
each person's experience of that historical personality can be seen to be true
from his perspective. It is also a commonplace that many historical accounts of
a momentous historical event, e.g., China's Cultural Revolution, are contradictory.
It is difficult to determine the exact course or nature of this event but it
would be preposterous to deny that the Cultural Revolution has happened. All
the above examples count against the sceptical policy and show that conflict of
presumptive data is not irremediable.
Many
critics argue that religious experiences are so contradictory that as a whole
they must be unreliable. The apparent plausibility of this argument hinges on
the ambiguity of the word "reliability." This can be used in a comparative
sense. It is true that when a kind of experience yields more contradictory
beliefs than those yielded by another, the former is less reliable than the
latter. Hence the conflicts between religious experiences do show that they are
more unreliable than, say, sensory experiences, but it does not follow that
they are absolutely unreliable, in the sense that "no information
can be gained from them at all." It is not true that whenever the token
experiences conflict, the whole kind is suspect and hence "unreliable"
in this sense. Even sensory experiences can't pass this test.
In this light we can
evaluate Richard Gale's objection: he argues that religious diversities would
render the PCT, which he calls “presumptive
inference rule,”
inapplicable to religious experiences. He points out that there is "no
analogous diversity of doxastic practices for basing claims about physical
objects on sense experience that differ among themselves as to what counts as
confirmatory and disconfirmatory of a given sense experience being veridical.” He claims that "This is a
cognitively invidious disanalogy that should destroy the requirement to extend
the presumptive inference rule from the sense experience to the religious
experience doxastic practice in the name of the principle of parity. There
should be parity in their treatment only if they are sufficiently
analogous."[xxi] It should be clear that
the objection is invalid because the disanalogy of religious experience with
sense experience in this respect only shows that the former is much less
reliable than sense experience. It would not show the absolute unreliability of
religious experience unless sense experience is adopted as the paradigm. To do
the latter is epistemic chauvinism.[xxii]
Hick's claim that the
particularist interpretation of the conflicting religious experiences is a
reversal of Alston's principle that "religious experience constitutes as
legitimate a ground for belief-formation as does sense experience" is
similarly ambiguous. If it means that the conflicts show that it is legitimate
to apply the PCT to sense experience but not to religious experience, then, as
I have argued, it suffers from the confusion between the PIR and the PCT. If it
means that the conflicts between religious experiences show that sense
experience is a more reliable ground for belief-formation than religious
experience, then Hick is making a true claim which is not a reversal of
Alston's principle or the CTA. Either way, Hick's objection fails.
The distinction
between comparative reliability and absolute unreliability can be further shown
by the following thought experiment. Suppose an alien species possessed a kind
of perception which was 99.99% reliable. One day they landed on the earth and
started to investigate the intellectual powers of human beings. Although they
found that our sense experiences were in fact 70% reliable, the conclusion of
their report read, "Human beings are very inferior in their cognitive
power because their sense experiences are very unreliable.” Is aliens’ judgment justified? Yes, in a
comparative sense; but no, in an absolute sense.
To sum up, we need to distinguish
several senses of reliability or unreliability:
1) Comparative reliability between different types of
experience
2) Type-reliability
3) Type-unreliability:
a)
Absolute type-unreliability:
the type of experience is sheer delusion and reveals nothing whatever about the
reality.
b)
Lower-level reliability:
although the type is unreliable at the highest level of description, it is
reliable at a lower level of description (cf. the Parable of the Survivors). In
this case, the type is a loose type.
c)
Sub-type reliability: it is
also possible that a sub-type of the type-unreliable experience can be
reliable. This can be illustrated by the case of sense experience.
When we look at the deliverances of
sense experience, we find statements about location, shape, size, color, smell,
taste and (felt) temperature of physical objects. According to the PCT, all of
these are prima facie justified. For common sense, a physical object (objectively)
possesses properties of size, shape and location as well as of color and smell.
However, the latter comes into conflict with the scientific view of a physical
object which, according to that view, solely consists of colorless and
odourless particles.[xxiii] It becomes difficult to
see how these physical objects can objectively possess color and smell. One
solution is to make the distinction between primary qualities, e.g., shape and
size, and secondary qualities, e.g., color and smell. The former are really
qualities of the physical objects while the latter only appear to be so.
In other words, this move involves a demarcation of sense experience into two
sub-types: experiences of the primary qualities and experiences of the
secondary qualities. The former are still literally prima facie reliable while
the latter are interpreted as (partly) projections of the mind. Experiences of
secondary qualities are not cognitively irrelevant but they are no longer taken
at face value. Actually the two sub-types of sense experience do not literally
contradict one another. Phenomenologically speaking, we can't distinguish one
type from the other: experience of the whiteness of the paper and experience of
its rectangular shape seem equally real and the two are integrated into a
single experience of the sheet of paper. However, the best explanation of one
type leads to an understanding of the physical object which contradicts
another.
The conflict can be
resolved in various ways. Some deny the conflict is real by offering
alternative interpretations of common sense statements about physical objects.
Others take an instrumentalist view of science. That these views are to some
extent attractive shows that the prima facie evidential force of the
experiences of the secondary qualities is quite strong. It seems very obvious
that the paper in front of me is really white, for example.
Nevertheless, if one thinks that the realist view of science and common sense
is more plausible and the proffered ways of reconciliation are not convincing,
then one has to re-interpret the experiences of color, etc. In my terms, the
prima facie evidential force of these experiences is indirectly defeated by the
best explanation of our experiences of primary qualities. If the above account
is correct, sense experiences are also indirectly inconsistent. (Martin, while
insisting that many religious experiences are indirectly inconsistent, does not
seem to realize that this could also be true of sense experience.) The common
sense interpretation of experiences of secondary qualities is not strictly
consistent with the scientific interpretation of them. The above resolution in
favor of the scientific interpretation seems to reflect the following
principle, The Principle of Conservation:
In resolving conflicts
between experiences, try to adopt the best and simplest explanatory hypothesis
which preserves the maximum prima facie evidential force of the (indirectly)
conflicting experiences.
It should be noted that the above conflict does not
result in a whole scale scepticism of sense experience nor rejection of
science. Neither are the experiences of the secondary qualities wholly
consigned to the realm of illusions nor completely eliminated. Those
experiences are still real and they reflect something real, i.e., dispositional
properties of physical objects. Again, it shows that conflicts of experience do
not necessarily result in whole scale rejection. Why isn't this also true of
religious experiences? Even if my account is not actually true of our sense
experience, it can still illustrate a rational strategy to deal with
conflicting presumptive data.
My
conclusion is that the CTA’s rules for sifting data are indeed rational
strategies which are employed by us in daily life and by scholars in various
disciplines. The need for such strategies is undergirded by the recognition
that our cognitive input is fallible yet not totally unreliable. Knowledge is
not an all-or-nothing matter. It is also untrue that either we have to accept
an experience in its totality or reject it in toto. Generally speaking,
the CTA seems to be a more realistic approach than the atheists’ Sceptical
Rule. Moreover, when we apply the former to conflicting experiences, various
kinds of realism rather than whole scale skepticism may often be the outcome.
Let us apply this approach to conflicting religious experiences.
Religious Experience as a Loose Type
Armed with the above distinctions and principles, we
can come back to Martin's conflicting claims objection to religious experience:
"Swinburne advises us when considering a new sense to assume first that by
and large things are what they seem. ... this initial assumption must be
quickly abandoned in the case of religious experiences. Religious experiences
are often conflicting, and thus things cannot be what they seem. We must
distinguish what is veridical and what is not, and there is at present no
non-question-begging theory that enables us to do this."[xxiv] Suppose he is correct
about the degree of conflict. Does it follow that religious experiences as a
whole have no evidential force at all? If my arguments are correct, this
conclusion is unwarranted. The conflicts of religious experience may indeed
show the type-unreliability of religious experience at the highest level of
description. However, I will argue that religious experience is
nevertheless a loose type because a common core can be extracted from the
diverse religious experiences at a lower level of description.
Let's elaborate the
Parable of the Survivors. Consider their “perceptions” of the sun. When they look at the sun, they see some
object up there but one sees it as round, another as square, and so on.
Even worse, for an individual he sees it as square on Monday but round on
Tuesday and hexagonal on Wednesday and so on. Obviously an object can't be both
round and square at the same time. So the object cannot be identical to
what it seems most of the time. Clearly the PIR can't be applied here. However
the application of the PCT is another matter. If they accept this and apply it
to their conflicting perceptions of the sun, they would at least arrive at the
conclusion that there is a bright object of some shape up there. There
is no need to adopt a reductionist account of the 'sun' as nothing but
projections of their minds, i.e., to discount their experiences of the sun as
absolutely unreliable. Similarly, despite the conflicts, religious experiences
still point to the fact that there is another realm up there or beyond.
In other words, although religious experiences taken as a whole hardly point to
a determinate supernatural reality, they cohere in that they all point to something
beyond the naturalistic world, i.e., the Transcendent realm. It could
be fortuitous, of course. However, the collective weight of them should not be
dismissed cavalierly. It could be defeated but not without good reasons.
The most important contradiction
remains that concerning the nature of the ultimate reality. Is it
personal or impersonal? Numinous experiences and theistic experiences seem to
indicate that it is personal while some mystical experiences (e.g., the
monistic type) seem to show it is impersonal. However, even this contradiction
is not irremediable.[xxv] Suppose the ultimate
reality is indeed personal. It is possible that a personal being can manifest
himself in a non-personal way. The manifestation can still be veridical and
revelatory. Consider Yahweh's epiphany to Elijah. God can be said to be
manifested in the earthquake and the whirlwind but this is not yet a personal
manifestation. If the epiphany stops at this level, the experient may even
think that God is impersonal. However, the situation is transformed when the “still small voice” is added to the scene. The whole
experience becomes an unambiguous personal manifestation. So a non-personal
manifestation does not entail that the underlying reality is anti-personal.
This is even more plausible when we realize that orthodox theists always
maintain that God is more than personal, i.e., the human category of “personal” can't exhaust the nature of God. Of
course, it can also be maintained that an Impersonal Absolute can manifest
itself in personal ways. For example, some schools of Hinduism make the
distinction between the saguna-Brahman (the personal manifestation of
Brahman) and the nirguna-Brahman (the Impersonal Absolute and Ultimate).
The present point is that it is by no means impossible to organize the diverse
religious experiences into a coherent framework. Of course some revisionist
moves are inevitable but the CTA does not forbid them, provided the resulting
worldview is more coherent.[xxvi]
For example,
Caroline Davis carefully sifts through the data and suggests the following as
the common core:
" (i) the mundane world of physical bodies,
physical processes, and narrow centres of consciousness is not the whole or
ultimate reality.
(ii) ... there
is a far deeper 'true self' which in some way depends on and participates in
the ultimate reality.
(iii) Whatever
is the ultimate reality is holy, eternal, and of supreme value; it can
appear to be more truly real than all else, since everything else depends on
it.
(iv) This holy
power can be experienced as an awesome, loving, pardoning, guiding (etc.)
presence with whom individuals can have a personal relationship ...
(v) ... at
least some mystical experiences are experiences of a very intimate union with
the holy power ...
(vi) Some kind
of union or harmonious relation with the ultimate reality is the human being's summum
bonum, his final liberation or salvation, and the means by which he
discovers his 'true self' or 'true home.'"[xxvii]
Of course, this analysis is
controversial and has to be backed up by detailed arguments. Nevertheless it
can plausibly be maintained that we can extract a common core from the diverse
religious experiences which points to the fact that this spatio-temporal world
is not the Ultimate. There is more to what we can see. Religious experience as
a loose type at least supports this modest conclusion. Martin’s claim that the
conflicts between religious experiences automatically render them completely
useless as evidence for a religious worldview seems mistaken. While religious
experiences themselves may not support a very determinate religious worldview,
they at least tip the balance away from naturalism to some degree, if the PCT
is accepted.
Critical
Trust: Religious Particularism versus Religious Pluralism
What has been said above
is also acceptable to a pluralist. Hick may argue that mere logical
compatibility between particularism and the CTA amounts to very little, and
that his pluralist hypothesis exactly expresses the common core of the diverse
religious experiences. So his approach is still superior to particularism,
given the CTA. I investigate this possible claim below. Note that I am not
offering a comprehensive critique of Hick’s position. Here I am concerned
mainly with whether his pluralism is more coherent with the CTA than
particularism. Since there are different kinds of religious particularism and
the answer to the above question may vary with the kind of particularism chosen
for consideration, I mainly consider the theistic interpretation of religious
experiences below.
It is important to
emphasize that a religious particularist need not reject all religious
experiences in other religions. Only those which are truly incompatible with
her faith need to be rejected. Now a theistic faith is of course largely
compatible with the bulk of experiences of a personal God. Moreover, a theist
need not reject all kinds of mystical experience. Theistic religions have their
own mystics, who believe that their mystical experiences, e.g., union with God,
rapture, are not only compatible with but also integral to their theistic
faith. The major type of religious experience which is clearly incompatible
with theism, is monistic mysticism, e.g., the intuitive apprehension that Atman
is Brahman and that All is One. This kind of experience, if veridical at the
highest level of description, is incompatible with theism because the
Ultimate disclosed in this kind of experience is not personal. However, as
suggested above, theists need not completely consign all monistic mystical
experiences to the rubbish bin. They can provide interpretations of monistic
experiences which preserve their validity to different degrees.
Theists can maintain that
some monistic experiences are the manifestation of the personal God in a
non-personal way. It is not at all surprising that God will bring about these
experiences, which enable us to see the emptiness of creaturely things and our
inadequacies and liberate us from the attachment to things. Having these
experiences can be the first stage in
the quest for God. In interpreting these strictly as experiences of the
impersonal Absolute, it is possible that either the mystics have misinterpreted
their experiences or others have been misled by the mystics’ language, perhaps
under the influence of monistic traditions. Sometimes a monistic experience may
just be an experience of the substance of one’s soul which is indeed grounded
in God. Maritain suggests, "The Hindu experience does appear therefore, to
be a mystical experience in the natural order, a fruitive experience of the
absolute, of that absolute which is the substantial esse of the soul
and, in it and through it, of the divine absolute. And how could this experience, being purely
negative, distinguish the one of these absolutes from the other? Inasmuch as it is a purely negative
experience, it neither confuses nor distinguishes them. And since no content of the "essential"
order, no quid, is then attained, it is comprehensible that philosophic
thought reflecting upon such an experience inevitably runs the danger of
identifying in some measure the one and the other absolute, that absolute which
is the mirror and that one which is perceived in the mirror. The same word "atman" will
designate the human Self and the supreme Self."[xxviii]
Now in
comparison with the above type of particularism, is Hick’s pluralism superior
from the perspective of the CTA? I think not. Despite the lip service of the
pluralist to the PCT, his hypothesis in fact does violence to all kinds
of religious experience: they are all “true”
of the Real, but only in a mythological sense. Hick explains, “I mean by a myth a story that is not
literally true but that has the power to evoke in its hearers a practical
response to the myth’s referent- a true myth being of course one that evokes an
appropriate response. The truthfulness of a myth is thus a practical
truthfulness, consisting in its capacity to orient us rightly in our lives. In
so far as the heavenly Parent is an authentic manifestation of the Real, to
think of the Real as an ideal parent is to think in a way that can orient us
rightly to the Real.”[xxix] This is because the Real
is ineffable and incomprehensible. The Real “is postulated as that which there must be if religious
experience, in its diversity of forms, is not purely imaginative projection but
is also a response to a transcendent reality.”[xxx] Referring to attributes
like personality, love, goodness, compassion, justice, mercy, intentions,
consciousness, knowledge, etc., Hick says that “all these attributes are components of our human
conceptual repertoire…
an ultimate reality …
exceeds that conceptual repertoire… It has its own nature, presumably infinite in
richness, but that nature is not thinkable in human terms.”[xxxi]
This position
has the drastic consequence that no religious experience is ever
literally true of the Real, and no major type of religious experience captures
even to some degree the nature of the Real. Despite all the talk that both
theistic experiences and monistic experiences are authentic manifestation of
the Real, from a cognitive and not practical standpoint, Hick is denying
in toto the content of all these experiences.[xxxii] Hick says, “in denying that the Real is personal
one is not saying that it is impersonal, but rather that the
personal-impersonal dualism does not apply here.”[xxxiii] This is to admit that
Hick’s pluralism preserves the cognitive validity of neither the
theistic type nor the non-theistic type of religious experience in which the
Real appears to be personal and impersonal respectively. In contrast, the above
theistic interpretation successfully saves a significant portion of the
phenomena, e.g., theistic experiences, and preserves to different extent the
validity of other types of religious experience, e.g., monistic experiences.
(Theists can agree that the nature of the Real is infinite in richness but this
does not entail the ineffability of the Real. This infinite richness only
entails that human terms can never fully capture or comprehend the
nature of the Real.) This is consonant with the Principle of Conservation of
the CTA. If Alston’s position were the reversal of the PCT, then Hick’s
pluralism would be an even greater reversal! Of course, as I have argued, both
particularism and pluralism are formally compatible with the PCT but the former
seems to conform better to the CTA than Hick’s pluralism.[xxxiv]
Furthermore,
the theistic interpretation preserves better the moral nature of the Real. Hick
takes pains to demonstrate that the concern for the good is common to different
religious traditions. For example, he seems to believe that extreme cruelty is
incompatible with the nature of the Real, as implied by his condemnation of the
Christian Church’s misdeeds in history. However, under the constraint of his
doctrine of ineffability, he has to say this: “I do not describe the Real in itself as good,
or benign, or gracious. But in relation to us- that is, in terms of the
difference that it makes to us- it is good as the ground of the transformed
state which is our highest good. So the sense in which the Real is good,
benign, gracious is analogous to that in which the sun is, from our point of
view, good, friendly, life-giving… Likewise, the Real is the necessary condition of our
existence and our highest good. It is in this sense that we can speak of the
Real as being, in relation to us, good, benign, gracious. But when we describe
the Real in itself in these terms we are speaking mythologically rather than
literally.”[xxxv]
This consequence is rather
depressing. In contrast, theism can speak of the Real as literally or at least
analogously gracious and good.[xxxvi] This is a merit from the
perspective of the CTA because that the Real is good and gracious is the common
content of many diverse religious experiences, and is endorsed by the major
traditions. Given Hick’s emphasis on the moral criterion, it is indeed strange
that moral categories cannot even apply to the Real. On Hick’s terms, can we
say that extreme cruelty is really incompatible with the nature
of the Real? No, we can only say that the Real is not the ground of cruelty,
and so on. Is this kind of roundabout statement about the causal relationship
between cruelty and the Real really expressing the essence of our intuition,
which Hick seems to share, that extreme cruelty is an absolute
evil? It is clear that all these
questions do not plague theism which can forthrightly says that extreme cruelty
is logically incompatible with the holy nature of God. There is no need for
theists to posit the tortuous noumenal-phenomenal distinction here.
Hick has likened the Real
to the sun above. Let us come back to the survivors’ conflicting perceptions of
the sun in my parable. Now suppose there are three major schools about the
shape of the sun: Round Sun School, Square Sun School, and Hexagonal Sun
School. Further suppose all three
schools are equally supported by the survivors’ experience, and all of them
cannot prove on neutral grounds the superiority of their positions. In this
impasse there comes a Pluralist, who argues that each of the three positions is
arbitrary and unjustified. He argues that the only solution is to postulate a
Noumenal Sun which is invisible and shapeless. (To be more accurate, we should
say the whole category of spatial or visual attributes is inapplicable to the
Noumenal Sun.) All the experiences of the Round Sun, Square Sun and Hexagonal
Sun are unveridical, literally speaking. Nevertheless, the Round Sun, Square
Sun and Hexagonal Sun are authentic manifestations of the Noumenal Sun
because they can all orient people appropriately to the Noumenal Sun. The
Pluralist claims that his hypothesis is the best and most comprehensive
explanation because it has taken account of all their experiences.[xxxvii] In contrast, each of the
three schools has only taken account of one-third of the experiences, hence is
inferior. How should we think of this Pluralist? Isn’t it quite clear that the
postulation of a Noumenal Sun here is rather farfetched and unnecessary?
Moreover, his claim to comprehensiveness is bogus because the Pluralist’s “taking account of an experience” amounts only to “granting that experience a merely
phenomenal status.”
After he has “taken account of all the
experiences,” all experiences, at least
one-third of which have been deemed reliable before, are now completely
divorced from the Real Sun, from the cognitive viewpoint. I can imagine all
three Schools protesting in one voice that the Pluralist is in fact
contemptuous of all their experiences. Anyway, it is by no means clear that the
Pluralist’s position is superior to either School. The implications for
religious pluralism should be clear.
To fully establish the
superiority of the theistic interpretation of religious experiences, a lot more
needs to be said. However, the purpose here is more modest. I just want to
outline a reply to Hick’s charge that from the perspective of the CTA,
particularism is inferior to pluralism. The above discussions suggest that
theism has more strategies to handle diverse religious experiences than Hick
tends to believe, and those strategies are consonant with the CTA. Moreover,
Hick’s doctrine of the ineffability of the Real seriously endangers the cognitive
validity of all religious experiences, which is exactly what the PCT is
supposed to protect as far as possible. The tables are turned against Hick.
Before he can satisfactorily deal with all the issues, it is premature for him to
declare victory.
Conclusion
The CTA advises us to trust all religious experiences.
A religious particularist believes that only one world religion is basically
correct. So on the surface it seems that a religious particularist cannot adopt
the CTA. This is a misunderstanding. On the one hand, the trust advocated is
only a prima facie trust. The CTA in itself does not favour any
particular position on religious diversity because it only asserts
the prima facie evidential force of religious experiences. We must bear in mind
the critical elements of the CTA. If sufficient reasons are given for
doubting religious experiences, the CTA can happily co-exist with atheism. On
the other hand, while a religious particularist will not accept many religious
experiences of other religions at the highest level of description, he
does not need to deny that those experiences may contain elements of truth at a
lower level of description. If he adopts the CTA, then he would think that in
face of conflicting prima facie justified beliefs or experiences, it is
rational to salvage something from them.
I have argued that this
strategy is actually feasible in many other cases, and may also be feasible in
the case of religious diversity. The presence of conflicts between religious
experiences is not in itself a sufficient reason for adopting the atheist
option. To do so would be analogous to rejecting all eye-witnesses'
reports just because they conflict with one another. It may be possible to
identify a "common core" of diverse religious experiences. While this
does not settle the debates between religions, it may tip the balance towards a
religious worldview. I have also indicated that type-unreliability can be
combined with sub-type-reliability. So, for example, theistic experience can be
separated from non-theistic experiences and then its sub-type-reliability
investigated separately. (A similar strategy, of course, is open to believers
of other religions.) Surely the problem of conflicts between theistic
experience and theism-incompatible religious experiences remains. The theist
need not insist that the conflict can be resolved entirely on neutral grounds;
he need only show that he is not irrational in trusting his theistic
experiences. How this position is to be worked out must be left for another
time. The burden of this paper is that this position is compatible with the
CTA, and is arguably superior to the atheist or pluralist solutions from the
perspective of the CTA. (I leave open the possibility that Hick’s hypothesis
might be correct.) So it seems misguided to deny that religious exclusivism can
be combined with the CTA.
Hong Kong Baptist University
NOTES
[ii] William Alston, Perceiving
God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1991).
[iii] For example, Matthew Bagger has repeatedly accused Alston of
adopting a protective strategy which shields religious experiences from
critical scrutiny. See his Religious Experience, Justification, and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), passim.
[iv] John Hick, "The
Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism," Faith and Philosophy
14 (1997), p. 277.
[v] A religion is not
strictly correlated with only one type of religious experience but usually one
type of religious experience is more prominent in a world religion than others.
The importance of this point will be clearer later.
[vi] John Hick, A Christian
Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths (Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 19.
[vii] I adopt this
classification scheme here for the sake of convenience. In fact I agree with
Gavin D'Costa's claim that religious pluralism, on the deeper level, is still a
kind of exclusivism ("The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions,” Religious Studies 32 [1996], pp. 223-232).
[ix] William Alston,
"Religious Diversity and Perceptual Knowledge of God," Faith and
Philosophy 5 (1988), pp. 433-448.
[x] Thomas D. Senor, ed., The
Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of William P.
Alston (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
[xiii] Michael Martin, "The
Principle of Credulity and Religious Experience," Religious Studies
22 (1986), pp. 87-88.
[xiv] In this paper I will not
discuss explicitly the second approach: inclusivism. I tend to think that
particularism and inclusivism are ideal types. In reality these two types of
position merge into one another: most religious particularists want to be inclusive
of some elements of truth in other religious traditions, and most inclusivists
judge their own traditions to be particularly important to different degrees.
Anyway, the distinction between particularism and inclusivism is not important
in this paper. Atheists think that both have erroneously adopted a religious
interpretation of reality, while pluralists like Hick will accuse both of being
arbitrary.
[xv] I examine Hick's other
arguments in another paper: "Does the Principle of Credulity Favour John
Hick's Religious Pluralism? A Defense of William Alston."
[xvi] D.Z. Phillips,
"Review of Phillip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds), A Companion
to Philosophy of Religion," International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 44 (1998), p. 62.
[xviii] John Baillie, The
Sense of the Presence of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p.
56.
[xix] Ibid.,
p.57; italics mine. This is also Alston's criterion. He thinks that a basic
practice might be shown unreliable if there is "a massive and persistent
inconsistency in its output" ["Religious Diversity and Perceptual
Knowledge of God," p. 437.]
[xx] Actually it is not the
case that a "common core" has to be shared by all the
eye-witness accounts. Sometimes it is sufficient that it is
shared by a large majority of the accounts, provided that either the error of
the deviant witness can be explained, or superior explanatory power is attained
by adopting the common core. Admittedly there are borderline cases in which we
have to rely on our judgments.
[xxi] Richard Gale, On the
Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
p. 317.
[xxii] One anonymous referee
thinks that Gale’s objection “is
not that there is more inconsistency between perceptual mystical reports
than between perceptual reports, but that there is diversity among mystical
doxastic practices (different criteria for evaluating mystical reports,
and so on), and no diversity among sense perceptual practices.” I would like to point out that the
latter disanalogy in itself hardly constitutes a “cognitively invidious disanalogy.” Why does the existence of merely
different criteria show that religious experiences are unreliable? In fact it
is not necessarily correct to claim that there is “no diversity among sense perceptual
practices.” It depends very much on
how you individuate a sense perceptual practice. For example, there is no
obvious reason why we cannot divide the larger sense perceptual practice into
visual practice, auditory practice, tactual practice, olfactory practice, and
so on. Obviously, the criteria for confirming a visual experience are different
from those for an auditory experience or those for a tactual experience. The
main thrust of Gale’s argument is that all these smaller practices can be more
or less united into one coherent sense perceptual practice because the outputs
of those practices do not massively contradict one another. Just imagine that
various kinds of mystical perceptual practices yield judgments which do not
conflict massively, but can be weaved into a coherent whole. In that case we
would tend to say that those different mystical practices with their different
criteria are just like the different sense modalities. What then remains of
Gale’s objection? So it seems to me Gale’s objection finally boils down to the
conflicts between mystical perceptual reports.
[xxiv] Michael Martin, Atheism:
A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), pp. 183-4.
[xxv] Mark Heim has a helpful
discussion of this problem. See his “Saving the Particulars: Religious Experience and
Religious Ends,” Religious Studies 36.4 (December 2000),
pp. 435-54, and The Depth of the
Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2000).
[xxvi] For example, consider a
curve fitting example. When a lot of experimental data lie perfectly on a
straight line, a single odd datum will surely be disregarded by most
scientists. It is also important to bear in mind that the PCT can be formulated
in different ways. Both Gary Gutting and William Lycan accept some forms of PCT
but they only grant an isolated token experience a small prima facie evidential
force. See Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 149-50; William Lycan, Judgment
and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 165-67. Moreover,
it is possible to formulate the PCT only for a more or less established type
of experience.
[xxvii] Caroline Davis, The
Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
p.191.
[xxviii] Jacques Maritain, Challenges
and Renewal (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, the World Publishing
Company, 1966), pp. 97-98.
[xxxii] Perhaps Hick will rebut
my claim by insisting that those experiences at least tell us that the Real is
transcendental to the natural world and so on. However, as long as those
experiences can tell us something that is really true of the Real, then
I can hardly understand how the Real can at the same time be ineffable.
[xxxiv] Similar reasoning shows that the non-theistic
interpretation of religious experience is also superior to pluralism. It at
least preserves more or less intact one major type of religious experience, the
monistic one. So both particularist interpretations conform better with the
Principle of Conservation! Hick’s sense of superiority is misplaced.
[xxxvii] Hick has made similar
claims with respect to his religious pluralism (A Christian Theology of
Religions, pp. 51, 62, 64.)
