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chapter_four.docxChapter Four
REASON, TRUTH, AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
Read carefully the following statements by pluralist thinkers:
1. John Hick claims that exclusivism rests uncritically on Aristotelian notions of truth, where truth “is essentially a matter of either-or. It is either this or not this: it cannot be both.” 1
2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith thinks that exclusivism is based on an outdated and Western view of the law of the excluded middle: either A is true or non-A is true. In Smith’s words, “[I]n all ultimate matters, truth lies not in an either-or but in a both-and.” 2
3. Paul Knitter writes that “all religious experience and all religious language must be two-eyed, dipolar, a union of opposites.” 3
Each of these statements appears to be an all-out assault on the usual role that logical thinking is presumed to have in responsible thought and action. Paul Knitter, for example, appears to link pluralism with a repudiation of logical categories of thinking that leads some people to reason that if Christianity is true, then non-Christian forms of faith must be false.
W. C. Smith also eschews either-or thinking in religion in spite of the irrationality that follows when we ignore either-or thinking anywhere else in life. Consider the statement “either this mushroom is poisonous or it is not.” Turning this either-or into a both-and could be fatal in ways that transcend logic. Whatever Smith’s theory turns out to mean, he clearly contradicts the common-sense position that the truth of Christianity implies the falsity of other religions. 4 The above quote from John Hick places him squarely in the same company. These statements from leading pluralists raise the issue of where they stand with respect to reason and truth in religion.
PLURALISM AND THE LAWS OF LOGIC
One of the fundamental laws of logic is the principle of the excluded middle. Stated formally, this principle says that “Either A [some proposition] is true or A is false.” One example of the law of the excluded middle is “Either Ross Perot will be the next President of the United States or Ross Perot will not be the next President of the United States.” Any proposition having this form is necessarily true. But contrast that statement with this one: “Ross Perot will be the next President of the United States and Ross Perot will not be the next President of the United States.” Any proposition having this second form—a form that is inconsistent with the law of the excluded middle—must be false.
The law of non-contradiction exhibits the form “A [something that exists] cannot be both B and non-B at the same time in the same sense.” Any proposition that attributes contradictory properties to some subject at the same time and in the same sense must be false.
I suspect that John Hick, W. C. Smith, and Paul Knitter avoid violating these logical principles whenever they deal with nonreligious issues. But do their earlier statements really suggest that religion is one area of life where the laws of logic are not necessary? Are Hick, Smith, and Knitter religious irrationalists? If the quotations we cited are any indication, they certainly seem to be.
If pluralists really object to exclusivism because of its reliance on such logical laws as the principle of the excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction, pluralism is in serious trouble. This would mean that in their view of things, any one who would become a pluralist must first abandon the very principles of logic that make all significant thought, action, and communication possible. 5 As Harold Netland argues, “[T]he price one must pay for rejecting the principle of non-contradiction is simply too high.” He explains,
The price of rejecting the principle of noncontradiction is forfeiture of the possibility of meaningful affirmation or statement about anything at all—including statements about the religious ultimate. One who rejects the principle of noncontradiction is reduced to utter silence, for he or she has abandoned a necessary condition for any coherent or meaningful position whatsoever. 6
This path leads to nothing less than intellectual suicide. Hick and the other pluralists surely do not want to make the repudiation of logic an essential feature of pluralism. To uncover what they do mean, however, will require a shift to the separate but related issue of truth.
PLURALISM AND THE QUESTION OF TRUTH
Christians believe that the proposition “Jesus Christ is God Incarnate” is true. Muslims believe that the proposition “Jesus Christ is not God Incarnate” is true. According to the pluralists’ statements, these two propositions should not be viewed as contradictory. Because we are giving these pluralists the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not rejecting the laws of logic, we must seek another way to understand their conviction that both these beliefs about Jesus are true.
What Is Truth?
The first thing to note about truth is that it is a property of propositions. To say that x is a property of something is to mean that x is a characteristic, feature, or trait of that thing. Just as baldness is a property of some men and redness a property of some roses, so truth is a property of some propositions.
What is a proposition? It is a statement in which the predicate affirms or denies something about the subject. Understood in this way, propositions are different from other uses of language such as commands (statements like “Close the door”) and expressions of emotion (the reaction of someone who has just hit his thumb with a hammer). Examples of propositions are the following: “The door is closed” or “Ron Nash is the world’s greatest living golfer” 7 or “Reformed Theological Seminary has a campus in Orlando, Florida.”
Propositions may have a number of different properties. Propositions may be long or short, simple or complex. They may also be true or false. The word or (another appearance of the principle of the excluded middle) is important in the preceding sentence. No proposition may be both true and false in the same sense and at the same time. One way we can identify a false proposition is if it asserts a contradiction, as in the statement “Some bachelors are happily married men.” Because the word bachelor means an unmarried man, the foregoing proposition is logically contradictory and thus necessarily false. One way we can identify a true proposition is whether it describes the way things really are. If I state, for example, that on April 20, 1993, the Orlando Magic basketball team had a record of forty-one wins and forty-one losses, we can easily check to see whether the claim is true. It is true if the team really had that number of wins and losses; otherwise it is false.
Some people want to use the word truth as a property of things other than propositions. For example, “Michael Jordan is a true shooting guard” or “That lady is wearing a true fur coat” 8 or “Joe Smith is a true friend.” 9 As we will discover, pluralists appeal to such usage as part of their way of reconciling what appear to be conflicting religious beliefs. I will argue, however, that all of these other usages of the word true are dependent upon its primary sense as a property—not of basketball players or fur coats or friends, but of propositions.
Propositions and Beliefs
Propositions are related to acts of believing. When someone says that he believes that such and such is the case, the “such and such” is always a proposition. To say that I believe that today is Friday is equivalent to saying that I believe the proposition “Today is Friday” is true.
Philosophers often distinguish between two kinds of believing, belief that and belief in. In belief that, my act of believing is directed toward some proposition. But in belief in, my act of believing is directed toward a person. If I believe in my friend, Joe Smith, it means that I trust him. When I believe in God, it means that I trust God and have committed myself to him. It is very important to see that belief in presupposes belief that. If I believe in God, it is because of all the propositions about God that I believe are true. 10
The apparently conflicting beliefs of the different world religions, I will argue, all make unavoidable reference to logically contradictory propositions affirmed by the followers of these religions. It is the pluralists’ rejection of this claim that contains the key to understanding their apparent repudiation of logic in the quotations provided. The pluralist simply denies that apparently conflicting truth-claims are really truth-claims; he or she thinks that they will turn out to be something different.
THE PLURALIST’S NEW UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGIOUS TRUTH-CLAIMS
So far we have learned that pluralists think that what we usually take to be the truth-claims of the world’s great religions are not really contradictory. This is not because pluralists (at least the ones examined in this book) reject the laws of logic, but because they deny that what look like truth-claims really are. Because the statements are something other than cognitive truth-claims, they turn out to complement, not contradict, each other. In 1981, Hick tried to explain all this by saying that the supposed truth-claims of competing religions are in fact “linguistic pictures or maps of the universe, whose function is to enable us to find salvation/liberation, the limitlessly better quality of existence that the nature of reality is said to make possible.” 11
A major influence on Hick’s thinking about this issue has been Wilfred Cantwell Smith, from whom Hick learned to oppose the older view of religions as competitive systems of belief or mutually incompatible systems. 12 Because of Smith’s influence on pluralist thinking about truth, we must briefly survey his position.
W. C. Smith and Rejection of Propositional Truth in Religion
W. C. Smith argues that the notions of truth and falsity should not be applied to religion. 13 It is wrong, he contends, to think of Christianity as true and Islam as false.
Christianity is not true absolutely, impersonally, statically; rather, it can become true, if and as you or I appropriate it to ourselves and interiorize it, insofar as we live it out from day to day. It becomes true as we take it off the shelf and personalize it, in actual experience. 14
For Smith, exclusivism errs in making beliefs (and therefore propositions as well) an essential feature of religious traditions. This easily leads to a misleading distinction between true and false beliefs. It no longer makes sense to ask which religion is truest, Smith believes.
Smith distinguishes between what he calls the “cumulative tradition” of a religious community and the faith of the individual believer. While the tradition is external and objective, the believer’s faith is internal and subjective. The tradition is “the entire mass of overt objective data that constitute the historical deposit, as it were, of the past religious life of the community in question.” 15 Creeds and codes that nourish the faith of individual people are an important part of this tradition. Faith, by contrast, is Smith’s way of referring to “an inner religious experience of involvement of a particular person…[It is] the impingement on him of the transcendent, putative or real.” 16 Faith refers to the way a person feels and lives when encountering transcendence. Basic, then, to Smith’s new view of religious truth is the claim that we should stop concentrating on the idea of “religion” and focus instead on external cumulative traditions and internal faith.
It takes a long time for the external cumulative tradition to form. Typically, when one thinks of a religion such as Hinduism or Christianity, it is this tradition that is in view. But Smith contends that the subjective faith of the individual believer is far more important than the external tradition.
One important consequence of Smith’s theory is its effect on doctrines, rituals, and the like, which henceforth possess only secondary importance. The propositional truth that some people still view as important resides in the cumulative tradition. But because primary importance attaches to inward faith, propositional truth must become secondary. 17
All this leads Smith to think that religious “truth” differs considerably from the kind of truth we encounter in everyday life. Instead of being propositional, religious truth is personal; it must have an existential impact on the life of the believer. It transforms and changes the person’s life. The cumulative traditions of this or that religion become true as they transform the lives of individual believers within that tradition. 18 Smith considers it misleading to talk about the supposed truth of Christ’s resurrection as though this were objective, static, and merely propositional. Christ’s resurrection only becomes true insofar as it transforms individual people. Hence, no religion is true in the objective or propositional sense. But all religions are true subjectively! And of course, this personal, subjective view of religious truth ends up implying that the same religious claim (proposition) can be true for me and false for you. It also implies that a religious proposition that was false for me yesterday can become true tomorrow.
An Evaluation of Smith’s Position
Does not Smith’s position still involve a repudiation of logical principles such as the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle? It is obvious that Smith thinks it does not. The “truth” that interests Smith is not related to the propositions that are part of the external traditions; it is rather a function of the purely subjective attitudes and feelings of different people. When religious “truths” are nonpropositional, they cannot contradict other nonpropositional “truths.”
I find several difficulties in Smith’s position:
1. Smith’s position leads to several absurd consequences. Consider the different ways that broccoli affects people. While less dramatic perhaps than some religious issues, broccoli has been known to have an existential or transforming effect on some people. Imagine a dispute between two people, one of whom is former U.S. President George Bush. The other person is a professional nutritionist whom we will call Violet Jones. Ms. Jones utters the proposition “Broccoli is good,” while George Bush denies her proposition. Do we have a contradiction here? Not really, because—extending Smith’s analysis of religious “truth” to this case—Ms. Jones is really uttering the subjective judgment “I like broccoli” while President Bush is really saying, “I do not like broccoli.” The reason that the two utterances are not contradictory is because each is describing something different. Ms. Jones’s words are doing nothing more than describing her feelings on the subject, while President Bush’s words are describing his feelings. There is no contradiction; both statements are true at the same time.
Although W. C. Smith’s way of handling religious “truth” might appear to solve a serious problem for pluralists (the problem created by their apparent rejection of logic), it only raises new and equally troubling questions. For one thing, Smith’s position on religious “truth” entails that no two people ever really disagree over religious truth-claims. After all, Ms. Jones and President Bush are not really disagreeing; each is simply describing a personal preference. Do pluralists really mean to say that the many apparently serious disagreements over religious claims are reducible to trivial disputes over different subjective states?
In addition, Smith’s position implies that no two people ever mean the same thing when they utter the same religious proposition. Two people could sing a duet to the famous words “Jesus loves me, this I know.” But because, according to Smith, what is important in this context is the subjective, existential impact the propositions have and because subjective impacts differ considerably from person to person, the vocalists would in fact be singing about two different things. The soprano might be singing about the effect of Jesus’s love on her subjective states while the alto might be referring to what is occurring in her subjective consciousness.
Finally, Smith’s theory of religious truth entails that no religious claim can ever be false; all of them are true, in Smith’s sense of the word. When a Christian affirms the deity of Christ, he is honestly reporting the subjective effect that his belief has on him. When a Muslim denies the deity of Christ, he is honestly reporting what is occurring in his subjective religious consciousness. Neither person is wrong. How wonderful! Or how ironic that religious pluralism is bought at such a high price. If Smith is right, then almost every follower of the world’s major religions is wrong in his or her understanding of what is going on in that religion.
2. Smith’s approach ignores the fact that in addition to expressing personal feelings and the like, adherents to a religion are always making cognitive assertions in propositions that have some presumed objective truth value. This point has been well-stated by Stephen T. Davis, a philosopher at the University of Claremont and a former colleague of John Hick.
Of course, theological propositions do not exhaustively explain a religion; we must look to what might be called practice as well as theory. Perhaps Smith means that a religion is “true” if, say, its adherents practice it sincerely, or if their lives are morally admirable, or if the religion automatically “works” for them. If he does mean something like this, he is right that the truth of Christianity does not entail the falsity of, say, Buddhism or Islam. But this is hardly to refute the notion that there is a broad propositional or theological element in religion. 19
This leads Davis to conclude that “The fact that for some person Christianity has become truth (in Smith’s sense) is quite unrelated to what I am calling the truth or falsity of Christianity, that is, the truth or falsity of its crucial claims.” 20
Smith’s highly eccentric theory of religious “truth” turns out to be irrelevant to the concerns of most religious believers in the world. As difficult as it might be for Smith to sway traditionalist Christians to his view, there are also millions of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists out there who will oppose his theory as strenuously as Christians, and for good reason. For his theory to work, Smith must redefine and in the process distort a huge set of propositions that all these people believe and regard as essential to their so-called tradition and their personal faith.
3. Finally, the pluralist’s subordination of propositional truth to private, personal truth has the relation between the two completely wrong. Smith holds that the fundamental sense of truth is personal and private and that the objective, propositional type of truth is derivative. A little reflection will quickly show that the fundamental sense of truth that underlies any other use of the term is propositional.
Harold Netland summarizes Smith’s understanding of personal truth as follows: “[I]n religion, truth is to be understood primarily as personal, that is, as having its locus in persons who satisfactorily appropriate religious beliefs.” 21 For convenience, suppose we call this summary of Smith’s position S.
Now, Netland asks, does Smith expect the rest of us to accept his S as true? Surely so. But S can only be true in the sense of propositional truth because, Netland continues,
S expresses a proposition which makes a claim about reality; it asserts that reality is such that truth is primarily personal and has its locus in persons who satisfactorily appropriate religious beliefs. And in proposing S Smith is suggesting that we accept it because it is true, that is, that reality actually is as the proposition expressed by S asserts it to be. 22
If the truth of S were only personal and subjective, then that “truth” would depend upon someone’s appropriating it, upon S’s affecting my life in some way. But this would mean that S could be true for Jones, but not true for Nash. Yet Smith could never allow for the relativity of S. He presumes that S is true for everyone. But this then means that S’s truth reflects the propositional sense of truth.
Once again we find the pluralists submerged in quicksand. Each time they attempt to escape from one problem, they seem to end up landing in another difficulty. Sometimes, the later problems encountered are far worse that the earlier ones. In this case Smith ignores how wise people will only appropriate beliefs subjectively if they think those beliefs are true in the propositional sense. 23
To say that “Allah is a righteous judge” is true would then be to recognize that a particular Muslim’s life and conduct is congruous with belief that Allah is a righteous judge. But this presupposes that the Muslim accepts and appropriates not only a set of practices and a manner of life but also a set of beliefs and values which taken together articulate a comprehensive perspective on reality. And such beliefs will be accepted in the first place because the Muslim regards them as true, [namely,] as accurately portraying the way reality actually is. Thus personal truth should not be regarded as an alternative to propositional truth, for it presupposes propositional truth. 24
All this leads Netland to a very important conclusion: “Smith seems to be confusing the question of truth with that of response to the truth…But the truth value of a belief or proposition and the degree to which one allows that belief to impact upon one’s life are two very different things.” 25 While beliefs and propositions are not equivalent, and while belief certainly includes more than mental assent to a proposition, belief always includes believing something, and that something is a proposition. Belief may be more than mental assent, but it cannot be less. “The fact is,” Netland concludes, “that adherents of the various religions believe certain propositions about the religious ultimate, humanity, and the nature of the universe to be true. And where these beliefs conflict—as they occasionally do—we have the problem of conflicting truth-claims.” 26
John Hick and the Rejection of Propositional Truth in Religion
John Hick takes a similar approach as W. C. Smith to the apparent conflict among the truth-claims of the world religions. Smith linked doctrines and other religious propositions to external traditions and then subordinated these traditions to the more important subjective faith of individual believers. Hick transforms religious doctrines into myths, or pictures, that help direct humans toward the infinite, unknowable, divine reality. 27 Hick’s reduction of religious beliefs and doctrines to myth is totally foreign to the way most religious devotees understand their faiths. Moreover, it suffers the same logical fate as W. C. Smith’s theory. Harold Netland explains,
[M]ythological statements about the Real are only informative to the extent that they are parasitic upon nonmythological-literal-truth. For the question whether any given behavior or pattern of life (loving one’s neighbor, fasting regularly, sacrificing children to Moloch) is to be regarded as an appropriate response to the Real will depend upon our ability to formulate clearly certain propositions about the nature of the Real and our relationship to the Real. 28
Hick’s claim that myths become true to the extent that they produce appropriate responses to the Real on the part of believers is indistinguishable from W. C. Smith’s theory. Hick is attempting to escape the clutches of logical rules such as the law of non-contradiction. He attempts this by redefining religious truth in a nonpropositional way, which makes his theory susceptible to the same criticisms that make Smith’s similar views so untenable.
WHAT SHOULD NON-CHRISTIANS THINK OF THE SMITH-HICK THEORY OF RELIGIOUS TRUTH?
Through almost everything he writes about pluralism, John Hick leaves the impression that the people he most hopes will accept his views are the recalcitrant Christian exclusivists of the world. He leaves little doubt that he regards this Christian recalcitrance as a product of ignorance, prejudice, intolerance, and no small amount of cultural conditioning—all defects that Hick himself presumes to be free of.
There is merit in recognizing that many non-Christians have their own good reasons to reject Hick’s work. This is certainly the case with Hick’s handling of the issue of propositional truth in other religions.
As Harold Netland explains, pluralism is committed “to the position that the many different conceptions of the divine or religious ultimate (Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Yahweh, Nirvana, Sunyatta, etc.) are all various culturally and historically conditioned images of the same single divine reality. This entails that [all these terms] ultimately have the same referent, although the connotations of the respective terms may differ.” 29
Netland notes the implausibility of this stance. Consider the different meanings these names for the ultimate have in the traditions to which they belong. For example, Netland writes, “the ontological implications of the Judaeo-Christian image of the divine as Yahweh, who is ontologically distinct from, and independent of, the created world, are incompatible with the ontological monism of the notion of Nirguna Brahman from Advaita Vedanta, or the monistic idealism of the Yogacara school of Buddhism.” 30
It defies common sense to suppose that the people who uttered all the competing claims we find in the major religions believed they were doing anything other than truly describing the nature of reality. Not only are the things they say apparently truth-claims to our minds, but also they were understood to be truth-claims by the people who uttered them. Basic to Hick’s approach to the world religions is the conviction that regardless of what the followers of these religions thought they were doing, pluralists know better. This is hardly convincing as a foundation for interreligious tolerance. It is also a highly questionable method of hermeneutics. Hick’s assumption on this point is indefensible both historically and hermeneutically.
Netland has even stronger words of criticism for pluralism.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that [Hick’s] resolute desire to resolve the problem of conflicting truth-claims without admitting that some beliefs of some traditions are false has driven him to a radical reinterpretation of religious beliefs and doctrines in mythological terms. The price for resolving the problem in this manner, however, is that Hick’s theory must be called into question as a general explanation of the nature of religious experience. For his understanding of religious beliefs bears little resemblance to that of most believers in the major traditions and consequently will be vigorously resisted by all within the mainstream of these traditions. 31
It simply will not do to downplay, ignore, or minimize the serious and very real differences among the world religions. They do conflict logically. In his book Dissonant Voices, Netland explores and documents at some length the logical incompatibilities among Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Shintoism with special reference to three questions: What do these religions teach about the nature of the religious ultimate? about the nature of the human predicament? and about the nature of salvation or enlightenment or liberation? 32
It is not plausible, Netland argues, “to maintain, as many do today, that the different religions all make essentially the same claims and teach basically the same truth.” On the contrary, he states,
Careful examination of the basic tenets of the various religious traditions demonstrates that, far from teaching the same thing, the major religions have radically different perspectives on the religious ultimate, the human predicament, and the nature of salvation. Any attempt to produce an essential unity in outlook among the many religions will result in distorting at least some of the actual religious beliefs of followers of the various traditions. 33
A number of specialized books provide additional support for Netland’s claim. 34
The major religions conflict at the level of essential doctrine. The pluralist claim that doctrinal disputes are irrelevant because they have little or nothing to do with salvation flies in the face of the evidence. Most religions insist that correct believing is a necessary condition for salvation. This is certainly true in the case of Christianity (Acts 16:31 and John 3:16). Parallels to this can also be found in non-Christian religions. 35
World religions also conflict at the level of the kinds of conduct they advocate. Not surprisingly, Netland maintains that “the common assumption that all religions ultimately are teaching the same things in their own culturally conditioned ways is prima facie untenable. Not only are they not all saying the same things, but the particular issues addressed in the various religions are not necessarily the same.” 36 According to William Christian, attempts to play down the major disagreements among the world’s religions by suggesting that they all teach pretty much the same thing “seem very implausible, and certainly much current talk in the aid of these views is loose and sentimental.” 37
With all this as background, it is hard to deny that the world’s major religions contain some false teaching. Naturally, Muslim or Buddhist exclusivists will think the errors are to be found in systems other than their own. Moreover, the millions of non-Christians in the world will not be satisfied with the distortions that pluralists like Hick and Smith introduce into their beliefs.
CONCLUSION
