Sophia, Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006. Copyright �9 2006 Ashgate Publishing Limited.

III. THE CHALLENGE OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM:

A REPLY TO JAMES KRAFT

STEPHEN PHILLIPS Department o f Philosophy and Asian Studies, University o f Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

phillips@uts.ec, utexas, edu

Religious pluralism does have, as James Kraft says, a negative impact on the epistemic confidence with which one holds a religious position, when epistemology is thought on both the externalist and internalist lines. I also conclude both that there is a resulting epistemic humility and that a tolerance of religious diversity results from it, but I reach these conclusions for entirely different reasons. Epistemic humility and religious tolerance are fostered by the realization that many religions are striving for the infinite, though all have limited views of it.

The paper by James Kraft, 'Religious Tolerance through Religious Diversity and Epistemic Humility', does a splendid job of revealing the negative impact of religious pluralism on epistemic confidence, the epistemic confidence, that is, of an ideal subject with respect to a religious doxastic or belief- forming practice according to the externalist approach of William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and others. There is indeed a resolution problem as Kraft argues. Portions of traditional belief systems are in opposition considering the world's major religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Buddhists, for example, reject explicitly the Hindu concept of God. Christians and Muslims disagree about the life and person of Jesus. I draw a somewhat different conclusion, however, than Kraft from all this.

Before I spell out a rather different lesson, it seems worth pointing out that the epistemic problem of religious diversity is a challenge to those subscribing to internalist theories of justification as well as to the externalism on which Kraft focuses. Once apprised of rival views through a neighbor's testimony, the Cartesian internalist who would cite religious experience as the foundation of her beliefs faces just as much a challenge as the externalist. Indeed, for the mystic externalist, the doxastic practice of knowledge through testimony might be considered trumped by experiential relationship to the Ultimate (whether that be God, Brahman, or the Emptiness of Buddhism). Of course, the externalist has a problem because of conflicting outputs of these practices, which cannot be kept entirely apart. But afortiori the

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internalist, for whom the coherence of beliefs is by all counts fundamental, faces a challenge to uphold the rationality of religious belief once she learns about religious diversity.

My main difference of conclusion is that the best option for the person of religious experience seems to me to be not just tolerance but to find solidarity with people of religious experience who belong to other traditions and faiths. Now one way of looking at religious pluralism is to see it as an evil to be explained in an overall effort to show that pain, suffering, and in particular spiritual ignorance are compatible with God understood as the perfect and ultimate being. Compatibility, however, is a weak and defensive standard. What I shottld like to see is an explanation that religious diversity (and all supposed evil) is what we should expect given the reality of God, not just that, given the way the world is, God is not ruled out. Similarly, within religious epistemology I should like to see efforts to find common cause. Work along this line would promote solidarity as opposed to apprehension. Unfortunately, judging from the popularity in theodicy of the defensive efforts by Plantinga (as opposed to broader explanatory theorizing in the case of, for example, John Hick), within philosophy of religion I think that I am proposing a countertrend. Nevertheless, to undermine charges of incompatibility requires a loosening up of the team mentality that Plantinga, Alston, and others manifest, perhaps unconsciously, it seems to me. ~ To continue with the analogy, one has not only to loan and take in players from other teams, but to change one's sense of the goal from winning to something like league excellence. I apologize for overworking the metaphor, but I will return to it after rehearsing a little more concretely the problem and resources for its resolution that I should like to promote.

Within the context of a religious doxastic practice, knowledge of com- peting practices with different outputs brings into question the assumption that the religiously-encountered object has, like the physical things encountered in the perceptual doxastic practice, an intersubjective reality. The religious externalists trade on a certain parallelism with perceptual practice, so it is important to see the differences. Since prima facie the religiously-encountered object, God, let us say, is not universally encoun- tered, the question arises whether the appearance of God is not entirely subjective, an illusion begotten from devotion to the idols of one's tribe perhaps. Beliefs formed about one's immediate environment on the basis of perceptual experience include the proposition that the things that one sees, touches, hears, etc., are objective in the sense that others in the right perceptual conditions would experience them too. If they do not and com- municate this to me, then I would be right to worry about my cognitive faculties. Illusions occur.

THE CHALLENGE OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM: A REPLY TO JAMES KRAFT 125

God, the One, Brahman, Emptiness, are all considered 'Ultimate' by those who embrace any of the world views in which one or the other of these religious objects figure, and this Ultimacy is taken to be Ultimacy for everyone. Christians believe that God is God of all, God of even Buddhists who take themselves directly to realize the nature of the Ultimate - which they take to be the Ultimate for Christians too - in a nirvd.na-experience. Kraft rightly sees that deep difficulties surround a conflict regarding whether the Ultimate is a Person. Surely Hindus of the Advaita Vedanta philosophy would deny Personality. My point is that the idea of Ultimacy which we find in both views and in all the diverse religious belief-forming practices of the major traditions implies that, for example, God is God of all, and should be experienceable by everyone. The reasons, then, for doubting that there is such a possibility are that, first, so many apparently have no religious experience at all, and, second, those who do make apparently incompatible claims. Let us focus here only on the latter problem.

Perceptual appearances give every one of us a track on physical reality. Of course, through science we learn to conceive of things in terms very different from those of the phenomenological descriptions that appearances seem most directly to warrant. Nevertheless, not only do perceptual appearances serve us well in most of our everyday activities, we find correlations between things as they are in nature and their appearauces to us. The exactness of these correlations varies considerably according to many factors, and we cannot be absolutely sure that some feature of appearance, like the apparent solidity of surfaces, reflects nature with any close approximation. Projection into experience there is nonetheless, such that perceptual beliefs provide, as William Alston says, a 'useful guide to the environment', 2 and this idea, I agree, may serve as a guide for the religious experiencer in conceptualizing the religious object or realm.

But then why be exclusivist about the enterprise? Current overrider systems, to use Alston's terminology, need overhauling in the light of our emerging knowledge of world religions. It is unfair and incorrect to say other religions are evil while ours alone is good. The worry about inter- subjectivity I have outlined is a sturdy defeater of any such position.

Furthermore, as Alston for one recognizes, in supposing that a religious doxastic practice is truth-tracking, one supposes not only the reliability of the moves from how the religious object appears to what is true of it, but also the reliability of the standard ways of identifying the object in terms of the theological (or buddhological) scheme. Within the traditional theisms, how could there be a God so unjust and unfair to allow no rational route into the true religion for a person who happens not to be born in the right place?

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Happily there are cross-cultural resources: ideas of God as Infinite (Brahman and gfmyat{t as an~di and ananta, etc.) as well as the value of diversity. God as Infinite could be expected to reveal its sacredness finitely in diverse ways. Furthermore, the fact that mystical language must be less exact than that about finite things allows a certain flexibility with the abstract propositions of the overrider system. It seems unlikely that an effort to preserve the incremental knowledge of a religious experiencer can be successful without questioning a great deal of the so-called background or proto-knowledge as found in all traditional theologies, buddhologies, and so on. Hopefully we stand at the end of the Middle Ages of spiritual theorizing, if we are not in its period of demise.

Claims of exclusivity cannot fare well on an empirical approach to theology. Given that the Advaitin experiences Brahman the Absolute as impersonal, is it clear that he or she is experiencing God as not a person? Similarly, does a Christian experience of God as personal prove that God does not have an impersonal side? Negative experiential judgments are a tricky matter, although it does seem that our current experience carries the lion's share of evidence that there is no elephant in the room. But if the object of a religious experience is the Infinite, as is suggested in all the major traditions, then religious experience is much more likely to provide positive content than show what the Infinite is not. Thus a non-sectarian spiritual philosophy that preserves doctrines of the major religions according to the warrant provided by experiential accounts seems feasible. I don't see how exclusion of other faiths can stand anywhere near the "core" of a religious commitment in the doxastic-practice approach. Kraft is absolutely right that the position should promote tolerance - at the very least, I should like to add. Incompatibilities should prove to be only apparent. But such a happy result can be realized only if the language and conceptual schemes used to interpret religious experiences can achieve much greater flexibility. What we need is some theological yoga, to loosen up the stifflimbs of doctrine. To return to the team metaphor, we need a league of all-stars, if only better to defeat a common opponent, scientism or metaphysical materialism, which benefits from the lack of solidarity of the other side.

Endnotes

1. See, for example, the papers in Philip Quinn and Kevin Meeker (eds.) The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

2. William Alston Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p.105.