How do we explain religious diversity?
Luke Muehlhauser at Common Sense Atheism summarizes six major responses to religious diversity.
The post is written with admirable clarity, and his viewpoints are set out plainly and efficiently. In the section on inclusivism Muehlhauser writes:
One objection to both inclusivism and exclusivism is that there is no neutral way to decide which religion is correct, or privileged. Some have replied that religion is a matter of faith, not rational assessment. This view is called fideism. Others have replied that a particular religion is true because its claims are warranted by evidence and argument, or because believers “just know” their religion to be true.
I think it is important to realize that these responses are available. There are all sorts of methods for investigating competing claims. I’d say methods range from banal (e.g. check for logical consistency) to extremely complex and person-involving (e.g. “wager” and experiment with a faith in the Pascalian sense).
In the section on his own response (atheism), Muehlhauser writes that the Christian God seems monstrous.
[R]eligious diversity does provide a problem for certain religions, like Christianity. Christianity teaches that God is all-loving and all-powerful, and yet he chose to reveal his saving truth by way of a human sacrifice in a remote corner of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, and will forever torture everyone who hasn’t heard of this or can’t believe it.
He gives three Christian responses. The Christian can say (1) maybe those who haven’t heard wouldn’t have believed anyway, or (2) that God’s ways are just beyond us and so his justice falsely appears as injustice, or (3) that we all deserve to be tortured forever. Muehlhauser says none of these responses mitigate God’s monstrous appearance. Therefore, the idea that “An all-loving God wishes to clearly reveal his means of salvation to the world” is unlikely. So this becomes the more likely explanation:
People evolved to see agency where it is not (because mistaking wind in the grass for a lion is better for your genes than mistaking a lion for wind in the grass), and this manifests itself differently from culture to culture.
I have two things to say about this issue of explaining diversity. First, I think there are serious responses available to the Christian which don’t have the consequence that God seems monstrous. The most plausible to me is that individuals are judged by the light from God that they have received. This seems immensely plausible to me from a moral point of view. Admittedly, it causes in-house debates about, for example, the function of evangelism, but I don’t think that should make it any less of an option among the others in Muehlhauser post, from a philosophical point of view.
Second, when I read Muehlhauser’s alternative explanations at the end I realized that I hold a variation on both of them. While I wouldn’t posit God’s revealing a plan of salvation as an explanation of religious diversity, I would posit God revealing anything at all as a partial explanation of religious diversity. I would then adopt a version of Muehlhauser’s second and favorite explanation, and say not that humans are just seeing agency where it is not, but are reacting to their palpable religious experiences and intuitions in culturally reflected ways. On a model where God issues “general revelation” to all people (say, via the natural world and human conscience), this may be reflected (and distorted) differently due to cultural realities. Whether or not one of the resulting reflections is better than the others is open to inquiry. The gospel stories say that a person is to be identified with the clearest revelation, correcting and perfecting all our reflections, past and future. So I would change Muehlhauser’s (1) and (2) to the following and embrace both of them:
(1) An all-loving God issues general revelation to the world, available to human beings in nature and conscience.
(2) People (for whatever reason) are imperfect, perceiving general revelation in different ways, and this manifests itself differently from culture to culture.
Overall, I am impressed with Muehlhauser’s presentation, not only for its own clarity, but also because it helps me sort out my own thinking in a similar useful context.
It is also open to the Christian to take a universalist standpoint, like the majority of the early Church leaders (Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Macrina the Younger, Saint Clement of Alexandria, and my favorite, Origen). He could do so by invoking the Bible (Wikipedia actually compiles a decent list, though I’ve seen much more thorough exegesis elsewhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_universalism#Biblical_origins) or making well thought-out theological statements (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/macdonald/unspoken3.viii.html). They could even agree with our previous President! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_8GoF9SLas&feature=related) So long as we are using the generic term Christian (clearly including those with many different theological beliefs), we should allow responses from a theological view held by the majority of the early theological schools of Christianity.
Universalism has similarities with pluralism and inclusivism, as they are presented in Muehlhauser’s post.
But I suppose Universalism from a specifically Christian perspective is an available option.
Similarities, sure, but it seems different in an important way. It’s certainly not pluralism. It doesn’t view other religions as in any way correct. In this aspect it is entirely with Christian exclusivism. There is nothing about different path or perspective. It states that Christianity is True, with a capital T. Perhaps other religions get some theological doctrines correct, or are closer to Christianity in certain important ways, but the view would not at all say any other religion is correct or as a viable alternate path to ‘Ultimate Reality’.
It also seems importantly different than inclusivism. The Universalist Christian ( I put it this way to make sure it is understood that their understanding of the doctrine of Universalism is what is describing their identity as a Christian, not the other way around. I have similar qualms with the phrasing Christian-American versus American Christian, though perhaps for entirely different reasons) does not believe that it is possible to achieve salvation through another religion. Salvation is only possible through Christ, and of course would not be possible through any other religions, as they are not even true on this view.
This would have the benefit of avoiding many of the problems that religious diversity is alleged to give Christianity. It maintains that “the world really is one certain way, and not also a contradictory way.” It puts forth a view which is taken to be a correct understanding of historical Christianity; it is not merely a move patched on later in order to avoid an unfriendly result. To this end, it is argued on the merits of what a correct understanding of history, the Bible, and God’s character would entail, and is more of a fortunate side effect that it deals with this problem nicely.
Perhaps most beneficial of all is that it doesn’t ascribe, what at least seem to be upon first understanding, torturous unjust actions to not only a loving being, but the ‘lovingest’ being.
Could you summarize how you are imagining universalism? Are you imagining the strong form where all souls in fact obtain (or are given) salvation?
There is a weaker sense, which is that all souls have available to them the means of salvation, and no one is elected out. Can I be annihilated if I want?
I think either would work for the solution, but I was imagining the first. Frankly, I’ve always had a hard time understanding the second. If one really has an understanding of the choice they have in front of them, it seems nigh near inconceivable that anyone would choose annihilation over salvation. And if they don’t have that understanding available to them, it puts us basically in exclusivist territory. With the understanding, it seems very much like the stronger version.
I don’t know if you read through the Justice sermon by George MacDonald. That is just about how I’m imagining it, which I would interpret as the stronger version of universalism. However, if for other reasons one preferred the weaker version, I really don’t see any difference in the result, as I think literally everyone would not choose annihilation. Even then, I’m not positive that it would be just to make that an option.
“(2) People (for whatever reason) are imperfect, perceiving general revelation in different ways, and this manifests itself differently from culture to culture.”
Epistemological revelation has no evidential starting place. It has as its foundation a God that we cannot detect with any of our senses and moreover we cannot detect with all our advances in science. And even through philosophical arguments, such as the ontological argument and the Kalam cosmological argument, we are still no closer to gaining a degree of reasonableness for God’s existence. The reasoning for trust in this epistemological view must rest solely on faith and it must be circular, i.e. I believe in God because I have the bible and I believe in the bible because I believe in God.
Epistemological revelation has as its foundations just the art of words. Knowledge is told to us in the form of stories, parables and reports of events. This is a very weak base to build knowledge upon. Each reader of such a format will go away and believe something subtly different or concretely different. For knowledge, in the form of prose, to pass from the page to a mind accurately then it has to be extremely well written. The only thing we could reliably conclude is that God or His Spirit-breathed writers aren’t very good at their art. If we grant that God would choose such a weak medium for knowledge transfer then I believe the kind of writing that it would contain would be a report or manifesto or some form of writing at present unclassifiable.
Ben: “I really don’t see any difference in the result, as I think literally everyone would not choose annihilation. Even then, I’m not positive that it would be just to make that an option.”
I’ve read MacDonald’s Justice sermon. I think he would have said that it would not be just to allow anyone to choose annihilation. Further, I think he would have said that a good father would not allow his children to be annihilated.
I agree about your interpretation of MacDonald’s universalism. I was exploring some of the variations which I think would meet the demands presented.
That being said, I think there are very strong arguments of MacDonald’s view. All I meant was, I think making a distinction between allowing someone to choose may very well be making a distinction without a difference. Presuming God makes sure his children are in the correct epistemic situation to make such a decision (which seems required for the decision to be just (think fair play like MacDonald)), then I don’t see how anyone would make the choice for annihilation.
Andrew Hawkins: The sentence you quote is part of what I suggest as a religious explanation of religious diversity. If God gives general revelation in nature and conscience, then imperfect people will reflect it imperfectly, through cultural lenses.
I don’t quite know what you mean by “no evidential starting place.” An experience of God seems to constitute greater than zero evidence for God’s existence, for example. Why isn’t that, even if very small, an “evidential starting place”?
You make a lot of assertions, many of which are not relevant to my comments. I didn’t say anything about the Bible, for example. Nor did I defend philosophical arguments as ways to establish the “reasonableness for God’s existence.”
Why do you think “epistemological revelation” (what kind of revelation isn’t epistemological?) is based on “just the art of words”? Much of people’s religious experiences do not involve words, which is one reason why revelational experiences can be distinguished from interactions with a text, testimony from others, reasoning through philosophy, arguments from authority, and so on.
I made two major points. The first was that more robust explanations of religious diversity are available to the Christian than Muehlhauser mentions. The second was that the two major competing explanations Muelhauser gives at the end of his post can be made consistent with modifications.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for bringing up MacDonald’s Justice sermon. Just thinking about God as the good Father who will go to any lengths to make his children righteous helped me through a difficult time.