Justified religious difference: a constructive approach to religious diversity

Abstract

In this paper, I provide a novel approach to the issue of religious diversity: I reject classical pluralist approaches to the issue, such as John Hick’s, and argue that their attempts to construe commonalities between the religions are contrived. The reason that they attempt to find commonalities at all costs is that they presuppose a bivalent notion of truth according to which that which is different is false. I suggest that, in order to get a robust theory on religious diversity off the ground, we should rely on the notion of justification rather than that of bivalent truth. Justification is pluralizable, dependent upon the (epistemic) circumstances, whereas bivalent truth is not. Armed with a pluralizable notion of justification, we can acknowledge that other religious beliefs are genuinely different without necessarily being false: They can be justified, given the (epistemic) circumstances a believer of a different religion is in. Perceiving religious differences in this way allows to liberate the interreligious dialogue from the pressure to find commonalities between religions at all costs, to respect the religious Other in her Otherness, and to ‘mirror’ one’s own religion in light of other religions.

Keywords:

• Hick
• Knitter
• Margolis
• Kvanvig
• Dawkins
• bivalence
• justification
• Rorty
• mirror
• paternalism

Notes

1. See, for example, Heleen Maat’s thesis that pluralists postulate a ‘uniformity in diversity’ (Religious Diversity, 47).

2. See Knitter, One Earth Many Religions, 122.

3. See Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 233.

4. See also the critique in Maat, Religious Diversity, 52.

5. See, for example, the more thorough critique in Grube, ‘Die irreduzible Vielfalt der Religionen’, 45.

6. For the notion of bivalence, see, for example, Béziau, ‘Bivalence, excluded middle’, 73, and, for a more general background, the introduction by Goble, The Blackwell Guide, 1; for the notion of excluded middle or tertium non datur, see, for example, Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, xxviii.

7. See Margolis, The Truth about Relativism, 18.

8. Ibid., 20 et al.

9. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176, Rorty describes attempts ‘to make truth something more than what Dewey called ‘warranted assertibility’. In describing this ‘something more’, he explains it with ‘more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying’. Although Rorty does not propose this characterization of truth explicitly here, it is commonly associated with his name.

10. I think of publications such as BonJour and Sosa, Epistemic Justification, 35 and 219.

11. See Kvanvig, Propositionalism and the Perspectival, 9.

12. Even Rorty acknowledges the existence of a difference between truth and justification (see Rorty, Truth and Progress, 2); see also Stout’s reconstruction of this difference in Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 231.

13. See, for example, http://www.the-brights.net/.

14. This result resembles closely the upshot of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous ring-parable in ‘Nathan the Wise’: Lessing argues that the truth of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious beliefs is indeterminate. Given this indeterminacy, justification kicks in. Yet, justification is intrinsically plural. Thus, adherents of all three religions are justified to hold their religious beliefs – an argument that can easily be extended to other religious beliefs as well (for a more detailed reconstruction of Lessing’s argument, see Grube, ‘Justification rather than Truth’, 357–359.

15. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 230.

16. This article is a (slightly) revised version of the inaugural lecture I held on 24 September 2015 at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and is modified in comparison to the published version of this lecture with the Free University Press (Amsterdam).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dirk-Martin Grube

Dirk-Martin Grube, Ph.D. (1991) from Temple University/Philadelphia, Habilitation from Kiel University (Germany, 1999), Chair ‘Religious Diversity and the Epistemology of Theology/Religion’ at VU University, Amsterdam has published monographs on Paul Tillich, Christology, interpretation theory, pragmatism, contingency and the foundation of (Christian) ethics as well as more than 50 articles at the intersection between philosophy (of religion) and theology, for example, on epistemology, Thomas Kuhn, William James, Alvin Plantinga, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.