Conceptual enquiry and the experience of “the transcendent”: John Hick’s contribution to the dialogue

ABSTRACT

John Hick (1922–2012) was an influential analytical philosopher of religion and liberal Christian philosophical theologian who taught in Britain and the United States. His work on religious epistemology, the theology of religions and, to some extent, eschatology has close links with his understanding of the philosophy of religious experience. This paper offers a detailed analysis and critical evaluation of these significant elements of Hick’s philosophical and theological thought, focusing in particular on his theory of religious knowledge and the role played by religious concepts within religious experience, and the relevance of these reflections for his pluralistic account of the variety of religions and his criterion of religious truth. Hick’s response to the challenges of contemporary neuroscience and the philosophy of mind is also reviewed. The paper reflects on the relevance of these views to accounts of an experience of transcendent reality collected through the empirical psychology of religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious epistemology
• pluralism
• the transcendent
• John Hick
• neuroscience
• religious experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rewritten and published as Faith and Knowledge in 1957 and considerably revised in 1966.

2. Hick designates them all “mystical” experiences (1999, p. 110; cf. 2008, p. 15). However, he also identifies a narrower category of mystical experience, understood as “internal” experiences that are “independent of the physical environment” and which occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from “prophetic” religious experiences (Hick, 1993c, pp. 20–21, cf. 24).

3. Hick suggested that telepathy may be a “partial analogy” for the impact of the divine (1993c, p. 26). Cheetham correctly notes, however, that “activity” (like any other category) cannot literally or analogically be applied to the noumenal Real, about which Hick really “does not want to say anything concrete” (Cheetham, 2009, p. 307; see Hick, 1993c, p. 177 and the next section).

4. Hick correctly interprets analogy as “a stretched literality” (in Hewitt, 1991, p. 26). Myth is not understood in the study of religion as an untruth, but essentially as a narrative form of metaphor, a dynamic expanded metaphor or “moving picture of the sacred”, to adopt Ninian Smart’s succinct phrase (cf. Hick, 1993a, p. 105, 1995, p. 101).

5. This Kantian view of the mind as playing an active role in imposing organising forms and categories on data, so as to enable and create perception and knowledge, is in accord with many “interactionist”, “constructivist” or “schematised” theories and perspectives in individual and social psychology. Unusually for a philosopher, Hick argues that Kant’s recognition of “the mind’s own positive contribution to the character of its perceived environment” has been comprehensively confirmed by “modern work in cognitive and social psychology and in the sociology of knowledge” (Hick, 1989, p. 240).

6. In one survey, around three quarters of those who had a religious experience felt that it had altered their “outlook on life”, although only 10% said that it had encouraged more moral behaviour (Hay, 1987, p. 157).