Tolerance and religious belief: a response to Joseph Margolis

Abstract

I offer a reconstruction of J. Margolis’ article on the question of the meaning and place of religion in our time proposing that one of its main subjects is the question of religious tolerance. I hint at the possible gains of a religiously less attenuated picture of religious belief than that which Margolis paints.

Keywords:

• reasons for tolerance
• theistic concept of God
• principle of bivalence
• meaning of life

Notes

1. E.g., Dawkins, God Delusion; also compare the title of the second chapter of Stenger, New Atheism: The Folly of Faith.

2. By the way, that shows that piety cannot work as a shelter for our limited cognitive capacities, nor as a kind of draw back position in avoiding the threat posed by relativism. Not even on the face of Margolis’ robust relativism this would be a viable strategy: a relativism which “admits some range of competing claims, claims for which there are at least minimal grounds justifying the joint application of competing principles”; Margolis, “Robust Relativism,” 37.

3. As far as I can see, a common reason for the restriction of the principle of bivalence is the existence of semantic or ontological vagueness. This fits nicely with Margolis’ proposal of a mythic understanding of religious discourse which can function as a reason for thinking of religious discourse as vague, which in turns justifies the restriction of the principle of bivalence in the area of religious discourse. For a critique of the use of vagueness as a basis for the rejection of bivalence, see Williamson, Vagueness. Williamson argues, that the vagueness of an assertive sentence does not consist of the semantic fact that neither the predicate nor its negation apply to the subject but of the epistemological fact that we do not know what the case is with the predicate or its negation. With other words: Williamson proposes that “vagueness is a kind of ignorance.” (Williamson Vagueness, 145.) His main argument against the denial of the principle of bivalence for certain sentences (not against its total rejection) is that the denial of bivalence for a particular sentence leads to an apparent contradiction because the ‘denial of bivalence for a sentence is equivalent to the denial that either it or its negation is true’ (145), which leads to the contradictory conclusion that this sentence is both true and not true. If Williamson is right (which I have to admit would be controversial), the strategy to deny the principle of bivalence only for particular sentences (e.g., sentences on which adherents of different religions disagree) would not work.

4. Kant, Grundlegung, 429: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’ (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; edited and translated by M.J. Gregor).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver J. Wiertz

Oliver J. Wiertz is a Professor of philosophy at Sankt Georgen Graduate School for Philosophy and Theology, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He received a doctorate in theology from Sankt Georgen School and a doctorate in philosophy from Goethe-University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. His research focuses on epistemology and analytic philosophy of religion. He has published articles on the rationality of religious faith, the theistic concept of God, the problem of evil, religious plurality and religious violence.