Introduction

This special edition of the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology emerges out of a conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 24 September 2015, entitled ‘Religious Diversity: Philosophical Perspectives.’

The urgency of the topic needs hardly any explanation: In Europe and elsewhere, we are faced with a diversity of different religions which occupy the same public space. We thus have to come to terms with this diversity one way or the other. If we wish to come to terms with it in a responsible fashion, we need to reflect on it in a serious way. This special edition focuses on the philosophical reflection on the issue. Its purpose is to add to the existing discourses a ‘theoretical-foundational’ reflection, a Grundlagenreflexion on religious diversity. Such a reflection is highly necessary in a situation in which the discussion on the issue is highly polarized – in the political realm but also in the philosophical one¹ – and catchphrases are widespread. This reflection attempts to provide a responsible philosophical analysis of the possibility of accepting religious diversity and the opportunities and challenges it provides. Hopefully, it will trigger further discussion and provide a useful basis for moral and, eventually, political decision-making on this crucial issue.

Three main papers were given at the conference, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Joseph Margolis and myself (my inaugural lecture). Christoph Baumgartner and Maarten Wisse responded to Wolterstorff’s paper, and Oliver Wiertz and Nicola Slee to Margolis’s paper. René van Woudenberg, Vincent Brümmer, Sami Pihlström, Peter Jonkers and Luco van den Brom responded to my inaugural lecture after the conference. All those papers and responses, plus my Concluding Remarks are collected in this special edition.

Wolterstorff targets the issue of toleration. He emphasizes that we should distinguish between toleration and indifference. He argues that ‘[i]ndifference makes toleration irrelevant’, genuine toleration requires caring about the issue at stake and, also, disapproving of it. After providing some historical considerations on the issue, he emphasizes that being a human person implies hermeneutic capacities, i.e. the capacity to interpret reality, and to have a ‘valorized identity,’ i.e. the capacity to form judgments on the relative importance a ‘person assigns to states and events in her life’. Both hermeneutic and valorizing capacities account, among others, for the special dignity of persons. That being the case, persons have ‘a natural right’ to be treated in ways that befit their dignity which includes ‘the civil right to free exercise of their religions’.

Baumgartner criticizes that Wolterstorff runs the notions of religious toleration and that of the right to freedom of religion together: The latter appears illegitimately to be a subspecies of the former. Furthermore, Baumgartner argues that Wolterstorff bases the special dignity on capacities of human persons, not of human beings in general so that his account of freedom of religion is not a human right but one of persons.

The counter-question to Baumgartner is to what extent Wolterstorff’s argument requires reference to human rights: Could the emphasis upon toleration and the free exercise of religion not be had without reference to the notion of human rights and be consistently reconstructed as a ‘dignity of persons’ – argument?

Wisse emphasizes that the grounds for toleration of other religions than the home-religion should be religious rather than philosophical: ‘Motivations for religious tolerance are intrinsically contextual and relative to one’s religious tradition …’. Pointing out that Christianity is itself a product of an intra- and interreligious dialogue, he emphasizes the need for religious tolerance and dialogue. Providing the example of a concern for the good life, Wisse insists that both Buddhists and Christians share common ground. Yet, in accord with what a number of other contributors emphasize (e.g. Wolterstorff and myself), Wisse rejects the view that the search for common ground is the purpose of the interreligious dialogue. Rather, it is an ‘invitation to discover what God has given in other religions through creation and revelation …’.

The counter-question to Wisse is whether an emphasis upon the theological roots of tolerance needs to be played off that strongly against the search for a philosophical basis of it. Aren’t both more compatible than Wisse thinks? Is the philosophical search not a meta-endeavour which provides the fundamental-theoretical foundations for the possibility of tolerance – without which the theological endeavours would be pointless?

Margolis emphasizes the contingent character of all religious pursuits: There are no such things as timeless truths regarding religion.² Homo sapiens does not occupy any determinate ecological niche or teleological function in terms of which the objectives of religion could be discovered. Yet, Margolis holds that persons are ‘hybrid artifacts of a unique form of evolution peculiar to the human species, creatures that, by mastering language [and self-reflectivity], are effectively capacitated to invent encompassing objectives for their own lives’ (emphasis added). In order to survive, they need ‘steady, convincing purposes in a purposeless world’ and religion is an important source of providing such purposes. Yet, the logic driving such ‘invented rather than discovered’ purposes requires us to retreat from a bivalent notion of truth to a many-valued notion or, as Margolis calls it here, a ‘relativistic logic’ (for the issue of retreating from bivalence, see also later).

Wiertz summarizes Margolis’ account as implying that every religion has to acknowledge its deeply historical and contingent character: There are no neutral grounds but justifications are internal to the religion at stake. Wiertz emphasizes that, for Margolis, human beings are artefactual persons who have to construct themselves as well as their norms and purposes. But Wiertz suggests that that is precisely what makes them special: Human beings are the only species which is in a position to create itself, to develop a ‘language sufficient for discursive aims’. Wiertz embeds this suggestion in a classical metaphysics.

The counter-question to raise to Wiertz is whether the difference between his anthropological presuppositions and Margolis’ are as huge as Wiertz seems to assume. Although this comes out in his paper only marginally, Margolis is in the records for criticizing the ‘profound inadequacy of the Darwinian model of evolution’ by drawing on post-Darwinian palaeoanthropology. According to Margolis, the human species is ‘biologically formed to be cultural animals’,³ and language, intentionality and (self-)consciousness emerge within the bounds of the natural but cannot be nomologically inferred from it in the sense in which materialists attempt to do so. Although Margolis will reject Wiertz’s emphasis upon a classical metaphysics, the idea that the human species is unique for its use of lingual capabilities is not at all foreign to Margolis.

Being a practical and feminist theologian, Slee emphasizes the need to root the philosophical discourse on religious diversity within the lived experience (of women) of faith. Her main point is not so much to reject Margolis’ approach but to question some of the standard assumptions Margolis and others make (in Slee’s eyes) when talking about religious diversity. Referring to her own experiences, e.g. with an interfaith group of women in Birmingham, Slee suggests that differences between deviant religious traditions may be relativized by the shared experience of marginalization. Rather than religious differences, differences in power, status, ethnicity, etc. may be at the foreground of the agenda. Her conclusion is that what we see to be key differences in the discourse on religious diversity ‘will depend to a large extent on our context, social location and agenda’ so that our ‘experiences of difference will also keep shifting’.

The counter-question to Slee is whether the theoretical reflection on religious differences must be played off that strongly against the ‘lived experience’ of (religious) difference. Obviously, Slee’s insistence on the situatedness of our perceptions of difference is a useful warning against all tendencies to ‘essentialize’ them. And insisting on the contrast between theory and practice is valuable when deconstructing the (traditional) tendency to overemphasize theory over practice. Yet, is such a stark contrast also helpful when it comes to reconstructing the discourse on religious diversity in a responsible fashion? Is it for the purposes of such a reconstruction not more helpful to think along the lines of a continuum between theory and praxis, a mutual interaction according to which one influences the other without principally privileging theory or practice?

In my inaugural lecture, I criticize religious pluralist approaches, such as John Hick’s, and their attempts to find common ground between the different religions at all costs. They are guided by the assumption that that which is different must be false. I trace this assumption back to bivalent presuppositions and reject a bivalent logic with its exclusive alternative ‘either true or false’. I suggest to drop the notion of truth and use that of justification in order to distinguish between epistemically praiseworthy and epistemically blameworthy behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that justification is context-dependent and thus pluralizable in a way in which truth is not. The pluralization of justification is the key to dealing constructively with the issue of religious diversity in my view: Religious believers in different contexts can be justified to hold different religious beliefs. This is the core of the paradigm of justified religious difference. This paradigm implies a number of consequences for reconstructing the interreligious dialogue. One of them is that the desperate search for common ground should be abandoned in favour of acknowledging genuine differences between the religions.

My criticism of bivalence is rejected by van Woudenberg, Brümmer and Pihlström: According to van Woudenberg, most religious believers accept bivalence and abandoning it would licence ‘madness’. Brümmer insists that bivalence, respectively, ‘excluded middle’ (i.e. that either a proposition or its negation is true) is a necessary condition for ‘the success of any legitimate speech act.’ Pihlström suggests to pay close attention to where bivalence applies and where it does not. He suggests to endorse a general fallibilism rather than a rejection of bivalence.

Following Ricoeur, Jonkers advocates a very strong notion of tolerance which he plays off against my account: He suggests that we should not only tolerate what we consider to be justified but also that which we consider to be unjustified. Van den Brom emphasizes the difference between religious beliefs and knowledge claims. According to him, the issue of the justification of deviant religious beliefs can be dealt with only from within the parameters of particular religious inside-perspectives.

In my Concluding Remarks, I respond to the issues my critics have raised: After pondering on the reasons why I consider a (broadly) semantic notion of truth to be crucial (Sections 1–2), I explain what I mean by the notions of ‘bivalence’ and ‘tertium non datur’ (3) and respond to van Woudenberg’s, Brümmer’s and Pihlström’s criticism (4). But I admit that nothing much hangs on deconstructing those notions. The real issue is that of an exclusivist competition, viz. that belief A necessarily displaces the deviant belief B (5). We need to abrogate this kind of displacement relation in the discourse on religious diversity as well as in many other academic and cultural discourses (as I demonstrate with the help of a criticism of Dawkins’ atheism) (6).

I explain why I consider the traditional concept of tolerance to be less important than my critics assume (7) and criticize Jonkers’ strong notion of tolerance (8). After specifying why I think that justification can be pluralized and that this is the key to the ‘justified difference’ approach I favour (9), I respond to the challenges Pihlström, van den Brom, and van Woudenberg raise regarding my use of the notion of justification (10). Finally, I provide a sketch of the theory of ‘justified difference’ I have in mind, drawing on the distinction between disagreement with a deviant belief which is false and disagreement with a deviant belief which is not false (11).

Notes

1. Recently, a number of Dutch philosophers signed a petition in which they plead that Europeans should be (more) ‘open’ to migrants (‘Wij zijn allemaal migranten’, Marli Huijer et al., published in Trouw, 30 March 2016, ‘De Verdieping’, 8).

2. It should be noted, though, that Margolis would be prepared to hold that there do not exist time-less truths in other disciplines as well, including (natural) scientific disciplines (see, e.g., Margolis, Texts without Referents).

3. (Emphasis mine). All quotes from Grube, “Introduction,” xii (see also below, my Concluding Remarks, f. 4).