Religious diversity is an obvious fact of American life and its healthy presence is a valuable indicator that our society truly values freedom. Americans have not departed in any appreciable manner from the pluralism celebrated by the influential philosopher William James a century ago. We are often wont, in fact, to boast that ours is one of the most, if not the most religiously-diverse nation in the world. And the empirical evidence seems to support this claim. (www.pluralism.org)
Religious pluralism, however, is more than just a cluster of largely indisputable sociological facts. It is, in fact, the position of some philosophers that pluralism is the necessary outcome of an unbridgeable epistemological divide between mankind and “the Ultimate.” This can be called a priori pluralism (before the fact) in contrast to the a posteriori (after the fact) pluralism that is the ongoing research subject of Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.
As a philosophy of religious epistemology (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/), pluralism is frequently illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the familiar tale, an elephant is examined by a number of blind men, each of whom feels a different part of the elephant and consequently draws different conclusions about the nature of the elephant, which of course, none except the story-teller actually knows as an elephant. The blind men, says the proverb, represent the epistemic status of the world’s religions: all have a part of the truth; none has the truth. The British philosopher John Hick, himself an influential pluralist, thus concluded: “If, then, we distinguish between the Real/ Ultimate/ Divine in itself [the elephant itself] and that Reality as humanly perceived [the parts of the elephant], recognizing that there is a range of modes of human cognition [the blind men], we can at once see how there is a plurality of religious traditions constituting different, but apparently more or less equally salvific, human responses to the Ultimate. These are the great world faiths.”
This “rainbow of religious expression” sounds great and liberal and broad-minded and all that stuff that is supposed to make non-pluralists feel like the knuckle-draggers they really are. But is religious pluralism as such actually a tenable philosophy? Even before I consult a religious text that might inform me otherwise, is it reasonable for me to embrace the idea that all religions are ultimately reconcilable with one another and all can be said to represent a small part of an even greater, ultimately unknowable truth?
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