Do All Roads Lead to God?

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? 

I do not think so, and I contend that religious pluralism as a philosophy is fraught with difficulties. Consider again the parable of the blind men and the elephant. We know that the elephant is representative of ultimate, infinite reality. We know that the various parts of the elephant are said to represent our finite perceptions of that greater reality. We also know that the blind men represent religious adherents who ostensibly grasp only a small part of that phenomenologically variegated reality. 

But have you ever asked yourself this: just who exactly is the all-knowing one telling the parable in the first place? The story-teller presumes to have a “God’s eye view” of the all the world’s religions. The story-teller presumes to know the truth about infinite reality, all the while using his story to convince others that they do not and cannot attain to such a lofty perch. In other words, the story-teller (1) is a hypocrite: he assumes his own objective knowledge of that which he claims cannot be known objectively. That also (2) makes him a condescending imperialist. When it comes down to it, the parable teller is saying this: “All the adherents to all the world’s religions are wrong about what they believe. None of them have the full picture. They are all partial truths at best.” But how does he know such things unless he is somehow free from the epistemological limitations inherent to the rest of us mortals? In addition, the parable teller is also (3) a relativist who conveniently overlooks the disparate metaphysical claims that the various religions make about ultimate reality. And despite all pretense to broad-mindedness, the religious pluralist (4) turns out to be just another religious exclusivist of a different sort. The thoroughgoing religious pluralist presumes to tell us the ultimate truth about ultimate reality – all the while claiming that the ultimate truth about ultimate reality is ultimately beyond the grasp of our finite minds. Self-refutation aside, the pluralist is still positing a truth-claim. All truth claims, by their very nature, exclude their contradictories. So if pluralism is true, all non-pluralist options are necessarily false. That is, if the religious pluralist is right, then every religious adherent that claims that their way is the only way is simply wrong. To put it another way, the fundamental truth-claim of the “broad-minded” religious pluralist is no different in kind from the truth-claim of the “narrow-minded” religious exclusivist: my way is the only way.  Anyone else see the irony here? 

Epistemological pluralism is a bankrupt religious philosophy because it is ultimately self-refuting. An old Indian proverb teaches that ultimate reality is infinite and inexhaustible and that different individuals grasp different aspects of it. None is wholly wrong and none is wholly right. But yet, the proverb implicitly claims to exhaust what is wholly right about what is really ultimate. One of my favorite contemporary philosophers calls this “passive-aggressive tyranny.”  Or, you may just call it a crafty little shell game. 

Mortimer Adler, (http://www.thegreatideas.org/) the everyman’s philosopher, once pointed out the commonsensical fact that logically speaking, the universe might be eternal, or the universe might have had a beginning, but one must be false and the other true. No tertian quid exists. It might be the case that God exists, or it might be the case that God does not exist. But one or the other must be the case. It might be that one God exists, or it might be that many gods exist, but both cannot be true at the same time and in the same way.  In other words, sound thinking demands that we reject the lofty-sounding platitudes of religious pluralism which suggest that ultimate reality is beyond the scope of truth and logic. On the contrary, true belief can ultimately be grounded in just one thing: ultimate truth, something religious pluralism both offers and denies in the same breath.