Religious Pluralism and Exclusivism

Everything in this tier has treated theism as one position with one set of commitments. It is not. The traditions that affirm a God disagree with each other about what that God is like, about what has happened in history, and about what a human being has to do; and they have generally held that the disagreements matter enormously. A treatment of the philosophy of religion that never notices this has left out most of the subject matter.

The shape of the conflict

The disagreements come in at least three kinds, and running them together produces confusion.

Some are about the nature of the divine. Whether God is one in a sense that excludes internal distinctions, whether God has become incarnate, whether God has a will at all, and whether the ultimate is personal are all contested between traditions, and the answers are not compatible.

Some are about history. Whether a particular person rose from the dead, whether a particular text was dictated, and whether a particular teacher achieved a particular state are ordinary factual questions of the sort that admit exactly one answer, however hard the answer is to establish.

Some are about the path. Traditions specify what a person must do, believe, or become, and the specifications do not coincide. This is where the practical stakes have historically been highest, since a tradition holding that its own path is the only one available is thereby holding something severe about everyone else.

Two further features of the terrain deserve noting before the positions are stated. The first is that agreement is also real: the traditions converge substantially on moral matters, on the inadequacy of ordinary human self-absorption, and on the existence of something the ordinary world does not exhaust. The second is that not every tradition affirms a God at all, which the standard framing of this debate tends to obscure and which the next rung takes up.

The three standard positions

The positions are ordered by how much they concede, and each buys relief from a difficulty at a price. Exclusivism keeps the traditions' own self-understanding intact and pays in the severity of what it says about outsiders. Inclusivism softens that at the cost of describing other traditions in terms their adherents would reject. Pluralism removes the severity entirely and pays by revising every tradition's account of itself.

The pluralistic hypothesis

Two features of the hypothesis do most of the work.

The first is the range of what the Real can appear as. Hick divided the phenomenal divinities into personal and non-personal forms, so that a tradition worshipping a personal God and a tradition oriented toward an impersonal absolute are both accommodated rather than one being ranked above the other. This is a genuine advantage over any position that treats non-theistic traditions as defective versions of theistic ones.

The second is the criterion by which authenticity is judged. Since no tradition's descriptions can be assessed against the Real directly, Hick assessed them by their fruits: a tradition is an authentic response if it effects the transformation of human beings from self-centredness toward centredness on reality. The criterion is doing a great deal, since it is what prevents the hypothesis from certifying every religious movement whatever.

What is wrong with it

Four objections have been pressed, and they are of unequal weight.

The first is that the Real, as characterised, is characterised right out of existence. If none of the traditions' descriptions applies to it, then it is neither personal nor impersonal, neither good nor indifferent, neither one nor many. The apophatic tradition discussed earlier in this subject went a long way in that direction deliberately, but it stopped short of denying that its subject was, for instance, good. A reality about which nothing positive can be said is difficult to distinguish from no reality at all, and it is not clear what the traditions would be responding to.

The second is that pluralism is itself a substantive claim that every major tradition rejects. The traditions do not hold that their descriptions are culturally conditioned appearances of an unknowable something; they hold that they are true. So pluralism is not the position that avoids telling the traditions they are wrong. It tells all of them they are wrong about the same thing, which is arguably a stronger claim than any exclusivist makes about any single rival.

The third concerns the criterion. Judging traditions by whether they turn people away from self-centredness requires a standard of what counts as an improvement, and that standard is not neutral between traditions. It is recognisably a moral standard of a particular modern kind, and applying it to rank traditions is exactly the sort of external judgement pluralism was supposed to avoid.

The fourth is a point about respect. Pluralism is often presented as the position that takes other traditions most seriously, but it does so by declining to take their central claims at face value. Telling a community that its scriptures are a culturally shaped appearance rather than a report is not obviously more respectful than disagreeing with them.

None of this settles the matter against pluralism. The first objection can be met by allowing some formal properties to the Real; the second by distinguishing first-order religious claims from second-order interpretive ones. But the position turns out to be harder to occupy than its reputation for moderation suggests.

The epistemic version of the problem

The positions above concern what is true. A separate and in some ways more pressing question concerns what a person is entitled to believe given that other people believe otherwise.

The general problem admits two families of answer. Conciliatory views hold that discovering a peer disagrees with you gives you reason to reduce confidence, on the grounds that from a neutral standpoint you have no better claim to be the one who got it right. Steadfast views hold that you may retain your belief, since you have your reasons and the fact that someone else lacks them or weighs them differently does not remove them.

Richard Feldman pressed a version of this in "Reasonable Religious Disagreements", published in Louise Antony's collection Philosophers Without Gods in 2007, arguing that the honest response to genuine peer disagreement is suspension rather than continued commitment on either side. The conclusion cuts against confident atheism as directly as against confident belief, which is the feature of the argument most often overlooked in popular versions of it.

Two difficulties attach to the second premise, and both are live in the general literature.

The first is that genuine peerhood is almost never established. To count someone as a peer is to judge that they are equally well placed, and that judgement is one the parties will normally disagree about: each thinks the other has missed something, and thinking so is not obviously a failure of honesty. The retreat to counting people who look equally intelligent and informed from the outside does not settle it, since what is at issue is precisely whether one of them has access the other lacks. In the religious case the believer typically claims exactly that, and the claim cannot be dismissed as special pleading without begging the question at issue.

The second is that conciliatory views have trouble applying to themselves. Epistemologists disagree about whether conciliation is required, and they are as close to peers as any group gets. A conciliationist who takes that disagreement seriously has reason to reduce confidence in conciliationism, and the view undercuts its own application. Various repairs have been proposed and none is uncontroversial.

Neither difficulty disposes of the argument. Together they suggest that its force is less than a bare statement of it implies, and that the intractability of religious disagreement may say more about how hard the questions are than about what anyone is entitled to believe.

What the earlier objection about conflicting claims becomes

The intermediate tier raised the conflicting claims objection against arguments from religious experience: experiences across traditions support incompatible conclusions, so they cannot all be veridical, and the practice that generates them looks unreliable. The material of this rung shows what that objection turns into once it is pressed.

William Alston's response, developed in Perceiving God in 1991, was to treat religious experience as a doxastic practice comparable to sense perception, and to argue that no doxastic practice can be validated without circularity, including the perceptual one. On that footing the diversity problem is real but not decisive: a participant in one practice has no non-circular reason to prefer it, and equally no reason drawn from outside any practice to abandon it.

Alston himself regarded the resulting position as uncomfortable. It licenses continuing in the practice one is in while conceding that a participant in a rival practice is in exactly the same position with exactly the same entitlement, and that concession is hard to hold alongside the belief that one's own practice is tracking something the other is not. His considered view was that the situation is unsatisfactory and that a practitioner should hope for its eventual resolution, which is an unusually candid place for a defence to end.

The exclusivist reply

Alvin Plantinga defended exclusivism in an essay published in Thomas D. Senor's collection The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith in 1995, and his argument sets the terms for most later discussion.

He distinguished two charges. The moral charge is that exclusivism is arrogant, arbitrary, or imperialistic. The epistemic charge is that it is irrational or unjustified. He argued that neither survives inspection.

Against the moral charge, he pointed out that the exclusivist's alternatives are not neutral. A person who considers a claim, understands the disagreement, and withholds belief is not thereby refraining from a judgement about other people; they are holding that everyone who does believe has gone wrong. And the pluralist, who holds that all the traditions are mistaken about the status of their own claims, is in a position no less exclusive than the exclusivist's. The charge of arrogance, if it applies, applies to every available option including agnosticism.

Against the epistemic charge, he argued that awareness of disagreement is a defeater only if the believer has some independent reason to think their own belief-forming faculties are less reliable than the other party's, and that awareness of numbers alone does not supply this. The believer's belief may be properly basic in the sense set out by Reformed epistemology, formed by a faculty operating as it should; and disagreement does not by itself show that it is not.

The reply is strong against the crudest form of the objection and weaker against the careful form. What it does not dispose of is the observation that both parties can run it. If the believer may retain their belief because they take their own faculties to be functioning, so may their opposite number, and the discussion terminates without either side having gained anything. Plantinga's argument establishes that the exclusivist need not be moved; it does not establish that they should not be.

The point about geography

The most widely felt version of the epistemic worry is not about peers in the abstract but about the distribution of belief across the world. A person's religious tradition is predicted with high reliability by where and to whom they were born, in a way their views about arithmetic are not.

The inference has to be made carefully, since the obvious form of it is a mistake. That a belief was caused by upbringing does not show it is false, and everyone's beliefs about almost everything have causes of this kind, including the beliefs of the person raising the objection. The genetic move was addressed in the intermediate tier and does not improve here.

What survives the correction is narrower and still substantial. The believer is committed to holding that a faculty which reliably delivers the truth in their own case reliably delivers falsehood in the case of people who differ from them mainly in birthplace. That is not impossible; faculties can be locally impaired. But it is a claim the believer has to accept, and accepting it while continuing to trust the faculty in one's own case requires a reason for the asymmetry that is not simply the deliverance of the faculty itself.

A useful way to isolate what the geographical fact does and does not show is to ask two different questions. The first is whether the believer would have held a different view had they been born elsewhere, and the answer is almost certainly yes. The second is whether that counterfactual tells against the belief they actually hold, and here the answer is less clear, because the same counterfactual holds for the person raising the objection and for beliefs nobody thinks it undermines. Someone raised in a scientifically literate society believes the earth is old for reasons traceable to their upbringing, and the tracing does not weaken the belief. What differs in the religious case is not the causal story but the absence of a method the two sides share, which returns the problem to the epistemic discussion above rather than constituting a separate argument.

Inclusivism is best understood as a response to precisely this pressure, which is why it has been the position most traditions have drifted toward. It preserves the claim to uniqueness while removing the consequence that most of humanity is written off for reasons of geography.

What the debate establishes

Three observations are fair.

Pluralism is not the neutral option. It is a position with substantive commitments about the limits of religious language, and it conflicts with every tradition it means to include. Whether those commitments are true is a real question; that they are not a way of avoiding controversial claims is not.

Exclusivism survives the moral objection and is left with an epistemic burden it can carry but not discharge. The believer is entitled to their belief in the sense that no one has shown them a defeater; they are not thereby in a position to show the other party anything.

And the disagreement problem is general. The features that make religious disagreement look intractable, that the parties disagree about method and about what counts as evidence, are present in ethics and in philosophy itself, including in the arguments of this subject. Anyone who concludes from religious disagreement that religious belief is unwarranted should check what the same reasoning does to their other commitments.

Next

This rung, like the whole subject so far, has assumed that the question is which conception of God is right. Several of the traditions in play do not have a God in the relevant sense at all, and some have many. The final rung looks at what happens to the arguments of the earlier tiers when the target changes: to a reality identical with the universe, to a reality containing it, to a plurality of deities, to a creator who does not intervene, and to traditions with no creator to argue about.