Exposition: A Brief Summary of Hick’s Pluralist Hypothesis

source: Bradley Cochran https://theophilogue.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hicks-philosphical-advocacy-for-pluralism__version-3d.pdf

There are many general interpretations of religion. These have usually been either naturalistic, treating religions as a purely human phenomenon or, if religious, have been developed within the confines of a particular confessional conviction which construes all other traditions in its own terms. The one type of theory that has seldom been attempted is
a religious but not confessional interpretation of religion in its plurality of forms; and it is this that I shall be trying to offer here.

In spite of real contradictions between the truth claims of the world’s great religious traditions, Hick argues that each tradition constitutes very different but (so far as we can tell) more or less equally appropriate and valid ways of “conceiving, experiencing, and responding in life to” what could be called “the Real/Ultimate” or “ultimate reality,” which in and of itself is transcendent, infinite, ineffable, and transcategorical.

To explain what this means it will be most helpful to first consider a scientific analogy to the kind of claim Hick is making, an example that he himself offered in its defence. Buddhism and forms of Hinduism that view ultimate reality as impersonal (Nirvana or Brahman) on the one hand, and the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) which view ultimate reality as personal on the other, can be brought up into a higher synthesis analogous to the synthesis scientists have been forced to postulate for the physical structure of light. Although not directly observable, under different experimental conditions light has been found to exemplify both wave-like and particle-like properties depending on how the scientists interacted with it. When interacting with it one way, it exuded a shower of particles; and when acted upon in another way, it behaves as a succession of waves. Light can be validly conceived in either way —as a shower of particles or a succession of waves— yet light in and of itself is such that it cannot be reduced to either one.

Likewise ultimate reality [or—in and of itself] cannot be directly known, yet it can be appropriately experienced as, conceived of, and responded to in a variety of ways (even contradictory ways).

Hick calls this the “wave-particle complementarity in physics” and considers it an empirical analogy to how the properties of the Real are experienced in different (even contradictory) ways depending upon how the observer (and in the case of religion the practitioner) acts in relation to it. Although not using it as an argument, Hick also used the
reality of a rainbow as pedagogical metaphor:

“The rainbow, as the sun’s light refracted by the earth’s atmosphere into a glorious spectrum of colours, is a metaphor for the refraction of the divine Light by our human religious cultures,” (Hick, The Rainbow, x).

We shall discuss three developments Hick applied in his work: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing-as,” Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the noumenal reality and its phenomenal appearances, and Dionysius’s
notion of divine ineffability or transcategoriality

1. Wittgenstein and ‘seeing-as’

The Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion “according to which religious language constitutes an essentially autonomous ‘language game’ with its own internal criteria of truth, immune to challenge or criticism from those who do not participate in that language game,” was decisively rejected by Hick. This approach, he believed, stripped religion of all metaphysical claims and was often appropriated as a strategy for shielding religion from secular criticism of such claims.

The piece of Wittgenstein’s philosophy he appropriated was the concept of “seeing-as.” Wittgenstein himself distinguished between two types of “seeing.” One type of seeing involves experiencing a picture in terms of raw sensory data—to see physically a thin paper, an array of colours, a certain size and position. The other type of seeing, “seeing-as,” involves interpretation of this raw data—to see it as a picture of a face. Apart from this second sense of “seeing-as,” there is no “meaning” attributed to the raw sensation of sight or the mounds of ink. Yet as Wittgenstein pointed out, in reality this distinction is merely hypothetical, for in actuality “we [only] see it as we interpret it.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trs. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 193. Cited in Hick, Problems, 18).

Such a process of interpretation and the attribution of significance and meaning to the visual experience of sight, although distinguishable formally, is not something that can be separated from what we experience as “seeing,” but is part of what we do when we see. Hick’s expansion on this idea was as follows:

we find meaning not only in sight experience, but in hearing, tasting, and smelling. We never simply hear, taste, and smell, but we hear a train, taste peppermint, or smell smoke. Therefore we “experience-as” in our “ordinary multi-dimensional awareness of the world.”  (Hick Probems 16)

Experiencing meaning (as distinguished from merely semantic meaning) is routinely applied to every event,
situation, relationship, and more-or-less every aspect of our lives.

Meaning is the most general characteristic of conscious experience as such. For to be conscious is, normally, to be discriminatingly aware of various features of our surroundings in such a way that we can act appropriately (or at any rate in ways that we assume to be appropriate) in relation to them. … To find the world, or some aspect of it, meaningful is thus to find it intelligible—not in the intellectual sense of understanding it but in the practical sense that one is able to behave appropriately (or in a way that one takes to be appropriate) in relation to it. So defined, meaning is a pervasive characteristic of our environment as we perceive and inhabit it. (Hick, An Interpretation, 130-131).

Although Hick believed that we normally experience life on multiple levels simultaneously, he distinguished between different “levels” of meaning and therefore experience—natural, social, ethical, and religious—each of which correspond on a continuum of lesser to greater exercise of cognitive freedom. Whereas we are (for all practical purposes) forced by cognitive equipment to experience a rock as hard (there is not much choice in the matter by way of thinking of it as soft
spongy matter), when we extract the sorts of meanings given to social relationships or events, we see that a much greater level of cognitive freedom is involved, and a much greater ambiguity exists. When my wife appears irritated and I ask “What’s wrong?” and she responds with a notoriously curt “nothing,” or when close friends fail to invite me to their apparently otherwise inclusive get-together, interpretation becomes a more difficult task and requires a greater level of
interpretive sophistication.

When we come to the ethical questions the ambiguity is only deepened: Is Kevin a murderer or was he acting in self-defence? Is America spreading the good of democracy out of a desire to free the oppressed or is Uncle Sam a global bully strategically sticking his nose in the business of nations out of his own self-interest? Is it OK that my wife no
longer loves me and wants to move on, and if so, why do I feel so wronged by her filing for an uncontested divorce? Does Jerome deserve to be taught a lesson for putting his hands on my girlfriend? Given that Hick has defined meaning in terms of appropriate responses and subsequently dispositions that incline one to respond in one way rather than another, Hick was not quite sure how to categorise aesthetic experiences, for some argue they create no disposition
to behave in any way, but leave the practical consciousness suspended, as it were, to simply
enjoy the raw sensation of colours, shapes, movements, etc.

Placing emphasis on how these various levels of meaning are continuous in our actual experience and unable to be disentangled, he broadens the question to focus on life as a whole, for it is here that life is capable of being experienced after the mould of a natural interpretation ora religious interpretation. In spite of all the philosophy wars between naturalism on the one hand and religious interpretations on the other, Hick argues that the universe is ambiguous in and of itself, capable of being experienced in both ways. This means he did not believe philosophical argumentation for either position was conclusive, but he held the rare position that naturalistic interpretations and religious interpretations alike were both irrefutable (that is, neither can be proven or disproven by argumentation conclusively). This creates an exceptional level of cognitive freedom on the question. Hick saw this as preserving human freedom in relation to the
Real, for whereas sensory experience (such as being hit in the head with a rock) virtually compel us to interpret phenomenon in a very particular way, a religious interpretation of the universe is uncompelled interpretation, and faith he defined as “the interpretive element in Religious experience.” Here he also follows Aquinas in holding a distinction between faith and knowledge — knowledge is compelled by its object to assent to its reality, whereas faith is
uncompelled interpretation through an act of choice.

Because ultimate reality is ineffable, infinite, and transcategorical (an idea we have yet to explore), it has accordingly been experienced in a plethora of ways by the world’s major religious traditions, all of which can be seen as resulting in appropriate conceptions of the Ultimate for those who experience them as such. These conceptions are referred to ubiquitously in Hick’s work as the divine personae and metaphysical impersonae relatively speaking, in order to cover both theistic faiths and nontheistic faiths. Although none of these conceptions resulting from religious experience can be
seen as final and complete, they can be seen as responding to different aspects of ultimate reality and “reducing it to forms that could be coped with” and responded to in practical ways. The world’s different major religious traditions are different cultural contexts of these responses, and thus bear the mark of cultural partiality and human finitude.

Now here we have come a long way from the discourse of Wittgenstein, but Hick has expanded his notion of “seeing-as” to “experiencing-as,” along with his conviction of the ultimate ambiguity of the universe to conceive the nature of religious experience as involving uncompelled interpretation that preserves cognitive and human freedom in relation to ultimate
reality. Although the Real is able to be experienced-as in many ways, its true metaphysical contours cannot be known.

2. Hick adopts Kant’s noumenal category

This brings us to what is sometimes called Hick’s neo-Kantian synthesis. German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between reality apart from ourperception of it, which he called the noumenal, and reality as it appears to us, which he called the phenomenal. He argued that all sense perception is filtered through built-in concepts of the
human mind that decisively determine how we organize and interpret the raw data of sense
experience. We only know objective reality (the noumenal) through imposing our default mental categories on our experience. In fact, such categories are the preconditions of human experience. Hick saw Kant’s main insight as one that helped us understand how the structure of the human mind contributes to all perception.

Although Kant was referring to basic human concepts presumably universal, Hick appropriated this distinction to argue that cultures also shape the structure of the human mind in such a way that the same reality can potentially be conceived of in ways that conform to culturally peculiar schemas of thought, and because the Ultimate is infinite and beyond all human conceptions (a notion we will come to next), the human mind is actually aided by such ready-made cultural schematizations in its attempt to interpret and respond appropriately to it; hence the divine personae and metaphysical impersonae among the world’s great religious traditions.

Finally, we come to Hick’s notion of the Real itself, which he argues is transcendent,
ineffable, infinite, and transcategorical, and therefore does not directly correspond to any human
concepts or metaphysical assertions or denials. In this respect he is not merely following
apophatic theology, for he treats denials and affirmations as equally inapplicable to the Real.

3. Dionysius and the ineffable

Hick argued that the ineffability of God was taught (with different nuances) in such preeminent theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Paul Tillich, so attributing this view to Dionysius is here for pedagogy, but also because Hick viewed Dionysius as unique in the way he is keen to notice and directly addresses the dilemma created between this view of God and the Biblical language about God. Hick believed that this notion of ineffability is

“in one form or another … required by the thought that God …is unlimited and therefore may not be equated without remainder with anything that can be humanly experienced and defined,” (Hick, An Interpretation, 237).

Dionysius is especially helpful in Hick’s construction of a pluralist hypothesis because although he did not use the buzzword “transcategoriality,” he explicitly says:

“the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge. It abides beyond the realm of mind and of being. … escaping form any perception, imagination, opinion, discourse, apprehension, or understanding,” and regards all biblical language about God as therefore metaphorical. (Dionysius, The Divine Names, ch. 1 in The Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionusius, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 53. Cited in John Hick, “Exclusivism vs. Pluralism: A Response to Kevin Meeker,” Religious Studies 45, no. 2 (2009): 225).

Hick believed attempts to interpret biblical language literally (such as the relational doctrines of the Trinity or the philosophical developments of Chalcedonian Christology) were actually incompatible with this basic theological insight held by virtually all the major preeminent theologians in the Christian Tradition (both Catholic, Orthodox, and
Protestant). Critics have called this view of religious language transcendental or ontological agnosticism, and argued that Hick “severs” religious language from any transcendent reality.

But Hick saw this label as inaccurate. If agnosticism is understood as the claim that we simply cannot know whether there is a transcendent reality or not, it would indeed be misleading toapply this to Hick’s hypothesis, which did in fact postulate a transcendental Ultimate as the best explanation for the global phenomenon of religious experience and its fruits.

Furthermore, Hick even allowed that this Ultimate has a nature, but denied that this nature could be expressed with any human concepts because it transcends all such concepts which are finite and partial and could therefore never capture the infinite Ultimate in itself.

Furthermore, he held that we can in fact consider the Real as

“good or benign, or gracious, so long as we understand that these refer to the Real in relation to us—that is, in terms of the difference it makes to us. … So the sense in which the Real is good, benign, gracious is analogous to that in which the sun is, from our point of view, good, friendly, life-giving,” (The Rainbow page 63).

If Hick’s self-appointed aim is to provide a non-confessional pluralist hypothesis, from whence comes the possibility of any objective criterion for establishing whether any given religious tradition can be considered legit—that is, an appropriate response to the Real? Hick provides an account of his understanding of the function of religion, along with what he calls soft criterion (as opposed to hard criterion) “in that it does not deal in anything that can be precisely measured.”

Though soft, this is also a practical criterion in that it is used in all the world’s major religious traditions and therefore their adherents operate with it implicitly or explicitly (e.g. “You will know them by their fruits,” Mt 7:20). In order to clarify Hick’s position against distortions of his views by certain critics however, who have made Hick’s criterion into “the essence” of religion, the function of religion and the criterion for authenticity in religion, though related, must be distinguished.

There are critics who accuse Hick of reducing human salvation to mere transformation of the ego in a way that severs salvation from any need of God and defines religion apart from any metaphysical claims. This is a serious mistake of interpretation, for Hick’s view of salvation is a profound “reorientation” to the transcendent metaphysical reality of the ineffable “Real.” Thus his soteriology is bound up with a lofty metaphysical claim. Gavin D’Costa, for example, makes the mistake many times of attributing a non-realist position to Hick in spite of the heavy metaphysical postulate of the “Real” as central to salvation and all salvific religions, describing Hick’s view of religious language as “entirely instrumental,” a distortion of the most central hypothesis in all of Hick’s pluralist advocacy. (D’Costa, “Taking Other Religions Seriously,” 522-23). Meeker has also criticised Hick’s view as making altruistic behavior the “essence” of all major religions. (Kevin Meeker, “Pluralism, exclusivism, and the theoretical virtues,” Religious Studies 42, no. 2 (2006), 200).

The function of religious traditions, and therefore the closest thing to an “essence” of a religion is a profound reorientation of human life from selfcenteredness to Reality-centeredness.  It is thus a human transformation. In Christian terms
this would be a soteriological function (to do with salvation). But the reason this must be distinguished from the criterion of authenticity is that it only pushes the question of criterion back a step, for how doesone know for sure whether she has experienced such transformation?

Hick answers:

“the only way in which we are able to observe this salvific reorientation is in its effects in human life,” but the chief criterion in this respect is “love/compassion for others—this occurring, needless to say, in many stages and degrees,” (Hick, “Exclusivism vs. Pluralism,” 210).

This, Hick believes, is the central moral fruit of any great religious tradition and constitutes the criterion for authenticity. It is by now uncontroversial (although Hick still strings together impressive quotations form the world’s great religions)38 that the golden rule—love your neighbour as yourself—is formulated either positively or negatively within each of the great traditions. What is more, Hick claims it is actually a “natural human moral insight.” (Hick, “Exclusivism vs. Pluralism,” 211.)

When asked how he knows this constitutes an appropriate response to the Real, Hick’s reply is as candid as can be: “There are no non-circular ways of establishing fundamental positions,” and he borrows here from Alvin Plantinga’s notion of a “properly basic belief” that one is within their epistemological rights in taking it for granted. When accused of arguing in a circle, he concedes:

“It’s a circle, I agree, but it’s the kind of circle which any comprehensive view inevitably involves. … This criterion is integral to the basic religious faith, and this faith as a whole constitutes a circle in the sense that it cannot be independently established” (Hick, The Rainbow, 78.)

We are at last in a position to see how Hick’s pluralist hypothesis has significant implications for any theology of religions. Concerning Hick’s criterion, he argues that it is impossible to give a precise and decisive answer to the question of whether any of the world’s major religious traditions evidence the central fruit of love/compassion more or less than the
next.I maintain that so far as we can tell this salvific transformation is taking place—and also failing to take place—to more or less the same extent within each of the great world faiths.There is no one religion whose adherents stand out as morally and spiritually superior to the rest of the human race. (If anyone claims such a superiority for their own religious
community, the onus of proof, or of argument, is clearly upon them).We are at last in a position to see how Hick’s pluralist hypothesis has significant implications for any theology of religions.

4 Implications

Concerning Hick’s criterion, he argues that it is impossible to give a precise and decisive answer to the question of whether any of the world’s major religious traditions evidence the central fruit of love/compassion more or less than the
next.Given the nature of the criterion—that is, its “softness” (dealing with entities that cannot be precisely measured), the operative prejudice that would be inevitably involved in evaluating the evidence, and the sheer scope of such a wide variety of religious phenomenon within a given tradition at any given point in history (not to mention throughout the ages), combined with the task of exploring all relevant evidence for all the major religious traditions, Hick did not think it
a reasonable task to expect for anyone to make a conclusive case for the superiority of any of the major religious traditions over the rest.

Hick’s criterion for appropriate response to the Real thus places all the major religious traditions on a more-or-less equal footing while at the same time clearly excludes certain religious traditions on the basis of their fruit (or lack thereof).

It is precisely at this point that Hick’s pluralism creates tension with any religion who views itself as superior to the rest. He especially challenged the Christian tradition on this point:

If we take literally the traditional belief that in Christ we have an uniquely full revelation of
God and an uniquely direct relationship with God, so that in the church we are members of the body of Christ, taking the divine life into our lives in the Eucharist, and living under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then surely this ought to produce some noticeable difference in our lives. Christians ought to be better human beings than those who lack these inestimable spiritual benefits. … So we are stuck on the horns of a dilemma. We either have to claim, against the evidence of our experience, that as members of the body of Christ Christians in general are better human beings than non-Christians, or we are going to have to rethink those of our traditional doctrines that entail that. (John Hick, “The Next Step Beyond Dialogue,” in The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration, ed. Paul Knitter (Maryknoll, New York: Obris, 2005), 8).

In this fashion, Hick argued that the traditional doctrine of incarnation, as well as most forms of inclusivism (which interpret all salvation as Christian salvation and acknowledge no other kind) are in conflict with “the realities of human life, a contradiction between theological theory and observable fact. It is this that has led many of us to feel the need for revision.”

This call for the revision of Christian dogma drew scorn from conservative Christian theologians and was perhaps the most disconcerting aspects of his pluralist hypothesis, although it could be seen as an implication of his pluralism more than an explicit part of his argued hypothesis. Yet it is precisely the fact that he attempted to hold on to the notions of incarnation and Trinity as central themes for Christianity that simultaneously places him squarely within the Christian tradition— albeit the liberal stream of that tradition.

He held that these traditional doctrines can be seen as mythically true rather than literally true—by which he meant that they are capable (when understood as myths) of evoking

“in the hearer an appropriate dispositional attitude to the story’s referent, which in the case of myth always transcends the story itself.” (Hick, An Interpretation, 101).

The background assumptions also shaping Hick’s critique are derived from the consensus of the historical-critical
method of biblical scholarship which—in spite of hotly contested details that will likely be endlessly debated—has agreed that Jesus did not consider himself to be literally a Son of God, but only in the metaphorical sense widely used in second temple Judaism—the same sense in which David was called a son of God.

In the end, then, Hick’s pluralist hypothesis leaves the world’s religious traditions as they are—provided they weed out any notions that imply their own superiority over all the other major religious traditions. Hick’s transparency about this controversial aspect of his pluralist hypothesis was exceptional and appreciated even by his most outspoken critics.

There should therefore be no concealment of the fact that one part of the dogmatic structure is being modified in order to retain the acceptability of another part and that this is being done, under the pressure of our modern sensibility, in order to make room for the salvation of the non-Christian majority of humankind. For those who define salvation in exclusively
Christian terms some such doctrinal modification is today unavoidable. (The Rainbow page 21)