The pluralist position put forward by John Hick has been  one of the most significant and influential philosophical approaches to religious pluralism.

Hick begins from the position that the world as it appears is ambiguous with regard to religion – there is no epistemological obstacle to experiencing and interpreting the world from the point of view of one religion rather than another, or indeed from a non-religious perspective (2004, p. 124).

From here, he proceeds to his central claim that religious traditions have emerged as finite, historical responses to a single transcendent, ultimate, divine reality. The diversity of traditions  is a product of the diversity of religious experiences among individuals and groups throughout history, and interpretations given to these experiences.

Hick’s claim that diverse interpretations are responses to a single transcendent Real draws on the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon;  the Real cannot be known directly in itself, but we can nevertheless experience it “as the range of gods and absolutes which the phenomenology of religion reports” (2004, p. 242).

Thus, Hick argues that no single description  applied to the Real from within the realm of human experience can apply literally to the Real (2004, p. 246). Nevertheless, the Real remains the final referent of the ontological claims made by the different religious traditions, even though such claims can at best only approximate to the real truth of divine reality.

Hick understands the multiple claims from diverse religious traditions that the object of their respective beliefs is ultimately unsayable and incomprehensible as supportive of his argument. As for the content of particular belief claims, Hick understands the personal deities of those traditions (for example, Yahweh, Viṣnu, Amida) as personae of the Real, explicitly invoking the idea of a theatrical mask implied by the Latin word persona.

Alongside these, he recognizes impersonae of the Real: concepts such as Brahman, nirvana, and Tao that represent ultimate reality in a non-personal way. Since the ideas in both of these categories arise from our experience of phenomenal reality, none of them can adequately describe the Real as it is in itself because this cannot be known directly. The only way that humans can describe the Real directly is by using formal language such as “ultimate truth” or “ground of experience” (2004, p. 246).

In light of his epistemological arguments (arguments about what can be known), Hick claims that all religious understandings of the Real are on equal footing because they only offer limited, phenomenal representations of transcendent truth. This position, which he calls the “pluralistic hypothesis,” brings together elements of several philosophical perspectives on religion into a complex whole. At the phenomenal, historical level in which humans live and religious traditions emerge, Hick advances the view that meaning is constituted largely by practice (linguistic and otherwise) within the contexts of particular cultures.

Thus, the justification of belief claims rests on the relation of various practical commitments within a certain tradition or culture, and evaluation of or comparison between claims of distinct cultures appears problematic at best. This aspect of Hick’s position seems to rely heavily on the cultural model of religion that places little importance on any cognitive content that belief claims may carry.

However, Hick also maintains that the content of religious belief claims necessarily implies the believer’s sincerity in supposing that such claims actually refer to the transcendent reality that they purport to describe. Hick maintains that the belief claims of the various historical religions have traditionally been articulated in ways that imply a realist perspective (2004, p. 176). Hick’s response to this issue is to posit that the referent of religious belief claims is ultimately real, but that any claims or knowledge about it must necessarily be historically and culturally mediated. If this is the case, then, as the pluralist hypothesis maintains, each religious tradition has some grounds for holding to its own beliefs and practices while no one tradition has grounds for claiming an exclusive or privileged status.

Hick claims that the pluralist hypothesis is more reasonable than either anti-realism or exclusivism given the broad extent and wide diversity of religious experiences and traditions. In response to religious anti-realism, Hick argues it is at least no less plausible to postulate a real, transcendent referent for religious belief claims than it is to reject such a reality in favour of a purely naturalistic explanation. Furthermore, he argues (drawing on William James) that a religious individual’s basic trust in her own experience is rationally justified, given the fundamental ambiguity of the world as it appears (2004, p. 228).

In response to exclusivism, Hick maintains that adopting an exclusivist stance toward the justifiability of beliefs is not rationally defensible (2004, p.235). Even if it were the case that only one religious tradition correctly represented the Real, it would not be possible for humans to know this with any certainty. However, Hick is clear that this is not a case of merely epistemological uncertainty; because the Real positively transcends all human description, no one way of describing can even possibly be true (2004, p. xx).

The moral and soteriological content of diverse religious traditions is also an important focus of Hick’s argument. He posits that, in various ways, all the major religious traditions that emerged from the “axial age” understand the salvation from or transformation of the present world as a central aspect of the human relation to the Real (2004, p. 300).

The ability to bring about such a transformation, as well as to promote a generally moral way of life, is perhaps the only common method by which one can evaluate diverse religious traditions. Thus, despite the various concrete paths to such an end proposed by the world’s major religious traditions, Hick affirms that the soteriological process at work in them is essentially the same. Furthermore, he points to what he sees as a broad consensus regarding basic moral claims among religious traditions to advocate the equal validity of diverse traditions with respect to their claims about salvation. Similarly to his argument regarding the ontological claims of various traditions, Hick does not ignore the fact that the details  often conflict with each other.

Nevertheless, he maintains that their overall moral themes generally agree and that their visions of salvation depict in various ways a path of transformation from self-centeredness to “Reality-centeredness.” The logic of this aspect of his position is also similar to the ontological-epistemological aspect insofar as no phenomenal experience can provide humans with certainty about the true effectiveness of any one path to salvation(2004, p. 337).

In principle, such knowledge can only be attained when salvation is achieved; according to Hick, such a point would be the proverbial mountain peak at which the various upward paths converge.

source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/rel-plur/#SH3c