How Agatheistic Account of Doxastic Pluralism Avoids the Shortcomings of Hickian Pluralism

This brings us to the main critical point of this paper. It seems that Hick has only two choices. Either he is a realist or a non-realist. If the first is true, then his arguments which aim at resolving the problem of the conflicting truth-claims of different religions do not work, thus making his hypothesis implausible. If Hick is in fact a non-realist (though he suggests he is not) and assumes that religions don't make any truth-claims whatsoever, then his position becomes indistinguishable from that of anti-realist thinkers and will be unacceptable for the vast majority of the adherents of the world religions which Hick wants to reconcile.

More importantly, Hick's apparent shift towards anti-realism makes his position totally inconsistent. On the one hand he wants to assert that the Real exists independently of the perception of believers. In other words, he wants to be a realist about the Real. On the other hand, in order to resolve the problem of conflictingtruth claims (and thus to save his hypothesis) Hick allows virtually all religious beliefs to be interpreted mythologically. At the same time he would like to maintain that various conceptions of the Real are `authentic faces' of the Real, and not mere hallucinations. But how can he know that this is the case? If all particular beliefs about the Real are only mythologically `true', how can Hick know what is their actual relationship to the Real? How can he be sure that believers who think about the Real in realist terms are not completely wrong because in fact the Real does not exist independently of their perception? And what are his arguments to support his view that all conceptions of the Real are `authentic'? Why not to assume that some of them may be authentic (e.g. monotheism) while some other may be wrong (e.g. polytheism)? Or perhaps some of them are much closer to the truth about the nature of the Real than others? Why think that all of them are equally good?

Hick faced with such challenging questions is likely to respond by stating that in the final analysis all those rather theoretical problems are not soteriologically vi tal, because the only thing which really matters in religion is salvation/liberation, which Hick defines as the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness. He makes it clear in the following passage: But if we ask: Is belief, or disbelief, in reincarnation essential for salvation/liberation? the answer must surely be No [Hick, 1989, p. 368]. Here we arrive at a point where the weakness of Hick's formulation of religious pluralism becomes again apparent. One can ask on what ground Hick assumes that his definition of salvation is identical with the one which hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians or Buddhists implicitly assume? What justifies Hick's strong conviction that transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness is what religion is all about? And why does Hick take for granted that all religions have the same concept of salvation or aim at the same ultimate goal? Is the Buddhist concept of liberation by achieving Nirvana not utterly different from the Christian concept of salvation involving our existence in heaven in the presence of a Triune God? It is hard to find in Hick's works any satisfactory answers to these questions which clearly challenge his pluralist hypothesis.

He argues that because all religions are bringing salvation despite their conflicting truth-claims, therefore conflicting truth-claims are not a problem for his pluralistic hypothesis. Here we have yet another example of question-begging. On what ground does Hick assume that salvation/liberation is happening in all religious traditions? Hick points to empirical evidence. But such an argument can work only if salvation is limited to some degree of moral transformation in this life. However, such very temporal understanding of salvation will be wholly unacceptable for the vast majority of believers of any major religion. Both the Christian and Muslim concept of salvation clearly refers to a life beyond the grave.

There is yet another proposition which Hick takes for granted, namely that what one believes about the nature of the Real and the after-life does not affect in any way one's experience of salvation. How does he know that? Adherents of almost every religion seem to believe something contrary to Hick's conviction [Aslan, 1998, p. 111-113]. Many New Testament authors seem to maintain that belief in the messianic identity of Jesus is a necessary condition for salvation (cf. e.g. John 1:12-14; 3:16-18; Romans 3:23-38; 10:9). Contrary to Hick, Luther and many Protestant Christians would hold that belief in the divinity of Christ is much more important for salvation, than is moral transformation.

This brings me to one fundamental conclusion concerning the way Hick `interprets' religion in order to defend his formulation of religious pluralism. In the final analysis Hick appears to be a typical revisionist theologian who does not take religious beliefs as they are understood and held by millions of believers, but ends with telling people what and how they should believe, so that his theory can work. This approach is typical of anti-realist authors and supports a hypothesis I would like to conclude with, that the only way in which Hick can defend his position while avoiding inconsistencies is by embracing the anti-realist view of religious language. Then he will have to accept all the consequences of that choice, including agnosticism about the existence of the Real, and complete `secularization' of the concept of salvation understood as the ultimate goal of religion. Acceptance of anti-realism will allow Hick to maintain on utilitarian grounds that all religions are equally `true' because each of them can constitute an effective means of salvation understood as the moral transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centred- ness. However, he will not be able to assert that each religious tradition is an authentic manifestation of the Real because anti-realism can not provide him with any arguments to support such a claim.

Conclusion

Advantages of agatheism over Hickian pluralism

When contrasted with the agatheistic conceptualisation of doxastic pluralism, Hickian pluralistic hypothesis exhibits a number of distinctive features. Firstly, Hick understands doxastic pluralism in the context of religion as diversity of `human responses to the Transcedent'. I suggest that there are only two ways to make sense of such `interpretation of religion': either `the Transcendent' is not really `Real', but is rather understood in some anti-realist way, or Hick makes in the point of departure a strong metaphysical commitment and holds that without the Transcendent really existing (in the noumenal sense) the very existence of religions (as religious phenomena) is unexplainable. It is my contention that such metaphysical commitment is groundless, indeed it is much weaker than Kant's commitment to the existence of the noumenal reality, because the phenomena that Kant is talking about do not exhibit the pluralistic nature encountered in the case of religious phenomena, therefore Kant does not face a challenge faced by Hick who has to explain not just the existence of religious phenomena (or simply religious beliefs), but also their striking diversity. Since ultimately Hick is unable to assert anything substantive about the Transcedent (such as that the Transcendent constitutes the ultimate human good), Hick ends effectively with an`anything goes' epistemic framework for his religious pluralism, since it is difficult to see any standard of justification of his claim that diverse religions are all authentic reponses to the Real, that they all possess mythological resources to convey to the believers the appropriate alignment with the Real, that they all provide appropriate context for transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness, etc. Ultimately the Hickian hypothesis does not explain how various religious beliefs are motivated, generated and justified. Despite achieving relatively little, Hick's interpretation of religion comes at a high cost of the mythological interpretation of the central religious doctrines (such as the doctrine of Incarnation in Christianity or the doctrine of reincarnation in Hinduism and Buddhism) which makes Hick's approach highly revisionist and therefore hard to stomach for billions of adherents of the historical world religions.

Agatheism also entails some challenging ideas, since it portrays all agathological beliefs, including religious beliefs, as a bottom-up, rather than top-down affair, namely as ultimately always human constructs, formulated in human concepts and expressed in human language, stemming from the phenomenologically identifiable agathological impulse of good-directedness (desiring good, indeed desiring ever greater good) and leading to formulation over time (in human history, but sometimes within the lifespan of individual human beings, especially in the case the geniuses of moral imagination, such as great religious, moral or philosophical figures) conceptions of the human good that transcend earlier such conceptions and point to the transcendent horizon of the Ultimate Good that does not have to be, but usually is conceived of in religious terms. However, agatheism does not understand religions as `responses to the Transcendent' (and therefore does not have to presuppose metaphysical commitments that Hick has to make without being able to justify them), but rather as a product of human search for the Ultimate Good, that results in diverse conceptualisations of the good that is aimed at and this axiological/agath- ological commitment gives rise to and justifies metaphysical commitments made by religious people (such as a belief in the reality of God as identical with the Ultimate Good). In this way agatheism explains in an uncontroversial way the diversity of religious doxastic beliefs, while at the same time does not leave the concept of the Transcendent empty of content, because the agathological imagination (and the reflection on the deliverances of agathological imagination) that generates agathological beliefs provides substantive content to the metaphysical beliefs that constitute the central doctrines of various religious traditions.

Most importantly, agatheistic conceptualisation of religious doxastic pluralism (and by analogy agathological conceptualisation of pluralism of other types of doxastic beliefs) opens a horizon of non-confrontational relation between adherents to diverse doxastic belief systems, since the agathological phenomenon of good-orientedness and desire for ever greater good is a pheomenologically identifiable universal human experience and aware of the irreducible subjective nature of agathological doxastic beliefs, human beings can open themselves to agathological dialogue which - presupposing good will and epistemic humility - may in time lead to crossfertalisation, enrichment and complementarity of diverse doxastic belief systems and metaphysical commitments, rather than to confrontation and conflict that more often than not is destructive of human good.

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