Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality

Peter Jonkers, Oliver J. Wiertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367784799
• eBook ISBN: 9780429671135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book deals with the intellectual aspects of having diverse religious expressions in proximity and the socio-political consequences. It provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on this complex subject, cross-fertilizing work on religious plurality with truth-claims from theologians as well as philosophers from the continental and analytic traditions.

The book includes three major parts. Part 1 explores the ideas around religious diversity and truth; Part 2 draws out the epistemic import of religious diversity; and Part 3 concludes the volume by examining the practical and social aspects of religious diversity.

Bringing a transdisciplinary perspective to a topic that remains at the forefront of conversation around the religious life of the world, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion.

Part I
Religious diversity and truth

1 Introduction to Part I: the truth-aptness of religious discourse and the problem of realism in relation to religious diversity and pluralism

Sami Pihlström

As the chapters in this first part of the present volume demonstrate, the perennial philosophical concept of truth is fundamental in inquiries into religious diversity and pluralism. In order to say anything meaningful about these issues, we must clarify what we mean by truth – in religion and more generally. Truth, moreover, is a key concept within the debate over realism in philosophy in general and philosophy of religion in particular. The purpose of this introduction to the chapter of Part I is to provide an overview of the realism issue and to briefly point out one possible problematic outcome of realism regarding religious exclusivism and inclusivism, in particular. I will begin with brief remarks on standard varieties of realism, focusing on the concept of truth, and move on to applications of these realisms to the philosophy of religion.¹ I will then outline the argumentative move from realism to exclusivism that may stimulate criticisms of realism in relation to religious diversity. Towards the end of this introduction, I will briefly describe the main ideas of the chapters that follow.

The very concept of truth has recently been under attack to the extent that we are now believed to witness a “post-truth” or “post-factual” era. It is indeed remarkable how deliberate lies and general disrespect for truth have been turned into politically powerful resources among populist groups in particular. While there is nothing new in this phenomenon as such, internet and social media have certainly intensified these developments. It would be impossible here to discuss the implications of the rise of political populism for religious pluralism, but the fact that truth needs to be defended certainly motivates us to examine this notion in the context of the religious pluralism as well. The ways we talk about truth, facts and reality when dealing with religious diversity are not politically neutral; on the contrary, any discourse on truth contributes to constructing these notions and thus the world we live in.

In this context, an important distinction ought to be drawn between truth in a propositional sense and truth in (what we may call) an existential sense – a discussion that will figure crucially in, for example, Hami Verbin’s chapter in this collection. While the “existential” dimensions of truth may be easily misused by political populists appealing to what individuals and social groups feel to be true or false without evidence or argument,² it does not follow that the existential notion of truth would lack value or philosophical significance altogether. Propositional truth is a matter of propositions (roughly, the meaningful contents of sentences, statements, or beliefs) stating how things are, and this notion of truth is traditionally construed as correspondence between a proposition and the state of affairs it represents: if a proposition p corresponds to the fact that p, then it is true.³ We need not, and cannot, here determine whether the correspondence theory of truth or some of its historical rivals is the most accurate philosophical account of truth; in any case, it must be observed that straightforward construals of propositional truth (in terms of correspondence or anything else) may fail to capture the existential significance of truth for human beings. In the existential sense, something – for instance, a religious system of beliefs – may be true “for me” or “for us” by defining our relation to the world and to ourselves at a fundamental level, without necessarily being available to a propositional interpretation in terms of true or false sentences or factual beliefs. In one way or another, this (admittedly sketchy and unclear) distinction between two roles that the concept of truth may play in our lives, including our religious practices, needs to be taken into consideration when discussing the diversity of religious truth-claims.⁴

The issue of realism

As is well known, realism has been a major theme especially in the philosophy of science over the past decades, and continues to be actively discussed. According to scientific realism, there “really” are unobservable theoretical entities postulated in scientific theories (or, in a somewhat more careful formulation, it is up to the world itself to determine whether or not there are such entities); those theories have truth-values independently of our knowledge and experience (i.e., they are true or false independently of our ever being able to verify or falsify them); and scientific progress may be understood as convergence towards mind-independently objective (“correspondence”) truth about the world. These features of scientific realism may have more specific applications in, for instance, the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, or the philosophy of history, and it is debatable whether the concept of truth applies exactly in the same way to the truth (or falsity) of historical explanations and (say) physical or biological hypotheses.

The realism debate functions relatively analogously in other areas of philosophy. In ethics, moral realism has been a major topic of dispute. This controversy is about whether there are objective, mind-independent moral truths about morally right and wrong. Just like the scientific realist believes in the objective truth-values of scientific theories, even when they postulate observation-transcendent entities, and the antirealist denies that theories have such truth-values, the moral realist maintains that moral statements are objectively true or false (though their truth or falsehood cannot be immediately perceived), while the antirealist argues that this is not the case (for instance, for the reason that moral “statements” are not factual statements at all, but moral discourse, as expressivists maintain, amounts to a mere expression of non-cognitive attitudes, such as emotions).

Highly important dimensions of the realism issue are debated within other core areas of philosophy. For example, metaphysicians and epistemologists have explored realism about the past (and about temporality generally). The question here is whether past objects and events exist mind- and discourse-independently and whether statements about the past – analogously to statements about unobservable objects in science – have objective truth-values. Many other examples of truth, realism and antirealism in different fields of philosophy can easily be distinguished. These are all different local and contextualized versions of realism (vs. antirealism).

These contextualizations of the problem of realism are to be distinguished from the philosophical dimensions of the general or global realism issue that concerns the mind- and discourse-independence of reality and truth. The ontological realism question is whether there is a mind- and language-independent world. Epistemologically, we may ask whether we can know anything about such a world. The semantic realist, furthermore, maintains that we can refer to or represent the world by using language and concepts; according to such realism, our statements about reality are, indeed, mind-independently true or false, and truth is typically construed as correspondence with the way things are.

The concept of independence – as well as, conversely, dependence – is crucial for making sense of the realism discussion. According to typical forms of realism, the world and truths about it are (largely) independent of various things: minds; their experiences and perceptions; concepts or conceptual schemes; language or linguistic frameworks; theories and models; scientific paradigms; perspectives or points of view; traditions; practices; and so forth. We may use “mind-independent” as a shorthand for such forms of independence (to be contrasted with relevant kinds of dependence). The relevant concept of (in)dependence is, at least primarily, ontological: A is ontologically dependent on B, if and only if A cannot (or could not) exist unless B exists (or existed). This ontological notion of (in)dependence must be distinguished from both logical and causal (in)dependence. Statements are logically independent of each other if there is no logical entailment between them. Moreover, a table is causally dependent on its maker but ontologically independent of them because it can continue to exist when they die.

Having sketched a preliminary conception of what kinds of realism there are, we should note that the concept of truth plays a key role in all of them. The ontological realist, maintaining that there is a mind-independent world, also maintains that whatever is true about that world is based on the way the world itself is (roughly in the sense of the correspondence theory). Scientific realism, for example, typically claims that theories either correspond or fail to correspond to the real system they seek to represent and are thus mind-independently true or false. The same holds for moral realism and basically all forms of realism, though there are also philosophers who want to keep the issues of truth and realism distinct and insist on the purely ontological (non-epistemic and non-semantic) nature of realism.⁵

Let me also briefly clarify some varieties of antirealism. An easy way of listing them would be to just list the denials of the corresponding realisms. However, more specific characterizations are needed. For example, while idealism is often mentioned as a version of antirealism, as idealists typically maintain that the world is mental, experiential, or spiritual, idealists can also be realists; indeed, Immanuel Kant was an empirical realist while being a transcendental idealist. A more obvious version of antirealism is relativism, according to which the ways the world is, and truths about the world, are relative to conceptual schemes or perspectives. There is no way the world is “in itself”, nor any scheme- or perspective-independent truth. Relativism is close to constructivism (which can also be compared to idealism): we “construct” the world through our language-use, discourses, or conceptualizations, and there is no non-relative reality or truth at all. A quite different version of antirealism is empiricism (in the philosophy of science), according to which only the observable world is real and metaphysical speculations about unobservables should be abandoned; hence, scientific theories should be interpreted as mere instruments of calculation and prediction, instead of sets of mind-independently true or false statements about reality. In this sense, strong empiricism in the philosophy of science denies that science pursues truth.

Finally, a distinction ought to be drawn between antirealisms and nonrealisms. Not all denials of realism or realistic truth can be simply classified as antirealisms. For example, Richard Rorty has repeatedly claimed that his “antirepresentationalism” leads us beyond the entire issue of realism, which in his view crucially depends on representationalist assumptions, that is, on the idea that we ought to represent non-linguistic and mind-independent reality and we may succeed or fail in this task.⁶

Realism and truth in religion and theology

Let us now take a look at how some key variants of realism and antirealism – especially with regard to truth – are applicable to the philosophy of religion and theology.

The problem of realism in theology and religion obviously concerns the (in)dependence of the world and/or objects purportedly referred to in religious and/or theological language-use, as well as the mind-independent truth or falsity of statements thus formulated. Religious “objects” could include God, souls, angels and many other things postulated in religious practices and theological theorization. In principle, it is possible to be a local realist about some of these ontological commitments while being an antirealist about others: for instance, one could be a realist about God’s existence while being an antirealist about angels – and such unorthodox views could create interesting cases of religious or theological diversity. Note, however, that one does not qualify as an antirealist about God if one just denies God’s existence, because one may very well be a realist about the features of the mind-independent world itself that (one claims) make it the case that there is no God. Atheism is not antirealism but typically presupposes realism. For the atheist, the world is mind-independently such that there is no God; as we might say, the truth of atheism is, realistically, grounded in the way the world objectively is.

We may distinguish at least four different “levels” of realism about religion, all of which are in principle neutra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part I Religious diversity and truth
• Part II Epistemic consequences of religious diversity
• Part III Practical questions concerning religious diversity
• List of contributors
• Index of names
• Index of subjects