John Hick

A Critical Introduction and Reflection

David Cheetham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754615996
• eBook ISBN: 9781351925129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

John Hick is considered to be one of the greatest living philosophers of religion. Hick's philosophical journey has culminated in the grand proposal that we should see all the major world religions as equally valid responses to the same ultimate reality (the 'Real'). This book presents a critical introduction to John Hick's speculative theology and philosophy. The book begins where Hick began, with the problems of religious language, and ends where Hick is now, exploring the questions of religious plurality. Incorporating early aspects that Hick himself would now wish to qualify, as well as explanations that reflect Hick's present focus, Cheetham offers some speculative reflections of his own on key topics, highlighting Hick's influence on contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. All those studying the work of this great philosopher and theologian will find this new introduction offers an invaluable overview along with fresh critical insight.

Chapter one
Faith and Knowledge

It is perhaps not surprising that a philosopher as profound as John Hick should begin his philosophical career by concerning himself with one of the fundamental questions of philosophy. This is the question of what we can know, the preoccupation of epistemology. His first major work, Faith and Knowledge (1957), is a developed investigation of this issue, but his epistemology has undergone various refinements throughout his career. Nevertheless, as there is a sense of continuity in his thinking on this matter, we shall be taking his work together.

Although Hick’s primary focus is the meaning of religious faith, his thinking extends to all aspects of belief and knowledge. This is because he does not believe that one can, or should, separate religious knowing from other forms of knowing. Religious knowledge is embedded in the totality of our knowing. Moreover, he does not think that beliefs necessarily arise from pure ‘intellection’, rather they arise out of personal experience. Another way of putting this is that, for Hick, religious cognition should take place in ‘presence’ rather than ‘absence’.¹ By this he means that he seeks to portray knowledge as something we are acquainted with rather than ‘knowing-about’. The irony, as Hick sees it, is that much academic (western) systematic theological work has been about examining religious beliefs as distant propositions whereas the inspiration behind them were lived encounters with, and experience of, the divine.

In this first chapter, then, we shall be considering Hick’s contribution to the questions of religious belief and knowing. To begin, we shall look at his view that all experience is ‘experiencing-as’; secondly, we shall proceed to consider his commitment to the basically factual character of religious belief. Thirdly, following on from this second concern, Hick’s distinctive response to the ‘verificationist’ debate of the 1950s will be considered; but in order to contextualise (conceptually) Hick’s response we shall also briefly allude to the responses of R.M. Hare and R.B. Braithwaite. Finally, a number of criticisms of Hick’s thinking will be looked at.

Experiencing-as

As we have said, Hick does not uphold the view that religious faith is a matter of assenting to a set of propositions; or that ‘salvation’ is reliant on our ability to be correctly cognizant of a certain creed. This does not mean that Hick is advocating an irrationalism as far as religious belief and faith are concerned. Rather, we should broaden our understanding of rationality. For Hick, rationality is not solely instantiated by a set of logical arguments or written propositions on the page. To be ‘rational’ is something human beings do (or not); or, as Hick says: ‘It is people who are rational or irrational, and derivately their states and their actions, including their acts and states of believing.’² Thus, being rational is connected to the whole web and totality of experience. Experience is an important starting point for Hick. This being the case, we might characterise his orientation as empiricist in that there is an emphasis throughout his work on the evidence of the senses and experience. Moreover, as an interesting corollary, we cannot, thinks Hick, divide into neat compartments our various beliefs; all beliefs are in some way connected or affected by our total experience. So, the experience of God does not arrive as something separate from the rest of our environment. It is not a ‘pure’ or direct knowledge, but is mediated through other objects. He writes:

The ordinary believer does not, however, report an awareness of God as existing in isolation from all other objects of experience. His consciousness of the divine does not involve a cessation of his consciousness of a material and social environment. It is not a vision of God in solitary glory, filling the believer’s entire mind and blotting out his normal field of perception[…] He claims instead an apprehension of God meeting him in and through his material and social environments.³

Another way of speaking about this comprehensive experience is what Hick calls significance. He explains significance in the following: ‘By significance I mean that fundamental and all-pervasive characteristic of our conscious experience which de facto constitutes for us the experience of a “world” and not of a mere empty void or churning chaos.’⁴ This experience of a ‘world’, or seeing a significance in things, also says something about our interpretative freedom. This is not to imply that the ‘real’ world changes at our interpretative whim. Hick is not advocating solipsism (the belief that the world is wholly a creation of our minds). Rather, the world enters our consciousness through an interpretative filter. Thus, an atheist and a believer inhabit the same world, but this world appears different to them; that is, it has a different significance for each. Hick writes:

For there is a sense in which the religious man and the atheist both live in the same world and another sense in which they live consciously in different worlds. They inhabit the same physical environment and are confronted by the same changes occurring within it. But in its actual concrete character in their respective ‘streams of consciousness’ it has for each a different nature and quality, a different meaning and significance; for one does and the other does not experience life as a continual interaction with the transcendent God.⁵

Hick characterises all experience as ‘experiencing-as’. Here he has borrowed and developed the concept of ‘seeing-as’ put forward by the modern philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). In this context, Wittgenstein was interested in drawing attention to the complex nature of changing perceptions, for example he writes: T contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”.’⁶ Moreover, Wittgenstein pointed out that it is possible to see the same thing differently. He made reference to ‘picture-puzzles’ such as a picture which, depending on how you looked at it, was either a duck or a rabbit. That is, it is perfectly possible to see the picture in two different but equally legitimate ways - as a duck or a rabbit. Hick extends the somewhat monodimensional idea of seeing-as to ‘experiencing-as’. Furthermore, he wants to say that ‘experiencing-as’ is not just something that occurs in special puzzle cases (like being confronted by a ‘duck-rabbit’ picture), but it refers to all our seeing and experiencing; that is, it is something far more all- embracing or, as we have said, significant.

According to Hick, the amount of freedom we have in respect to interpreting our world varies in proportion to the sphere in which we are operating. There are different degrees of freedom in interpretation. For example, our interpretative freedom is most restricted (or involuntary) at the level of everyday sense experiences. We may choose to interpret a bus speeding towards us as an illusory creation of our imagination, but the bus will tend to ignore such mental sophistry and assert its reality! Thus, Hick notes that for us the significance of the physical world is that it is something objective who’s ‘laws we must learn, and toward which we have continually to relate ourselves aright if we are to survive’.⁷ At the level of inter-personal relationships and morality our freedom is less restricted. However, it is still closely connected to the most basic kinds of sense perception and interpretation just mentioned because such things take place within the natural environment. That is, our moral experience does not take place in an abstracted world, but within our physical world. Hick writes that the ‘world of moral significance is, so to speak, superimposed upon the world, so that relating ourselves to the moral world is not distinct from the business of relating ourselves to the natural world but is rather a particular manner of so doing’.⁸ And finally, as we have said, there is religious experience which is yet another layer of interpretation. At this level there is great freedom to interpret the world in many different ways; that is, we might say that seeing or perceiving religious significance (or none) is ‘a voluntary act of interpretation’.⁹

To explain further, we start at the level of perceiving our natural environment and build up layers of interpretation (that we have ‘learned’ through our experiences) which together constitutes for us a significant ‘world’. The important thing to reiterate is that Hick characterises all belief as a matter of ‘experiencing-as’, not just religious belief. To say this may seem exaggerated or brashly all-encompassing, for example it is surely the case that at least basic perceptual beliefs are ‘directly’ encountered? But Hick’s point is that no object or experience, however basic, merely enters our consciousness without some interpretative process. So, the simple fork might be interpreted as just an interesting metal object to those unfamiliar with its use. A tuft of grass on a field may be mistakenly experienced-as a rabbit instead. The existence of a person struggling in heavy seas at the base of a cliff can be experienced-as merely a description of a state of affairs or it can be experienced-as a moral imperative to seek help. An immense waterfall with a rainbow glimmering in its spray may be theistically significant for those experiencing it as evidence of design, but it will perhaps only have aesthetic significance for the atheist. In saying all this, Hick is giving religious beliefs the same pedigree as all beliefs. That is, by describing all experience as ‘experiencing-as’, Hick has given religious beliefs a validity that can only be denied at the cost of questioning all beliefs. Put bluntly, if a criticism of religious belief is that ‘it’s just a matter of interpretation, so it cannot be trusted’, then Hick’s riposte is that all our beliefs are the result of interpretation! Thus, despite its complexity, religious belief is not a special case requiring separate justification. In an appreciation of Hick’s work, the Christian philosopher William Alston commented on the force of Hick’s point:

One cannot demand an independent warrant for the interpretative scheme of religious experience without, in parity, making such a demand for the other areas of experience as well. And since the demand cannot be met anywhere, the logic of the criticism would lead us to reject the epistemic credentials of all experience.¹⁰

Nevertheless, if all our knowledge is characterised as ‘experiencing-as’ does this not also mean that everything (even natural belief) is cast into subjective uncertainty? Hick responds by saying that although the existence of a real world external to our senses presents a notorious philosophical conundrum its existence is, for all practical purposes, taken for granted. Or rather, the real world is not a propositional certainty, it is an experienced reality. Furthermore, our sense-experiences have an involuntary character; that is, there is a ‘given-ness’ about such things, and by acting in accordance with such perceptual beliefs we find that we live successfully in the world. So, when we choose to step out of the path of buses (because we trust that our sense-experiences are accurate about the existence of buses), we find that such choices have proved correct! Given the involuntary character of our sense-experiences, and our ‘successful’ living, Hick concludes:

These characteristics […] constitute a sufficient reason to trust and live on the basis of our perceptual experience in the absence of any positive reason to distrust it, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 101 Introduction
• 1 Faith and Knowledge
• 2 Evil and Soul-Making
• 3 Death and Eternal Life
• 4 The Universe of Faiths
• 5 Religious Pluralism
• 102 Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index