MORE ON RELIGIOUS PLURALISM: In an older post, I wondered what religious pluralism might mean to the rationality of religious belief. If there are many religious traditions, the members of whom are all (seemingly) warranted in their beliefs, doesn’t this say something about how rational or irrational one’s particular religious beliefs are? In my earlier post, I confessed to wanting to say that religious pluralism tends to suggest that religious belief is irrational, but I couldn’t think of convincing grounds that would justify this claim.

I recently read an interesting short article in the latest “Faith and Philosophy” that spoke to this question, and gave me reason to believe that there might be something to be said about religious pluralism making religious belief (or better, belief in a particular religious tradition) less than rational. The argument goes something along the lines of an analogy to medical data. Suppose you agreed that you had some medical data which said something about condition X; you had good reason to believe in the data. However, let’s say that another hospital also has data which says something about condition X, but what it says is, if not the opposite of what your data indicates, says something very different.

Now, here’s the key move: let’s say you concede that the doctors in the other hospital are just as warranted in believing their data as you are in believing yours. The article argues that the rational thing to do in this case would be to suspend judgment on what we can say about condition X: there is conflicting data, which both sides are warranted in believing, so we should take an agnostic stance on condition X.

The analogy spelled out, is this. If we say that those in religious traditions other than are own are as equally warranted in believing their religious truths as we are in believing ours, then the right response would not be to stick with one’s tradition, but to be agnostic about which tradition was the right one.

My earlier post intimated that in the case of a stalemate, where each side was admitted by the other to be justified in believing what it did, one could go on, rationally, in preferring one’s religious tradition to those that opposed it. This analogy says maybe not, that one’s preference would be groundless, and that it would be more rational to suspend judgment.

This strikes me as a compelling point, but open to the following rejoinder: what if I think that, in fact, other religious traditions aren’t warranted in believing as they do? Then aren’t I rational in believing my religious tradition is superior?

Well, yes – but then this is just to deny the key point of religious pluralism, which is that other faiths are as equally warranted as you are in believing what they do. So now we’ve got the religious believer in a kind of dilemma, where he either denies religious pluralism (because he has specific grounds for claiming other traditions are not rationally justified in believing what they do) or he embraces it. In the latter case, he loses warrant for saying that his tradition is superior.

I have a feeling I’m missing something in all of this argument. Perhaps I’m loading the dice by assuming a controversial point about pluralism, i.e., that it means conceding other traditions are rationally warranted in believing what they do. (Note: pluralism in my sense is not that all religions are true, but rather that there are many religious traditions in which the members are rational to believe as they do. It is compatible with this sense of pluralism that religious traditions contradict one another.)

I also wonder if religious exclusivists (they think only their tradition is true) who are also pluralists in my sense (they think other traditions are warranted in believing as they do) take it on faith that their tradition is the true one, and so considerations of “rationality” or “reasonableness” don’t have a place.

But it was my impression at least that many exclusivists cum pluralists (in my sense) wanted at least to be immune from the charge that they were being unreasonable in believing as they do. If the argument I’ve canvassed from the recent Faith and Philosophy is on the right tract, they lose this prima facie reasonableness, because the default reasonable position is agnosticism.

- posted by Chad @ Sunday, September 14, 2003