John Hick Religious Pluralism is either descriptive or prescriptive. The descriptive version is merely the observation that there are many different religions. It is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with this premise. However, prescriptive pluralism is what appears to be implied by such an observation. Since there is so much disagreement between religions an explanation must be provided for such diversity of opinion. Either one group are correct and everyone else is mistaken or something else is going on. Given the apparent parity between the religions (all religions are made up of human beings who claim to have some truth about god or gods and ground such beliefs in religious…
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Van Til vs Hick
John Hick is most well known for his argument for religious pluralism. He argued that, given that so many people are religious and believe in some kind of divinity, there must be something that all religions refer to. That thing Hick called the “real,” a kind of incomprehensible reality that best explains the existence of all religions. Religion is the human appropriation of the “real” in the phenomenal realm. The fact that they are different only goes to show that the real is unknowable in itself and only empirically expressed in human culture. How would a presuppositionalist like Van Til respond? First of all, the Christian presuppositional approach to a philosophy of religion is…
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More Than a Feeling
Francis Spufford, in a metaphor laden piece for the Guardian, defends his Christian faith against atheism on the basis of his feelings: “I assent to ideas because I have feelings; I don’t have feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.” Spufford claims that no one can know if there is a god or not; God “isn’t a knowable item.” And so all he can go by is his feel of God. One might wonder what Spufford means by “feel.” Surely “feeling” means a sensation. And a sensation is how we know that we have stepped on a pin, but we don’t say that a pin is unknowable. What kind of feeling does…