John Hick is an English Professor of Theology, who worked for most of his career in the USA. Hick was a fundamentalist Christian in his youth but became a liberal Christian after studying the ideas of Immanuel Kant. Hick is a controversial philosopher because he advocates religious pluralism - the idea that all religions have valid insights into God and that Christianity is not the only true faith. His ideas have been criticised by the Roman Catholic Church for relativism (the belief that there's no such thing as absolute truth).
Hick's ideas appear throughout the Philosophy of Religion course, notably in The Problem of Evil & Suffering and Religious Language, however he is a key scholar for the argument for the existence of God based on religious experience.
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in mosque and synagogue, temple and gurdwara, ... essentially the same kind of thing is taking place in them as in a Christian church - namely, human beings opening their minds to a higher divine Reality, known as personal and good and as demanding righteousness and love between man and man - John Hick
different human responses to one divine Reality - John Hick
Hick uses an analogy from science to explain this. He suggests that theism (which views the Real as a divine person) and monism (which views the Real as universal truths) might be the same thing in the end, just like:
the two ways of conceiving and registering light, namely as waves and as particles - John Hick Hick is referring to the puzzling discovery in physics that light is simultaneously a wave (like radiation) but also a particle.
If this analogy isn't helpful, Hick's ideas are shown in this famous parable: |
Several blind men were investigating an elephant. The first blind man held the elephant's leg. He said, "I think an elephant is like the truck of a great tree." The second blind man disagreed. While holding the elephant's trunk he said, "I believe an elephant is like a large snake," The third blind man believed they were both wrong. "An elephant is like a great wall," he exclaimed. He was touching the elephant's side. Each blind man was convinced he was right and others were wrong without ever realizing they were all touching the same elephant. Some believe the blind men in this parable represent the major religions of the world, each in contact with the same "elephant" without knowing it. (adapted from God & the Universe of Faiths, 1973)
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We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning - Werner Heisenberg
the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains non-religious as well as religious responses - John Hick
the same thing appears in either slightly or considerably different ways to different people owing both to their varying spatial locations in relation to it and to differences in their sensory and mental equipment and interpretive habits - John Hick
This is sometimes called "divine hiddenness" - the idea that God in some way "hides" from humans and gives them the freedom NOT to believe in him.
The idea of God 'hiding' has a basis in the Bible: Then they will cry to the Lord, |
Why, we may ask, would God be hidden from us? Surely a morally perfect being - good, just, loving - would show himself more clearly - J.L. Schellenberg
Two men are traveling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere. But since this is the only road there is, both must travel it. Neither has been this way before, therefore neither is able to say what they will find around each corner. During their journey they meet with moments of refreshment and delight, and with moments of hardship and danger. All the time one of them thinks of his journey as a pilgrimage to the Celestial City … The other, however, believes none of this, and sees their journey as an unavoidable and aimless ramble … Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong (adapted from Faith & Knowledge, 1966)
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the theistic assertion is indeed — whether true or false — a genuinely factual assertion - John Hick
YES
Hick is an important philosopher for religious believers in a tolerant, multicultural society. His Pluralistic Hypothesis makes religious experiences meaningful without insisting that one religion is right while all the others are wrong or demonic. His idea of religious ambiguity explains how believers interpret religious experiences differently while atheists interpret nothing religiously.
Hick's Eschatological Verification removes a powerful criticism of many religious experiences - that they cannot be factually verified. According to some philosophers, this would make them meaningless, but Hick argues that religious experiences could be verified in the afterlife, even though all experiences in this life are ambiguous and God is hidden by epistemic distance.
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NO
By insisting that all religions have truth to them, Hick is really insisting that none of them are true. Religions make some very specific claims which, if they are false, invalidate the religion. For example, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead or if Muhammad didn't receive the Quran from God, then Christianity and Islam are false. This is why the Catholic Church condemns Hick for being a relativist.
Eschatological verification is a cop-out. Anything could be declared meaningful if we're prepared to believe that an all-knowing spirit is going to reveal the truth to us after we're dead - but why should we believe that? Hick is guilty of circular reasoning: he assumes that God exists and uses this to prove that religious experiences are meaningful, but you can't prove God exists by doing that.
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