The Pluralistic Hypothesis Summary

y Payne People will fight to their death defending their religion against another person’s religion. In John Hick’s The Pluralistic Hypothesis, he uses the commonalities of all major world religions and three metaphor to explain why all religions are true. John Hicks speaks of how this hypothesis began; knowledge and opportunities began to arise after the Second World War that started to provide people with interactions necessary to understand world religions. First, books began to be published about many different world religions including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, Sikhism, Baha’I and primal and indigenous religious of Africa, North America, South America, Australia and others. (38) In addition,

Speaking strictly in terms of salvation, exclusivism is confined to traditional Catholic dogma, “that extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church there is no salvation. (41) Christian inclusivism, however, can take on two different forms. The first form defines salvation by the idea that one must accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior. The other form is much less traditional and states that all salvific influences in other religions are due to the salvific work of Christ. Hicks theory of pluralism is based off of this information. As we move toward the idea that Christ is at work in all of the world religions, there is no longer “an exclusively Christian inclusivism, but a plurality of mutually inclusive inclusivisms which is close to the kind of pluralism that I want to recommend.” (44) Arguing against Bertrand Russell’s idea that if one religion is true the rest must be false, John Hicks provides three different analogies to combat this

Using this picture, he exemplifies that a culture familiar with ducks but unaware of rabbits will refer to the picture as a duck. The opposite would occur with a culture familiar with rabbits. Neither is incorrect but both lack the knowledge of the other culture and are unaware of what else the ambiguous picture could be. With neither group being wrong, both are equally capable of also being correct; the picture is both that of a duck and rabbit. Hicks relates this to religion by making the claim that “Reality is capable of being authentically experienced in terms of different sets of human concepts, as Jahweh, as the Holy Trinity, as Allah, as Shiva, as Vishnu, and again as Brahman, as the Dharmakaya, as the Tao, and so on, these different persone and impersonae occurring at the interface between the real and our different religious mentalities and cultures.” (46) The second analogy Hicks offers is the wave particle complementarity in physics. This experiment has shown that to act upon light one way will provide wave-like properties and in another way, particle-like properties. This means that the properties observed depend solely on the way that they are observed. Like the wave particle complementarity, “revelation is a relative matter” (46) that depends on traditions, concepts, and practices.