Archive for 'Hick, John'
Skepticism as a Western Phenomenon
Published on October 1st, 2009.
The culture within which modern science first arose was theistic; and accordingly the prevailing form of modern skepticism has been atheistic. The skeptics have mostly been secularised Christians and Jews or post-Christian and post-Jewish Marxists. Distinctively post-Hindu, post-Buddhist and post-Muslim forms of skepticism have yet to arise.
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John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 74.
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Philosophy as Social Dialectic
Published on September 26th, 2009.
If I were the only person in the world I should probably have no philosophical motivation; for philosophy is essentially a dialectical and hence social activity. One philosophises within a community of people who are interested in trying to get things clear, with whom one can share one’s own attempts and amongst whom there are many other such attempts going on, so that all these different endeavours can interact with and, one hopes, correct and assist one another.
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John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 58.
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Hell is for Others
Published on September 25th, 2009.
And it is noteworthy that within the Semitic traditions the final disaster of hell is almost invariably seen as befalling others, not oneself! Hell is for the irredeemably wicked, or for the infidel, the heathen, the enemy; but have any theologians failed to assume that they and theirs are among the elect who are to be saved by God’s grace?
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John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 68.
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Hick and the Critical Trust Approach
Published on September 23rd, 2009.
The hypothesis. The starting point is the religious ambiguity of the universe, the fact that it can be understood and experienced both religiously and naturalistically. But given this ambiguity it is, I argue, entirely rational for those who experience religiously to trust their religious experience and to base their living and believing on it. The principle on which this argument rests has recently been aptly called ‘the critical trust approach’ (Kai-man Kwan 2003, 152f). The important qualification indicated by ‘critical’ is that it is rational to trust our experience except when we have some reason to doubt it. In the case of sense experience if we did not normally proceed on this basis we would be unable to act in relation to our environment and hence to survive within it. But this ‘normally’ allows for exceptions when we have reason to think or suspect that, for example, we are being subject to an optical illusion or are, or were, hallucinating or otherwise deluded. Given that qualification the principle of critical trust is an aspect of what we ordinarily count as sanity. The present question is whether it properly applies to religious experience also. Against this it is argued that sensory and religious experience are too different for the same principle to apply. For whereas the former is compulsory, the latter is not; whereas sense experience is reported by all human beings, religious experience is not; and whereas sense experience is largely uniform around the world, religious experience sometimes differs widely between, and indeed within, the religious traditions. However these difference correspond appropriately to differences between the respective putative objects of sensory and religious experience. The compulsion to be aware of the physical world sets the scene within which we exercise our moral freedom but does not undermine that freedom itself. But – putting it in monotheistic terms – if we could not avoid being conscious of being all the time in the direct presence of a God of limitless goodness and power, who knows us through and through, and always wishes us to act in a particular way, we would have a formal, but not a real, moral freedom in relation to the deity. However, if God preserves an epistemic distance from us, so that we are free to be aware or unaware of the divine presence, then it can reasonably be expected that at any given time not everyone will have freely opened themselves to an awareness of that presence. And if, as the pluralistic hypothesis holds, religious experience is always culturally conditioned, it is not surprising that it takes different forms within the different traditions. In view of this I believe that it is reasonable to apply the critical trust principle (with its proviso) to religious experience.
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John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xvii-iii.
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