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Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: a Jamesian Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: A Jamesian Investigation Christian Polke Georg-August-University of Goettingen What kind of diversity? Which kind of metaphysics? I start with some personal remarks: Since last year I am a member of our diversity committee in my faculty in Goettingen. Whereas in former times it was mainly the duty of such commissions to be mainly aware of gender problems and thereby to help installing affirmative actions in direction of gender equality, it is now no less part of our daily tasks to sensitize for questions of all kind of diversity, including different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and of course issues of disability access. But why am I telling you that? Because during the last 12 months I start to think about the concept of “diversity” which is used or better is underlying all different programs we are organizing. What is its inner meaning? And, moreover, why do we usually value diversity in an affirmative way, not only in “diversity policies”, but within our schools and universities, not forget in international business companies? The term “diversity” is originally taken from biology. In that area, biodiversity means variety of species within a genus. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), biodiversity is typically measured by the variation of genetic type, species, and even on the general level of our ecosystem. Following this description, the maintenance of biodiversity becomes more and more a central task for our contemporary age. However, 1 already the transmission of our key term “diversity” from the world of non-human animals and living beings to the world of humans is at first glance in no sense plausible because as a species the homo sapiens sapiens does not show any longer a variation of either, its genetic type or its physiology. Therefore, one can only metaphorically speak of human diversity, at least when it comes to biological conditions. Nevertheless, the term has been successfully introduced not only into contemporary debates on cultural politics but even more into legislation. If one now is – like me – invited to speak on religious diversity, one faces the challenge first of all to clarify which kind of diversity we are talking about when we try to develop something like a metaphysics of religious diversity. At least, in my position as one of the diversity manager in our department, what is expected from me, has nothing to do with any kind of metaphysics. Thanks to God! If we take, for example, the relevant literature on this topic, it fairly seems impossible to draw a clear distinction between what people call “religious diversity” and what is discussed under the term of “religious pluralism”. In his recent study on “Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimensions”, Roger Trigg deals with numerous aspects of our problem, i.e. “Religious Freedom”, “Is Religion only Subjective?”, “Relativism and Religious Faith”, “Religion and Truth” etc. However, throughout his argumentation it becomes in no way clear why we should use the term “religious diversity” instead of “religious plurality” or “religious pluralism”. And the same is true for most other influential writings on this topic. So I have no choice but to propose my own predefinition which is more narrow and more distinctive when it comes to plausible alternative key terms. For the following, I define “religious diversity” as the variety of individual and communal beliefs and faiths that properly includes questions of ultimate meaning and ultimate reality but is always referred to an individual´s own life- options. In contrast to “religious plurality” or “religious pluralism” I thereby emphasize the role of individual persons to hold on or to change their beliefs and faiths, or – what is even 2 more widespread – to vary different sets of religious convictions and thereby to create idiosyncrasies. That does not mean to underestimate the role of religious traditions and communal commitments. Moreover, it can easily be shown that without any religious social settings to which people can affiliate, religious beliefs can hardly occur or continue. However, as for other social aspects, the concept of “religious diversity” is tighter bound to the ideas of religious freedom and – as we will see – of the individual person´s “Right to Believe”. Thereby it remains true: “Beliefs matters. Specific ideas of what is true matter. However inconvenient this may be, we cannot dismiss them all or pretend they are about something different”1 because then we no longer can speak of religious diversity. “If, on the other hand, we say that because there are so many competing views” – maybe so many as people exist2 – “they are probably all false, we are merely substituting another belief of our own about what is true.”3 Thus, even when we are dealing with religious diversity, metaphysical questions arise. Moreover, strictly speaking, we are always dealing with religious diversities because there can be several different aspects of or angles within religious traditions and life-forms, within religious attitudes and temperaments that can function as a measurement criterion for which kind of diversity we are focussing on. And this may even be the easiest and almost convincing answer to another serious question, especially asked by our culturalist and 1 Roger Trigg, Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimensions, Cambridge University Press: New York 2014, p. 94. 2 However, there is some truth in this statement, even from a standpoint of religious absolutism as the following quote from the former Cardinal Ratzinger and later Pope Benedict XVI. illustrates: Asked by the interviewer “How many ways are there to God”, Ratzinger answered: “As many as there are people.” (cf. J. Ratzinger, Salt on Earth: The Church at the End of the Millenium. An Interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press: San Francisco 1997, p. 171.) Of course, this statement does not include a variety of different religious truths beside (catholic) Christianity, but it refers to existential forms and ways of individual religious persons. Thus, there is an affirmative meaning of religious diversity regarding the individual way of each believer or non-believer, even for a conservative Catholic theologian. 3 Roger Trigg, Religious Diversity (fn. 1), 94. 3 postmodern friends: “Why at all looking for a metaphysics of religious diversity?” Because it is not once for all clear in what way religious diversity matters and to what extent these issues and their related phenomena have to be critically examined. Now, regarding my other initial question (in the headline), “What kind of metaphysics?”, I can easily refer to my colleague Mikel Burley who persuasively distinguished in his paper “two main kinds of enterprise”, namely “enquiry into diverse religious metaphysics” and “enquiry into ultimate reality”4. Where the former type has been conceptualized in the works of John Hick, John B. Cobb, Jr. and others, the latter type is the one Burley prefers, and this for good reasons. Especially in the case of John Hick, the problems within his own concept of “The Real in Itself”5 as the metaphysical entity that underlies his pluralistic hypothesis are more than obvious. Not only is his semi-Kantian background clearly rooted in theistic conceptions of the ultimate (but not in non-theistic, as for example Friedrich Hermanni has pointed out6), it also excludes polytheistic religious world-views and such of religious traditions that do not work with some “salvation hypothesis”. Moreover, Hick´s denial of any purposiveness of “the Real in Itself” makes his own theory to some extent self-contradictory, at least regarding his ethico-soteriological criterion for any normative valuation of different religious world-views. Nevertheless, in more recent years, other approaches to a metaphysics of ultimate reality have been developed that partly overcome the problems of religious pluralists, like Hick and also Perry Schmidt-Leukel. The most persuasive approach at least in my view comes from Robert C. Neville. In his three-volume Philosophical Theology he tries to combine a metaphysics of ultimate reality that deals with the one ontological ultimate (“the ontological act of creation”) and four other cosmological ultimates. Thereby his own 4 Cf. Mikel, Burley, The Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: Two Modes of Enquiry (draft for the ESPR Conference, August 2018, Prague), pp. 1-2. 5 Cf. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Macmillan: Houndmills and London 1989, esp. Chap. 14 (pp. 233-251). 6 Cf. Friedrich Hermanni, Metaphysik. Versuche über letzte Fragen, Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen 2011, 191-214, esp. 201-2. 4 approach of comparative theology mostly refers to the so-called Axial-age-traditions.7 Though Neville, like Hick, in the end runs into dangers of monism, he can better than any other thinker (of this type of metaphysical enterprise) safeguard the plurality of different religious traditions by his strongly emphasis on concrete symbolic engagements. According to Neville, in no way can metaphysical enquiries into the plurality of religious world-views represent a substitute for a lived religious option bound to cultural traditions and life-forms. So, he differs from Hick in the outreach of metaphysical critical inquiry. Only within the symbolic engagement with the ontological ultimate reality and the other four cosmological ultimates, religious truth can be grasped. The task of a metaphysically philosophical theology thereby
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