Justified religious difference: a constructive approach to religious diversity

Abstract

In this paper, I provide a novel approach to the issue of religious diversity: I reject classical pluralist approaches to the issue, such as John Hick’s, and argue that their attempts to construe commonalities between the religions are contrived. The reason that they attempt to find commonalities at all costs is that they presuppose a bivalent notion of truth according to which that which is different is false. I suggest that, in order to get a robust theory on religious diversity off the ground, we should rely on the notion of justification rather than that of bivalent truth. Justification is pluralizable, dependent upon the (epistemic) circumstances, whereas bivalent truth is not. Armed with a pluralizable notion of justification, we can acknowledge that other religious beliefs are genuinely different without necessarily being false: They can be justified, given the (epistemic) circumstances a believer of a different religion is in. Perceiving religious differences in this way allows to liberate the interreligious dialogue from the pressure to find commonalities between religions at all costs, to respect the religious Other in her Otherness, and to ‘mirror’ one’s own religion in light of other religions.