SOME ASSUMPTIONS
John B. Cobb, Jr.
I have expressed my views about "religious pluralism" in many different ways. David has reviewed my position admirably. In considering how I might say something a little different, it has occurred to me that I might identify what I take to be basic assumptions, negative and positive, underlying these views. If I am right that most of my more specific views flow from these assumptions, together with historical judgments, then putting the assumptions together in one place may make it easier for others to know whether they agree or disagree with me.
Obviously all of us assume many things. I am not trying to formulate all the logical assumptions that underlie all my work and that of many others. I am listing only those assumptions, bearing directly on the topic, that some others, and in some cases, most others, seem not to share. I will begin with some negatives.
I. Negative assumptions
!. It is better to avoid the noun "religion".
When I first encountered criticism of the noun "religion", in John Dewey, I think, I reacted negatively. It seemed to be a useful way to identify Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so forth. Each was frequently called a religion, and I thought they could be compared as such.
But the more I thought about it, and the more I saw where the use of that noun led, the more I agreed with Dewey. Categorizing these religious traditions as religions misdirects the investigation and discussion. This is true for several reasons.
First, this is not a term that any of the traditions classically used about itself. The term developed in Christendom and gained its meaning from standard features of Christianity. The first two meanings given in my dictionary still speak of a superhuman creator. Clearly this excludes Buddhism. The use of the term to classify other traditions is one more expression of Western intellectual imperialism. It is we who decide what counts and what does not.
Now it can be correctly pointed out that, over a period of time, scholars have developed definitions of religion that are less biased to the West. We no longer identify "religion" with worship of a "supreme being", for example, or with beliefs about the supernatural. Historians of religion are now doing much more careful phenomenological work to determine what types of practices are common to the traditions they identify as religions.
In any case, even when the Western bias is reduced, another problem arises. For example, scholars may find that cultic practices are common all over the world, and they may decide that these are the heart of "religion". What then happens to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, which depreciated cultic practices in favor of justice? Are these no longer to be understood as central to Judaism? Or, alternatively, is Judaism to be understood as partly religious, partly secular.
My own choice is this second alternative. Let us go with the phenomenological accounts of the religious. Let us then recognize that these play a role in all the traditions and communities that have been called religions. But let us also recognize that many adherents of these traditions regard their religious dimensions as secondary to others. In that case, it is misleading to call these traditions and communities "religions." They include religious practices, and for some of their members, these are of central importance. But they include other elements that are not "religious" in the phenomenological sense. For some of their most devoted adherents, these other elements are the most important.
I feel this quite strongly since the prophetic tradition is central to my understanding of Christianity. I certainly do not want to exclude the religious features of the tradition. I participate regularly in the liturgical life of the congregation. But to identify Christianity as a "religion" in the phenomenological sense, leaves me, and many others, out, by marginalizing what seems most important to us.
Of course, there are other ways of defining "religion" that do not have this result. If I am required to use this term at all, I would choose to go back to what I understand is the Latin root. A religion is a way of binding everything together. In that case, the definition is open to the real variety of ways that things can be bound together.
But when we take this step, what are included and excluded from the "religion" is quite different from ordinary usage. For most Protestants in the past two centuries, Christianity has not bound everything together. It has bound a few things together, whereas science and political loyalties have bound other things together. Hence Christianity has not been a religion for most Protestants.
In China and Japan, similarly, Buddhism has bound things together for very few. Most Buddhists have also been Confucianists and many have been Taoists or Shintoists. What has bound things together for most Chinese has been being Chinese; for most Japanese, being Japanese.
I am quite open to moving in this direction. We can compare the various ways in which people have attained an overview that informs their whole way of being in the world. But we must then be prepared to consider a very different range of topics from those generally treated in academic departments of religion. We must recognize that, in the modern West, churches have functioned only marginally with respect to "religion", thus understood, for most of their members, and that what we call Eastern "religions" are so for only a few. Islam would probably have the best claim among the traditions generally recognized as religious to function as a religion for many of its adherents.
Given this definition, I would like to see Christianity again become a "religion". My own theological work is directed toward this goal. But success seems to be a remote possibility. To insist on this definition seems to change the subject rather than illumine the topics most people have in mind when they use the word.
One implication of these observations is that there is no true definition. This is, of course, widely recognized but also commonly ignored. Definitions are more or less useful, not true and false. In general, they should point to what is commonly intended by the use of the word, although highly specialized, and even eccentric, definitions can be justified in some circumstances. Since ordinary usage is multivalent and vague, explicit definitions are needed to clarify for the hearer or reader the way a speaker or author has chosen to use a word that is central to the argument. Providing a definition makes it easier to determine whether one is consistent or whether one is slippery in the use of terms.
I often make this point by saying that I do not believe that there is an essence of religion. There are a variety of related phenomena that the word evokes in common usage. It is usually better to use it in relation to those phenomena. But if one makes clear that one is using it in another way, is consistent in doing so, and draws no conclusions about the phenomena usually designated by the term, that procedure is acceptable also. Sometimes it may prove highly illuminating.
Hence, I do not say that it is wrong to use the noun "religion". I only say that the usual consequences are disturbing and that few of those who use the term succeed in consistently avoiding these negative consequences.
Perhaps one follows Tillich and defines religion as "ultimate concern". Historically, the meaning of the phrase derives from the Jewish-Christian-Muslim family of traditions. The connotations of "ultimate concern" are related to monotheism. But the term is intended to abstract from theism and be open to nontheistic ways of expressing such concern. That is admirable. But in fact, it remains misleading to say that Buddhists are ultimately concerned about Nirvana. It would be equally accurate to say that they are ultimately concerned about having no ultimate concern. But such twists and turns only serve to show that this is an alien concept forced on the discussion by the West.
2. There is no common norm.
Very often people derive from their definition of religion a norm by which to evaluate what they call the religions -- what I prefer to call more or less religious traditions. Clearly, if we avoid the noun, "religion", this tendency will be avoided. But there may still be a tendency to think that the various religious traditions have a common goal. If we can correctly identify that goal, some suppose, then we can ask how well the several traditions achieve it.
John Hick has done what I regard as the best job or carrying out this approach. He proposes that all the higher religious traditions aim to transform people from being centered in themselves to be centered in "the Real". He undertakes to define "the Real" in a way that is neutral among the traditions. I believe his effort to find a neutral way to identify a common center in all religious traditions is a promising project. I think it is clear that he does not succeed. But that is not my concern here. The question in this context is whether success in transforming people away from self-centeredness can be seen as the common norm.
I do believe that it is empirically the case that all the religious traditions of humankind undertake to overcome egocentrism in their adherents. Hence, to ask how well they succeed is to bring to bear a norm that may well be common. Hence, I see real value in Hick's proposal.
Formulated in this negative way this is not a norm that distinguishes religious traditions from others. No society could ever have survived if children were not led to care about a greater good than their own ego-satisfaction. What is clearly common to all the religious traditions does not distinguish them from other forms of socialization.
Hick, of course, knows this. He goes on to specify that the religious norm is to move people from egocentrism to centeredness on "the Real." This distinguishes the religious goal from that which is required for social functioning. The higher religions, he teaches, seek to orient us to something beyond any limited social grouping, something universal and ultimate, whereas ethnocentric religions and secular movements often prefer more limited loyalties.
There is a certain circularity here. If we define the higher religions as those that are universalistic, then it follows that their goals will have a universalistic character. But this does not mean that all of them aim to "center persons on "the Real," however open-endedly this is defined. We have here another case of generalizing from the monotheistic traditions. In these it makes sense to speak of centering our lives in God rather than in ourselves. In Buddhism it does not make sense to speak of centering ourselves in emptiness rather than ourselves. The realization of emptiness is better understood as decentering.
Even among the monotheistic traditions, in which this ideal has meaning, by no means all serious believers place the same weight on the attainment of this goal. Other goals loom large. For some, the assurance of being accepted by God is primary. For others, growth in love of neighbor may be more meaningful than becoming centered in God. For still others, the primary goal is defined in socio-historical ways rather than personal transformation. And for some, the goal may be thought of as perfect obedience to God's law. One can find leading thinkers who regard the goal of a theocentric life as unattainable, and who recommend, instead, acceptance of our creaturely finitude and constant need of forgiveness.
The Zen Buddhist, Masao Abe, agrees with John Hick that there is one goal or norm for all the higher religions. He disagrees as to how this should be identified. His candidate is enlightenment or satori. He is clear that although this goal has been clarified chiefly in Buddhism, one can see that there are tendencies in all religious traditions to move in the direction of this mode of realization. This is what is truly authentic in all the traditions. It would be very difficult, however, to understand the biblical writers as focusing on this goal. It may be generous of Abe to see that they have in some ways contributed to this attainment, but few biblically oriented Christians can identify the quest for or realization of satori as the heart of their faith.
My point here is that any statement of the norm of all the religions, even all of what one judges as the higher religions, involves imposing personal judgments. These judgments may be shaped within one or another tradition. Or they may come from some nontraditional source.
There is no objection to someone announcing her or his personal views as to what religion should contribute to the world and then examining the several religious traditions to determine whether, and how well, they make this contribution. But one should not present this work as an objective explanation and evaluation of the religions.
3. There is no neutral position.
My critique of John Hick and Masao Abe is based on my negative assumption that there is no neutral position from which to pronounce on the norms of religions or any other important matter. Hick and Abe have done as well as one could do. But each betrays a particularity of standpoint. I certainly do not object to people speaking from particular standpoints. On the contrary, I am convinced there is no other way of speaking. I only object when what is spoken in this way is presented as an objective and neutral account.
Both Hick and Abe assume that if one speaks as a Christian, one will not be neutral or objective. Christians speak from "faith." But Abe believes that Buddhism appeals only to experience, that Buddhist experience demonstrates the possibility and the total value of enlightenment. Hence, he thinks, to point to this form of human realization does not depend on a particular standpoint that can be relativized by others. Buddhist experience leads to what he calls the "positionless position."
This Buddhist claim should not be trivialized. I myself have no doubt that Buddhist disciplines have led some people to a radical transformation of experience that is of extreme value to them. I think it dangerous, however, on this basis to say that this is the one goal at which all religious traditions aim or should aim. A group of people may feel called to work for peace and justice in the world rather than to attain personal fulfillment. This may be an inferior goal from some point of view – but not from all. There are also forms of mystical experience that differ from Buddhist enlightenment. They, too, may be inferior, but those who experience them may judge them superior. Sri Aurobindo, for example, had a series of diverse religious experiences. One of these he considered Buddhist enlightenment. Much as he affirmed this, it was not his climactic experience. Again, he may be wrong and Abe right, but it is difficult to see just how this would be demonstrated.
This means that I view Abe as speaking from the Zen Buddhist perspective. From that perspective, he makes a very important contribution to the whole community of religiously concerned people. But this is not a neutral perspective. The claim that it is neutral hinders, rather than advances, the movement toward fuller understanding.
Hick seeks a neutral perspective by turning to philosophy. He supposes that a philosophical perspective allows him to view all the religious traditions fairly, and to make neutral judgments among them. The self-understanding of philosophy as the open-minded quest for wisdom encourages that kind of claim. Nevertheless, it is extremely questionable. His philosophy clearly reflects the Western tradition in philosophy, and within that tradition selects some sources and rejects others. It also, as I have suggested, reflects the influence of Christianity. It is certainly not a philosophy on which all practitioners of the discipline now agree.
To relativize philosophies only means that the thinking of philosophers is deeply affected by their location in the history of thought, as well as the broader history, in which they stand. They have made many efforts, beginning with Descartes, to find an unconditioned ground on which to stand and then to build on that foundation in uncontestable ways. Noone has succeeded. John Dewey long ago criticized this quest for certainty. Many today reject the "foundationalist" approach. Every philosophy is part of the historically-conditioned thought, which is the only form of thought there is. Obviously that applies to all my assumptions as well.
Of course, Hick, working from his particular standpoint, may have achieved the finally correct philosophy. But it is impossible not be skeptical. Indeed, Hick would not want to make any such claim. We should welcome those with philosophical approaches into the discussion of religion, but we should recognize that they are not free of particular points of view. Philosophy does not provide a neutral perspective from which to view religions.
The most influential claim to have a neutral perspective comes not from Buddhists or philosophers but from scientists. Science can rightly claim to have developed methods that lead to reliable results that are not as relative as those of theologies and philosophies. People all over the world, coming from many cultural perspectives, can perform the same experiments and attain the same results. Today we know that even in physics the direction of research and the interpretation of data are perspecitivally conditioned, so that the line between what may be regarded as fully established and what is open to reformulation is not easy to establish. Nevertheless, the claim of the sciences to have found ways of achieving objective knowledge must be taken very seriously.
Accordingly, those who approach religion "scientifically" seem, on the surface, to have some claim to neutrality. Unfortunately, for this promise, repeatable experiments can play a very small role in their study of religion. Their "scientific" approach is more likely to be one that takes the categories of a particular psychology, sociology, or anthropology as given, and then interprets religious phenomena in these terms. They can certainly throw important light in this way on what is studied. But the categories in which scientific theories are formulated are the least neutral aspect of the sciences. Especially in the social sciences they are all contested.
The neutrality breaks down in another way. Modern Western science in general and overall is based on a highly questionable worldview. It came into being partly through the exclusion of final causes from its purview. When it studies such highly purposeful activity as religious practices, this may prove radically distorting. Also, by the twentieth century, the exclusion of God from any causal role in the world became a cardinal principle of science. To approach the study of theistic religious traditions and practices with the a priori prior conviction that there is no God is hardly neutral.
Again, atheistic materialists may contribute richly to the study of religion. It may turn out that they, and they alone, have the correct worldview. But to assume that this is so is not neutral, and the conclusions that follow from this assumption are not neutral. The scientific study of religion is just as perspectival as the philosophical or theological or Buddhist one.
II. Positive Assumptions
The separation of negative and positive assumptions is certainly not a sharp one. In my exposition of my negative assumptions I have made many positive assertions. Nevertheless, what I have tried to do above is to push aside some habits of mind that have, in my view, blocked an adequate approach to issues of religious pluralism.
Much of what I have said in these negations agrees with those who have made the "linguistic turn" in one or another of its forms. They often go from these negative assumptions to a quite thoroughgoing relativism. They may, for example, see each tradition as having its distinct cultural-linguistic system, incommensurable with other cultural-linguistic systems. The words and symbols of this system are understood to refer to one another but not to any world outside the system.
I could formulate my differences with this relativistic view as additional negative assumptions. But this would consist is double negatives. I do not believe that language has no reference beyond language. It seems better to make this point as a positive one. One of my assumptions is that language has a referential element and that this is as true of religious language as of any other. Hence I turn to what I consider the positive assumptions underlying my understanding of religious pluralism.
1. I believe that the world is vastly richer and more complex than any scheme of thought has ever grasped or will ever grasp. I find Whitehead's vision of this complexity convincing as far as it goes. But no thinker was more sensitive than Whitehead to the limitations of any scheme of thought in finally grasping the whole. My belief that the complexity of the world exceeds any current or even possible human grasp does not arise simply from Whitehead's authority, but it is reinforced by his agreement and clarification.
Every scheme of thought that has any hold on thoughtful minds highlights some features of this complexity and obscures others. When these schemes of thought, or cultural-linguistic systems, become well entrenched in a society, they deeply shape the sense of what is real and what is not real within that community. People's self-understanding and judgments of importance follow from these visions of reality. When they encounter beliefs arising from other cultural-linguistic systems that do not fit into their understanding of what is real, they are likely to consider them false.
I like to illustrate my understanding of the complexity of things by pointing to the history of healing practices. The dominant form in the twentieth century in the West (and increasingly around the world) is allopathic medicine. It is based on modern scientific knowledge of physiology and chemistry. It has developed a definite picture of the human body. Few of us have any doubt this picture accurately describes many features of our bodies and that the practice of this medicine has been brilliantly successful.
There have, however, been groups who have viewed the body differently and have practiced different methods of cure. Chiropractic is a good example of this alternative. It focuses on the way in which lack of alignment of the bones, especially the backbone, causes stresses throughout the body that lead to many problems whose symptoms are treated by standard medicine. I have no doubt that not only have chiropractors relieved much pain from back problems but also that, when the alignment they seek is achieved, there are general health benefits.
Still others view the body primarily in terms of the food and liquids that are consumed. Far more problems than the dominant medicine has recognized occur because our bodies are allergic to particular foods and need others. Viewing the body in these terms has led to many successful cures.
Christian Science illustrates a more radically different approach. This religious tradition is based on philosophical idealism and takes seriously the idealist doctrine that the physical world exists only for thought. This has led to concentrated attention on how mental states affect physical health. Many other groups, religiously and psychologically oriented, support the judgment that there are such effects, although most regard the body as having partly independent reality as well. Most religious people pray for the sick, supposing that such prayer has some beneficial effects. Those who participate in these communities have many stories to tell of remarkable successes.
The dominant allopathic community as a whole was long skeptical of all other approaches. Today there are remarkable changes. The hostility toward chiropractic has softened. The importance of diet is recognized. And courses on the relation of religion and healing have found their way into the curricula of some medical schools. This reflects the recognition by the medical profession that the human body is more complex than the traditional scientific depiction recognized. It means that several abstractions from that complexity have captured elements of the total reality that were obscured by other approaches.
The most striking development is that of the encounter of Western and Eastern medicine. Chinese acupuncture is an excellent example. This medical practice is based on a detailed study of the body over many centuries that has discovered patterns of connection in the body of which Western medicine was unaware. The first reaction to the claim that there are such connections could be expected to be denial or, at best, skepticism. But Western doctors were admirably open to the evidence. The evidence is that acupuncture is effective. The maps of the body employed by acupuncturists depict something quite real about the body, even though they are hard to integrate with Western physiology. Clearly, two cultures, approaching the body with different systems of thought, have both learned much about it. An integration of the two schemes of thought should provide a more adequate depiction. But there is no reason to suppose that this integration will capture the full complexity of the human body.
It is my assumption that the human body is not the only part of the world whose complexity exceeds all that we can now think or imagine. I fully expect that advances in physics and cosmology will continue to reveal aspects of reality that astonish us. I also fully expect that, as in the case of the human body, the purely scientific, objectifying mode will neglect or omit other dimensions of the totality of reality apart from which the fullness of reality is not understood.
2. I assume that our language refers beyond itself to a real world. This is, of course, the practical assumption underlying daily life. If we tell a child to eat vegetables or to avoid taking cocaine, the practical assumption is that vegetables and cocaine are real things that are really beneficial and harmful to the body respectively. That the human body exists is assumed by all the approaches to healing mentioned above except Christian Science. Most people, even those who have made the linguistic turn, are distressed when Christian Scientists refuse to seek standard medical care for sick children.
Since, practically speaking, almost everyone assumes that language has a referential aspect, it seems hardly necessary to make a point of this as an important assumption. However, especially in the field of religious thought, a large part of the scholarly community rejects this assumption. It is important to understand why this is so.
There are two reasons. One is the history of recent Western philosophy, which has cut strongly in an anti-realist direction from Hume and Kant to the present. The second has to do with the way religion has been understood. I will consider them in that order.
Western thought has overwhelmingly supposed that knowledge of the external world is mediated by sense experience. For a long time it was assumed that this sense experience provides a basis for affirming the substantial reality of the physical world. But more sophisticated philosophical analysis showed that this is not the case. Vision gives us only patches of color that we cannot reasonably suppose to exist out there where they are seen except in the experience of the one who sees. The phenomena undoubtedly exist, but only in this dependent sense. We cannot deduce from them the existence of material substances underlying them and causative of them. The idea of efficient causes that had played so large a role in earlier philosophy and science cannot be justified when we suppose it must be derived from sense experience.
Kant "saved" science by theorizing that what sense experience in itself cannot provide us is given as the necessary forming of that experience by the human mind. This tells us nothing about what is really there independent of our experience. But it does tell us that the only world about which we can have knowledge is constructed by our minds. In dealing with that phenomenal world, the sciences are free to proceed.
In general we can say that continental European thought to the present time is Kantian. That means that if language refers beyond itself, it is to the phenomenal world, not to a real one. But within this broad sphere of Kantian anti-realism, there have been many creative developments. One of them is the linguistic turn.
Instead of attributing the order of the phenomena to the universal structuring activity of the human mind, one can pay attention to cultural differences. One finds that different cultures have constructed their world in different ways. They have done so through language and the broader processes of symbolization. There is no way of speaking of a common world, even a common phenomenal world, that is ordered in these diverse ways. One cannot go behind the diversely constructed worlds to anything else.
To respond to this currently dominant form of anti-realism, one must return to the origins of that anti-realism in Hume and Kant. One must challenge the fundamental assumption they share with most of the Western tradition, namely, that our knowledge of the external world derives exclusively from sense experience. If that assumption were correct, then the conclusions that have been drawn from it would, indeed, follow.
Most phenomenologists have accepted this standard Western assumption. But we can be grateful that one of the greatest, Merleau Ponty, in open-mindedly examining experience, recognized that our experience of our bodies cannot be understood exclusively in this way. True, we know something about our bodies by seeing them and touching them. But the body enters into our experience in a more direct way as well. Merleau Ponty wrote about the "lived body".
Although Whitehead did not call himself a phenomenologist, he did careful phenomenological work. This led him to go far beyond Merleau Ponty. He saw, above all, that a major part of every experience was the inclusion of past experience. If each momentary human experience includes both one's body and one's past experience, it is far from cut off from the reality of other realities. These are known immediately, not by inference from sense experience. When we speak, we can refer to our past experiences and to our bodily feelings. Through these we have access to a wider world about which we can also think and speak. The discovery and articulation of prehensive relations is Whitehead's greatest contribution. It opens the door to the renewal of realism.
At the same time what is real is now found to be events that are both mental and physical in their constitution. When "realism" means the existence of enduring substances, Whitehead is certainly not a "realist." But I think it is far clearer to say that this is a different kind of realism than to seek a new term to name it.
3. I want now to state a more practically controversial assumption. I assume that the experiences talked about in the great religious traditions also have a realistic element. Of course, I do not assume that every statement by practitioners of all traditions is true. But I assume that just as the medicine of West and East analyzed different features of the human body; so the great thinkers of West and East, including the religious ones, have apprehended real features of a real world.
In the previous section I said that, in practice, virtually everyone is a realist. The denial of realism in general is a kind of bad faith that intellectual history has imposed on much of the intelligentsia. But this is not necessarily true of the rejection of realism in the sphere of religion. Especially, this is not true with respect to belief in divine beings. One may believe that natural things are real and even that human experience is real and still doubt the reality of the entities about which religious people often speak.
We need to consider some of the reasons that, in the modern world, skepticism has focused especially on religion. First, whereas the antiquity of ideas or writings long gave them special authority, in the Enlightenment, the modern superseded the ancient in authority. Religious traditions, however, continued to appeal to ancient texts. Often their authority was associated with claims that the events or persons whose work they recited were in some way supernatural. This added to legitimate modern skepticism.
Second, the claims of various religious traditions are in conflict. To whatever extent these claims are made in absolutist terms, such conflicts necessarily rule out all but one. By far the greater likelihood is that they rule out all.
Third, many beliefs were about a putative reality inaccessible to ordinary experience. The arguments given for this reality were unconvincing. Everything then seems to rely on the reality of some type of extraordinary experience, the occurrence of which is not evident.
Fourth, the major argument for the reality of God was the need for a creator of the world. This presupposed efficient causality. Hume denied that there is any actual causal relation of that kind, substituting for the notion of necessitation, regular succession of phenomena. God is not a phenomenon at all, and certainly no regular succession can be observed between God and phenomena. Kant's response also limited causality to a relation in the phenomenal world. For both Hume and Kant, God cannot be a cause of any phenomenon. Accordingly, there is no basis for thought to move from the world we know to God.
Fifth, standard teachings about God's power and God's love were incompatible with the vast reality of evil and unmerited suffering in the world.
I believe that, given much of the content of dominant Western religious teaching and given the assumption that we know the external world only through sense experience, the skepticism that came to dominance in the intellectual community was well founded. If I am to justify the assumption that, nevertheless, the religious traditions are sources of valid knowledge about the totality of reality, I must explain how I evade these two "givens."
Much of the religious history of human kind has focused on matters that are much more experiential than what is rightly viewed with such skepticism. If we begin with Indian and Chinese religious thought, rather than eighteenth-century Protestantism, this becomes clear. There are many dimensions of this thought, but much of it is directly connected to meditational experience of one kind or another. It explains that certain types of practice affect experience in certain ways. To a large extent it is repeatable, much as modern science is. It includes profound analyses of experience in its immediacy. It describes the broader character of experience and life in ways that locate the meditational discipline and explain how it can occur and affect the rest. It connects with Eastern medicine in ways that are mutually reinforcing.
The experience in question is certainly not "ordinary" experience, and what is experienced are not the objects of ordinary experience. But meditative experience is not disconnected from ordinary experience. One can understand it, in some cases, as a highly focused intensification of specific features that can be found also in ordinary experience. Even when this approach breaks down, one can have some understanding of the transformations that occur. To deny all validity to what is learned in these ways expresses the dogmatism of the denier rather than the implausibility that features of reality unnoticed in ordinary experience may be manifest under these circumstances.
When one turns from Indian and Chinese religion to the Bible, one finds very little about special meditational disciplines and what can be learned through them. One finds, instead, a focused attention on human relationships, moral issues, motivation, and the interpretation of history. In these the working of God is discerned. God is "heard" calling, directing, judging, and encouraging. This awareness of God is not gained through special disciplines and often comes unsought, but it is compelling, all the same. It is not an inference from what is known through sensory experience.
Obviously, those committed to a nontheistic explanation of all phenomena can undertake to explain all these experiences. I am not proposing that one can prove that they are wrong. I am suggesting that if one approaches the matter open-mindedly, the scientistic accounts of moral experience are likely to be less convincing to many of those whose moral experience is intense than the idea that in that experience one is affected by a reality that transcends the experience. The scientistic account, when accepted, tends to weaken the role of morality in society. The theistic account tends to strengthen it. It is my assumption that we may learn something about the nature of reality, including God, from the theistic traditions.
All of this account is based on the assumption that sense experience is not our only source of knowledge of the world. The awareness cultivated in Eastern disciplines does not exclude sense experience, but it is not exhausted by it. The Jews have known from the beginning that their knowledge of God does not come from vision or touch. It is often expressed in terms of audition, but for the most part this should not be understood in terms of physical events in the ear. The biblical authors are speaking of the apprehension of meanings that are directly imparted. They find themselves called to act in particular ways, often in ways they would not have chosen.
Thoughtful Westerners have recognized that the choice between sense experience of God and inferential knowledge is not acceptable. They have appealed to "intuition" or "mystical" experience or special "spiritual" senses. Whitehead provides a much better way to approach these matters. He shows that our fundamental relationships to the external world are prehensive, that what is primarily prehended is a world of events that are both physical and mental, that the objectifying of some of these events in vision is a high-level process that is highly abstract in comparison with the basic experience.
This turns matters around. Experience of our own past and of other persons need not be mediated by sense experience. The same is true of our experience of God. The affirmation that we directly experience God does not require a special category of experience, since it can fit into the most basic form of all experience. That our moral experience is partly informed by this experience of God is a meaningful hypothesis supported by widespread experience. The direct experience of our personal past, of other persons, and of God rarely comes to clear consciousness. Such consciousness is largely reserved for the sense experience that has been so central to our intellectual history. But what is most clearly conscious may not be what is most fundamental to knowledge. Indeed, the fact that, practically speaking, we all know we live in a real world and that we cannot explain that knowledge through clearly conscious sense experience should warn us that there is a great difference.
If the religious beliefs in view are just those of traditional Christianity, then overcoming the bias against nonsensory perception will not reinstate credibility. The problem of evil, which I listed last in my account of reasons for skepticism, may be the most important reason for not accepting Christian teaching. It does not disappear with a changed epistemology. But if we are attentive to what moral and historical experience may actually teach us about God, we will not be drawn back into this quagmire. Nor will we end up with supernaturalist and absolutist doctrines. To believe that religious experience East and West tells us something about reality does not support dogmatic reaffirmations of all traditional teachings. These have many sources other than such experience and are in urgent need of reformulation in our scientific and pluralistic context.
4. I assume that believers from diverse traditions can communicate with one another. This again may seem too evident to note, but it has been seriously challenged. The challenge typically assumes the nonreferential character of language or, at least, of religious language.
The argument is convincing in its own terms. The basis on which we assume that we can translate from one language to another is the common reference of words in different languages. Many languages have a word referring to trees. Even if the exact designation of the words in different languages is different, for example the boundary between trees and shrubs, the overlap is sufficient so that the translation is successful. Perfection is not required. Even in a single language there are diverse uses of the same term. The hearer may not understand exactly what the speaker intends. But there is still effective communication.
But if the religious communities have cultivated very different experiences and have ordered the world in quite distinct ways, is communication still possible? Suppose, for example, that pratitya samutpada is a Buddhist concept that is absent in Christian thinking. One cannot point to it and ask how Christians name that. How, then, can communication across the barrier be possible?
Let us recognize that it is far from easy. Those who underestimate the differences among religious traditions often suppose that they can find some idea or teaching in their own tradition that is similar to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. If they adopt this idea and translate accordingly, they will consistently misunderstand what is said to them. If we live in a fixed cultural-linguistic world and can understand only in so far as what is said fits into that world, then the effort to communicate is hopeless. But in fact matters do not end there.
The usual translation of pratitya samutpada is "dependent origination," which in turn is taken to be "emptiness" or "emptying." Here we have English words, but if we examine their meaning in English without constant recourse to the way that pratitya samutpada is used in its Buddhist context, it is unlikely that we will have learned much from the Buddhists. Yet Buddhists can explain the meaning of these terms to Christians in ways that lead to progressive understanding. They become useful and meaningful words to Christians, not only in expounding their understanding of Buddhism, but also in expounding their changing understanding of reality as a whole.
Thus, in dialogue, communication, imperfect but real, occurs. We do not live in fixed cultural-linguistic worlds. These worlds are constantly changing. One source of change is the encounter with words or ideas that don't fit well into our existing system. These constitute a challenge. We can misleadingly translate them into existing terms. We can simply reject them. We can live with them, seek to understand them through conversation and new experience, and then incorporate them into our own worlds with some change occurring through that world.
This statement presupposes that the words, in part, refer to nonlinguistic reality. If their meaning were exhausted by their references to other words, then they could not be abstracted from the entire cultural-linguistic system in which they reside. If, on the other hand, the word refers to some feature of the totality to which others also can attend, then the abstraction is possible. Certainly there will be some change in connotation and role for the word in its new context, but there will be real communication nevertheless.
Conclusions
I have not succeeded in separating assumptions clearly from the conclusions to which they have led me. For that I do not apologize. Even assumptions change, or should change, as one works with and from them. Also, these assumptions have assumptions, some of which I have partly expressed. In some ways, I have simply restated my ideas about how Christians can view other religious traditions.
However, I hope that what I have done here does supplement what I have written elsewhere. I usually write for fellow-Christians in ways that do not make my commitment to Whitehead's philosophy fully explicit. I can do so, because most Christians share many of these assumptions even if they do not have at hand a philosophical system that supports and clarifies them.
In this group, I can share my belief that there is a value in showing how Whitehead's philosophy, especially his doctrine of physical feelings or prehensions, makes possible views of the relations among religious traditions that are largely excluded from the academy because of its lack of this concept. For me, this not only helps us in dealing well with an urgent contemporary issue but also demonstrates once more the fruitfulness of Whitehead's conceptuality.