Abstract
Spiritual truth is found in more than one tradition. Each religion presents a model of Reality based on the apercu or disclosure of Reality available to it. No model is, or can be, complete. Reality is most adequately understood through a plurality of models. But, since models are limited and subject to error, critical pluralism must apply to all religions the methods of spiritual discernment and theological insight currently used only within each tradition. The task of discernment is not only an intellectual exercise. Reality is transformative, but we are not all called to the same way of life. We must each respond to that aspect of Reality most present in our own lives.
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Notes
- 1.
van Fraasen provides the most comprehensive exploration to date of the perspectival nature of models.
- 2.
To be used for explanation or prediction, a model must include the “location” of the person using the model. For a map to be useful, you need an X that marks where you are. van Fraasen gives the example of the Aviation model used for predicting the weather, which is just an inert set of data and equations until the user specifies a location (van Fraasen, pp. 77–8, 196–7). “In sum,” he concludes, “the use of ‘perspective’ and ‘perspectival’ in connection with depictions of events in varying frames of reference cannot be banished completely” (van Fraasen, p. 71).
- 3.
The history of efforts to unify religions is not reassuring. Some are hierarchical. Hegel provides a grand theory in which all religions express a moment of the Absolute, most adequately expressed in a philosophized Lutheranism. Some are essentialist. The phenomenological tradition attempts to identify a single essence of religion – the sacred, or the numinous, or the holy, or ultimate concern, or a wholly-other Power, and so forth. Some achieve unification by making religion mute. John Hick regards the great religions as incommensurable representations of the noumenal X. The Perennial Philosophy makes religion both hierarchical and mute by privileging the mystical level, regarded as ineffable, over those aspects of religion that can be expressed.
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A model of models of Reality is not itself a model of Reality, any more than a theory of maps is itself a map.
- 5.
Mitchell also describes her own theory of biological explanation as “critical pluralism,” which she sees as the reasonable “middle ground” between epistemic “promiscuity” and the ideal of a “grand unified theory” such as reductionism – an unsuccessful research program increasingly rejected by a “developing antireductionist consensus” among philosophers of biology (Mitchell, pp. 2, 179, 214).
- 6.
An object is viewed from one side, but implicitly as being visible from other sides as well, as being the reference point of a horizon of perspectives. Looking directly at the midday Sun overwhelms the visual field and blocks this horizon. Awed by their own apercus, religions tend to ignore the horizon of alternative perspectives, of other dimensions of Reality. They acknowledge the partialness of their apercus in another way – by asserting the ultimate ineffability of Reality.
References
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Mitchell, Sandra D. 2003. Biological complexity and integrative pluralism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Padovano, Anthony. 1987. Thomas Merton. In The encyclopedia of religion, vol. 9, ed. Mircea Eliade, 389–390. New York: Macmillan.
Panikkar, Raimon. 2007. The methodic of Hindu–Christian studies. Journal of Hindu–Christian Studies 20: 52–54.
van Fraasen, Bas C. 2008. Scientific representation. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Martin, J.L. (2013). The Many-Sided Reality: A Model of Models. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_77
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