John Hick two

well now one of the themes that seems to come up as a crucial aspect of Hicks thinking is this idea of life after death we've already seen that with the idea of the verification of religious language for example he talked about an eschatological verification eye that theism or belief in God or religious language is made sent off by our experiences after death similarly with the soul making theodicy of course the one of the criticisms that we didn't mention was that rarely are the soul making is the soul making process accomplished in this single life because the question about the destruction that evil can wrought upon an individual's life leading to death of course is very a cogent criticism of the soul making theodicy so clearly the soul making to make sense there has to be a continuation after we die either process carries on so he is committed therefore to extending the life's journey beyond death this is not the only life that we actually lead and so in the 70s in particular in the early 70s he was committed to the idea of studying this whole question about how do we make sense of immortality is the whole concept of life after death coherent but of course the real risk here then is that if we can't think of a coherent way to conceive of life after death then a lot of Hick's projects really are well they're just academic exercises without any real reference point so he is committed to the idea of there being some kind of existence beyond death and his next great work after evil in the God of love death and eternal life which was published in 1976 is devoted towards conceptions of life after death and it's one of those another one of those very comprehensive works that hicas produced where he covers a whole range of beliefs ranging from the early church other religions various philosophers the evidence for example of parapsychology as an important aspect of his study of life after death - and drawing all these elements together hick is concerned to present a picture of how the journey continues beyond death he's not just concerned with showing that we can in principle live after death although he does deal with that earlier on in that particular text so what is what position does hick take well he is a duelist that is to say he is committed to the idea that there is a distinction to be made between mind or soul and body he thinks that therefore that studies in the brain or studies of the human person don't necessarily rule out the idea of there being something which is apart from the body which is part which may be called a soul or whatever but one of his real most important most famous contributions is to deal with this question about well what would really look like so he might say that well the self might persist in some kind of form after death but in the end he wants to say well in order for the life's journey to continue in order for the soul making process to carry on there has to be a form of reimbold 'men in another world which is also the kind of world that has the challenges in the same way as this one but it would be a different kind of world and so he comes up with a postulate about what that really meant would be any calls it very famously a replica theory or what he calls an exact replica now what is this a response to well it's that he interprets it as being a modern view of traditional views of resurrection now the early church fathers if you read that they were concerned with finding very precise mechanical descriptions of how you might resurrect a particular person and they were very concerned about getting the same particles together again so so you know when David Cheetham dies are we going to make it better get all these particles together again and so we'll have the real David Cheetham when the resurrection takes place and what happens that you know he gets eaten by cannibals do they get some of his particles and you know there's a big confusion that might break and Higgs observation that all these kinds of discussions of course not really representative of where modern Sciences in terms of quantum physics and what-have-you anyway setting all that aside what he thinks is well what is a modern conception and he gives her a thought experiment he says well imagine as if I was giving a lecture in one part of the world and then suddenly I reread in New York City just carried on talking as if I'd nothing had happened I disappeared from one place and reappeared in the next exactly the same body with eyes coloration stomach contents everything he said would we have a problem in saying that the same person that had disappeared from one place had reappeared another place and the way I think of that and this is obviously what hick has said but if you think of the of contemporary science fiction take a classic science fiction film like Star Trek when captain of the starship enterprises beam me up Scotty and so he disappears from what the planet and he reappears in the starship and the point I think hicas make is the way I interpret it is that we don't look at that and say oh hang on is that the same Captain Kirk how can we be certain it's the same body and of course we don't go through that process we just take it as read that that's a rather obvious thing he's been his particles have been broken down and the same pattern has been reassembled in this other place and we have the same person so and I remember asking John actually about this I said do you actually believe that this is what is actually going to happen we're going to have to have we're gonna have replicas I got the impression in talking to him that he saw is more as a a philosophical modelling that he said well how might we defend the notion of reembarked how might we describe it as something that's meaningful so I think it's I'm rather ambiguous about whether I could say that he actually believes that there will be replicas but rather what he is he's but he's behaving as a philosopher he's constructing a particular model for how life after death might look and how Rhian body might look now of course that does a what would be a classic criticism about that well when the early church fathers were bothered about searching through the you know matter to find the real David Cheetham there was a there's a point there and that is that David Cheetham is unique that he's not you can't copy him to in order to get the real person back you have to somehow get that particular thing back and so one of the problems with replicas is that is the problem of multiple replication because if in principle God can just sort of remake me out of the the cheatin pattern can be remade somewhere else then can't he make two or three of me and then doesn't the whole question of uniqueness break down does it mean that I can't say that I really continue after death if in principle you can divide me up into several parts because then I would ask the question which one is the real me and you would be able to give a clear answer to that so there's some kind of intuition in the old views that somehow maybe you have to have uniqueness going on so did rip to the one of the questions that have been asked in the journals in discussing Hicks replica theory when it came out was what about this question of multiple replication has hit preserved uniqueness in his modern perspectives on resurrection but setting that aside the whole point that he wants to paint and this is another very famous thing that he is associated with and this is the idea of many lives in many worlds so he is already being pluralistic and the way he constructs his view of life after death so he's bringing together eastern ideas of reincarnation of course Eastern ideas says that we might be reincarnated and many many times in many places and rebut reborn he is in a way bringing together Western in Eastern traditions in his idea of many lives in many worlds he says and he's of course connecting that with his soul making or RNA and intuition that there has to be an extension of time and so this might as far as he says he it'd be a series of embodiments a series of valid existences where our souls are made further as we go on he calls this this period of time by the way par eschatology that's a kind of an in-between it's not a description of the final state this is not Hicks view that the final state is that kind of a constant progression he remains he reserves judgment about what the ultimate outcome and actually be of the soul making process so he describes this kind of posture at about what will happen after death is a kind of a power eschatology which is best summed up as a kind of many lives in many worlds where our souls continue to be made and developed well probably what John Hickey is most famous for well when he say our most least most famous for of course the truth is he's made contributions to such a broad range of things but probably most controversially maybe is his theory of religious pluralism and his pluralistic hypothesis and this was this is this finds its greatest articulation in his what I think is his magnum opus which is called an interpretation of religion which was published in 1989 and recently I think in 2004 went into a second edition and it's hearing that hick creates his overall perspective or interpretation of religion and you really get a sense in reading that book that it's really is the sum total of a great deal of very deep and profound scholarship that he's undertaken over the many years and certainly it brings together a lot of his thinking in particular what Reese seems to resurface very strongly is his very early work on epistemology which seems to be that the thread really that's gone throughout Hicks thinking right from the very word go so let's dispel a few myths to begin with so some people think that the idea of religious pluralism of course is a very destructive thing so from a religious perspective it might be seen that if you say all religions are equally valid it means that well my religion is less valid it means that there are certain things that I believe that can't be true because of course religions claim different things so if you're going to say they're all equally valid and there's going to be have to be some kind of reinterpretation involved and some people find that very very uncomfortable so on the face of it it may seem that if somebody comes along and says well all the religions you know are equally valid that can be bad news I think it's important whatever the views about that I think it's important to understand that actually the way that hick is constructed is pluralistic hypothesis is a defense of religion it's meant to be a defense of the basic claims of religious faith and based the basic realist or critically realist perspective that he holds about religious language that he actually refer to something that's actually out there it's not just all this poetic stuff invented within human communities think of David Hume the classic sceptical philosopher part of Humes criticism of religion why he thought that atheism was a more truer option was that well you had many religions and many of these religions were all claiming different things and so actually that's an evidence for the non-existence of God or the invalidity of religion because surely all these truth claims that people that religions make cancel themselves out and so the best the most obvious conclusion is that well there is no God really all religions are just creations of wishful thinking so really if you think of it that way Higgs pluralistic hypothesis is their response to that problem it's really a good if the question is well how can there be many religions and yet religions still be true or all religions still have some kind of real reference point and so that's the framework really I thought that's how I see explore ilysm is that it's actually a defense of religious belief of religious reference points now whether I agree with the pluralism or not myself is a separate matter but I think it's important to understand that he sets up his pluralism is a kind of a defense of the differences that you find in religion and how like and how though all those religions can still have a real reference point now this is where the epistemology comes in because the question is there well how do you account for all the differences so Christianity says that God has a son Islam says that God does not have a son Buddhism says that well one of the truths is that there is no soul or that everything is impermanent and in fact for a Buddhist you might even say that belief in God is part of the suffering it's the grasping all the attachment of things now how can that contrast more would say Islam with the idea that God is one that we should submit to God so you have two very different perspectives and so you could equally you can easily go along with humans say well yeah they're all different they've all they all say different things so how does hick account for all this well we have to bring ease epistemology back in that the world is in a state of finely balanced ambiguity and that our religious knowledge is not necessarily propositional by a literal knowledge about like a list of things to believe in about God but rather it's a it's a sum total of experience it's rational belief it's a rational kind of way of living in the world or experiencing the world in light of other kinds of ways of experiencing the world and there's one other thing to add as well and this is important is that hick is influenced very much by Immanuel Kant I can't made a famous distinction between the lumina and the phenomenon there is the world as it is in itself and there is the world as it is perceived and this was of course a fundamental insight in Western philosophy at the time that we can't get to reality as it is we can't get to reality unmediated we can only get to it through our own conceptual lenses so the mind is involved in structuring the reality that's out there now Hank borrows this basic idea he says that well and this is important rather like the way he treated IRA næss he's not meant to be full-blown Kantian he's boring cants basic fundamental ideas to develop his own ideas and so he's inspired by this idea that there is a distinction between things as they are things as they are perceived and he says well perhaps it's like that with God perhaps it's that like that with the divine that there is the divine in itself but then there are the many different sorts of cultural manifestations of the divine there are the different ways in which cultures and human beings have responded to this divine reality that lurks behind them and so he draws a distinction between what he calls the real and this is term he uses because of course he's got to encompass Buddhists as well as Muslims and Christians he distinguishes between the real as it is in itself and the real as it is perceived or encountered in the many human responses to that reality and so the Khan said the way he then deals with differences between the different religions is simply to say that there's a difference that at the phenomenal level I the way that we perceive the real there are course cultural differences that the different things that we say about the real don't represent this contradictions in the real in itself but rather just the differences at our own phenomenal level and so in a an important statement he believes that the real is trans categorical it won't be it's not good enough to try to say that the real might be well somewhat personal maybe impersonal which is it he wants to say that the real is beyond our conceptions the real in itself is outside of our cultural apprehensions as it were and therefore to try and apply to the real things that we find within our different religions is not true the real in itself but it's true of our religions as we experience it so it very cleverly and shrewdly manages to say that well all religions are valid responses they are true within their own terms of reference and they are in fact true of the real that lurks behind them but the real in itself is neither purposive or non purposive good or evil person or non person and he says well or one and many in fact because these are the things that we would apply in our own conceptual resources to God all the real the real behind that is beyond all our categories and now he thinks that well this is actually quite Orthodox stuff really it may sound quite a radical way of configuring things but all religions have a kind of a mystical tradition all religions will say what God is bigger you know how can we question God famously in the story of Jobe God says where were you and I'm made the foundations of the earth or you know God is the God beyond our conceptions God is bigger than anything we can conceive and so you could say that in all traditions not just Christianity but other religions too there is a mystical idea that God is beyond and so in some ways pluralism up pick argues is entirely consistent with that kind of mystical dimension you find in all religions anyway so there's nothing into that extent you could say well that's fairly straightforward and Orthodox so now what I want to say if that's the basic structure there what to say in in what are the criticisms of that perspective well one of the criticisms might take this form is that well what is the nature of the real that lies behind all the differences so we have the real as it is in itself and the real as it is perceived and this real as it is in itself describes as trans categorical and so what mate may even ask the question does it have any reality at all does it mean anything what does it mean to say something is neither good or evil and if you say that the real is neither good or evil then what effect does that have on what he said earlier in evil and the God of love when he says that well how do we justify the God of love in the light of evil well presumably the real being Beyond Good and Evil doesn't have to be justified any more because well we're not really saying the real is good or bad so there is that these interesting elements of why heck is done in in the real to have an effect as you can see on some of the earlier things that he says but it also has an effect for example on what he says about the real about realism about whether our religious language has a real reference point so if you remember he talks about eschatological verification that in the eschaton you'll get and verify whether you know the existence of God is true or false how do you verify the pluralistic hypothesis how do you verify a real that is neither good or evil purposive or non purpose of personal poor thing what would the experience be mean that hick is committed to an empiricist sort of view of knowledge what will be the experience of this real to confirm or disconfirm the truth of the pluralistic hypothesis now what I'm doing here this is just rehearsing a number of typical kind of criticisms that have occurred since he produced his pluralistic hypothesis it's not entirely fair because you could hit can really just say well all religions have a mystical element we all have an element which will be we can't put into words now but we all trust that somehow that we will we will see something or experience something that will verify it even if we can't put it into words now so maybe actually we're trying to understand now what the verification of saya a pluralistic view of things would be through our own conceptual resources but HICC may be able to dodge that problem by simply saying well God is beyond but we will know then well when we have the experience we don't have to articulate it clearly in the now the other criticism might be that well this is hick actually even though he's defending religion is he really defending religion all the terms that they want to see done is is it in the end do religions are they going to be able to tolerate the idea that all their beliefs are made into myths effectively made into cultural responses to the real rather than big direct responses to the real so many religious Islam in particular for example and Christianity are committed to the different kinds of revelation Higgs kind of Revelation is that is experiential we learn by experience by butter our lives about how to see the world that's his view of how he gained some kind of religious awareness but what about other kinds of traditions where God speaks where God breaks into the world and says well no I'm like this and here's a book to read or here's a person and I if you've seen him you see me these are the kinds of forms revelation of the Korean religion and those kinds of appearances are designed specifically to overcome agnosticism doubt about what the nature of the world in the universe is so you can see there's a problem there about how hackers characterize religion is experiencing hours of the real behind and the religions themselves that want to say well hang on our knowledge of God is more certain because God has spoken in various forms if you take that kind of view of revelation one famous criticism or important criticism that's taken place of Hick's theory is this whole idea which may seem rather obvious is that well maybe the religions do different things to you maybe not all religions are about making into better people or transforming you from selfishness to reality sentences maybe this kind of and he uses his particular criterion for his hypothesis he says well all religions are in a sense saving you or liberating you or enlightening you you're moving away from your selfishness to a more outward perspective in terms of the divine it's at the center of the universe and some people say well we didn't do different things if you're a Buddhist you're trying to lose the self you're trying to embrace the idea that everything is impermanent if you're a Christian you're being transformed into the likeness of Christ you're becoming into the relationship with God the Father in Islam you are submitting to God saying the towhead that the God is in everything that God must be followed in more Eastern traditions and Hinduism maybe you are trying to overcome the ignorance of the way you see the world and in fact all is one and that you are not differentiated from the world and that's part of the peace that you gain in liber liberating yourself and becoming part of the oneness of this part of the reality these are vague descriptions of difference but the point is as the question is are those very different kinds of salvations or different kinds of outcomes are there multiple religious ends as one critic is described critical Markheim so that well maybe there are multiple adjust outcomes maybe Hicks theory isn't pluralist enough maybe in the end behind hex pluralism but there is an ontology of sameness that his use of the the county and typology that there are that there are differences at the phenomenal level but behind them there is this real does that sound like a a rather singular reference point is that really very pluralist in the end is hick force to say the well if religions seem to have the same kind of fruit that they seem to transform you is he effectively saying that behind that there is the same thing is that really pluralism is one of the questions that sound has been asked now of course all this has an effect also on important aspects of doctrine within religions so I just mentioned already the idea of revelation that religions might want to talk about you know specific or special revelation as given what about beliefs like the incarnation for example so I've said earlier that hick is quite famous for the myth of God incarnate there's a book he edited in 1977 and one of the reasons that for his Christology was the presence of other faiths that really by upholding Christ as being superior or being the one and only the way the truth and the life that would you know fit in with the picture that well there are many different cultural representations of the real that lurks behind them and so there are consequences for religious faith and this is ironic in some ways because he wants to describe his pluralistic hypothesis as a second-order discourse that is to say if a philosophical explanation of the many differences that occur in religions it's not a first-order confession it's not something that's meant to be confessed it's not as if hick is saying well I think we should all confess pluralism believe in the real but it's difficult to get away from that assume that that viewpoint that maybe really pluralism is I kind of first all the discourse why because it seems to have effects on religions it doesn't leave them as they are it doesn't explain religions as they actually are right now it wants to say well we have to reinterpret certain beliefs that will be exclusively claims claims for Jesus claims of the Koran claims maybe for the Four Noble Truths and Buddhism so this is the part of the the question whether what is the status of Higgs hypothesis it's part of the most significant important maybe revolutionary perspectives on the on the nature of the plurality of religions but the question is does it work and what status does it have is it actually a confessional form of discourses itself is it confessing that all religions are equally valid as if that's a creed or statement or is it merely just a philosophical ghost in the machine leaving religions pristine and untouched and that's part one of the unsigned undecided debates that are happening right now in the discussion of the relationship between religions is that well what is pluralism precisely what is its status as a theory of religions so what's the future I mean the future of Hick's reception in the academic world is probably also tied to the future of liberalism or tied to the ideas that we can somehow come up with the global perspectives or overall theories so some thinkers think that the age of the overall grand theorists the grand meta-narrative as opposed to modest might put it it has come and gone that we no longer can somehow write theories I think seek to encompass everything and so you can see already that if you take a more postmodern perspective that well we can't assume the view from nowhere all our perspectives are culturally conditioned then already the questions can we therefore offer interpretations of religion as people who stand outside of those traditions or seek to for example with explore listing hypotheses give a viewpoint which seeks to engage in a more neutral attitude above the action as it were to be fair to hick he would also say that you know he's also working from within a cultural tradition and that his hypothesis is working from the ground up he's seeking to bring to the sorts of different religions he's not necessarily seeking to superimpose something from top down but that remains a perennial debate many critics of Hickey accuse him of being an Enlightenment philosopher or somebody who follows the Enlightenment tradition I that is an important topic an important way of putting it that the Enlightenment isn't seen or that way of philosophizing using reason and so isn't seen as a dispassionate neutral activity rather it's a kind of Western tradition specific rationality and so post liberals will argue that Hicks theory is a kind of an old hat form of meta-narrative is an Enlightenment sort of tradition and it to be fair you would say that right now and however long this lasts the post liberals the post modernists half of the day they are the most dominant in the Academy so the question is you know does this hick thinking represent something that has a continuation in the academic world or does it represent a time that has come and gone well I don't know what to say about that I think that the truth is is that well the better way of asking that question is well Hicks still be read is his work still going to make an impact is it still going to have an influence there are hundreds of articles written about hick there are I think 50 or 60 PhD pretty more by now multiple books that have been written by hate and are still being written about hit a little students are still studying when they study philosophy are still looking at hick and hick of course has contributed to epistemology evil form of evil questions in the afterlife Christology pluralism and so because he's had such a broad scope and because he's so clear in what he says I think it would be the best thing to say that he will continue to be read and continued

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Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019