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Saturday, November 24, 2007

"The dominant answer in religious thinking concerning God and morality is that what God commands is morally right independent of his commands and he commands them because he sees that they are morally right...

Consider God's belief that 2 + 2 = 4. Is it true that 2 + 2 = 4 because God believes it? Or does God believe that 2 + 2 = 4 because it is true that 2 + 2 = 4? If we say the latter, as it seems we should, we imply that certain mathematical statements are true independent of God's believing them. So, we already seem committed to the view that the way some things are is not ultimately a matter of God's will or commands. Perhaps the basic truths of morality have the same sort of status as the basic truth of mathematics...

The second difficulty for an exclusivistic religion arises as soon as we become serious acquainted with other religions and the lives of their founders and chief saints... That Mahatma Gandhi, for example, is destined for hell because he did not convert to Christianity or some other exclusivistic religion is bound to seem a dubious, if not absurd, idea to anyone who becomes acquainted with Hinduism and the life of Gandhi...

None of these substantive properties is knowable by us or even expressible by our human concepts. So our concepts of "good," "loving," and "divine," fail to pick out any of the substantive properties of the Real in itself. But if ultimate reality (the Real in itself) is not good, not loving, and not divine, why is it manifested in experience as good, as loving, and as divine?... Hick holds that the Real possesses neither the positive substantial property of being purposive nor the negative substantial property of not being pruposive. But many philosophers would regard such a view as simply incoherent...

If neither many gods nor a single god called by different names or titles in the different religions exists, what then is left for Hick to adopt as the proper view of the many different gods of the world's great religions? Without explicitly endorsing the view, Hick suggests that the gods are "projections of the religious imagination." They are human creations in response to encounters with what is truly ultimate reality. Thus, [no] such beings actually exist."

i.e. If all religions are right, then all religions are also wrong."

--- Philosophy of religion : an introduction / William L. Rowe
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