Introduction

This is a distinction that Van der Veken himself puts forward under inspiration from the mathematician, scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, chapter on God in Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1925 213-4), which rendition Jan prefers to the last part of Process and Reality. In the Part V of Process and Reality Whitehead is himself overtly dependent on the particular experiences of particular people, namely the brief Galilean vision. In Process and Reality Whitehead goes too far, much further than is legitimated by his own speculative cosmology.
 

As Van der Veken has it, this distinction may be intuitively compared to the distinction between the knowledge that a perfect stranger might have of my good friend and the knowledge available to me as his or her good friend. This is a fair comparison, in so far as, among other things, it brings out the fact that faith is much more than just knowledge. It is also trust and already a kind of love. In process theological terms indeed 'faith' can cash out as something like, clueing into the lure of the Divine Mystery in our lives and having the courage to entrust oneself to it, as in "Do not be afraid, only have faith".
 

However, as is regularly the case with imperatives and performatives, such 'entrustment' will bring with it certain cognitively relevant commitments (as for example with something so banal as "please open the door"). Such commitments are based on particular experiences of particular people, the person who comes to faith and those of others whom he or she has come to know or know about. Such experiences meanwhile help to form and indeed are formed by, interpreted with the help of and even enabled by religious traditions of one kind or another. This constitutes religious traditions for cognitive purposes as dynamic traditions of experience and interpretation.
 

This distinction, now embedded in a distinction between religious and scientific traditions of experience and interpretation, is affirmed, extended and deepened with the help of recent Philosophy of Religion and recent Philosophy of Science. The epistemic consequences are then elaborated with the help of some theses on 'the hermeneutics of reasonable believing' with a connection to David Hume's 1st Enquiry section on miracles and a probably less surprising link to the later political philosophy of John Rawls..
 

When we do all this, the distinction also ends up getting relativised, and in what I think is a rather harmless sense, 'naturalised'. From the point of view of generalized or more generalized reason, for a person taken up into particular traditions of experience and interpretation, it is only to be expected that they believe as they do. Indeed given the tradition specific criteria it may even be reasonable for them to so believe, in a sense of particularized rationality.
 

So the first allegation of this paper (Part I) is that the cognitively relevant distinction between Faith and Reason is not that of subjective versus objective, or non-rational versus rational, or supernatural versus natural, but more like, particular versus general, or even, as it will turn out, more particular versus less particular.  Even so, within this broad division some clearer distinctions need to be made, in order to preserve some kind of distinction between science and philosophy on the one side and between religious and non-religious views of life on the other.
 

The paper then goes on to make some suggestions for a way forward on the vexed issue of judging between religious (or it may be non-religious) traditions. The notion of a Pluralism of Reasonable Believing, announced already in Part I, is put forward as a modest alternative to the usual Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism on the question of who has the truth. This side of the Parousia, we cannot demand of people that what they believe be 'true', which usually means what we take as true. All that we can require of each other is that our believing be reasonable. This will always be contextualized, with a good deal of 'luck' one way or the other.
 

This is not to say we cannot learn from each other, or that we should avoid or eschew dialogue. On the contrary, the logic of maintaining our reasonable believing in the epistemic meta-world created by the thesis itself may push us into even stronger dialogue. The suggestion will be that this happens from out of a carefully defined 'dialogal inclusivist' attitude, versus exclusivist, pluralist or generalized religious skeptic. What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands (1 John 1:1, New RSV translation), albeit had inside a mutually validating tradition of experience and interpretation, will continue to have a hold over us over against what other people share with us in the way of testimony from outside. This is only natural, to be expected, and indeed reasonable in a double sense. What we have experienced personally will other things being equal have an epistemic advantage for us over mere testimony from others, at least to the point of giving us an epistemic right to stay with it for the time being. Furthermore, it is precisely the richness of our own particular experiences that we have to contribute to any cross-traditions discussion. However, the attitude remains largely functional. It is a carry over from our own reasonable believing. At no point do we dispute the in principle reasonably believed character of the beliefs of our dialogue partners, any more than they dispute ours. The dialogal inclusivism continues to be framed inside a pluralism of reasonable believing.
 

We begin our story (for Part I), then, with some remarks on contemporary philosophy of religion and recent philosophy of science before moving on to the so-called hermeneutics of reasonable believing. We then draw some consequences and applications. In Part II, we look at suggestions for a way ahead on the question of judging or deciding which religious tradition to belong to, if any.
 
 

Part I: Towards a Pluralism of Reasonable Believing

Post-Katzian Philosophy of Religion

In the late 1970's and early 1980's the philosopher Steven Katz edited two books (Katz 1978, 1983) which between them have changed the shape of the philosophy of religious experience, almost as much as the work of Karl Popper changed the shape of philosophy of science. Since then, the question has been, not whether religious experience for the most part is constructed most of the time, but 1) the extent and manner by which it is constructed, within the religious tradition in which it occurs, and 2) the significance of this, if any, for the question of the cognitive value of religious experience.
 

In respect of the first issue, the extent and manner of construction, we may make a broad distinction between various partial constructivists (e.g. Katz himself, Peter Moore, John Hick, Dupre, Schillebeeckx) and the occasional total constructivist (e.g. probably Gimello, in Katz 1978, 1983; also the linguistic constructivism of some deconstructionists). Partial constructivists acknowledge in theory at least that the externality also plays a part in the formation of experience, and in principle at least allow experiences to affect traditional interpretative structures, as well as the other way around. For the total constructivist, the movement is all one way. Traditional meditative practices and such like are for the sake of enabling or constructing certain experiences, to enable us, for example, to experience the world the way the Buddha says it is (Gimello).
 

According to the broad run of partial constructivist post-Katzian philosophy of religion, for epistemological purposes a religion may be understood as a developing tradition of experience and interpretation. Interpretative structures prepare the way for and indeed enable and get incorporated into certain types of experience; experience evokes and sometimes brings about changes in interpretative structures. One may make a relative distinction between originating experiences, e.g. the experiences of the Buddha or of Jesus and the early Jesus community, and founded experiences, which happen and are to a large extent made possible by the existence of the tradition to which the originating experiences eventually gave rise. But even this is only a relative distinction, with the experiences of Jesus and the early Jesus community presuming the context in 1st Century Judaism and the experiences of the Buddha presuming a context within the religious traditions of his time in India. (See Dupre 1998, 116-117 for this version.)
 

'Interpretation' here, of course, is more than just worldviews or theories. It includes attitudes, emotional stances, value judgements, meditation and other practices, various disciplines etc. Indeed, it consists in the whole gambit of what shapes the way deeply religious people in one of the religious traditions experience each other, the events of daily life, the world and the Mysteries or what John Hick calls the Real (Hick 1989).
 

The debate is far from over, even in favour of partial constructivism. However, even if, contra Katz and his constructivist colleagues, there turns out to be some such phenomenon as pure empty consciousness unaffected by its context (cf. Esp. Forman collection, 1990), its significance and indeed its very point would seem to be still tradition dependent. (Cf. even Smart in Katz, 1983, as well as Nelson Pike, Mystic Union 1992, regarding Union without Distinction). Similarly with regard to neo cross-cultural classifiers (e.g. Wainwright, Stoeber). Cross cultural classifications, if any, need to be made more circumspectly and acknowledging tradition incorporation in their detail and the significance of the various stages as relative to the tradition. For epistemological purposes then we would still be into traditions of experience and interpretation, whatever happened to the debate on both of these points.
 

Whatever, religious traditions are always particular, relating to the particular experiences of particular people taken up into various particular historically determined communal traditions of experience and interpretation. Religious experiences typically happen within or in contact with such particular traditions, and are formed by, interpreted with the help of and help to form such traditions.
 
 

Post-Popperian Philosophy of Science

Popper already has science 'built on a swamp', with so-called 'basic statements' only relatively basic (Popper, 1972, 111). Post-Popperian philosophers of science, such as Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Toulmin, and a host of others have taken things even further. It seems that Science or the sciences happen inside and between paradigms, research programs, traditions of enquiry etc., that all facts are theory laden and all experience and all experiments are also theory laden. Of course, this need not be the theory under test; it may be various background theories. But the point is still made. All enquiry is tradition-constituted, not only e.g. ethical enquiry. The only difference is in the mode by which traditions constitute the enquiry.
 

Once again, paradigms, research programs, traditions constituting enquiries, are not just theories. They are also attitudes, disciplines, practices, ways of operating with each other including certain implicit criteria for what is allowable. Indeed, they are the whole gambit of what a scientist in a particular discipline puts on when she or he goes to work of a morning, much of it all be incapable of being brought to consciousness.
 

Other work in the history and social situated-ness of sciences might be slotted in at this point, including work by feminist philosophers and historians of science such as Carolyn Merchant and Nancy Howell.
 

Over against religious traditions: entrance into such traditions is typically more easily available than entrance into an entirely different religious tradition to that of ones birth. Such scientific traditions, particularly the mathematical and natural scientific one, indeed tend to move fairly readily across cultural and religious boundaries. After all, the whole of one's life is not typically involved in such an entrance. The experiences on which they are based is more generally available, typically rather less tightly restricted in its criteria for availability than typically fully-fledged religious experience. However, it is only relatively more generally available, relative to the paradigm, research program, tradition of enquiry in which the particular scientist is implicated. Indeed, the scientific enterprise itself is in a certain way only relatively generally available to us human beings. Its coming about as a human practice is the product of certain historical contingencies, datable by some to the High Middle Ages. But once it has come about, it becomes available to others outside the particular cultural and historical context which first gave rise to it.
 
 

Moral, Scientific and Religious 'Luck'

One quick if rather intuitive way to bring out the similarity, the only relatively distinct character of such human practices as Science, Ethics and Religions is in terms of the apparent ubiquity of the notion of 'luck'.
 

The term, 'moral luck', has been brought into common discourse particularly by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. The notion is already in Hume in his refusal of a fast distinction between natural abilities and virtues (Hume is just following the ancients, including Aristotle, in this respect). However, religious people have probably known about it for ages, via such phrases as "there but for the grace of God go I".
 

There appears to be class of phenomena which we might by analogy call 'scientific luck', roughly, being in the right place at the right time. This could be applied to Science itself. It certainly would seem to apply to paradigm change in science, e.g. whether one happens to be old and embedded or young and enthusiastic at the time (Kuhn). It probably applies pretty well to a lot of particular scientific discoveries.
 

We could also talk of such a thing as 'religious luck', whereby when and where one is born and various contingencies along the way after that will often have a lot to do with one's religious convictions and commitments.
 
 

Some Differencesmaking for a relative distinction:

In spite of such similarities as brought out by this analogy, however, the different spheres are still relatively distinct. The distinctiveness has probably two main sources. As Van der Veken has pointed out, in religions we do have to do with particular experiences of particular people, taken up into rather particular and not all that easily available particular traditions of experience and interpretation. In the sciences, especially the natural sciences, we have to do with more generally and more easily and widely available experiences, albeit taken up once again into traditions of enquiry, paradigms, research programs etc. This criterion of degree of availability itself bears a rough relationship to another criterion, the criterion of degree of abstractness. Religious traditions have to do with the whole of life in its concreteness, in Whiteheadian Process terms, to guide concrescence in the midst of concrete life. Mathematics and the sciences, even when they deal with the whole of the created universe, do so only very abstractly. It seems, then, that the religious person sacrifices generality (though not always certainty) in favour of concreteness.
 

Further than this difference in respect of the criteria for availability of the relevant experiences, as well as similarities there are probably significant differences in the manner in which the different species of tradition constitute the enquiries and experiences specific to the tradition in question. However, what these differences are cannot be said a priori. If we want to know how a tradition constitutes its enquiries and affects its typical experiences, we have to go and see. Whether such differences are at all important has to be addressed after such a close look, not before. There is also the question as to whose or which criteria to use, or whether there are any neutral criteria at all. See below, for more.
 

Before we conclude this section on possible differences: there may be one significant feature that distinguishes religious traditions from traditions of enquiry e.g. in science. As noted briefly already, religious traditions tend to have a special relationship with certain 'originating' experiences, which constitutes that tradition as the tradition that it is, e.g. Christian, rather than Buddhist or Moslem. To quote Louis Dupre, "The process would constantly pass through new experiences and interpretations, all of which, however, remain both subjectively and objectively dependent upon the original, interpreted experience." (Dupre, 1998, p. 117.) A religious tradition, to this extent, is more analogous to a 'research program' in science (Lakatos) than to science itself, though only analogous, not the same. At the core of the tradition stands, not a set of fundamental formulae, but a set of originating revelatory experiences including perhaps a primary interpretative structure indistinguishable from the experience (Dupre again). We do our best to be faithful to this, whatever else.
 

This is probably a bit too strong in respect of our distinction. Research programs or paradigms in science consist in more than formulae. Also included are ways of doing science and implicit conceptions of what science is, which can change from one research program to another. There is also the example, the 'scientific experience' of certain key people early on in the tradition, which becomes a paradigm (in one of the many senses of that word) for future science in that tradition. On the other side, revelatory experiences in religion are very soon turned into various core 'dogmas', which typically go beyond the primary interpretation in the originating experiences. This tends to once again relativise our distinction a little bit, but let us not throw it away altogether.
 

Another problem, just to complicate matters, is that certain religious traditions e.g. Hinduism, may not have originating experiences in quite the same sense as the so-called 'historical' religions, such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and also Buddhism. Though certain sub-traditions such as Sankara Vedanta may be more in this line.
 

The bottom line on this point, then, seems to be that, in dealing with a specifically religious tradition, we should expect a closer relationship with immediate experience than is typical for a mature tradition in science. We should expect a religious tradition to be rather closer to its experiential base, whether guided by a definitive originating experience or not. However, to know what goes on really in a particular tradition, once again we have to look and see. Also, the epistemological point of this has yet to be determined.
 

It may be interesting to note at this point that the Whiteheadian Process tradition to which Van der Veken and Cloots belong gives us the where-with-all to make sense of the inevitably particular character of religious traditions. The particularity is an inevitable consequence of concreteness, both in origin and in purpose. In process terms, a good and holy person is at minimum a person whose subjective aims are consistently in line with the initial aims or Lure of the Divine Mystery. For Whitehead, such initial aims are always particularized to the situation in question. Beyond this, concrete life is always environmentally dependent, always particular, with this peculiar past to take account of and no other. Life, being concrete, is particular, while science and philosophy aim for generality. Theology, meanwhile, does its best to bridge the gap, frequently using the resources of philosophy for this purpose.
 

Since I began writing this paper, I have come to realize that there is a need for some more precise distinctions here.  In this respect I refer particularly to an essay by the Swedish philosopher Eberhard Herrmann (Herrmann, 1995). Herrmann makes a clear distinction between Scientific Theory and what he calls 'Views of Life'. Scientific Theory is focussed on our knowledge of reality, Views of Life on our engagement with it. Views of life may be inspired by scientific theory, but are value-added, deal with the contingencies of life such as happiness and misery, suffering and death, give some idea of what human life might be like at its best and so serve to ground distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong. Herrmann argues for a non-representational realism in regard to both, though it is a different species of non-representational realism, not exactly the same.
 

In respect of science, he distinguishes three levels, namely supposedly real Systems, Models and Scientific Theory. Scientific Theories are abstract structures or patterns, whether mathematised/axiomatised or not, which, under suitable interpretation, may give rise to models capable of generating testable hypotheses in respect of particular phenomena or supposed real systems 'out there'. The theories themselves are patterns or abstract structures rather than statements, and so are neither true nor false, and they become representational in any sense only when they are used to produce models of particular segments of reality. However, they are crucially involved in our discussions of reality and so a 'non-representational realist' attitude is appropriate in their regard. This, Herrmann contends, rather than an instrumentalist attitude.
 

For Herrmann, Views of Life are also best understood in a non-statement perspective, and unlike theories can not in general be used to generate testable hypotheses. However, the adequacy of the expressions in our Views of Life can still be tested. According to Herrmann, such testing can be made on grounds of 1) internal consistency, 2) coherence with what we otherwise have reason to believe, and 3) whether we can live it, whether one can recognize oneself in it, in other language (not Herrmann's), whether it can be integrated into ones personal and communal narrative identity. (See below, for some similar tests, derived more from Whitehead.) In so far as it is susceptible of such testing in respect of adequacy, and in so far as Views of Life function crucially in our more or less felicitous engagement with reality, a 'non-representational realist' attitude is appropriate here as well.
 

Right towards the end of his essay, Herrmann incorporates Views of Life into traditions:

A Third Ingredient: the hermeneutics of reasonable belief.

This is rather earlier than the advances in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. It can be dated at least as far back as Hume, the essay on miracles in the First Enquiry. The locus classicus is the example Hume gives of the Indian Prince, who quite reasonably refused to believe travelers' tales about water freezing, this being against all his own experience and the ideas about the nature of water which he had based on these experiences. (See EHU 113-114, and footnote on p. 114. For more details see Moses 1994.)
 

For Hume, this is not sufficient to save miracles. Given that a miracle is an event against the laws of nature, no amount of evidence based on testimony will be enough to overcome the skepticism against it having occurred. What we could call the hermeneutics of belief will always, he thinks, be against belief in miracles. I've argued elsewhere that Hume is mistaken (Moses, 1994). But the point for us is that reasonableness in belief is not universalizable. It is partly a contingent matter, a function of ones place and time and ones history. Reasonable does not in fact mean valid for all minds. What is reasonable for one person may well be unreasonable for someone else.
 

This, in principle, is no big deal. The boy who cried wolf is another classic example. Indeed, something like the principle is illustrated everyday in courtrooms throughout the world. The person with the uncorroborated alibi knows exactly where they were at the time of the crime. It is quite reasonable for them to firmly believe in their innocence. Yet the more generally available evidence may be such that a judge and jury would convict beyond reasonable doubt. In such cases we have diametrically opposed reasonable beliefs.
 

Such examples may be good enough to get the notion of a 'hermeneutics' and consequent pluralism of reasonable believing into play. A better analogy for our cause might be found in the later work of John Rawls, Rawls himself depending on Joshua Cohen. (See Political Pluralism, Rawls 1993, pp. 35-41, reference to Cohen footnote 37, p. 36, plus Lecture IV "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus", pp. 133-172.) In his later work, Rawls seeks to ground his theory of justice in the prospect of an "overlapping consensus" between diverse reasonable comprehensive doctrines in a democratic society marked by the fact of reasonable pluralism. According to Rawls,

Of course, not all comprehensive doctrines and views count as reasonable. (Cf. Rawls 1993, p. 39) In particular, "When there is a plurality of reasonable doctrines, it is unreasonable or worse to want to use the sanctions of state power to correct, or to punish, those who disagree with us." (Rawls 138) In fact, it sometimes seems that there is an element of circularity in Rawls argument: a comprehensive view which,in a situation of reasonable pluralism did not endorse Rawls' political conception of justice would count as unreasonable. We will look for another way of making the distinction. But the point for us, is that what we have termed differing Views of Life would presumably count as candidates for Rawls' diverse and conflicting, but what's more reasonable, comprehensive doctrines.
 

This excursus into political theory gives us at least the beginnings of a case for extending the notion of an hermeneutics of reasonable belief to such broad historical determinants of belief as religious and other traditions of experience and interpretation. What is reasonable for a person with one conceptual apparatus itself determined by a certain flow of particularized experience, need not be reasonable for a person who lacks this conceptual requirement. In application to our problem: what is reasonable for a person taken up into one tradition of experience and interpretation may or may not be reasonable for a person taken up in another, and vice versa. Even where 'reasonable' is taken univocally, what turns out in practice to be reasonable can still be tradition dependent.
 

Note, however, that this is just an in principle claim at this point. The contention is that traditions of experience and interpretation are doxastic practices capable in principle of yielding reasonable belief (thus also Alston). This is not to say that they all do so. Nor is it to say that all beliefs had by people inside a particular tradition are reasonable. Particular traditions of experience and interpretation will have their internal rationality criteria, which will distinguish between belief and belief. Even more than that, there may well be broad relatively neutral criteria sufficient to eliminate at least some whole traditions. This second question will be the burden of the last part of this paper.
 
 

Some Consequences So Far

This has a double effect.
 

On the one hand, for people who are willing to accept the story, 'Science', 'Philosophy' and the broad realm of 'Reason' and 'Rationality' get to be somewhat demystified. Even Sciences are human endeavours, the work of embodied human beings in the natural world with others taken up into particular histories and communal traditions. In spite of its glory, Science is not the work of disembodied spirits or angel-like beings. The same goes for Philosophies.
 

On the other hand, from the point of view of Reason, it tends also to naturalize Religions and the realm of religion and faith, while still managing to preserve their specificity. 'Faith' in its cognitive aspect comes out almost as a species of 'particularized Reason'. Religious belief comes to seem only natural, in the specific neo-Humean but rather harmless sense of, only to be expected in the circumstances. The phenomena are such as to lead people aware of them to have certain kinds of expectation, without going into the question of the 'secret springs and principles'. There is a sufficient conjunction between the right interpretative structures and the having of certain experiences and belief consequent of such experiences, for the mind of a third party to be determined, in Humean fashion, to expect one when given the other.
 

At the same time, given the thesis of the hermeneutics of reasonable belief, this does nothing in principle to show the beliefs as unreasonable. People who have the concepts of table and watch, in certain circumstances will experience tables and watches, and third parties will expect them to. Religious belief also might well be reasonable for the people who have it, in spite of its particularity, while not reasonable for the people outside, and vice versa for other beliefs. Indeed, religious people can still speak of grace, as a particular interpretation of religious luck, which interpretation of the 'secret springs and principles' actually at work is motivated by particular experiences of particular people.
 

Indeed, that a belief in either sphere is natural does not preclude it being reasonable. On the contrary, while not everything recognized as natural will be thought reasonable, recognizing a belief as only natural is frequently a step along the way to recognizing it as reasonable. The travelers with the Indian Prince if they are really honest might well recognize that the Prince was within his rights to disbelieve them. So also the prisoner with the jury if he or she was cool enough. So even more so third parties. Consider the steady progression: It is only natural that she/he/they should go that way. In the circumstances I would go that way also. One would indeed be a fool not to. In the circumstances it is a perfectly reasonable way for this person or group of people to so proceed. There seems to be possible, then, a subjective universalizability of belief within a specific situation criterion at work, with, presumably, a tradition-specific subjective universalizability criterion as a sub-set of this.
 

Such considerations I suspect are much to the betterment of religion. Religion is not an entirely other world, in spite of its distinctness. Epistemologically both it and what is typically called Reason and Science and Rationality are involved in a complicated experience-interpretation dynamic. In both cases, what is meant by 'interpretation' is rather more than just bits of theory. In spite of their mostly relative differences, they would indeed appear to constitute a constellation of equally valid 'doxastic practices' (William Alston: Alston 1992), at least in principle, capable of realizing reasonable belief in the people inside them.
 
 

Applications

The application to belief in God has already been well made by Jan Van der Veken and his colleague Andre Cloots. Whitehead's God is not Whiteheadian enough. The God of the Christians, or the Jews or the Moslems, is not available to people on philosophical grounds alone, but requires to be grounded in particular experiences of particular people. The God of the philosophers may well be the same as the God who properly deserves the Name, the God of the Religions, but only abstractly considered, the same reference but a long way from the same sense, as with your good friend to you and to a perfect stranger.
 

David Griffin already does a reasonable job, on similar lines, in respect of the after-life. Philosophy, in particular Process philosophy, leaves the question open, and can at best, show it to be possible. The rest depends on particular experiences, albeit always received in a certain interpretative context. What one might add to this is a rather stronger emphasis on the idea that the experiences themselves might be shaped by the interpretative structures that people take to them but that, on the other hand, this is not epistemologically crucial. Further than this, the structures explained above might go a long way to explicate the reception of Griffin's work on the after life and indeed the reception of his more recent work on parapsychology (Griffin 1997 Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality).
 

On the basis of particular experiences of his own, had obviously within a particular context, the present author might like to affirm and strengthen Griffin's widening of the field of available experiences in this latter regard. It is not just near death experiences and telepathy and such that count. Even more important are experiences of other people around death, typically the death of people close to them, fathers or mothers or spouses or brothers or sisters or other close family and friends, as well as the death of Christ and other religious leaders. In the right interpretative context, these can give a person an inkling of what resurrection is, of what reconciliation as a consequence of a death might be, and such-like. The point here is that such interpretations are much more convincing to people who have had the experiences or to people who have had similar experiences, than to people who can hardly imagine what they are talking about, and rightly so.
 

A further application might be in respect of claims to authority. Much greater recognition might need to be given, by the claiments themselves, to the historical and human component of such claims. They are sometimes historically and contingently determined and 'theory-laden' to an extraordinary degree. While some kinds of claims might still be made, any facile authority positivism is thoroughly misplaced. Besides, there isn't any magic, it's all 'natural', the mystery has gone, though hopefully not the Mystery. But this is a whole other issue.
 

Part II: On Comparing Traditions of Experience and Interpretation:

The Way Ahead

This analytic procedure is well capable of being done in each case from within the tradition in question. Indeed, it is probably done best by people operating inside the tradition. We are dealing with 'craft-bound' discourses (James Ross) after all, and in respect of such full understanding comes more easily to people inside the craft. This has advantages but will also raise problems, some of which we will look at afterwards.
 

In each case we would need to ask such questions as:

• What are the various 'facets' to be kept in equilibrium? For example, theory on one side, observation and experiment on a second, various background theories background both to the theory and to the experimental apparatus and to the interpretation of experimental results on a third.

• Who constitutes the community, how is this determined, according to what criteria and typically by what process? Does everyone and every institution count equally in this community, and if not why and how is this determined?

• How do people get excluded from the community, put into the category of heretics and schismatics, so that their contributions no longer count?

• By what processes is equilibrium typically achieved between all these people and institutions and in respect of all these facets? How does one know that reflective equilibrium has been restored?

 

This all might lead to some very interesting results. For example, it could turn out that in respect of processes for inclusion and exclusion, there are contemporary analogues to the Holy Inquisition to be found in university-based secular sciences and philosophy, whereas our ecumenical colleges of theology are rather more forgiving.
 

Whatever about this, when it comes to analysis of what actually goes on, it is now all something close to a 'level playing field'. If we want to know what goes on we look and see, we do not make assumptions of superiority in either direction. And we get all this without destroying the specificity of Faith. Or of Reason, for that matter.
 
 

Judging between traditions

We will come to a better understanding of the various different doxastic practices, of their actual differences and similarities. As noted, this might have some very interesting consequences in respect of overturning prejudices and assumptions as to how different practices work, including the ones we espouse and the ones we look down on. So it will increase our store of data and clear the decks for a more well-based judgement.
 

The question is, what happens after all that is done? To make any preferences for this tradition over that we would have to be employing some criteria. These criteria would have to be either tradition-specific in origin or not.
 

This will get us into all kinds of complicated dialectics and scholarly debates.
 

To cut a long story short, the position of the present author is that:

1) There may well be criteria neutral between the relevant traditions and even transcendental, but they don't decide very much. The more neutral the less useful. (Cf. D'Costa 1993).

2) There probably is rationality of a tradition-constituted variety for moving from one tradition to another (cf. Imre Lakatos in philosophy of science, Alistair MacIntyre in ethics). One can recognize, in terms of the criteria at work in one's own tradition, that another tradition is doing better. But problems will arise further down the road, as one gradually absorbs the rationality criteria of the tradition into which one has been converted.

3) There might still be a species of rationality yet to be explicated at work, which however might be all we need.

For the rest of this paper I will consider briefly the third thesis and then do my best to illustrate the more contentious first. The second, for the time being, will be left at an intuitive level.
 

To expound a bit on the third, then: this may mean that decisions here are not 'reasonable' in the strong Kantian sense of, what all reasonable people, after sufficient examination, might be expected to agree on. It could still be reasonable, in a neo-Humean sense, for the person themselves, with his or her tradition-constituted background and experiences. Furthermore and crucially in the present circumstances, this reasonableness could be appreciated by third parties. To see this, we need to put ourselves once again in the position of the travelers telling their tale to the Indian Prince. The travelers know that this is the exception to the rule, but may well appreciate the Indian Prince not believing what they say. More generally, while we ourselves can or can't go for a particular belief-standpoint, we could still understand how a reasonable person coming from another background with a different store of historically determined experiences might well decide that way. Not only is it natural, only to be expected, for a person to decide that way. It is also right for the person to go that way, and a way I and other people might go in similar circumstances. The recognition of reasonableness comes in at another level.
 

Note carefully, however, that at no stage do I accept that what the other person believes is true; merely that the other person in their context, like the Indian prince, is not being unreasonable in believing it, or not believing it as the case may be. It truly is a meta-statement, dependent in the realization that there is a hermeneutics of belief.
 

This is to say that on the question of reasonableness of belief, we look like pluralists. However on the question of truth, we might well be inclusivists or even, in principle, exclusivists. By the end of the story, I hope,  we will see reasons for acting more like inclusivists.
 

The first thesis has been expounded rather strongly by D'Costa (1993). Rather than just repeat D'Costa's arguments, however, we might illustrate the first by way of a process-like attempt to treat religious traditions as analogous to systems of metaphysics (cf. F. Ferre). Criteria for the evaluation of complexes of mind-sets constituting religious and non-religious comprehensive traditions might then include the sorts of criteria that Whitehead enunciates early in Process and Reality. This works up to a point.
 

The 'logical' criteria such as logical consistency and coherence, also simplicity and elegance relative to the job to be performed, work all right provided we lay down some conditions and provisos. Logical consistency and coherence would apply, not directly to the traditions themselves but rather to the theologies to which they might give rise. The question then becomes, could this tradition give rise to a theology or theologies, faithful to the tradition, which was or were consistent and coherent. As for simplicity and elegance, that is relative to the job to be performed, which 'job' might be differently constituted by different traditions while sufficiently analogous for us to grant them all the designation, 'religions'.
 

The application of empirical criteria is of course complicated by the interplay of experience and interpretation. It might be possible to lay down a few general principles, for example the following:

(a) The traditions are required to be experience inspired. The conceptual sets in question, which form experiences, ought themselves to have been chiseled out in dialogue with experience. For example, the Christian world view as founded in the experience of the prophets and Christ and Mary of Magdela and the other disciples, or the Buddhist world-view, founded in the enlightenment experiences of the Buddha and following Buddhists.

(b) Secondly, it is an advantage to have confirming experiences in the present, even though some of these are made possible by the belief system itself. It is after all one of the functions of conceptual sets to enable richer experiences than could be had without them.

(c) Thirdly, it is an advantage for a tradition to be an instance of knowledge in process. An open system or mind set, that is, a vision which is dynamic, self-correcting, on the way, is probably to be preferred over a closed system. This side of the eschaton, there has to be room for experience, which is always had inside some tradition or another, to break through the limits imposed by that particular set within which it takes place. This third criterion is a bit controversial: we will come back to it.

(d) Finally, there is the criterion of empirical adequacy, how well the tradition does at making our experience as a whole intelligible. This however is probably the province of theologies to work out rather than the religious tradition itself.
 

The third criterion of openness, creates a bit of a problem, not however insoluble. Religious traditions, as already noted, tend to have a special relationship with certain 'originating' experiences, which constitute that tradition as the tradition which it is, e.g. Christian rather than Buddhist or Moslem. People in the tradition do their best to be faithful to this, no matter what. The situation is largely saved however once we acknowledge the possibility of a comparison with a Lakatosian 'research program' in science, with the originating revelatory experiences including a primary interpretative structure at the core (cf. above). This still allows for quite a lot of experience and practice-inspired development, not only at the margins but even in respect of appreciation of what is and what is not involved in the originating revelatory experiences.
 

No, the real problem with respect to application of the empirical criteria has to do with their vagueness. It is all right to say, inspired by experience, but there are probably as many ways of being 'inspired by experience' as there are traditions so inspired. As soon as we start to privilege one way rather than another, e.g. that found in contemporary physics, we will be accused, and rightly, of 'epistemic chauvinism' (Alston).
 

The consequence of this inevitable vagueness is that we may manage to rule out the more fanciful and fairy-tale like extremes, but still leave a lot of traditions in the middle.
 

In addition to logical and empirical criteria, we might like to have some pragmatic criteria. After all, we are interested not just in knowing but in successful insertion into the real, a mind-set which promotes successful co-ordination in action of person and total environment, or something which can be integrated into our personal and communal 'narrative identity'. We have an interest in a complex that inserts one in a vigorous fashion in the midst of concrete life. Of course, we want a way of living fully which is at the same time congruent with the real. However, for a tradition to promote successful co-ordination of person and total environment is probably a good sign even from a hard cognitive point of view.
 

Once again, this works, provided we are pretty vague about it. Various different traditions will have different visions of the fullness of life and will strive to convince people of the rightness of their conception. Once again, we will rule out some of the more outrageous extremes but still leave plenty of room in the middle.
 

In conclusion, while the criteria sound fine in the abstract, their concrete application appears to be in many respects tradition and culture dependent.
 

So also is the bias likely to be given to each of the sets of criteria. Some cultures are more obsessed than others with certainty and will prefer a simple but certain system to a more complicated and arguably more empirically adequate one. Even within a culture, this can vary a lot from person to person. We all believe in Ockham's Razor, but some use it with much more glee than others. Some people don't mind being thought 'muddle-headed' if that is the price of adequacy, whereas others would rather risk being thought simple-minded. (This is an allusion to certain comments of A.N. Whitehead about himself and Bertrand Russell.)
 

Indeed, a final decision will sometimes depend on very personal factors. What is more important to me: applicability and empirical adequacy, or logical coherence and simplicity? How strongly am I into certainty and not being fooled, or is as likely to be true as anything else all that can be expected? Does it fit my own experience and lifestyle? Or promise a better, more 'meaningful' lifestyle, more in line with my or my community's moral intuitions as well as reality? Does it charm me? Can I afford it? A lot depends on what Hume refers to in a footnote to Part XII of his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion: habit, caprice, inclination, the influence of education, etc.
 

The conclusion seems to be that a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines religious, not religious,  philosophical may survive the application of our analytic apparatus and our criteria. Some, or even most, of Rawls' reasonable comprehensive doctrines could end up reasonable even on the meta level.
 
 

Towards a Dialogal Inclusivism, nesting within our Pluralism of Reasonable Believing?

So what is to happen to us, then, in this epistemological meta-world we have now reached, where on a non-chauvinistic application of agreed 'transcendental' or 'neutral' criteria more than one tradition of experience and interpretation may well turn out to be 'reasonable' and capable of supporting 'reasonable believing'? Must we now become de jure epistemic sceptics about the lot, including our own, while acknowledging, perhaps, that de facto we may well continue in our various believings because of certain psychological determinisms? Or do we move, perhaps, beyond our pluralism of reasonable believing to a pluralism in respect of probable access to the truth, entering into any further dialogue on this latter basis?
 

Rather than either of these, I would like to argue, at least in terms of an hypothesis worth exploring, for a position somewhere between a 'committed' pluralism and a fully-fledged inclusivism, by way of a kind of analogue of Swinburne's 'principle of credulity', along the following lines:
 

Hypothesis: a person retains a defeasable epistemic right to that which he or she is determined to believe, where that determination apparently results from their membership within what is apparently a 'reasonable' tradition of experience and interpretation, even in cases where there appear to be other 'reasonable' traditions of experience and interpretation covering similar territory.
 

The notion of apparently reasonable tradition of experience and interpretation is sufficiently explained above, i.e. that which passes the test of non-chauvinistic application of agreed criteria. Given that a non-chauvinistic application of agreed criteria will either be abstract or concretized in terms of the tradition being explored, it is an entirely contingent, historical matter as to whether this will leave more than one.
 

A right is being claimed, not an obligation: one has a right to continue to believe, but may not be obliged to do so. This is similar, I think, to the legal distinction between prima facie evidence and conclusive evidence.
 

This right is a defeasible right, rather than an absolute right for all time, and defeasible in at least two ways.
 

Firstly it can be defeated internally: a determination which appeared to be the result of one's membership within a particular tradition of experience and interpretation might not in fact be so. It could turn out not to be implicated in that tradition after all. It could be rather the result of individual determinisms related to psychological type or the unconscious, or group bias or something like that on group or community level. Or it could be the result of certain historical developments found out in retrospect not to be essential to the tradition, e.g. Limbo, or exclusivist versions of Extra Ecclesia Nulla Salus, in Catholic Christianity. It turns out to be not a 'core' belief after all, but something on the more easily falsifiable (and in this case falsified) periphery.
 

Secondly, the right could be defeated by the defeat of the tradition itself. It could be found after further examination that even on abstract agreed criteria the tradition is only apparently reasonable. Or it could be found that even according to the concretized intra-tradition criteria, another tradition of experience and interpretation is definitely and clearly doing better and likely to be doing better for the foreseeable future.  Interestingly, the belief in question could well be the 'straw which breaks the camel's back' in this connection, making the vital difference either on abstract agreed criteria or on concretized intra-tradition criteria.
 

Finally, the reasons for taking this as an epistemic right rather than some other kind of right would be rather similar to those given by Swinburne for his principle of credulity, namely that if not admitted a large part of our human knowing practice might come to ruin, not just our religious cognitive practices but our scientific, ethical and common life ones as well.
 

To draw out this crucial final point a little bit: in the natural and social sciences, and in ethics and aesthetics, also, belief can be contextually determined in a fashion which does not call into question either the sincerity or honesty or intelligence of the other party.  When this gives rise to conflicting beliefs - an entirely contingent matter - to deny to the parties even the right to continue to believe and to push their different positions would deny everyone in the circumstances a genuine right to their belief.  Indeed, I suspect it would make any genuine good faith debate impossible.   Our knowing practices might well continue in fact of course, but only via illegitimate means.
 

Controversial questions in ethics probably provide the best examples of all. Philip Adams does not cease to believe in euthanasia, nor does his belief cease to be reasonable, merely because he acknowledges the reasonableness of the belief of some of his opponents. Similarly with the question of abortion (text cited below). In neither case does acknowledgement of the reasonableness of the believing of the other side mean that I have to suddenly give up my belief as unreasonable. If in ethics, why not in religion?
 

So far, this would justify even a tolerant dialogal exclusivism � I believe �p�, you believe �q� which implies �not-p�. I�m right, you�re wrong, but I do not for all that deny you the title of �reasonable�. What pushes one more in the direction of a tolerant dialogal inclusivism is the addition of a bit of meaning-holism and moderate incommensurability between traditions, plus perhaps a move from Truth as Correspondence to Truth as Disclosure or something like that, particularly in matters of religion (Keith Ward, Louis Dupre, Ian T. Ramsey, eventually Heidegger). I have an epistemic right to my belief and may act on that right, so I�m not exactly pluralist. On the other hand, I could conceive that your tradition could make a positive contribution to a future tradition that inherits something from both and is more adequate than either, while being closer to mine. So I�m not exactly an exclusivist either. Meanwhile, this is a condition that could conceivably obtain in respect of conflicting paradigms or research programs in science. However, the matter is very tricky and it is difficult to come up with a truly adequate name to what we may end up being.
 
 

A Reply to Some Objections:

We can't quite go home yet, though. I need to make some attempt to reply to some objections which Dr Mark Wynn of the Australian Catholic University, Brisbane McAuley Campus, was kind enough to make to a previous version of this paper.
 

Firstly, there would seem to be a crucial difference between the examples I used to get up the notion of a hermeneutics of reasonable believing and the case of inter-religious dialogue. In all three examples, Hume's Indian Prince, the boy who cried wolf and the unsubstantiated alibi, it's the testimony we discount, not the validity of their experience. We do not distrust their experience or the way they interpret it, we distrust their testimony to have had such experience. However, in the case of inter-religious dialogue, we take the testimony at face value. So they both have experience and the experience they say they have had.
 

Secongly, even if this problem could be got over, what legitimates us in still giving preferential treatment to the perspective of our own tradition?  Why not move into a Hick-like fully-fledged pluralism?
 

But in the case of views of life or traditions of experience and interpretation, both the experience in respect of its formation and how it is afterwards interpreted, including the fact that it is taken as evidence and what it is taken as evidence for, implicates the tradition in which the experience stands. Belief is contextually determined in a fashion which does not call into question the sincerity or honesty of the other party: precisely. What is needed, then, and the only way forward, is a way of evaluating the interpretative and formative tradition, together with its confirming instances. The experiences cannot be evaluated, for good or ill, in isolation.
 

This is where the fun starts. A non-chauvinistic application of agreed criteria to these complexes is likely to eliminate the Jonestown extremes but still leave plenty in the middle. The criteria will either be too abstract to eliminate anything other than the extremes or will be concretized in terms of the tradition itself and therefore circular or will be in terms of another tradition and therefore chauvinistic. We are forced to acknowledge that not only are they, e.g. Buddhists, Moslems, Protestants, Catholics, Humanists, sincere and honest in their reporting but also reasonable in their believing, and that this is yet another instance to which the hermeneutics of reasonable believing may reasonably be applied.
 

So far so good: we are back to our pluralism of reasonable believing.  But why not then be pluralists also in respect of probable access to the truth, striving to treat all the traditions even-handedly.  Because the above in and of itself is not enough to put us above the fray. Our wide reflective equilibrium analyic apparatus didn't decide the issue. Our supposedly neutral criteria might constitute a meta-perspective but were too vague to be of much use. Indeed, so far as I can tell at this point, the project of constructing a genuinely useful meta-perspective which would treat the traditions even-handedly would seem to be doomed, as it seems to require something paradoxical. Namely, it would seem to require general, cross-cultural and cross-tradition criteria which are yet as concrete as the particular criteria deployed in the religions themselves.
 

As with the hermeneutics of meaning according to the followers of Gadamer, the best we can hope for might be a broadening and probably a deepening of our own starting horizon. Which is to say, something like our dialogal inclusivism. But I do not jump so to speak into a kind of absolute horizon of being as such.
 

Of course, nothing said here prohibits development and growth over time through contact between religious and other traditions. On the contrary. But this will happen in an organic, communal, long-term fashion. At no stage will it require one to leap into what would seem to be an impossible meta-perspective.
 

Nor, finally, do we rule out the development of a Hans Kung like 'overlapping consensus' in respect of a Global Ethic for the sake of solving our ecological and social justice world problems - each 'from its own point of view'.
 

Conclusion:

So where does this leave us? From the viewpoint from which we are working in this paper, i.e. the viewpoint of relatively more general Reason, Faith in its cognitive aspect seems to be a version of More-Particularized Reason. But Less Particularized Reason finds itself incompetent to decide in any final fashion in the realms of more-particularized reason. Philosophy, which lives in Less-Particularized Reason territory, can bring greater clarity, and it may be, greater charity, but it can't make religious choices for us. We are still in the position of the person building the tower or the ruler going to war in the Christian gospels, weighing up alternatives. Mind-sets and interpretative structures determine experiences and vice versa. Constraints on theory making and theory choice which determine such mind sets can be very complicated and ill understood. Even when better understood, we are still not home and hosed. And, either there is no way of getting out of such mind sets or else, just in case there is 'pure experience', the good interpretation of such phenomena depends crucially on the mind sets into which it is taken. Very general criteria may perhaps be specified for helping us make our religious decisions, but their meaning, bias and exact application will itself be tradition dependent.
 

The consequence of this is that, in spite of our knowledge of traditions, including our own, as determinants of belief, we cannot but act like inclusivists. Our own position will naturally and inevitably retain a kind of privilege. Nor is this a bad thing. As noted in the introduction, it is precisely the richness of our own particular experiences that we have to contribute to any cross-traditions discussion. However, the attitude remains largely functional and may give us no more (but also I propose no less) than a defeasible epistemic right to stay with what we cannot not do anyway. It is a carry over from our own reasonable believing. Our own reasonable believing remains in possession.  But at no point do we dispute the in principle reasonably believed character of the beliefs of our dialogue partners, any more than they dispute ours. The dialogal inclusivism continues to be framed inside our pluralism of reasonable believing.
 

So there is an element of 'luck', we are back with Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist sutra. And yet, for all that, decisions once made can be recognized as reasonable, by ourselves after the event and even it may be by third parties who cannot go our way.
 

Let us end with a very similar quotation from a contemporary feminist philosopher Anne Seller (Seller, 1988, p.183), herself quoting Kristin Luker:
 

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