Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought

P. Schmidt-Leukel, J. Gentz, P. Schmidt-Leukel, J. Gentz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137318503
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This collection of essays by major scholars analyze the religious diversity in Chinese religion, bringing together topics from traditional and contemporary contexts and Chinese religions' encounters with Western religion.

Part I

THE BROADER CONTEXT

1

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY: WHAT IS THE ISSUE?

SOME GENERAL REFLECTIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Perry Schmidt-Leukel

“Excuse me, but what’s the question? Isn’t religious diversity normal?” This is the title Rita Gross, an American scholar of religion, feminist, and practicing Buddhist, gave to one of her essays on religious pluralism.¹ One possible answer to her rhetorical question might be that not everything “normal” is unproblematic. Disease, for example, is certainly normal but is by no means unproblematic. We do not regard diseases as desirable; we try to avoid them, and once we get one, we take measures to get rid of it. Of course, what Gross has in mind is that a major part of the problem of religious diversity is the inability of the religions—or at least of some religions—to regard religious diversity as unproblematic. In this she is certainly right.² However, those religions may have a point. Why should they see religious diversity as unproblematic? As “normal,” sure. But hence unproblematic? This is far from clear. Critics of religion also consider religious diversity normal but not unproblematic. Therefore, we need to be specific about why and in what sense both religious people and their critics tend to regard religious diversity as problematic and to what extent their views have an impact on how to assess religious diversity.

These kinds of questions are usually discussed in the philosophy and theology of religions. Religious diversity can be addressed from a variety of perspectives: psychology, sociology, anthropology, politics, history, and so on. In this chapter, I raise some of the fundamental issues from the perspective of the philosophy/theology of religions. I hope that these general considerations shed some light on the more specific question of how religious diversity has been and is understood and dealt with in China.

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND THE RATIONALITY OR IRRATIONALITY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

One way of approaching the issue of religious diversity is by asking whether religion and, in particular, religious belief is, by and large, something rational or irrational. If religion is understood as irrational (in the sense of being antirational instead of merely nonrational), and if rationality is perceived as a virtue, religion will be seen as a kind of evil. As a consequence, religious diversity will be seen as a diversity of evils, and usually diversity of an evil makes the evil even worse. (A diversity of diseases, for example, makes disease even worse; a diversity of torturing methods does not turn torture into an even greater cultural achievement.)³

This way of looking at religious diversity depends on the preconceived premise that religion or religious belief is irrational—a premise that was, is, and can be contested. Defenders of this premise, however, may not only point to religious diversity as a diversity of evils but also may draw on it as a fact that allegedly supports the premise of religion’s irrational nature. In fact, this has been a default position in the Enlightenment’s critique of religion. The issue of whether religious diversity is indicative of the irrational character of religion in general is by no means of concern merely to critics of religion. Usually religious people also desire to be rational—that is, exceptions aside, they do not wish to entertain beliefs that, according to all reasonable human standards, are most likely to be false. Not all religious people rejoice in rejecting rationality. A considerable part—perhaps even the majority—may well presume to be rational and religious at the same time. Hence the cognitive challenge of the religious diversity issue is of concern to them as well.

What in contemporary English is called “religion” or “religions” refers to a cluster of rather diverse components. When raising the question of the rationality of religion, we focus on the cognitive aspect of religion—that is, on religious beliefs—so that the more accurate question is whether it is rational or not to entertain and act upon religious beliefs. But still, what do we mean by “religious beliefs”? The term “religion” is notoriously difficult to define, and it is not my intention to challenge the widespread consensus that it is better to abstain from any new attempt at defining it. Nevertheless, “religious belief” can be defined without defining the far more complex phenomenon of religion. Here I suggest following the American philosopher William A. Christian Sr. (1905–1997) that religious beliefs are beliefs about “something more important than anything else in the universe,” an idea that in itself implies the key belief that “something more important than anything else” really exists.⁴

Christian’s suggestion has a couple of advantages: The first is that his definition is not so wide as to become trivial. We all hold many beliefs, but not all of us believe that there is something more important than anything else. The second advantage is that the definition is wide enough to include the beliefs of so-called secular or political “religions”—for example, the belief of communism that the realization of a classless society is more important than anything else in the world. Whether the width of Christian’s definition is really an advantage or a disadvantage may be disputed. Some may be concerned that it blurs the boundaries between religion and secular ideology. However, I feel—and count this as advantage number three—that the definition allows for drawing a rather precise boundary between traditional religions and secular ideologies: While secular ideologies understand that which is “more important than anything else in the universe” as an inner-worldly reality (e.g., a particular people or race) or ideal (e.g., a classless society), those traditions that are usually regarded as religions tend to understand what is “more important than anything else” as a transcendent reality. By “transcendent reality,” I mean—following the British philosopher John Hick (1922–2012)—a “reality which transcends everything other than itself but is not transcended by anything other than itself.”⁵ It is thus an unlimited or infinite reality in the sense that it is not subject to the finite limitations of this world. This is again a rather wide definition because it does not specify transcendent reality as a supernatural being or deity. Yet this is deliberately so: Such supernatural beings (e.g., ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, deities such as the devas in Buddhism, etc.) are not “God” in the sense of a “transcendent reality” but are at best representations or “masks of God,” to borrow a term from Robert Neville, one of the “Boston Confucians.”⁶ Yet note that this way of defining transcendent reality does not exclude its also being immanent. It can be (and is usually understood to be) immanent in finite reality without being subject to its limitations. Some notions of ultimate reality in Chinese Buddhism or Daoism would certainly fit into this category.

So, is religious belief rational? More precisely, is it rational to believe that a reality exists that is more important than anything else in the universe and is not subject to the limitations of the universe? I think we need to admit that all attempts to prove the existence of transcendent reality by means of conclusive arguments have failed. None of the classic Western arguments for the existence of God, nor any Eastern equivalents, succeeds in demonstrating the existence of transcendent reality beyond rational doubt. Nevertheless, these arguments do show that the existence of transcendent reality is at least possible or feasible. This is so because it has also been impossible to demonstrate beyond rational doubt the nonexistence of transcendent reality. Seen from an epistemological point of view, it is some progress that the so-called new atheists refrained from claiming (as classic atheists did) that there is certainly no God but produced the more moderate claim that there is probably no God, as they wrote during their advertising campaign on double-decker buses in London. Whether, however, there is really a higher probability for the atheist creed or not is an open question. My point here is that the existence of transcendent reality can be neither proved nor disproved.

If I am correct, why then should belief in the existence of transcendent reality be regarded as irrational? Should we not judge that, in this situation, both belief and disbelief alike have to be taken as two opposite but equally rational options? Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and other atheists disputed this.⁷ Russell famously argued that on an admission like that, it would be equally rational to believe in a tiny flying teapot circulating at some orbit in space, too small ever to be detected. There is no proof or disproof of its existence; hence it would have to count as a rational belief. But this objection misses one crucial point: The existence of a tiny teapot in space would not explain anything, while the existence of transcendent reality would explain why religious experience is such a widespread phenomenon in the history of humanity. The latter would imply that religious experience is in principle trustworthy. That is, religious experience would have a realist basis: the existence of the transcendent and its presence to human consciousness. The atheist alternative consists of interpreting religious experience as by and large illusory, a mixture of error and deceit. Here we can turn the tables and ask whether it is more rational to believe that humanity in its vast majority is suffering from a fundamental distortion of perception. It is at this point that the issue of religious diversity comes in.

From the European Enlightenment until today, atheist philosophers have argued that religious experience, far from being credible and hence providing any evidence for the existence of transcendent reality, is doing rather the opposite because—and this “because” is crucial—the testimonies of religious experiences are largely at variance. According to David Hume (1711–1776), the situation resembles a trial at court where all the witnesses accuse each other of being liars, so that the rational option seems to be not to believe any one among them.⁸ The late Antony Flew (1923–2010), before he himself became a believer in his final years,⁹ argued that we are not allowed to infer from religious experiences the truth of any religious beliefs for two reasons:

First, that religious experiences are enormously varied, ostensibly authenticating innumerable beliefs many of which are in contradiction with one another or even themselves; and, second, that their character seems to depend on the interests, background, and expectations of those who have them rather than upon anything separate and autonomous.¹⁰

This objection, however, is fairly easy to counter. If we acknowledge the working of some element of culture-depende...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I The Broader Context
• Part II Perspectives from Premodern China
• Part III Aspects of the Modern and Contemporary Debate
• Index of Names