have ample opportunities to develop face-to-face familiarity with practitioners of
religions other than own. Often enough, we discover that their religious commitments
help to make them people we feel compelled to admire. The dangers of religious diversity
also force themselves on our attention. Around-the-clock news broadcasts confront us
with graphic illustrations of what can happen when religions clash in such places as
Belfast, Beirut, and Bosnia.
Philosophy can come to grips with religious diversity in numerous ways. In this essay, I
discuss four of them. Somewhat arbitrarily, I divide the topics I consider into two
categories: familiar problems and novel opportunities. I count as familiar problems the
epistemological challenge to the rationality of religious belief and practice posed by
religious diversity and the political problem of religious intolerance. I classify as novel
opportunities two questions that are often addressed by the emerging academic area of
specialization that may be described as comparative philosophy of religion. One is the
question of whether religion can be defined; the other is the question of how to carry out
constructive comparisons of religions. In my treatment of each of these four issues, I
focus mainly on discussions in the recent scholarly literature, though I also allude briefly
to their roots in the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Our epistemological challenge is difficult enough even if we restrict our attention to the
so-called world religions. It only becomes worse if we add in the many African religions,
Native American religions, and religions from other parts of the world. Religions differ
along the doctrinal dimension, and often their doctrines conflict. For example, traditional
Christians assert that the Supreme Being is a trinity of persons, while traditional Muslims
deny that this is the case. Religions also differ along the practical dimension, and often
the goals they set and the paths to those goals are also opposed. For instance, traditional
Christians hold that the ultimate goal of religious striving is salvation, which consists of
union of the individual self with God forever in the afterlife, while traditional Buddhists
hold that the ultimate goal is liberation, which consists of reaching a state of nirvana that
in some sense involves the ceasing to be of the individual self and thus freedom from
repeated reincarnations. Morever, each of the world religions can offer evidence for its
doctrinal and practical aspects from a variety of sources. They include philosophical
arguments for doctrines and mystical experiences of practitioners. Each of the world
religions also derives a kind of self-support from the way many people who follow its
path come to enjoy the spiritual fruits it promises. But it seems that none of them is
decisively superior to all the others in terms of evidential support. So it appears that each
undermines the evidential support of all the others because it remains an uneliminated
competitor for them. And the problem is that this undermining may be so severe that the
epistemic status of all of them is lowered to a point at which it is not rational for anyone
who is fully aware of the situation to belong to any of them.
Both history and current events bear witness to our political problem. Rivers
end p.393
of blood have been shed in the name of religion. Crusades and inquisitions are ugly
blemishes on European history. The Reformation gave rise to devastating Wars of
Religion. Even more recently, religiously inspired violence is to found in such places as
Northern Ireland, the Balkans, northern Africa, the Middle East, and in Asia. Of course,