68 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION9 The reason for accepting religious pluralism is that it is the best
explanation of central facts about religious plurality.
The general idea of RP goes like this. One begins by engaging in an act of
abstraction. Particular diagnoses and cures are replaced by a vague
question. Then appeal is made to the notion of phenomenal reality. The
language of “phenomenal versus noumenal” is derived from the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Its relevance to religious pluralism is that
all the things that all religions think exist turn out to exist only
phenomenally, not noumenally. Each religious phenomenal being is
peculiar to one religious tradition. Each religious tradition makes claims
about its own phenomenal being. Response to one phenomenal being in
one religious tradition seems to produce people who are roughly as nice
as response to another phenomenal being in another religious tradition.^10
Since this is so, one religious tradition is about equally effective in
producing niceness as another. We can express this by saying that each is
“equally valid.” If we use “true” here we should mean “effective in
producing nice people.” We remove religious traditions further from
considerations of truth if we claim that while they appear to make claims
about what there is, religious traditions are myths or extended metaphors
whose function is to elicit behavior. The reason for accepting this is that it
better explains religious plurality than anything else.
Some religion-relevant consequences of RP
Here are some religion-relevant consequences of RP. First, each religious
tradition is said to deal with phenomenal realities. According to RP,
Jahweh and the Father and Allah and Brahman and Jivas and the Buddha-
nature are all phenomenal realities. A phenomenal reality is something to
which human cognitive capacities and the Real contribute. It is something
that RP says arises when a human being responds to the Real in religious
experience. It is how the Real appears to someone. Remove all human
beings and you remove all phenomenal reality. One not immersed in the
evasionary language of RP would simply say: phenomenal beings do not
exist. After all, ghosts and leprechauns are describable as responses to
something external to the one who claims to experience them. At best, the
things that religious traditions think exist are like colors on the standard
view in Modern Philosophy: they exist only in the sense that perceivers
of colorless objects are affected by those objects. On this view, colors are
subjective, mind-dependent contents of perceptual experiences that do
not represent qualities in the things that cause them. RP, then, claims that