Epistemology

Abstract

The epistemological path pluralism must tread is a narrow and rocky one. One of its three defining theses states that none of the faiths has a doctrinal system certain enough to serve as the means of interpreting religion as a whole. To assert this thesis is to avow a large measure of scepticism toward extant religious convictions. Yet pluralists are not just religious sceptics. For they wish to assert that most traditions do succeed in referring to a transcendent sacred. For this thesis, and the corresponding one about salvation, to be plausible, there must be a real possibility of cognitive contact between human beings and a transcendent reality. So pluralism’s scepticism about the certainty of particular confessions, and in particular their absolute claims, cannot be based on the epistemology of naturalism, and its agnosticism cannot lead to neutralism. Despite the fact that pluralists affirm that much of what has been believed about the sacred in actual traditions cannot be known to be true, at least when strictly and literally interpreted, they must offer an epistemology which allows human contact with the sacred.