Evidence · Case 05 · Relativism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Religious Diversity (Pluralism)”
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
The encyclopedia lays out the pluralist claim that more than one religion can be equally close to the truth, and canvasses the standard objections, including that pluralism itself takes a definite and contestable position rather than a neutral one. That is, the pluralist is also making an exclusive claim about how religions relate.
Sources
Objections & responses
- The real objection to exclusivism isn’t logical but moral and epistemic: it’s arrogant to think your own tradition, held mostly by accident of birth, is the true one, and religious diversity is evidence against any single tradition being right.
Correct, and this is the objection to answer. The accident-of-birth point applies to the pluralist too, since pluralism is largely held by Western academics, which is also an accident of birth, so it cannot decide anything; and where one first hears a claim does not determine whether it is true. The argument from diversity is more serious and is Plantinga’s subject in his essay defending religious exclusivism, where he argues that awareness of disagreement may reduce confidence but does not make exclusive belief irrational, since the same is true of every contested belief in ethics and philosophy. The Stanford entry cited here contains both the objection and the replies.