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A critique of Peter Byrne's religious pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2014

ROBERT T. LEHE
ROBERT T. LEHE*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, North Central College, 30 N. Brainard St., Naperville, Illinois, 60540, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

An interesting version of religious pluralism has been proposed by Peter Byrne in his Prolegomena to Religious Pluralism. Byrne's pluralism aims to unite an affirmation of the equal cognitive and salvific success of all major religions with a realist view of religious truth and a severe agnosticism about specific descriptions of religious reality. I argue that Byrne's proposal, while an improvement upon non-realist versions of pluralism, fails to resolve the tensions between its agnosticism about detailed descriptions of the sacred reality and its realist conception of religious truth, which requires the revisability of descriptions of the sacred offered by diverse religions.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 505 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

Byrne, Peter (1995) Prolegomena to Religious Pluralism (London: Macmillan).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Mawson, T. J. (2005) ‘ “Byrne's” religious pluralism’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 58, 37–54.Google Scholar
Rahner, Karl (1975) ‘Faith, hope, and charity’, in McCool, Gerald A. (ed.) A Rahner Reader (New York: Seabury Press), 205–244.Google Scholar
Yandell, Keith (2004) ‘How to sink in cognitive quicksand: nuancing religious pluralism’ and ‘Reply to Byrne’, in Peterson, Michael L. & VanArragon, Raymond J. (eds) Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell), 191–200, 215–217.Google Scholar