The coexistence and conflict of multiple religions in the secular society is a landscape that the world has seen over and over again today. We often define this religious terrain as religious diversity. And from the landscape, we tend to ask for the p...
The coexistence and conflict of multiple religions in the secular society is a landscape that the world has seen over and over again today. We often define this religious terrain as religious diversity. And from the landscape, we tend to ask for the possibility and necessity of inter-religious dialogue, straightforwardly. That because of the coexistence, for my claim of own right, and to criticize political acts justified by other’s religious dogmatics, inter-religious dialogue must be done, is what this request presupposes. Here to define present as religious diversity engages with to justify religious pluralism for political utility.
But does this definition and justification have their proper foundation? Defining today with the term ‘religious diversity’ presupposes diversity of religion or coexistence of multiple religions, as the word itself. At the same time, we generally consider this presupposition as what is supported due to the fact that different religious opinions exist together. But disagreements within actual religions merely at glance are not enough to account for the definition ‘religious diversity.’ We need proper theoretical scheme(s), to define this circumstance as religious diversity or to refuse such defining within multiple religious statements that coexist and seem to disagree with each other and multiple religions full of those statements. Without such schemes, neither inter-religious dialogue nor refutation against the dialogue is possible, from their own right.
Our task must begin from a more specified place: How can religious beliefs be true; How would religion be a reliable one; What do concepts constituting those beliefs mean? …. After these tasks are piled up neatly, conditions for particular religions to be a true religion could be sketched upon them, and given the conditions, we would determine whether there can be many true religions, whether it would be meaningful to talk with other religions, and so on. All of these problems are philosophical problems; for this, problems of the basis for religious diversity become the problems for the philosophy of religion, especially, for the ‘philosophy of religions.’ This thesis aims to play a reflection within the context of the philosophy of religion as a philosophy of religions, and then suggest a fundamental theory for religious diversity.
My argument is as follows. At the very first, in Chapter 2, non-pluralistic accounts for religious diversity, Monism, Concordism, and Pantheonism are to be contested. Next, in Chapter 3, I introduce Hilary Putnam’s “Internal Realism” and see which philosophical perspective of religion does internal realism present, and then show we get one pluralistic model as its implication. Finally, in Chapter 4, I advocate the internalist stance with two arguments that represent internal realism and argue the pluralistic model which I present is a valid and tempting one showing that internalist pluralism avoids criticisms toward religious pluralism(s).