Many people today still believe that there is only one religion that has “the truth,” to the exclusion of every other religion.  Among these people are not only average conservative Christians (and Muslims for that matter) but also prominent theologians and philosophers. Others, such as Schleiermacher and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, strongly believe this view of religion is misleading and in fact represents a deep misunderstanding of what religion is all about. I have also posted an extended quotation from a speech by the American Indian Chief Red Jacket (1805) that you will find instructive in connection with the question:  After taking this course and reflecting about the five religions we have studied, does the concept of one religion having the absolute truth still make sense?  In what sense, for example, would you say a particular religion is “true” and every other is “false” (or at least, that only one can be true)?  Does the study of religion itself in a comparative approach as we did it here force us to rethink what we mean by “religion” and by the concept of “truth” as it applies to religion?

TO HELP YOU THINK ABOUT THE QUESTION: Think about the ways we considered the concept of truth:  e.g. (1) as propositional (statements that are true or false in the sense that they correspond to or are “factually” based on reality).  In this view, a religious tradition can be regimented or systematized in a set of propositions or statements of which it can be asked “are they true?”  In this view it is assumed that every religious tradition is reducible to a set of propositions that can in principle be compared to reality (perhaps only “at the end of history” or “eschatologically”), and that only one such set of propositions can correspond to reality since reality is one.  By dint of logic, it can be further assumed that one such set of propositions (or equivalently, one religion) can be true or false; or at least, since the world religions contain propositions that are incompatible with the propositions of every other religious tradition, either one religious tradition is true or all of them are false.  That is, no more than one religious tradition can be true, and this is in fact what religious exclusivism affirms (against relativism).  The strength of this view is obviously its appeal to logic and to the intuitive view that any statement, whether religious or not, is true by virtue of some fact or state of affairs in reality to which it corresponds or which it “depicts” (picture).  If religion is not about factual statements then it is not worth bothering with since it is not about truth (by definition), that would make it equivalent to fiction or make-belief.  It might have emotive or artistic merit (maybe even psychological and sociological significance), but it cannot be taken seriously since it has nothing to do with reality.

(2) Or truth in religion is non-propositional, that is, truth is a property of religion that is diffused through the entire fabric of a religious tradition, and not reducible to statements that can be systematized [since any attempt to systematize a religious tradition would have to overlook its internal complexity and its multi-layered nature that only by a process of reduction and abstraction can interpreted as equivalent to a set of propositions which are supposed to be the essence of that religion, and that are said to stand in one-to-one correspondence to a state of affairs (or reality).  That religions (whether Scriptures or dogmatic summaries of beliefs) abound with statements that appear grammatically and intuitively to be depictions of a corresponding reality cannot be denied, but these (a) actually make up a fraction of what makes up a religious tradition, that includes over and above its—often contrary and diverse, and hence not easily reconcilable or systematizable without pruning, harmonizing, and elimination—doctrinal or philosophical propositions, institutional structures, traditions, practices, worships, prayers, chants, sub-traditions (with their own set of unique and idiosyncratic formulations, appropriations, and departures from the dominant traditions), experiential or affective dimension, symbols, art, material artifacts, rituals, communal events (ceremonies, festivals, meals, gatherings), narratives, memories, ethical, moral, legal traditions, iconographic or artistic expressions, music, and the like.  The aforementioned philosophical and theological codifications of the traditions in propositions in fact usually come much later and introduce further language and elaboration that may not have existed explicitly or implicitly in earlier layers of the evolving fabric of the tradition, and which may be quite incidental and secondary to the other performative, experiential, and aesthetic dimensions of a religion.  (For example, before there were theological or philosophical statements of belief in all five religions we studied, this view of religion points out, these religions had existed for centuries; and when an attempt to state in creedal or doctrinal form the belief system of that religion, a plurality of divergent interpretations and statements emerged that could only be controlled, in Christianity for example, by a hierarchical structure such as Councils and Popes.) The propositional (philosophical or doctrinal expressions) of a tradition not only, on this view, make up a minuscule part of a religious tradition (vis a vis the other aspects mentioned above), come after these other aspects (and usually much after), but also do not have any assertoric (i.e. truth-force or truth-value) force individually or on their own, but rather as part of their membership in the entire fabric of the religious tradition.  They do not make the other dimensions of a religion meaningful or truth-full; on the contrary, they derive their assertoric force from their being embedded in a vast and complex network of practices, symbols, narratives, rituals, experiences, etc., that together, as a Gestalt, distribute truth-value across the entire fabric of the religious tradition (as these dimensions themselves derive their truth- or reality-content from their dependence on and connection to the others).

It is in this sense of truth that more than one religious tradition can be true, in spite of the fact that a part of those traditions contains propositions that stand in logical tension with the propositions of other religious traditions.  On this view, religious truth is based on the ability of a religious tradition to provide its followers over time with a worldview, which includes the ability of a religious tradition to facilitate in a sustained and prolonged way to its followers meaning, communal and individual spiritual integration, purpose, moral orientation, sustenance, hope, faith, a sense of the sublime and the beautiful.  It is not that the concepts don’t matter; it is that the concepts or the propositions do not by themselves legitimize the tradition; the systematized, reflected-upon propositional content often comes after the other dimensions have been functioning and they and receive their legitimation from being part of the vast fabric that makes up the religious tradition (i.e. from the whole) as pointed out in the foregoing.  And even the non-propositional dimensions of a religion often affect and alter the propositions produced upon reflection, so that the propositions themselves undergo revision and reformulation and are not the exclusive truth-bearers of a religious tradition; the propositions themselves have no epistemic or absolute priority vis a vis the other dimensions of the religion. In other words, to locate religion in the purely conceptual or doctrinal (hence, propositional component) elevates this component to a normative status that distorts its place in the entire fabric of a religious tradition at the expense of the other non-conceptual dimensions which are, from the religious point of view (although not in isolation from each other), prior and disproportionately so.

This model receives indirect support, as I pointed out in class, from the work of the Harvard philosopher W. V. Quine, who has argued for the view that even scientific statements do not have their own fund of empirical (verifiable) evidence individually, but the scientific theory of which they are a part is validated as a whole, not by having each sentence of the theory individually verified, as if each had their own fund of empirical evidence (by analogy, as if they could be compared to or placed in one-to-one correspondence to reality).  In other words, a theory confronts reality as a whole, not its sentences individually or in isolation from every other part of the theory.  Even those statements that constitute the observational core of a theory are meager as compared with the theoretical (non-observational) aspects of the theory beyond and remote from the observational level.  The observational itself, far from validating the theoretical in any rigid or absolute way, often depends on the theoretical for legitimation because it (the observational) is both inextricable from the theoretical itself (theory-laden or theory-dependent), and because it receives validation, as it were, “from above” (from the theoretical) as much as it gives it, as part of its membership (or embeddeness) in the overall theory.  Going further, if it is admitted that even those propositions that appear to be in one-to-once correspondence with reality do so only apparently and not really (because as a theory evolves truth-value according to Quine gets redistributed as the theory is adjusted in the light of further experience, then what sentences (or terms) of a theory are factual, including observation sentences, and which are “mythical” or provisional cannot be known with certainty.  Truth is holistic through and through for scientific theory, and for more than one theory it appears; why not the same for religion?  That is why for Quine there can be “empirically [experientially in my vocabulary] equivalent, but logically incompatible systems of the world.”  Not only now, but forever more.