Religious Ambiguity and Diversity

This study looks at two central religious issues--the religious ambiguity of the world and the diversity of faiths--and probes their implications for religious beliefs. Author Robert McKim offers a self-critical, open, and tentative approach to beliefs about religious matters. The religious ambiguity of the world has many aspects, one of which is the hiddenness of God. Theists have proposed a number of explanations of God's hiddenness. Some putative explanations contend that the advantages of God's hiddenness ("goods of mystery") outweigh whatever benefits would result if God's existence and nature were clear to us ("goods of clarity"). Goods of mystery that have received a lot of discussion include human moral autonomy and the ability on our part to exercise control over whether we believe in the existence of God. The extent of the ambiguity that surrounds God's existence, and indeed all important religious matters, combined with our lack of an obviously correct and adequate explanation of this lack, suggest that, even if God exists, it is not important that people believe in God. Another central theme in the book is the significance of religious diversity for religious belief. The character of this diversity is such that it provides people who take a position on religious matters with reason to adopt the "Critical Stance" -- which requires people in all the religious traditions to subject their religious beliefs to critical scrutiny and hold those beliefs in a tentative way.Some contend that religious faith requires complete confidence in what is believed but tentative belief actually is sufficient to sustain many forms of religious commitment.

This study looks at two central religious issues - the religious ambiguity of the world and the diversity of faiths - and probes their implications for religious beliefs. Author Robert McKim offers a self-critical, open, and tentative approach to beliefs about religious matters. This book is built around the two themes of religious ambiguity and religious diversity. Robert McKim first asks whether the religious traditions can account for the fact that the beliefs that they wish their adherents to accept are not clearly true. He then explores the significnace for religious belief of the fact that there are so many competing religious traditions. A central thesis of the book is that beliefs about religious matters ought to be held tentatively, with an awareness that the beliefs in question may be wrong. This applies to the beliefs of theists, of atheists, and of members of non-theistic religions alike. McKim attempts to show the validity of this thesis by applying it to the theistic problem of the 'hiddenness' of God: that is, the question why, if God exists, it is not clear to everyone that this is so.