Religious Diversity

Intuitively, there is something rather troubling about coming to the realisation that not only are one's cherished religious beliefs not held by the majority of the people in the world, but also that there is a dizzying array of mutually incompatible belief-systems on offer. The epistemologist Sanford Goldberg (2014, 284) suggests that the situation regarding religious diversity exhibits three features that together make for a case of "systematic disagreement": namely, it is non-local, which is to say that there are many interconnected topics that are under dispute; it is widespread, in that the disagreeing groups have members in the tens or even hundreds of millions; and it is entrenched, in that the disagreement has been going on for centuries and shows no sign of imminent resolution. It may be added that there is a rather striking correlation between living in a certain part of the globe at a certain time and adhering to a certain religious belief-system (Maitzen 2006). An obvious explanation for this correlation is that the adoption of religious beliefs very often occurs by way of social belief-forming practices in which the testimony of others, especially the testimony of adults to children, plays a central role. Various prominent voices in the Western philosophical tradition, most notably David Hume ([1777] 2000), have regarded testimony with deep suspicion and viewed its central role in sustaining religious beliefs as a serious strike against the credibility of religion in general. In strong contrast to this, the Jewish tradition is not only candid about the role that testimony plays in the sustaining of religious beliefs, but it has also tended to embrace the communal character of its remembrance of formative events in the life of the nation of Israel and to celebrate the intergenerational bonds that are forged through the social transmission of beliefs and practices. Samuel Lebens writes that "the key function of much of Jewish ritual, and the (or at least a) primary source of post-Biblical religious knowledge, is testimony. This suggests an epistemology with different priorities to the mainstream Western tradition" (2023, 121). As Jewish thinkers are increasingly contributing to discussions in analytic philosophy and particularly analytic epistemology (see Lebens, Rabinowitz, and Segal 2019), there is great potential for a fruitful reshaping of the discourse around the value of testimony and the closely related discussion of the epistemology of religious diversity.