The Ecology of Religious Knowledges

Juan Morales

doi:10.3390/rel13010011

Abstract

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains.

Highlights

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate and supreme source of reality, on which everything else depends.this epistemic claim has encountered, among other important obstacles, a main problem in the multiplicity and, at first sight, incompatibility of its different accounts
From a Kantian perspective, other authors articulate the phenomenon in terms of a unique reality that is multiply experienced and conceptualized, but that ends up being a noumenon that is beyond our knowledge (Hick 1989, 2004). Others go beyond this and argue that the diversity applies to our concepts and experiences but to their objects (Katz 1978), which implies that different religious traditions do not speak about the same reality or that, if they suppose to do so, they end up being mostly false (Alston 1991; Plantinga 2000)
We can better understand why neither everyday nor scientific experience and knowledge can, by definition, account for a reality with these aspects, since they are devoted to interact with objects and situations which are spatiotemporal finite, with derivative ontological relevance, and with secondary ethical and aesthetic value

Summary

Introduction

Beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate and supreme source of reality, on which everything else depends. Even personal or theistic religions, affirming the omnipresence, omnipotency, omniscience, and all goodness of this supreme being, explain him/her through diverse and potentially conflicting accounts: as a great immaterial mind, a merciful mother/father, an immutable and impassible agent, a king or master who should be worshiped with awe and reverence, the love of his associates by whom he is controlled, and even the paramour of many girls and married women. From a Kantian perspective, other authors articulate the phenomenon in terms of a unique reality that is multiply experienced and conceptualized, but that ends up being a noumenon that is beyond our knowledge (Hick 1989, 2004) Others go beyond this and argue that the diversity applies to our concepts and experiences but to their objects (Katz 1978), which implies that different religious traditions do not speak about the same reality or that, if they suppose to do so, they end up being mostly false (Alston 1991; Plantinga 2000).

The Ecology of Knowledges

The Religious Mystical Experience and Its Epistemic Niche

Religious Objectivity and Plurality

Conclusions