John Hick

Background

John Hick (1922–2012) was a British philosopher of religion and theologian who taught at Birmingham and at Claremont Graduate University in California. He is unusual in this wiki for holding load-bearing positions on both sides of its debates: his soul-making theodicy is one of the two great modern theistic answers to the problem of evil, while his pluralist hypothesis — that the world religions are culturally conditioned responses to one ineffable Real — is the most influential philosophical challenge to Christian particularism. The trajectory from evangelical convert to pluralist made Hick the twentieth century's emblematic case of where the diversity problem can lead a serious Christian philosopher.

Positions held in this wiki

• Religious Pluralism — Hick is "the most influential proponent of unitary salvific pluralism." He never denied that the religions conflict — "the differences of belief between (and within) the traditions are legion" (Hick 1983, 487) — but held that such differences "are best seen as differing ways in which differing cultures have conceived of and experienced the one ultimate divine Reality," so that each major tradition "constitutes a valid context of salvation/liberation; but none constitutes the one and only such context" (Hick 1984, 229, 231, quoted at SEP Religious Diversity §6). His master argument is transformation parity: all the evidence shows the major religions to be equally transformative of self-centeredness into Reality-centeredness (Hick 2004, ch. 3, ibid.).
• The Evidential Problem of Evil — the soul-making theodicy: goodness "attained... by meeting and eventually mastering temptation... is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or of virtue" (Hick 1977, 255–6, quoted at SEP PoE §7.1). The world is not a failed hedonistic paradise but an environment designed for spiritual growth.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Evil and the God of Love (1966/1977) and An Interpretation of Religion (1989/2004) are copyright-locked. The pluralist hypothesis is anchored to SEP 'Religious Diversity', which quotes Hick extensively; the theodicy to SEP 'The Problem of Evil' §7.1. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• Alvin Plantinga — "Ad Hick" (1997) and Warranted Christian Belief: the pluralist hypothesis is self-undermining as a warrant defeater; see the particularist view in Religious Pluralism.
• William P. Alston — doxastic-practice epistemology defending the rationality of staying within one's own tradition.
• William Lane Craig — middle-knowledge particularism against Hick's soteriology.
• Against the theodicy, the SEP presses that soul-making "provides no justification for the existence of any animal pain" nor for the suffering of young children (SEP PoE §7.1).

See also

• William James — the experiential-parity predecessor whose cross-cultural data Hick's hypothesis systematizes.
• J. L. Schellenberg — presses the diversity data toward skepticism rather than pluralism.
• Richard Swinburne — fellow theodicist within The Evidential Problem of Evil.