Essay

Belief

Creed

29 June 2023

9 min read

Elephants on mountain tops: thinking better about religious pluralism

In the first of a short series on pluralism, philosopher Barnabas Aspray explores the key questions about different beliefs.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Daniel Kim

It used to be easy to assume that other religions are wrong and ours (or our non-religion) is obviously right, without even giving reasons. Those who belonged to ‘other religions’ were far away from us, foreign in their culture and clearly wrong about so many things. But we no longer live in a society with a common religious framework. Members of different religions rub shoulders with one another and with ‘nones’, those of no religion, every day. When those we respect – believe and live differently to ourselves, we are forced to consider the possibility that their way of life may be reasonable and not absurd. We see how arrogant and immature it is to assume that our culture’s way of doing things is superior. It is like assuming that the nearest house to where we are standing is bigger than houses further away – i.e. it is to forget the perspective on the world which we have simply because of where we are and how we grew up.

We have learnt to celebrate cultural diversity as a good thing, not a threat or a problem. So should we do the same with religious diversity? Is it possible to be ‘religiously neutral’? If one religion is right, does it mean all others are wrong? Or is it better to believe that ‘all religions lead to God’?

Cultural plurality vs. religious plurality

There are many definitions of the word ‘religion’. Some have even claimed that it’s a false category made up by colonial powers who projected Christian categories onto non-Western cultural expressions. However, there is a coherent core to the meaning of religion which connects the word’s historical origins to today’s context.

Long ago there was no word for religion because it was simply an aspect of culture; there was no concept of any divide between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, or ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’. But at some point, the ancient Romans noticed something about the nations they conquered that could not be explained simply as a cultural practice, which had to do with the ‘worship of the gods’. So they invented the word religio which literally means either ‘reading again’ or (more likely) ‘binding again’. Throughout this article I will take this ancient original meaning as a starting point, using ‘religion’ to mean the ‘bond’ between humans and ultimate reality, the commitment we feel towards what lies beyond the visible world, and our indebtedness to whatever gives us all we have and are. Although in the ancient world it was possible to worship many gods at once, today most religions are exclusive, claiming absolute allegiance and offering an ethical framework along with ritual practices. That is why this definition of religion – of an ultimate bond of allegiance – is the most helpful for engaging with today’s situation.

To believe something does not only mean to think it true in your head. It means to follow the implications of that belief in your behaviour and life decisions, even when it costs and means doing things you’d rather not do.

If we understand religion as our whole-life commitment to what is of ultimate value and importance, it becomes obvious that for those who are deeply religious, their religion is all-encompassing and transforms how they think and act in every part of life. That is why asking about the truth of a religion is not a fun pastime for idle curiosity. It changes your behaviour. To believe something does not only mean to think it true in your head. It means to follow the implications of that belief in your behaviour and life decisions, even when it costs and means doing things you’re rather not do. We all have skin in the game when it comes to religion.

But how can we commit to a single religion when there are so many options that seem equally plausible? In other words, how do I seek the truth, and how do I know it’s the truth when I’ve found it? Let us begin with three common approaches to religious pluralism in contemporary society.

The elephant and the mountain

A popular model imagines each religion as a blind man touching a different part of an elephant. One says the elephant is like a snake, another that it is like a wall, and another that it is like a tail. They disagree over what the elephant is like, because each of them has only part of the truth, and none of them can see the whole truth.

A similar image is that of a mountain, with the truth at the top, and each religion seen as a path up the mountain. Each of us must pursue the truth as it seems to us, and the closer we get to the truth, the closer we will come to each other, until we reach the top together.

The main problem with this way of thinking about multiple religions is that both analogies – the elephant and the mountain – assume that it’s possible to have a perspective that is superior to any existing religion. If you can see the elephant, then you are not yourself one of the blind men; by implication you have far greater insight than them. If you can see the paths up the mountain, then you can’t be on any of them. The adopter of the analogy sees themselves as more enlightened and closer to the truth than any of the particular religions. This means unconsciously assuming a privileged (and rather patronising) super-religious point of view that surveys all the religions from a non-committed standpoint. But this is simply to create a new religion and to evaluate all the existing religions in light of it. It is the religious equivalent of doing what is done in technology that this XKCD comic makes fun of:

How Standards Proliferate

This view also assumes that all the manifold teachings of every religion are compatible and non-contradictory, which seems a stretch. To be sure, many aspects of religious practice are often seen as equivalent cultural expressions – priests, rabbis, imams, and gurus being roughly equivalent, or churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues, or the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita. Even these ‘equivalences’ turn out to be far more complicated than a superficial glance imagines. More obviously, the ethical teachings for life-guidance contain incompatible ideas. You can only really see the incompatibility if you’re trying to live according to these teachings. Then you will find that it's impossible to follow all of them at once. To switch to politics as an example, should Marxism, Nazism, and Capitalism all be seen as paths up the same mountain? Are these political models all like blind men or ways up a mountain? The near-universal repulsion to this idea is the root of Godwin’s Law (i.e. if there’s anything we all agree on, it’s that Nazism is bad). If the elephant/mountain analogy doesn’t work for politics, why would we assume that it works for religions? We can only assume that if we think ourselves in a position to judge all religions by some standard external to any of them. Where did we get that standard from? Each religion claims to be such a standard itself. To make the point really clear: even Nazism is only bad in light of a particular set of religious and ethical commitments, and only those commitments can provide the reasons for why Nazism is bad.

For a religious practitioner – for anyone who has left the comfortable ivory-tower armchair of comparative religion and is seeking serious guidance on how to live and understand the world – this super-religious position is not an option. The only thing we can do is to take a position concerning these questions, which is to be one of the paths, be one of the blind men, and no longer pretend to have any superior viewpoint.

The pick-n-mix buffet

I would summarise this view as saying, in essence, “I don’t think any one religion has the whole truth. They all have some things right and some things wrong. I pick the bits that are good about each religion and kinda go my own way.”

This view has soared to great popularity in recent decades. It seems eminently reasonable and mature, and by contrast, to imagine that one religion happens to have everything right seems naïvely narrow-minded. Isn’t it better to filter each religion for what’s best about it?

But this view also has a problem. A religion claims to be a guide to understanding what is good and bad in the first place. If each of us were able to judge good and bad reliably and consistently for ourselves, there would be no different religions in the first place – they would never have existed. This pick-n-mix approach assumes the opposite: that I already have the truth, and am therefore able to recognise its presence or absence in the world’s religions. This view hasn’t got past the first hurdle of cultural relativity, which is to understand that all knowledge is situated in a particular culture and moment in history. The holder of this view, like the holder of the previous view, has created a new religion for themselves, with a single member who is also its high priest.

Each of the major religious traditions developed over thousands of years, and contains great riches and wisdom from across many ages and cultures. They deserve respect at the very least. What makes any 21st century individual think that they have deeper insight into the truth than any of these great, long traditions of belief and lifestyle? It would be better to belong wholly to any of them, to submit to its teachings even when they are uncomfortable and conflict with contemporary wisdom, than to take this supremely arrogant standpoint of claiming to be the judge of them all.

Can you belong to more than one religion?

This is another common question for those who engage with the question of religious pluralism. It is worth taking seriously because there are people who mean it sincerely and are not just spectators who judge from a distance. I have a friend who tried for a long time to be a faithful Buddhist and Christian at the same time. He emphasised the overlap between the two, especially in the emphasis on compassion, self-denial, and not belonging to the world. He drew on the spiritual resources of both as much as he could, and tried to find ways of reconciling apparent contradictions between them. But one day he realised that this wasn’t working for him, although he couldn’t quite explain why. He was feeling torn between the two, as he tried to go deeper into each. Why is it that I feel compelled to pursue one at the expense of the other, he asked me? This is the answer I gave.

Suppose you went to the Buddha and asked him ‘what do you think of Jesus and of following Jesus?’ And suppose the Buddha said, ‘Jesus is great! What a great idea for you to follow him!’ And suppose you took the Buddha’s advice and chose to follow Jesus. What would be the basis for your trust in Jesus? It would be a consequence of a prior trust in the judgment of the Buddha. Or suppose the opposite: that you went to Jesus and asked him, ‘what do you think of the Buddha?’ and Jesus said, ‘The Buddha is a wonderful example of the values of the Kingdom of Heaven. He is worth listening to.’ You would then learn from the spiritual wisdom of the Buddha, but only because Jesus suggested it. In both cases one is the supreme judge who judges the other, even if that judgment is positive.

There can only ever be one supreme judge in your life, where the buck truly stops. There can only be one final arbitrator, because no matter how similar any two may seem, eventually there will come a place where they tug in different directions. For many people, that supreme judge is really themselves, even if they’re not aware of it. But to belong to a religion means to have submitted to that religion as the supreme judge of reality, which entails subordinating your judgment to the judgment of that religion.

Now, if all the above is correct, then the question of religious pluralism cannot be approached or evaluated from a transcendent non-committed position. Even non-religion turns out to be using a standard of truth and goodness to judge other positions. There is no ‘neutral’ way of evaluating or positioning the diverse religions in relation to each other. The only way to do it is from a particular religion. What, then, is the Christian approach to other religions? How should Christians think about them? That will be the topic of a second article.

Article

Attention

Creed

Education

Psychology

1 April 2025

6 min read

We miss so much when we only see what we are looking for

Explaining why we don't see the unseen - with the help of a gorilla.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Manuel Bonadeo on Unsplash.

In a thriving Pentecostal Church on an English city street, a room full of worshippers are singing, clapping, dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The preacher cries “Come, Holy Spirit!” and there are cries of “Amen!” and “Yes Lord!” One person has tears on their cheeks.

A few doors down, a few dozen Anglicans also gather. Heads bent over their liturgy books, there is a hum of responses and an air of reverence. “Give us the joy of your saving help: and sustain us with your life-giving Spirit.” The altar candles flicker as the community settles itself into pews. The Holy Spirit is no less present to these worshippers, although they respond in a completely different way.

Both churches share one creed, in which they commit to their belief in God as the source of all things, seen and unseen. Whilst Pentecostal theologies tend to focus on the observable and unpredictable signs of the Spirit at work, many Anglicans would describe the Spirit in terms of an inner experience, perhaps one that is cognitive rather than physical. But either way, Christians share one belief – that God is present in the world, and we call that the Holy Spirit.

However, there are also hundreds of people who walk past both of these churches, week by week, who would never dream of setting foot inside. Many of them will think that anyone who believes in God is deluded or deceived. Such rationalist thinkers often have a strongly monist view of the world, in which everything, even mysterious things such as human consciousness and perception of non-physical entities, must have a physical or biological basis. As Ebenezer Scrooge says to the apparent ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

It is almost impossible to convince someone who hasn’t had a first first-hand experience of God that anything like the Holy Spirit exists. Many nay-sayers, I suspect, quietly (or maybe not so quietly) believe that their unbelief is because they are more rational and maybe even more intelligent than those who get excited by such things. But there is another possible explanation for why some people apparently cannot, or will not, see the unseen.

The British education system is heavily orientated towards STEM. Even when more creative subjects such as literature find their way into the syllabus, they are often studied in a rather dry and analytical way. Notwithstanding the efforts of the occasional maverick teacher, I recall much time spent learning how to identify the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, and little (if any) time learning to articulate how his sonnets made me feel. Such a system turns out good scientists, but it may be that in doing so it trains our young people out of being able to perceive a whole raft of things which are arguably just as important to human flourishing.

The world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it.

A “selective attention test” can quickly prove this point. I did one recently with a room full of psychology undergraduates, almost all of whom had identified as monists. “Since you guys are the brightest and the best,” I simpered “let’s do a little intelligence test. Apparently only five per cent of the general population get the answer right to this puzzle, but in this room, I expect the success rate will be a little higher…”

Having primed them by flattering their egos, I proceeded to show them a video called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, designed in 2009 by scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. During the short film, a group of people pass basket balls to each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. It seems simple enough, and when the film ended, I asked the students how many counted the right number of passes. Almost every hand in the room went up. No surprises there.

Then I asked the more important question – who saw the gorilla? There was a smattering of laughter, and this time only about half of the hands went up. Meanwhile, the other half of my students were looking around at their peers, utterly confused…

But it was true. In “The Monkey Business Illusion”, a person in a 6ft gorilla costume walks right across the middle of the scene, weaving through the players in the game. However, because most viewers are intently focussed on watching the players in white, they simply don’t perceive it. You can try this for yourself - the video I’m talking about can be found easily on YouTube, and if you follow the search term “selective attention test” there are many others like it.

The material point is that the world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. If you pause for a moment right now, you might notice that there is the hum of a heater in your room, or the noise of traffic outside, or the smell of an air freshener, or that a piece of your clothing that is too tight – things you were simply not aware of until I pointed them out. It’s common that we don’t perceive things until something else makes us think that they are important. If someone tells you that your house might have structural damage, you will suddenly start to notice every creak that comes from your walls and ceilings, even though those creaks have probably been happening for years.

As social beings, we can be easily conditioned into paying attention to certain things and ignoring others. If I tell a group of students that intelligent people are highly attentive to the players in white shirts, I increase the likelihood that they simply will not notice a gorilla.

There is good research to show that children, even in our modern and secular society, are inherently spiritual – most young kids believe in God, or gods, fairies and the existence of many things unseen. But this is not celebrated in our STEM focussed education system, wherein young minds are highly conditioned to let go of such “irrational” beliefs and trust in the full explanatory power of science. It is so effective that, by the time they get to my classroom at university, I’ve got little hope of persuading any of my monists that there was a 6ft gorilla without showing the video again and letting them see it for themselves.

But there are always some people who are willing to challenge the idea that Marley was just an undigested bit of beef. There are always some people who attend churches of one type or another, or practice other forms of spirituality and religion. Some pray, some meditate, and many take part in rituals. This trains them in what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann calls “micro-processes of attending”, leaving them more ready to perceive spiritual things instead of screening them out of their conscious awareness. How they respond might depend on preferred tradition – dancing, liturgy, or a little bit of both. But all agree that there is something going on that is unseen and important.

Many STEM educated, highly rational and fully committed monists no doubt think that those who attend churches are deluded and deceived into perceiving unseen things are simply just not there. These nay-sayers have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it is more intelligent to believe in the all-explanatory power of science. But perhaps it is they who have been deluded and deceived? As the Monkey Business Illusion demonstrates, if you flatter someone’s intelligence enough, it becomes entirely possible to hide a 6ft gorilla in plain sight.

Watch the Monkey Business Illusion

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