Light out of Plenitude: Towards an Epistemology of Mystical Inclusivism

Abstract

The question to what extent the putative mystical experiences reported in the variety of religious traditions contribute to the conflict of religious truth claims, appears to be one of the hardest problems of the epistemology of religion, identified in the course of the ongoing debate about the philosophical consequences of religious diversity. A number of leading participants in this debate, including the late W.P. Alston, took a strongly exclusivist stance on it, while being aware that in the light of the long coexistence of seemingly irreconcilable great mystical traditions, mystical exclusivism lacks philosophical justification. In this paper I argue that from the point of view of a theist, inclusivism with respect to the issue whether adherents of different religious traditions can have veridical experience of God (or Ultimate Reality) now, is more plausible than the Alstonian exclusivism. I suggest that mystical inclusivism of the kind I imply in this paper may contribute to the development of cross-cultural philosophy of religion, as well as to the theoretical framework for interreligious dialogue, because (1) it allows for the possibility of veridical experience of God in a variety of religious traditions, but (2) it avoids the radical revisionist postulates of Hickian pluralism and (3) it leaves open the question whether the creed of any specific tradition is a better approximation to the truth about God than the creeds of other traditions.