Stud Philos Educ (2008) 27:71–75 DOI 10.1007/s11217-007-9066-y

Is Religious Education Possible? A Response to Philip Barnes Michael Hand

Published online: 26 October 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

I am grateful to Philip Barnes for his generous review of my book (Barnes 2007; Hand 2006), and to the editors of Studies in Philosophy and Education for this opportunity to respond to it. As I think Barnes’ summary of my argument is largely accurate, and am not inclined to disagree with his verdict that it is successful, my response will be short. In fact I should like to do just two things: the first is to show that the problem Barnes professes to have identified in my statement of the objection to non-confessional religious education is illusory; the second is to express some reservations about Barnes’ assessment of the relevance of my argument to other debates in the field of religious education. My purpose in writing the book was to refute a philosophical objection to the idea of non-confessional religious education first advanced by Paul Hirst and Roger Marples in the 1970s. The objection is that non-confessional religious education is logically impossible because religious understanding necessarily presupposes religious belief. The argument for the latter proposition is as follows: (1) (2) (3)

Religion is a unique form of knowledge. Understanding a unique form of knowledge involves holding certain propositions of that form to be true or false. Therefore, Understanding religion involves holding certain religious propositions to be true or false.

In the book I try to defeat this argument by showing that, while the conclusion is entailed by the premises and the second premise is true, the first premise is false. Barnes, however, claims to have spotted a problem in my formulation of the argument: Premise (2) affirms that understanding a unique form of knowledge involves holding certain propositions of that form to be true or false. If religious understanding can be gained both by those who judge religion to be true and by those who judge religion to be false, then those who do not believe in religion are accredited with religious understanding. But if those who judge religion to be false are capable of religious M. Hand (&) Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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understanding, then it follows that non-believers, for that is what those who judge religion to be false are, understand religion; and if non-believers understand religion, then the objection to non-confessional religious education to non-believers collapses. (Barnes 2007) Barnes’ worry, then, is that the argument as I formulate it appears to allow that religious understanding is available to both religious believers and religious non-believers, and therefore supplies no basis for an objection to non-confessional religious education. Why, then, have I articulated the argument in this way? The short answer is that this is how Hirst articulates it, and it is Hirst’s account of the logical objection to non-confessional religious education that sets the agenda for the book. Here’s what he says: If [religious] propositions belong to a logically unique form, then their truth criteria must be unique. Religious propositions are then only intelligible to those who know these unique truth criteria. But can such unique truth conditions be known without our actually being able to judge any propositions of this kind true or false? Can there be unique truth criteria that are never satisfied? If meaning is tied to knowing a unique set of truth criteria, is not meaning tied to our actually satisfying these in judging some propositions true or false?... The claim to an irreducible, unique form of propositional meaning, thus seems to necessitate that at least some proposition of this kind be known to be true. If so, there can only be a unique form of meaning if there is a unique form of knowledge, and the claim that religion involves a unique form of belief only, is incoherent. (Hirst 1973, pp. 88–89) Twice in this passage Hirst asserts that it is judgments of the truth or falsity of propositions of the relevant kind that are required for understanding a form a knowledge. And there is a very good reason for this. Coming to understand a form of knowledge requires ‘agreement in definitions’ to fix the logical criteria of concepts peculiar to the form, and ‘agreement in judgments’ to fix the experiential criteria of those concepts. And the agreement in judgments may consist either in the acceptance of truths or in the rejection of falsehoods. I can learn the experiential criterion of the concept of redness by accepting, in relation to an indicated red object, either the truth of the proposition ‘This is red’ or the falsity of the proposition ‘This is not red’. With respect to the learning of experiential criteria, truth and falsity are two sides of the same coin: the experience that makes a proposition true is also the experience that makes its negation false. It would, of course, be odd to teach someone the experiential criteria of material and mental concepts by asking them to reject false propositions rather than accept true ones. But defenders of the view that religion is a unique form of knowledge could, it seems to me, tell a plausible story about the important pedagogical role of religious falsehoods in imparting religious understanding. Suppose that there are distinctively religious experiences which make it true that God is infinite, incomprehensible and immortal, and that grasping the experiential criteria of the infinitude, incomprehensibility and immortality of God is one way of coming to understand the religious form of knowledge. Under these circumstances it might be quite natural to teach the meaning of religious propositions by asking learners to accept, in relation to the relevant religious experiences, the falsity of the propositions ‘God is finite’, ‘God is comprehensible’ and ‘God is mortal’. So Hirst is right to formulate the argument for the necessary connection between religious understanding and religious belief as he does. What, then, are we to make of Barnes’ contention that the argument so formulated supplies no basis for an objection to non-confessional religious education?

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I think the contention is confused, and the source of the confusion lies in two significant and unwarranted elisions Barnes makes in the passage quoted above. First he elides the class of people who hold certain religious propositions to be false with the class of people who judge religion to be false; then he elides the class of people who judge religion to be false with the class of religious non-believers. Both moves are serious mistakes. To take the second elision first, people who judge religion to be false are one kind of non-believer, but not the only kind. Another kind is people who reserve or withhold judgment on religion. In equating non-believers with unbelievers, Barnes simply ignores the distinction between atheism and agnosticism. This is important because, even if Barnes were right to suppose that the argument as Hirst states it implies the availability of religious understanding to both acceptors and rejectors of religion, this would still leave the undecided out in the cold. If programmes of non-confessional religious education were compatible with pupils being believers or unbelievers, but not with their reserving judgment on religion, we should still, I maintain, have grounds to question the propriety of those programmes and their entitlement to the label ‘non-confessional’. But, in any case, Barnes is not right to suppose that the argument implies the availability of religious understanding to both acceptors and rejectors of religion. This supposition depends on his elision of people who hold certain religious propositions to be false with people who judge religion to be false. That the two classes are not equivalent is obvious: religious believers belong to the former class but not the latter, since they are necessarily committed to the falsity of those religious propositions that are incompatible with the ones they hold to be true. The implication of the view that religion is a unique form of knowledge, however, is that the two classes are not just non-equivalent but mutually exclusive. Those who judge religion in its entirety to be false are precisely not those who hold particular religious propositions to be false, but rather those who hold that religious language has no valid use. Coming to understand religion is a matter of learning how religious concepts are anchored in a distinctively religious mode of experience and thus how religious propositions are verified and falsified; to reject religion in toto, on this view, is to deny the anchorage of religious concepts in experience and thus the meaningfulness of religious propositions. Unbelievers are not well-described as holding certain religious propositions to be false because, for them, the whole business of distinguishing between true and false religious propositions doesn’t get off the ground. Barnes is therefore wrong to suggest that the argument for the dependence of religious understanding on religious belief, in the form Hirst defends it, poses no threat to nonconfessional religious education. If the argument were sound, it would show that religious understanding is available only to those who, by accepting the truth or falsity of certain religious propositions, come to see how religious concepts are anchored in human experience and so learn to play the religious language game. And this would be to show that religious understanding is unavailable to non-believers, of either the agnostic or the atheist stripe. Having summarised the book’s central argument and declared himself sympathetic to its conclusions, Barnes proceeds in the second half of his review to discuss what he takes to be its relevance to some other debates in the field of religious education. He gently chastises me for neglecting to do this myself: Hand ends on the note that religious education is indeed possible, but what kind of religious education is appropriate if religious understanding is as Hand believes?... In one sense Hand wins the argument with regard to the possibility of religious education but fails to press home his victory and challenge contemporary

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misunderstandings of religion that are perpetuated by British religious educators and in British religious education’ (Barnes 2007). Barnes suggests that the account of religious understanding I defend might serve not only to vindicate the enterprise of non-confessional religious education but also to expose ‘misunderstandings’ at the heart of some contemporary approaches to religious education in schools. There is one ‘misunderstanding’ in particular at whose door he lays the blame for much that is wrong with British religious education, and to which he seems to think my argument might pose an effective challenge: ... mainstream religious education has embraced the liberal theological conviction that respect for religious difference is best achieved by inculcation of the view that each of the different religions mediates God’s revelation and salvation. By challenging notions of religious uniqueness and an exclusive attitude to religious truth, religious educators in Britain believe themselves to be challenging the roots of religious intolerance and prejudice, and contributing positively to the social aims of education. Pursuit of the thesis of the essential unity of the religions has been a defining characteristic of British education over the last four decades. (Ibid) This ‘liberal theological conviction’ has two components which need to be distinguished. One component is the strictly theological claim that ‘each of the different religions mediates God’s revelation and salvation’. The other is the educational claim that ‘respect for religious difference is best achieved by inculcation of’ the theological claim. Barnes firmly rejects both claims, and I am inclined to agree with him. What I am uneasy about is his suggestion that the falsity of these claims is somehow implied by my argument in the book. Let us consider first the theological claim regarding the ‘essential unity of the religions’. Barnes objects to this on the grounds that ‘the various religions are not only substantially different but also in some cases mutually exclusive: if the beliefs of one religion are true, the beliefs of some other religion (or religions) must be false’ (Ibid). Clearly there are doctrinal incompatibilities between the different religions, and it certainly follows from this that not all religious doctrines can be true. But no thoughtful advocate of the essential unity thesis would deny these points. The thesis, at least in its more sophisticated forms, does not ignore the existence of doctrinal incompatibilities, but rather asserts that each religion contains elements of truth and offers its followers a genuine path to salvation. A more pertinent objection, I think, is that it is difficult to see what evidence, theological or otherwise, could be adduced in support of the thesis. Is it supposed to be a revealed truth that all religions are salvific? If so, to whom was this revelation made, in which text is it recorded, and why is this putative record of divine revelation more authoritative than the sacred texts of the religions themselves, which typically set more exclusive criteria for entry to heaven? Or is it supposed to be a truth discovered without aid of revelation? But what then are the findings in the psychology of religious experience, or the history of world religions, or the sociology of religious practices, that could possibly warrant this sort of theological inference? The problem with the essential unity thesis is not so much that we can show it to be false as that we have no good reason for believing it to be true. None of this, however, has much to do with the account of religious understanding I develop in the book. I argue that religious propositions are propositions about the existence, nature or actions of gods, that gods are transcendent or supernatural persons, and that children can therefore be taught the meaning of religious propositions with reference to everyday discourse about persons and without reference to distinctively religious

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experiences. Neither these contentions nor anything they imply seem to me to count either for or against the theological claim Barnes would like to see discredited. What of the educational claim that respect for religious difference is best achieved by inculcation of the essential unity thesis? Against this Barnes questions whether a theological position that finds religious differences to be ultimately insignificant is really conducive to respect for those differences. Again, I am not sure that this is the right line to take here: as educators we ought to be uneasy about talk of inculcation even in relation to the transmission of indubitable facts, and when dealing with such highly controversial claims as the essential unity thesis it is a matter of basic educational principle that teachers ought not to engage in any sort of endorsement or promotion, let alone inculcation. So whether or not widespread acceptance of the essential unity thesis would be conducive to social harmony is rather beside the point. And again, I cannot see that my defence of the logical possibility of non-confessional religious education has any direct bearing on this matter. I do not think there is any fundamental disagreement between Barnes and me about the central aims of religious education. Barnes holds, as I do, that the first priority for religious education in schools is ‘to engage [pupils] in rational debate on the purported truth of religion and involve them in discussion about the criteria that are relevant to the assessment of religion’ (Ibid). I have elsewhere set out in some detail my reasons for holding this view (Hand 2004; Hand and White 2004). Nor do we disagree that the ‘liberal theological conviction’ Barnes describes has done, and continues to do, a certain amount of harm to the theory and practice of religious education in Britain. But it is important not to conflate different theoretical problems in the field, or to suppose that a solution to one problem will be a solution to all. I hope I have shown in the book that one interesting philosophical objection to non-confessional religious education can be defeated. I am doubtful, however, that the arguments I have deployed to defeat it can be pressed into service to challenge the contemporary approaches to religious education Barnes finds objectionable. References Barnes, L. P. (2007). Is religious education possible? Studies in Philosophy and Education, doi:10.1007/ s11217-007-9067-x. Hand, M. (2006). Is religious education possible? A philosophical investigation. London: Continuum. Hand, M. (2004). Religious education. In J. White (Ed.), Rethinking the school curriculum: Values, aims and purposes (pp. 152–164). London: Routledge Falmer. Hand, M., & White, J. (2004). Is compulsory religious education justified? A dialogue. Journal of Education and Christian Belief, 8(2), 101–112 [Reprinted in Journal of Christian Education, 47(2&3), 119–133]. Hirst, P. H. (1973). The forms of knowledge revisited. In P. H. Hirst (Ed.), Knowledge and the curriculum (pp. 84–100). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

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