Abstract

For several hundreds of years the world's major religious traditions have existed side by side each making claims about the nature of ultimate reality, the human condition or problem, and the means of salvation from this human problem. These claims often diverge from one another and even contradict one another. There has been some modest effort by representative intellectuals of the world's religious traditions toward dealing with the problem of competing religious claims, the problem of how we can know which claims are true ones, and the question of "What effect is there on my salvation if I have been holding incorrect religious beliefs?" In this work I survey some of these representative thinkers, from Christian apologists who attempt to demonstrate the exclusive truth of Christian claims, to pluralists who argue that, whatever their beliefs, salvation is available to sincere members of any of the world's religions. I critically examine these approaches, then offer my own approach to this problem, arguing that where the world's religions make conflicting claims then, at most, only one of those sets of religious claims can be true. I further argue that a believer has the epistemic right to affirm her religious beliefs to be correct until such time as apologists show that they are mistaken. And I argue that we can affirm the possibility that salvation can be enjoyed even by people who hold incorrect religious beliefs