Early John Hick’s religious epistemology (1957-1971): basic ideas and criticism

This paper offers an analysis of the earliest subject of John Harwood Hick’s philosophy of religion - his religious epistemology. The first section reveals Hick’s understanding of the correlation between faith and revelation. The second one provides his own conception of faith as an interpretation of experience. The third examines his proposed concept of eschatological verification against the background of the discussion that took place in the middle of the 20th century about the cognitive status of religious statements within the context of logical positivism. The fourth section presents the main objections to Hick’s religious epistemology. And the fifth one provides his counter-arguments to these objections. Turning to Avery Dulles’ classification model of Revelation, the author shows that Hick’s concept of perceptual non-propositional faith, corresponding to (2), (3) and (5) types of Revelation, inevitably entails the concept of religious ambiguity, thereby forming a favourable ground for his forthcoming “Copernican revolution”. At the same time, the author concludes that the attempt of the early Hick to accept the game rules of positivists (who denied the cognitive significance of anything outside empirical science) in order to justify the factual status of religious statements in their own language does not seem to have been a necessary task, especially given the pluralist world picture he subsequently adopted.