Knowledge and Ignorance

Knowledge and Ignorance

KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE. A cognitive element is essential to most religions and probably to all, but exactly what constitutes religious knowledge is problematic. Strong belief, for example, may be subjectively indistinguishable from knowledge. In a 1984 BBC interview, Billy Graham asserted that he knows there is to be a second coming of Christ. At a lecture, the Hindu scholar Swami Bon declared that "transmigration is not a dogma, it is a fact." This article will examine the various and conflicting conceptions of religious knowledge that have emerged in the major traditions through history.

Primal Peoples

"It appears," Dominique Zahan has written, "that every religion, however primitive, contains a cognitive element" ("Religions de l'Afrique noire," Histoire des religions 3, 1976, p. 609). In primal religions, according to Åke Hultkranz, religious knowledge rests on a fundamental division of experience: "A basic dichotomy between two levels of existence, one orderly or 'natural'—the world of daily experience—the other extraordinary or 'supernatural'—the world of belief—conditions man's religious cognition" (Hultkranz, 1983, pp. 231, 239). The world of belief is in turn divided into that of the sorcerer and that of the magician. "They are opposed to one another on the plane of knowledge and wisdom, as a tortuous, obscure knowledge full of contradictions and uncertainties, over against a clear knowledge, imbued with evidence and conforming to the logic of a thought at the service of the community" (ibid., p.

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