ABSTRACT
John Hick's approach is a hybrid of two Immanuel Kantian-type positions: one-realm transcendental idealism as far as his understanding of everything-that-is-not-God goes; two-realm transcendental idealism as far as his understanding of God is concerned. Hick is also interested, in a way that Thomas Aquinas was not, in the role that symbolic and cultural frameworks and expectations play in organizing the world into a world-view. So Hick identifies the main difference between his views and Kant's as being that the categories of religious experience are not universal and invariable but are on the contrary culture-relative when they are employed they tend to change and develop through time as different historical influences affect the development of human consciousness. As well as being unsupported by his basic epistemological insight, Hick's views on a noumenal God have problems of their own. To avoid the fingers-in-the-jam-pot objection Hick needs to use only formal logically generated concepts of the noumenal Real.
