For Further Reading
11
Recognizing Divine Revelation
Charles Taliaferro
There is a famous photograph of the aftermath of a napalm-bomb attack during the Vietnam War. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc is running, naked, her clothes having been burned. Soon after the photograph was taken, she lost consciousness. She spent fourteen months in a hospital and had seventeen operations.
Although I suffered from pain, itching and headaches all the time, the long hospital stay made me dream of becoming a doctor. But my studies were cut short by the local government. They wanted me as a symbol of the state. I could not go to school anymore. The anger inside me was like a hatred as high as a mountain. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times. I spent my daytime in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible. In Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.[1]
Kim Phuc professes to have found Jesus Christ through the Bible.
It is one thing to describe and reflect on God in the Bible. Virtually anyone, regardless of whether one thinks there actually is or is not a God, can explore God or the person Jesus Christ found in the text. “Christ the Redeemer” or “God” may be treated as a character one finds in a narrative that may or may not be true. It is another matter, however, to encounter God through the Bible. On this reading, searching Scripture may actually constitute a search for God.
Is it possible that the Bible is a means through which we can encounter God? Or, to rephrase slightly, could it be that God provides, through the Bible, a means by which there can be a genuine discovery of God? In this chapter, I offer an overview of the very idea of divine revelation and then take up the question of why anyone might believe that a divine revelation has occurred or is occurring and available today.
My principal goal is to address what I shall call the framework of inquiry. Given certain frameworks, the case for divine revelation does not stand a chance. I shall be challenging these frameworks, however, and recommending a more open-ended method for assessing the possibility of divine revelation. I believe that a balanced, open methodology can recognize the profundity and authenticity of experiences like Kim Phuc’s.
Revelation as Disclosure
What is revelation? Traditionally, Christians have distinguished between general and specific revelation. The first concerns the ways in which the world itself may manifest or disclose the reality and nature of God. Like many of the contributors to this book, I have argued that philosophical reflection on the world has given us reasons for a belief in God. Special revelation, however, concerns a more focused, historical disclosure of God.[2]
For traditional Christians, the Bible itself is a divine revelation, though some Christians prefer seeing the Bible as either containing divine revelation (use of the Bible’s content enables God to be disclosed to persons) or as a record of God’s revelation (the Bible records the life of Christ which discloses God incarnate). On either of these interpretations, divine revelation involves what is believed to be God’s special, specific activity in disclosing the divine nature and will. Such disclosures are believed to have occurred through miraculous events (the resurrection); auditions, or spoken or written statements in the form of commands; divinely inspired history; and through parables, poetry, songs, proverbs, dialogues, as well as visions. While some biblical narratives suggest that revelation took place by way of a strict recording of divine speech, other parts of the Bible suggest that God worked to achieve a revelation through inspiring a person’s own insights and creative imagination (Isaiah and Jeremiah).
To fill out an account of just how an inspired divine disclosure may develop, consider this overview by Evelyn Underhill of the experiences of Madame Guyon (1647-1717), St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and William Blake (1757-1827):
Madame Guyon states in her autobiography, that when she was composing her works she would experience a sudden and irresistible inclination to take up her pen; though feeling wholly incapable of literary composition, and not even knowing the subject on which she would be impelled to write. If she resisted this impulse it was at the cost of the most intense discomfort. She would then begin to write with extraordinary swiftness; words, elaborate arguments, and appropriate quotations coming to her without reflection, and so quickly that one of her longest books was written in one and a half days. “In writing I saw that I was writing of things which I had never seen: and during the time of this manifestation, I was given light to perceive that I had in me treasures of knowledge and understanding which I did not know that I possessed.”
Similar statements are made of St. Teresa, who declared that in writing her books she was powerless to set down anything but that which her Master put into her mind. So Blake said of “Milton” and “Jerusalem,” “I have written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.”[3]
Christians who believe that the Bible as a whole is the inspired medium or mediation of God’s acts and nature tend to see the meaning of parts of the Bible in relation to the Bible as a whole, and to subsequent Christian reflection. Consider, for example, a text in Isaiah where it appears that there is a prophecy (or prediction) of Jesus: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Is 7:14). Was Jesus likely to have been in the mind of the author(s) of this text? It is highly doubtful, as it is also doubtful that they could possibly have had a concept of the Trinity. Nonetheless the meaning and significance of this passage need not be seen as confined to the original intention of the author. Rather, Christians may look back at this after Christ’s birth, life, death and (believed) resurrection and come to see that Jesus was foreshadowed in earlier texts that hint at a future act of God in saving his people.
Given the Christian conviction that God is omnipresent and active in disclosing his nature and will over time, it is natural that Christians sometimes describe revelation itself in dynamic terms. There is a scriptural reference to the word of God being alive (Heb 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active”). Arguably, a text or an event constitutes a revelation only if there is a bona fide disclosure. If the living God is not disclosed to a person studying the Bible, there is a sense in which the text is not (as it were) living or functioning as revealing or disclosing God’s life. From a Christian’s point of view, this may be a case in which God’s living word and disclosure are obscured; in its place we merely have an ancient text or a book that was at one time the most influential reference book in the Western and Near Eastern worlds. My aim here is to propose that if the Bible does authentically disclose God’s nature and will, this may be seen as a living disclosure insofar as it reveals in the present the life of God in relation to human history. Thus, if one reads and assents to a scriptural testimony about God (for example, 1 Jn 4:8: “God is love”), one thereby encounters a disclosure of God as God is, and not just as God was once thought of or experienced once upon a time.
Why Would Anyone Believe in Divine Revelation?
If there is some reason to believe there is a good God, there is some reason to believe this God would provide some means for awareness of and a relationship with God. In traditional Christianity God is seen as a powerful, loving being who calls us to a life of justice and mercy, and who especially calls persons to confession, repentance and, ultimately, a complete transformation through the redemptive life of Christ. On this view, the Bible can play a vital role in the shaping and sustaining of an individual’s and a community’s identity.
Some Christians—especially Reformed or Protestant traditions—see the Bible as the uncompromising exclusive means of a life of faith in God (this teaching is sometimes represented in the phrase sola scriptura or “Scripture only”), whereas others see the Bible as a primary source of divine revelation and definitive of faith while also appealing to tradition and reason as amplifying and serving as a source of divine revelation (Anglicans have promoted a threefold foundation for faith: Scripture, reason and tradition). But if we grant that there may be some good involved in fostering a loving relationship with God through divine revelation, we are still some distance away from having grounds that such a revelation is real.
Traditionally Christians have sought to build a case for the authenticity of the Bible as a divine disclosure on the grounds of miracles, religious experience, its internal coherence and beauty, and its coherence with what may be known of God independently through, for example, philosophical arguments. As for miracles, Christian apologists have highlighted fulfilled prophecy and eyewitness testimony about the resurrected Christ. Religious experience comes in many forms, one of which is the perceived or experiential awareness that persons seem to have of God through Scripture. As for coherence and beauty, an analogy may be useful. Imagine you come across what appears to be a manual for a machine that is highly complex and coherent, and provides a detailed, elegant account of discoveries made by using the machine that also seems coherent. Imagine, however, that there is no sign of the machine itself (the thought experiment may be likened to discovering a manual and account of a telescope or microscope before you have heard of or seen either). Of course, internal coherence, detail and beauty may define many novels that are fiction, but I suggest that a manual with sufficient coherence may be, along with a body of observations that appear to have been made possible by the machine, some evidence that there was some kind of machine at one time. Similarly, it may be argued that the beauty and coherence of the Bible can be seen as some reason to think that something like its narrative is true. This reasoning would need careful articulation (we would need to suppose that the Bible does not conflict with what is known to be false, and so on), but it could be one reason among others to entertain the Bible as divine revelation. The Bible has also been defended by philosophers who argue that it is compatible with, and confirms much of, what is known about God through independent argument.
Four Reasons for Denying Divine Revelation
In a single chapter, it is impossible to offer a full positive case for divine revelation. I shall concentrate instead on presenting and then replying to four influential objections to the idea of divine revelation, thus paving the way toward taking divine revelation seriously. Consider the following objections: the problem of fairness, the objection that the God of the Bible is vicious, the inadequacy of religious experience and an objection to miracles.
The problem of fairness. Isn’t special, divine revelation unfair? Monotheistic religions seem to support the idea that God is just, but wouldn’t it be unjust for God to privilege some people with a divine disclosure and not others? Related to this is a worry that making a claim to possessing a divine revelation could be a reflection of vanity or misplaced pride. Why think God should privilege your people or religion rather than others?
Vanity and jealousy of God. A problem with seeing the Bible as a divine revelation may lie not just in the vanity of believers in the revelation but in the apparent vices of its chief character. Richard Dawkins advances the following colorful portrait of the God of the Bible:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. . . . The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe.[4]
This charge, of course, seeks to undermine any temptation to see the Bible or its God as beautiful!
The inadequacy of religious experience. I offer only one version of this objection here, coming from Daniel Dennett, a foremost contributor to philosophy of mind. He charges that religious experience cannot possibly count as evidence for religious beliefs. Dennett is deeply suspicious of relying on the testimony of others and introspection about what people seem to experience when they feel as though they are in the presence of God or the sacred. He claims that the only reliable data that we can muster about religious experience concern the external behavior that is involved in religious avowals. So, we may study what people say and how they act when they profess to encounter the sacred, but we can make no headway with respect to their inner states. We are all, as he puts it, “outsiders” and may even lack comprehension about the nature of one’s own experiences and beliefs concerning religion.
When it comes to interpreting religious avowals of others, everybody is an outsider. Why? Because religious avowals concern matters that are beyond observation, beyond meaningful test, so the only thing anybody can go on is religious behavior, and, more specifically, the behavior of professing. A child growing up in a culture is like an anthropologist, after all, surrounded by informants whose professings stand in need of interpretation. The fact that your informants are your father and mother, and speak in your mother tongue, does not give you anything more than a slight circumstantial advantage over the adult anthropologist who has to rely on a string of bilingual interpreters to query the informants. (And think about your own case: weren’t you ever baffled or confused about just what you were supposed to believe? You know perfectly well that you don’t have privileged access to the tenets of the faith that you were raised in. I am just asking you to generalize the point, to recognize that others are in no better position.)[5]
If Dennett is correct, an appeal to the experiential testimony about divine disclosure cannot get off the ground.
The no miracles objection. The most famous case against the plausibility of miracles goes back to David Hume (1711-1776), who argued that it will always be more reasonable to conclude that reports of miracles stem from fear, a love of wonder, an overactive imagination and so on than to believe a miracle actually occurred. For Hume, a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; all the evidence of our senses that there are certain laws (e.g., laws that entail that upon physical death there is no resurrection) counts as evidence that there was no violation of the law (e.g., reports of a resurrection are not true).
It has been further argued by Bede Rundle, Matthew Bagger, Jan Narveson and others that explanations involving God are simply unacceptable. Theistic explanations do not, for example, have the adequacy and precision of scientific explanations. Jan Narveson offers the following critique of theism.
It ought to be regarded as a major embarrassment to natural theology that the very idea of something like a universe’s being “created” by some minded being is sufficiently mind-boggling that any attempt to provide a detailed account of how it might be done is bound to look silly, or mythical, or a vaguely anthropomorphized version of some familiar physical process. . . . It is plainly no surprise that details about just how all this was supposed to have happened are totally lacking when they are not, as I say, silly or simply poetic. For the fundamental idea is that some infinitely powerful mind simply willed it to be thus, and, as they say, Lo! it was so! If we aren’t ready to accept that as an explanatory description—as we should not be, since it plainly doesn’t explain anything, as distinct from merely asserting that it was in fact done—then where do we go from there? On all accounts, we at this point meet up with mystery. “How are we supposed to know the ways of the infinite and almighty God?” . . . Why does water boil when heated? The scientific story supplies an analysis of matter in its liquid state, the effects of atmospheric pressure and heat, and so on until we see, in impressive detail, just how the thing works. An explanation’s right to be called “scientific” is, indeed, in considerable part earned precisely by its ability to provide such detail.[6]
If Narveson is correct, then theistic accounts of miracles or any events in history or even creation itself are philosophically and scientifically pointless.
The Framework of Inquiry
Before replying to the four objections to divine revelation, let us consider a general point regarding philosophical inquiry. Sometimes the method we employ to describe or explain a given phenomena will unfairly lead to a substantial conclusion. I offer two examples.
Can you observe yourself? This may seem an odd question, but several philosophers have maintained that self-observation is either impossible or clearly not the case. They believe that the self is not an individual thing or subject that one can observe. David Hume offered the following case for the conclusion that a person either does not or cannot observe himself.
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.[7]
Hume’s thesis has some plausibility. It would be odd to think one can observe oneself the way one observes a color or hears a noise or detects pain. Before accepting his conclusion, however, it is important to question Hume’s framework. Hume assumes that if you can observe yourself, you will be like an object of experience in your visual field or in some sense in front of you. But this is not the only framework. Consider an alternative thesis: you experience yourself in virtually all your experiences and can make due observation of yourself. When you feel pain, don’t you feel yourself in pain? When you feel heat, aren’t you yourself feeling hot? When you see color, it is you who are experiencing (for example) the blue and green. When you love something, don’t you experience yourself as loving (or have self-awareness of yourself as a lover)? Hume’s case against self-observation has traction as long as we do not allow for the possibility of a broader framework in which to recognize the self.
My point here is not that Hume is obviously wrong or that merely shifting frameworks decisively refutes his stance. My point, rather, is that if you broaden your method to consider both Hume’s method as well as take seriously philosophers who believe we observe the self as a substantial subject that has sensations and so on, then we are better able to reach a fair conclusion.
A second case where it seems that frameworks can interrupt open inquiry concerns free will. Some philosophers deny that we have the freedom to act in ways that are not fully determined because they only recognize two possibilities when it comes to human behavior: either the behavior is determined or it is random. Given those alternatives, the idea that a person could act responsibly in a way that is not determined looks quite hopeless. After all, can a person be responsible if her “free” acts are actually random (or without cause)? The case for freedom opens up only when you consider the possibility that our apparent experience of freedom involves a third possibility: persons have the power to consider more than one act and to make a choice between them when they could do otherwise. There is not space to fill in all the details, but the main point to note is that open-ended, fair-minded inquiry should, at least in principle, be open to a third form of explanation.
These observations about the importance of frameworks are intended to pave the way for considering the four objections to divine revelation.
Four Replies and Some Positive Reasons for Recognizing Divine Revelation
The problem of fairness. The objection from fairness assumes that a just, all-good God would not distribute goods that gave only some persons unearned or undeserved advantages. Taken to an extreme, this sort of objection might rule out God creating creatures with unequal powers that conferred unmerited advantages of any kind. Would a fair creation have to be homogenous or only modestly differentiated? I do not think so, given the good of fecundity or plentitude (bonum variationis). Insisting on some strictly equal distribution of goods makes sense if the framework is an elected official distributing a surplus, but the framework of creation does not seem to require equality or homogeneity. But apart from questioning whether a good creator can allow for different degrees of power and value in the created order, it should be noted that Judaism and Christianity hold that the special divine revelation as embodied or conveyed through the Bible is intended for all people. The goal is equal access to divine revelation for all.
The idea that God would have a “chosen people” has traditionally been understood as a means of blessing all people. In Genesis 28:14 (NASB) the divine revelation of God to Jacob is couched in terms of a universal blessing: “Your descendants will . . . spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendents shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Followers of Christ are enjoined or commissioned to welcome all into a fellowship made possible by the divine disclosure in Christ. In the course of conveying this divine revelation more people come to have their own encounter with the living Word of God.
It should also be appreciated that divine revelation can be humbling and burdensome. Part of the content of the biblical revelation is a story of human evil, violence, murder, rape and so on. The Bible as a whole does not offer a flattering portrait of human life at its best. Hence, the charge that biblical devotion may be a reflection of human vanity is not compelling.
The idea that divine revelation is to be extended humbly and lovingly by persons reflects the biblical understanding of God as personal or as a person. J. R. Lucas draws out the implications of thinking about God in personal terms:
If God is a person, it follows that our relations with God are personal relations. . . . God is not a Thing. Nor is he an Idea. If we were Platonists, we might believe that there was some technique whereby we could emancipate ourselves from the shackles of our earthly existence and put ourselves on a level with the Forms. But God, being a living spirit, has a different sort of existence from the dead timelessness of the Forms. Knowledge of him is not like knowledge of mathematical truths, which any man can set himself to come to know, but like knowledge of persons, and is essentially an interchange between two parties, requiring not only our wish to know, but his willingness to be known.[8]
Because biblical revelation is essentially the revelation of a divine person, there is some fittingness to the notion that divine revelation itself is to be personally communicated (Mt 28:19, 20). The Bible does, indeed, locate divine revelation as specific and focused in its inception and reception, and revelation is received at one place and time in human history in order to be communicated personally throughout the world. Because of this call to make divine revelation universally accessible, the objection from unfairness seems to be met.
The vanity and jealousy of God. Dawkins’s portrait of God requires a lengthy reply, but here I shall have to focus on his charge that the God of the Bible is vain and jealous. If we think only of earthly rulers or human beings, the desire to be worshiped is the height of vanity. And for an earthly ruler to be jealous of any other ruler and to desire for our complete fealty seems also to be a matter of megalomania. But if we take seriously the biblical and subsequent theological identification of God with goodness, matters change.
If God is essentially good (God can do no evil) and the goods of the cosmos reflect God’s goodness (for example, there would not be the good of friendship between persons unless God created and sustains them in being), then to worship God is to take delight in and respond in reverence and awe to goodness itself. Worship is not, then, paying compliments to a massive ego but reverencing the goodness that makes created goods possible.
God is depicted as jealous in the Bible, but is jealousy always a vice? Imagine, again, that God is good, and a relationship with God is itself good. What would be amiss if, say, a creature’s desire for self-destruction aroused God to call this person back to a good life of harmony with God and if this calling was out of jealousy? Assuming God to be the good creator of all, this would not be akin to a human being making inappropriate claims to a relationship with another human being.
But even if we used human jealousy as an analogy or image of God’s character, would this be a matter of vice? Image a healthy, good relationship between parents and a child until the child goes to school and becomes infatuated with an alcoholic, drug-pushing, pornography-watching, narcissistic philosophy professor whom the child calls “Daddy.” Wouldn’t the parents properly feel jealous (as well as perhaps angry) in response to this scenario? The biblical portrait of a jealous God can be part of the biblical injunction to live fully and forsake violence: “Choose life in order that you may live” (Deut 30:19 NASB).
Dawkins’s failure to recognize the centrality of goodness in the Christian concept of God is explicit in his book The God Delusion. Dawkins defines what he calls “the God Hypothesis”:
There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. . . . Goodness is not part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add on.[9]
But in Christian tradition, goodness is the key reference point, the essential mark of divinity and no mere “add on” or afterthought. This is also central to Judaism. The Bible offers a progressive or evolving portrait of God, beginning with a divine revelation to a nomadic “desert tribe” and then reaching out to the breathtaking dimensions of the great Hebrew prophets with their universal teachings of peace and justice (Isaiah, Jeremiah). The key to answering Dawkins lies, in part, in taking seriously the theistic framework in which goodness is the central nature of God.
Dennett’s religious experience. Is the case for treating the Bible as a divine disclosure stymied because we simply are complete outsiders to the experience of others and because religious experience is (by its very nature) “beyond observation”? In this reply I shall use what philosophers call an ad hominem argument. I have chosen to focus on Dennett both because of the popularity of his work and because he represents an important case of a situation where the framework he uses to reject religious experiences is so severe that he himself is not able to maintain it consistently.
First, I simply note that Dennett denies what many of those who have religious experiences assert, namely that they have an observational or experimental awareness of the divine. I have defended the evidential force of such experiences elsewhere, as have William Alston, Keith Yandell, Caroline Davis and others.[10] But here I note that Dennett’s skepticism about accessing other people’s states of mind is in conflict with what he reports as accessing the thoughts and experiences of his child.
In the same book in which he professes only to study “the behavior of professing” and to forgo trying to decipher “the inner mind,” Dennett offers the following account for how he managed to grasp and alter “the inner mind” of his daughter.
One’s parents—or whoever are hard to distinguish from one’s parents—have something approaching a dedicated hotline to acceptance, not as potent as hypnotic suggestion, but sometimes close to it. Many years ago, my five-year-old daughter, attempting to imitate the gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s performance on the horizontal bar, tipped over the piano stool and painfully crushed two of her fingertips. How was I going to calm down this terrified child so I could safely drive her to the emergency room? Inspiration struck: I held my own hand near her throbbing little hand and sternly ordered: “Look, Andrea! I’m going to teach you a secret! You can push the pain into my hand with your hand. Go ahead, push! Push!” She tried—and it worked! She’d “pushed the pain” into Daddy’s hand. Her relief (and fascination) were instantaneous. The effect lasted only for minutes, but with a few further administrations of impromptu hypnotic analgesia along the way, I got her to the emergency room, where they could give her the further treatment she needed. (Try it with your own child, if the occasion arises. You may be similarly lucky.) I was exploiting her instincts—though the rationale didn’t occur to me until years later, when I was reflecting on it. (This raises an interesting empirical question: would my attempt at instant hypnosis have worked as effectively on some other five-year-old, who hadn’t imprinted on me as an authority figure? And if imprinting is implicated, how young must a child be to imprint so effectively on a parent? Our daughter was three months old when we adopted her.)[11]
Dennett is seeking to bolster the claim that religious beliefs can achieve authority though parental and other authorities using quasi-hypnotic techniques. In this story, Dennett does not treat his daughter (nor does she treat him) as an outsider; Dennett seems perfectly willing to reference subjective mental experiences that go well beyond his daughter’s verbal profession of pain and her physical behavior. I would go so far as to claim that the above case seems like a straightforward incident of when the daughter felt the love of her solicitous, caring father.
Dennett’s framework for critiquing religious testimony would not only sweep away the testimony of Kim Phuc, it would make nonsense of his shared emotional loving bond with his daughter. If Dennett can access the inner mind of his daughter, anthropologists can assess and evaluate the inner minds of religious believers. More modestly, I propose this anecdote reveals that in many cases we can assess a person’s inner states (the daughter’s apparent observation of her father’s love, for examples), and so we should at least be open to the profession of the religious believer to experience the presence of a sacred, divine reality.[12]
No miracles? If one assumes at the outset that theism is false, no reported miracles need to be taken seriously. But it is becoming harder to dismiss theism out of hand. Daniel Dennett does in a handful of pages of Breaking the Spell, but he is evidently unaware of the revival of theism in philosophy since the 1970s.[13] If one allows for the possibility of theism, however, Hume’s and Narveson’s verdicts are not at all self-evident.
Narveson’s own outlook raises a question similar to the one raised about Dennett. In his framework he may rule out not only divine agency but also human agency. He suggests that we should not accept explanations in which an agent willed that something take place and “Lo!, it was so.” He appears to want some kind of complex mediation as in an account of water boiling in terms of atomic particles and heat. Two points are worth making in reply: If human activity is genuinely to be accounted for in terms of reasons and desires (I turned on a light switch so that I could see you), then my reasons cannot be reduced to or undermined by an impersonal scientific account as to why I turned on the switch. Arguably, persons must have a basic power to act on reasons. Thus power is enabled, supported and limited by our brains, our anatomy and environment, but its power is not something that can be eliminated from a plausible account of human agency. Second, most accounts of physical causation allow that on a foundational material level, some causal powers are basic and not further explainable. Why does a quarter have a certain spin? Eventually (to avoid an infinite regress) one has to posit basic powers. If there are basic powers possessed at the subatomic level, why can’t persons themselves have basic powers? I suggest that explanations by human agents are intelligible in part because we take purposive, reasoned explanations as basic and not substituted by impersonal forces. If so, there is no reason in principle to dispatch with explanations that appeal to divine agency.
As for a positive case for the experience of God through the Bible, this is a matter of assessing not just theories and probabilities but values.
Looking for Values
So far I have largely sought to clear the ground for recognizing divine revelation, rather than argue in detail, for example, that it is reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Christ and therefore to plausibly believe that this life needs to be seen as involving more than natural causes and events. I refer you to Richard Swinburne’s fine work The Resurrection of God Incarnate for detailed argument. I want to conclude this chapter with the proposal that when you do look further into such detailed arguments, you consider not just frameworks but the overall values that are at stake. I will back this proposal up with a tragic illustration.
The greatest opponent of miracle reports, David Hume, was a racist or, more technically, a white supremacist. This does not itself undermine his case against miracles in the slightest. But there is an interesting, similar pattern in Hume’s case against miracles and his case against reports of black intelligence. Here is a notorious passage that captures Hume’s prejudice against blacks:
I am apt to suggest the Negroes and in general all of the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have all still something eminent about them, in their valor, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people without education will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.[14]
Hume may begin this passage with “I am apt to suspect”; however, this show of tentativeness quickly gives way. By his estimation, there has been a uniform and constant association of whites and superior intelligence. He acknowledges reports of exceptions (the man from Jamaica) but dismisses this talk in light of his view of the regular, uniform, exceptionless character of nature. He is so convinced of this that he offers an explanation of ostensible anomalies. It is more probable (likely) that blacks merely simulate intelligence, the way a bird may merely simulate language, without being intelligent; presumably both may be accounted for within the bounds of what Hume conceives the laws of nature to be.
Hume’s strategy was to define the nature of black persons so as to make any reported exceptions to nature implausible. He does the same thing with reported miracles. He defines nature as an arena in which, if there is a reported miracle, it amounts to a report of an event that violates nature.
Hume was aware in his day both that there were widespread reports of miracles historically and that there were reports of intelligence among nonwhites. The man from Jamaica was Francis Williams, who held a degree from Cambridge University, headed a school and was known for his Latin poetry. There were some ten thousand blacks in London during Hume’s tenure there. A black American poet, Phillis Wheatly (1753-1784), went to London where she publicly wrote and received poetry. Why wasn’t Hume open to taking Wheatly and other remarkable black artists, scholars and so on seriously? I believe he was not open to such counterevidence because he defined nature in such a way as to make reports of black intelligence profoundly implausible. The tragic results of this racial foreclosure are that Hume lost both an appreciation for the abundant, evident goods that stem from productive interracial activity, and he provided reasons that were employed by slave owners to practice their race-based slavery. By not being open to black equality, he encouraged white supremacy.
The lesson to draw from Hume’s predicament is not that Hume was wrong about blacks and thus wrong about God and divine revelation. All a follower of Hume needs to do is to separate the cases and claim Hume was wrong about blacks and right about God. And it could be that, if Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and other New Atheists are right about religion being poisonous (to use Hitchens’s phrase), we may have a moral reason to encourage a highly skeptical evaluation of the credibility of religion. But if, like Kim Phuc, we find in religion (or at least in a biblically based religion) more of an antidote than a poison, we have reason to make sure our frameworks do not rule out what may be of profound value. Given the possibility that divine religion provides us with a means for an authentic, transforming encounter with God, then a framework broader than Hume’s, Dennett’s, Dawkins’s and Narveson’s is worthy of pursuit. This section may be summarized succinctly: provided one has the same reason to be open to theism, one should not define nature and explanations so as to make recognizing divine presence as difficult as Hume made recognizing blacks’ intelligence.
The overall case for recognizing and experiencing the Bible as God’s living word will depend on your overall view of nature, history and values. As you consider the merit (or supposed demerits) of the Bible, one thing is crucial not to omit: it is one thing to look at the Bible, but if you only look at it, your investigation will be as limited as if you only looked at a telescope. I also recommend trying to look through the Bible to see what or who might be revealed through it.[15]
For Further Reading
Abraham, William. Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006.
Hume, David. Of National Characters. London: Longmans, 1886.
———. A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Harvard University Press, 1888.
Lucas, J. R. Freedom and Grace. London: SPCK, 1976.
Manson, N. A., ed. God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science. London: Routledge, 2003.
Swinburne, Richard. Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Taliaferro, Charles. Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.
———. Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Reason Within the Bounds of Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976.
———. Divine Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.