The Desirability of Revelation

Before my extended absence and my couple digressions onto other loosely related topics, I was examining what conclusions can be drawn after having admitted that all of the world before us exhibits form which seems to require its design by some intelligence. Supposing this, there is actually very little that can be concluded with any confidence. I suggested the possibility of direct revelation from the intelligence.

I can imagine many would shirk at such a suggestion, preferring pure reason and universal experience to the words offered of one or more people. We recognize that in our world, the words of people are unreliable. There is a thing called lying, and because such a thing is possible we cannot always trust everything that everyone says. The mere fact that two people may say two different things which are exclusive of one another is sufficient proof of this. There are a lot of "scriptures" out there, and they can't all be right, and there's no way of knowing whether the authors are lying or not, so there's no good reason to trust them. However, it should also be noted that pure reason and experience are deceptive as well. Over the ages, philosophies inspired by reason have been just as multitudinous as religions inspired by the words of others. We recognize that appearances can be deceiving because appearances, too, can lead us to contradictions. There is nothing more or less perfect about reason--on this criteria alone--than about revelation, yet philosophy has for a long time hoped and assumed that it is.

Consider, however, the words of the intelligence, if there are any available. For convenience, I will refer to the intelligence in the singular masculine. When talking about an intelligent designer, we have implicitly assumed that this intelligence is qualitatively similar to that shared by human beings if not quantitatively. One peculiar feature of this intelligence is the ability of communication, that the ideas of one intelligent being can be shared with another such being. I may at times use the concept of "words" interchangeably with "ideas" as used in the preceding sentence; do not be surprised by this. Therefore, communication between an intelligent designer and humanity is at least not inherently impossible.

Now, the words of the designer are either fully true, at some point false, or have no truth value at all--that is, it is a collection of words either with no meaning or it is purely subjective. I am hesitant to say this last option is a real option to be considered, but for the benefit of the doubt I'll let it stand. Whatever the case, in all but the first option, these words would be inadequate for our purposes. We desire truth. If the intelligence's words are at some point false, then to find truth we would need a measure by which to judge his words; the best candidate, it seems, is the reason and experience of man, and if we go with that, we may as well have trusted that from the beginning. If the intelligence's words have no truth value at all, then of course they will be worthless for finding truth. Supposing his words are false or foolishness (or even true), this still provides us with some small glimpse into the nature of the intelligence that we are dealing with. Namely, we know that he is unreliable. If he is unreliable, is there any reason to suppose that that which he shaped will be more reliable and more knowable than he? Yet it was the reliable nature of the patterns of the world that led toward an intelligent designer in the first place. The argument is loose, I concede, but on the surface our limited assumption of an intelligent designer seems more consistent with his being reliable.

If he is reliable, then his words are to be trusted above all else. Having been the designer of this world, his knowledge of the world would be extensive and complete; he could not be deceived in this regard. I suspect that no one is really afraid that, if an intelligent designer chose to speak with humanity, that he would somehow get his words all wrong. The real fear is that humanity, upon reception, has changed these words around, or that humanity calls revelation that which is not at all. This is the root of the distrust of "scriptures." If we could be confident in finding some imparting of words from the designer to the designed, then in those claims, at least, we may be assured of having found answers to these uncertainties. Our hope is that, if the designer has chosen to give any words at all, its words are sufficient for living in this world, since he would, after all, know the world well enough to know what was sufficient for life in it.