Thank you for your answer.
You’re welcome.
You say that revelation is only useful to the person who experiences it. But you don’t consider it to be evidence. Do you mean that revelation in general is thus no justifying evidence for a certain reality? Or do you mean that it is also no justifying evidence for the person who experiences it, so that he has no justifying reason to believe in this reality, and his beliefs are therefore wrong?
Well, it’s hard to say, but I would generally take the position that “revelations” are dubious pieces of evidence at best, even to the people who experience them.
For example, if a voice spoke to me and revealed some “truth” that I couldn’t confirm in any other way, I would be incredibly skeptical. I’m aware of the capacity of the human mind and the senses to fool themselves, and I doubt that I would take the “revelation” as evidence of anything other than something weird that I can’t explain.
But certainly
my revelation would not be reason enough for anyone else to believe in my claims, no matter how sincerely I might (or might not) believe in them.
Is this an argument to dismiss revelation as false? You seem to argue that if person A has a revelation that he experiences to be X, and person B has a revelation that he experiences to be Y, revelation must be false since X unequals Y.
Not “must be.” But it casts doubt on the idea of revelation. If two people could experience “revelation” and have contradictory ideas revealed, then clearly one of them is fooling himself (and fooling himself convincingly enough for him to sincerely believe in his revelation).
My only point is that if one person is fooling himself, isn’t it possible that both are fooling themselves?
And more to the point, if there is one divine truth that is actually contacting people, why aren’t its messages clearer? Surely an onmipotent being could transcend language barriers and give an unambiguous, consistent message to all people.
Different groups of people all coming up with different “inspired” stories is precisely what we’d expect to see in a completely natural universe. If different groups of people – most of whom having no contact with each other – independently had the same exact information revealed to them, then that would be pretty compelling evidence that something supernatural is going on. But we don’t see that. We see human beings making up stories.
You cannot define revelation as X or Y, and people don’t experience it the same way. A lot of people experience something supernatural. A lot claim to experience God. A lot even claim to experience God in a personal way. How they describe that experience and how it shapes their worldview differs immensely. It’s dependant on language, culture, tradition, time, etc. But that is obviously not an argument against the existence of revelation itself.
And here we have it. You’ve just made up an unfalsifiable story that explains away all of the inconsistencies (“it’s really one truth, but it’s experienced in so many different ways since it’s filtered through the limited perspectives of individuals”).
Your story may in fact be true, but we have no way of ascertaining that. And further, we have a lot of good evidence that all of this “supernatural perception” stuff is natural and tied to brain chemistry (there was a fairly famous experiment where they were able to trigger “spiritual” experiences by stimulating the brain in various places; subjects invariably described this experience in different cultural terms, as you indicate above).
So it certainly seems, from the evidence we’ve gathered, that all of this depends on brain chemistry – any further claims would have to be supported by further evidence. There’s no reason to think that any of the “supernatural” stuff is actually supernatural and a lot of reason to think that it’s all natural.
