Over the years, I have written a lot about the reason/revelation debate, particularly as manifest in the thought of Leo Strauss and Charles Darwin. I have made five claims.
First, I have agreed with Catherine and Michael Zuckert in identifying Strauss as a zetetic philosopher--as someone devoted to Socratic inquiry into the nature of the whole without expecting to achieve full knowledge of the whole, who makes a rational choice for philosophy over revelation but without ever refuting revelation.
Second, I have identified Charles Darwin as a zetetic scientific philosopher in choosing evolutionary science over Biblical creationism, while recognizing that he could not refute the revelation of God as the First Cause of natural evolutionary history, which would support theistic evolution.
Third, I have argued that the Darwinian liberalism that emerged during Darwin's lifetime promoted the public debate over reason and revelation that was revived by Strauss, which shows how the liberal social order secures the freedom of thought that allows people to freely choose between the philosophic life, as satisfying the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and the religious life, as satisfying the natural desire for religious transcendence.
Fourth, I have said that the success of Darwinian liberalism over the past two hundred years has made esoteric writing undesirable and unnecessary, so that now the choice between reason and revelation can be an open and public debate, because in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the practical life of the many.
Fifth, although the zetetic scientific philosophers cannot refute revelation, they can show that revelation suffers from such obscurity that religious believers cannot agree on what is religious orthodoxy, and consequently, as Locke said, "everyone is orthodox to himself," which supports the need for religious toleration and liberty.
As one illustration of the last point, I have pointed out that neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among Christians over creation and evolution.
Another illustration of the obscurity of revelation is in the disagreement among Christians about the afterlife in Heaven and Hell. In some ways, this is the crucial teaching of Christianity because it's the question of the eternal destiny or final end of human beings in the cosmos: Will we achieve eternal happiness in Heaven or eternal misery in Hell?
In my next three posts, I will take up the question of Hell. And I will argue that neither biblical revelation, nor traditional revelation, nor natural revelation provide Christians with a clear teaching about Hell on which they can agree.
The zetetic scientific philosopher will infer from this that either God has not revealed the truth about Hell, or He has, but He has failed to reveal it clearly enough to be understood by all (or at least most) believers.
Then, in subsequent posts, I will take up the question of Heaven, and argue that the revelation of Heaven has been just as obscure as the revelation of Hell.
2 comments:
What would it mean to "refute revelation"? If you accept the existence of a sufficiently powerful and knowing deity, then it follows trivially that this deity could reveal things we would not otherwise know. And if it could, perhaps it did. But how do we assess the claim that something purporting to be a revelation actually is, versus other purported revelations that are not, in fact, revelations? I suppose that if a purported revelation were sufficiently specific and addressed things we could figure out for ourselves, along with the imponderables, we could check whether those revelations were true, and, if they were not, reject the claim that the proffered revelation was, in fact, a genuine revelation. But if the purported revelation sticks to things that can't otherwise be known, then what? Is revelation self-certifying?
My argument here is that while we cannot refute revelation, we can show that the purported revelation of doctrines like Heaven and Hell have not been clear enough that religious believers can agree on what they mean. This creates the problem of religious pluralism--that believers disagree about what counts as orthodoxy. If this is so, then either there has been no true revelation, or there has been a revelation, but it's too obscure to be understood. This is what I call the failure of the Holy Spirit.
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