God and Revelation

Abstract

This chapter will be concerned solely with revelation of true propositions. It will not be concerned with truths which God supposedly conveys to particular humans which are of importance only for those humans (for example, that he wishes a particular human to pursue a particular vocation), but only with those truths which are supposedly of importance for all humans (even if they concern a privilege or command given to a particular individual or tribe). This chapter will also follow the normal theological understanding of a ‘revealed truth’ as one which is to be believed on the ground that God has told us that it is true, even if—as with some purportedly revealed truths—it is also a truth which some of us could discover for ourselves if we were clever enough and so is said to be discoverable by ‘natural reason’. Christianity and Islam have both strongly affirmed that God has told us truths of great importance for human life, which we should believe because he has told them to us; and hence this category of ‘revealed’ truths. Many recent thinkers, beginning with the eighteenth-century ‘Deists’ such as Voltaire and including some twentieth-century Christian theologians, have claimed that all we can know about God and morality is what our ‘natural reason’ can show us, and that we can have (or at least do not have) any knowledge of truths revealed by God. The chapter argues that it is possible for us to have such knowledge, and that we have the criteria to assess the competing claims of different religions to possess such truths.