What If It's True?

The Irrational Rationality of Revelation

Photo by Larry George II on Unsplash

I recently finished reading NYT’s columnist, Ross Douthat’s, new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, in which he makes the argument that religion is the only rational response to the irrational mystery of existence. Though Douthat’s orientation is distinctly Christian, he makes a cogent interspiritual, rational case for why science alone can’t explain the unexplainable, as well the faults of “mix-and-match” feel-good, New Atheist, and modern spirituality.

I agree with much of his premise and his proofs, but the sticking point for me has always been the idea of “revelation,” which he argues is fundamental to the rational value of many religions. The Abrahamics— Judaism, Christianity and Islam —but also Zoroastrianism, Bah’aism, Hinduism, sects of Buddhism, and even sects of Daoism declare that the truths of their beliefs were revealed to their mystical founders through the voice of God or some other deity or power to someone who heard that revelation.

First of all, that posits that there is some deity or being or some supernatural force to “speak.” For non-theists or purely scientific rationalists, that’s a hard hurdle to jump. If you believe the universe to be random or governed only by forces of physics, chemistry and biology, revelation is a non-starter. It’s as improbable – and as irrational - as unicorns and fairies. Even for people who believe in a “God” of some sort, perhaps just as the creative principle of the universe, as I do, the idea that He/She/It/They could reveal the truth of the universe and the mysteries of creation to humans – and that we would hear it, let alone understand it – seems equally as irrationally far-fetched.

In general, I would fall into the into the later category. Though I do believe there is some creative force/process/principle/reality that is greater than us, I am not sure it “speaks” or that I hear it, let alone grasp what I am being told. That feels too anthropomorphized for me and gives my human pea-brain way too much credit. But after reading Douthat’s book, I began to feel a little uncomfortable with my self-assured belief in the impossibility of some sort of divine revelation. How do I know “It” doesn’t “speak” to us in some way? How can lil’ ole’ me be so absolutely certain I am right?

So, I played a thought experiment with myself, and proposed to explore the very thing I resisted. I asked myself, “What if it’s actually true? What if there really was and is such thing as divine revelation? And what if the revelations in our sacred texts are not only possible, but true?”

Much to my surprise, I was shocked by with what I came up with.

If you look at the etymology of the word, “revelation,” it means uncovering something hidden, as in “revealed.” The “knower” learns something that they didn’t know before because it was secret, hidden, or inaccessible. OK, there’s really no magical woo-woo there. We receive revelations all the time in all kinds of mundane ways. For example, we might discover that our partner is cheating on us, or that politician X is really a serial embezzler or sex offender. The hidden truth has been revealed to us.

In a literary model, revelation of this sort is the basis of the “tell-all” memoir genre in non-fiction, as well as the thriller or mystery novel. We humans love a good secret and the uncovering of that secret. It’s inherently satisfying to our curious minds that want “to know.”

Likewise, when we look at our sacred books, we find that many of the main characters also uncover the answers to secrets. Big secrets. These are the prophets, and their discoveries form the basis of a theology, and later, a religion. For some, that’s satisfactory: answers are revealed. But for the rest of us, that’s where we say, “Oh, no. Not possible.”

Why? What’s the difference?

One of the distinctions here is that in the secular model, the revelation comes about through human effort: the detective or other characters in the story dig around and put clues together, and voilá, they find the truth that was hidden. This makes sense to our modern, human-centered, rational minds. We like to think we can figure it all out and these stories affirm our “supernatural” intellectual powers.

But in our sacred stories, humans aren’t making the effort: it just happens through deus ex machina, bolts of lightning, voices in the rocks, embodied gods on the back of a chariot, or in burning bushes. In other words, it is revealed through no effort on the human part. It’s not intellectual or a process of deductive reasoning. The source of it is supernatural; not us. It’s experiential, and cannot be rationally explained or acquired. It’s a gift or…a Revelation.

And that’s the part that’s hard for us unbelievers. Revelation of this sort disempowers us. It actually humbles us. “What? We aren’t the all-powerful, all-knowing?” We’re also skeptical. It’s all too easy to dismiss supernatural voices in thunder and writing on stones as some kind of woo-woo magic, or simply a literary device designed to make gullible humans toe the line. We’re too smart for that.

But is it? Are we?

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Recognizing my own ego, skepticism and post-Enlightenment worldview, I started asking myself logical questions.

Question 1: How often, whether in deep meditation, or just before waking up, or in some kind of consciousness altering ceremony, do you get an “Aha! moment?” What about those strange coincidences or déjà vu? Or “knowing” something there is no way you could really know? In other words, how often do you receive some kind of wisdom from some source that there is no rational explanation for, and for which you weren’t doing any digging?

Answer: I get them all the time. Rarely are they on the level of ultimate knowledge about Life, The Universe, and Everything, but sometimes, I do get glimpses into those mysteries, and I can’t tell you where they come from. Some might say we tap into the Great Consciousness of the Universe (which we can’t really explain), but isn’t that just another “non-theistic” word for “God,” or, as Douthat explains, a scientific rationale for “I don’t actually know?”

Conclusion: Yes, it appears to be possible that we humans can receive information or knowledge from some source that isn’t just our own hard-working brain, and we don’t really know where it comes from or what that is.

Question 2: Is it possible, then, that the prophets of old had similar experiences?

Answer: Why not? They weren’t so different from us.

Conclusion: Yes, it is possible that the prophets of our ancient religious past had similar experiences of receiving knowledge from some unknown source.

Question 3: When you get those unbidden downloads that open a window into something deeply mysterious, do you discount them as mere hallucinations, or do you give them some credence? Is it possible that these flashes of insight are real?

Answer: I would say that most often, we take these “revelations” or insights to be true, at least partially. We are often willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, entertaining the possibility of some kind of relationship to reality. I certainly do (unless they are clearly nonsense or my own hyper-active imagination).

Conclusion: Yes, it is possible that these “revelations” might be true, if even only partially, and might have some bearing on reality.

Question 4: If we think our “revelations” or insights have some veracity, would it not follow that we might take the revelations of the prophets in our sacred texts also to be at least partially true? Can we give them the benefit of the doubt?

Answer: Why not?

Conclusion: Yes, it is possible that the revelations in our sacred texts might be true.

That changes everything.

Because, logically, if I accept that revelation is possible, I also have to accept that there is some kind of mysterious “other” that is the source of that revelation. And if I accept my own “revelations” or mysterious insights as true, whether in whole or in part, I also have to accept that the revelations of prophets recorded in our sacred texts might also be true.

But, unless I take the whole of the revelation to be true, I have to decide which parts I take to be true or which parts are untrue. That’s problematic. I might be able to determine which parts of my personal revelation are true and which parts are just my deranged imagination, but who am I to decide what is true revelation in someone else’s context, and what isn’t? Sorry, but that seems way above my pay grade.

I am not saying that every single line in the Bible or Qur’an or other “revealed” text be taken literally, or that all the narratives that flesh out the story are factual or historically accurate (for example, there is zero archeological proof of the actual Exodus though that story contains one of the deepest, most important revelations in the Bible, the Ten Commandments). But logically, if we accept that divine revelation is possible and possibly true, how can we truthfully, accurately say one part isn’t, but one part is?

I mean, these texts are thousands of years old, and millions - billions - of other people give them credence, so while I have the right to question their truth, I have to consider that by trying to parse out which parts I personally decide to be true or not, I might be completely full of myself or just trying to maintain an illusion of control to defend myself from falling down the irrational rabbit hole of fundamentalist blind faith. In other words, I have to take the reality and truth of revelation as a whole. It’s either true and real, or not.

This is hard for me, and I suspect for many of us because my thought experiment logically proves the opposite of what most of us want to believe. In modern spirituality, we don’t want any supernatural weirdness. We want a rational explanation for belief in which we are still in control, which is why Western Buddhism, and even Liberal Protestantism, Unity, New Thought, New Atheism, dumbed-down Daoism, and Humanistic Judaism have such appeal: there’s zero woo-woo. Revelation is disregarded. It’s all about us. It’s all in our minds. We are the masters of all knowledge, our destiny and the universe, and if there ever was a god, well, she’s been on vacation for millennia.

On the other hand, some of us find tremendous appeal in FULL woo-woo, which allows us to believe we live in a magical universe that is speaking to us all the time, and which we can also control (calling on Angels, casting spells, praying with crystals, etc.). That’s Pantheism, magical thinking, or simply escapism. It feels good. There’s no one god controlling the universe, let alone making harsh demands on us, and whatever deities there might be are kind of cute.

But divine revelation as described in our sacred texts is not full-on woo-woo. It’s also NOT rational, especially since it’s not our job – or even within our capacity -- to decide which parts of it are true, or to determine that the source of that revelation isn’t real. We don’t know. We can’t control it, and sometimes, it insistently demands our attention and response. Moreover, the source of this “revelation” is anything but cute: it’s powerful and kind of frightening.

That’s why many of us reject the idea or reality of divine revelation as taught to us, and the religions that are based on it. It is just too far-out there, and it leaves us feeling simultaneously obligated and powerless.

But I am not so sure I can completely reject it anymore. And that’s kind of scary.

I have been doing a deep dive into the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) lately, and when seen through this lens of revelation-as-true, the text comes to life in a much different way than simply as a mythical tale, theological treatise, or narrative construction. It carries a gravitas and mystery that, even as a spiritual teacher and minister well versed in the text, I never fully gave it before.

If I actually allow myself to accept that YHVH spoke to Adam and Eve, or to Noah, or to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Moses then the whole of the story takes on an entirely different meaning. I actually have to look more closely at Genesis and the creation story, or the giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, and even the books of the prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, or the Psalms of David, or parts of the New Testament (or even the entire premise of Jesus), and consider that they, too, might be true. After all, I can’t decide what is or is not true, can I?

I might also have to take as true what God tells specific people to do, about the nature of this divine source, and the specific details of the lives and journey of a certain group of people to and within the land. I might even have to suspend my disbelief when the text says things about the future that there’s no way the writers could ever have known that ACTUALLY ended up happening, i.e. I have to accept the reality of prophecy. And I need to understand this story not just as a fanciful narrative vehicle for moral and ethical instruction, but as something that might actually tell us something true about the nature of being, the mysteries of existence, WHY behaving well is important and what happens when we don’t.

Lastly, I might actually have to accept that this divine source of revelation might not only be real, but that it can “speak” to us. Not in a white-bearded, dude-in-the-sky anthropomorphized way, but in a much more mysterious and profound way that we cannot name or categorize.

That’s a lot to swallow.

I get it if my talking this way about the Bible freaks you out: it kind of freaks me out, too. But even if the Bible isn’t your thing, you could do the same with the Qur’an, The Bhagavad Gita or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all of which ask you to accept that revelation is not only possible, but true, and that whomever/whatever was revealing it, might be real.

Trust me: it opens up a whole new world. It might still freak you out, but it also might change things for you, too. I know one thing that happened for me in this process was that my daily walk in the woods became mystical. Not that I was seeing fairies and wood nymphs or talking to the trees, or that God suddenly came swinging in on the breeze like Tarzan, but that something mysterious opened up and the forest, with all it’s infinite, mind-blowing, creative, complexity became almost tangibly, 4-dimensionally real, true, and very, very close. I even had a glimpse of the pattern we might call Existence. If I had wanted to see that as a revelation of the power, majesty, everything-everywhere-all-at-once, awesomeness of that thing we call God “speaking” to me through the forest, it very well might have been. This is the “experience” of God at the basis of any revelation and of faith, itself.

Since I can’t truthfully say it wasn’t that, I’ll take it.

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While I am not quite ready to jump into the ring with the True Believers, I find a strange comfort in at least considering that all the truths revealed by the prophets who claim to have heard “God,” might actually be true, and that they received these revelations from a powerful source I cannot name or understand that can actually do that. It’s like realizing that it’s not all on my puny human shoulders to decide or figure out how all this works. It’s kind of a relief.

But it’s not the security-blanket it appears to be, and which non-rationalists contend makes religion “the opiate of the masses.” Accepting the truth of revelation and all that it requires also creates a sense of deep humility and trembling fear in the face of that power and mystery, as well as awe and reverence for the revelation itself and the prophets to whom it was revealed. I will even go so far as to say it engenders that dreaded, anti-rational “faith,” along with an urgent sense of moral clarity and obligation to do the right thing. It’s actually the opposite of feel-good, convenient spirituality.

Most compellingly, though I could simply dismiss it all as fabulistic poppy-cock, and go back to thinking I know everything, I can’t rationally or satisfyingly argue against it’s possibility —or even it’s reality— with any proof that isn’t an overly intellectualized solipsistic or tautological one with no basis in reality…or by claiming to be delusional or psychotic.

I don’t think I am delusional or psychotic.

So, against my better judgment, I am going to side with Ross Douthat and say that perhaps the irrational religious experience might very well be the most rational explanation for the mysteries of Life, The Universe and Everything. While I have always believed that we need to orient ourselves toward the Sacred however we understand it because without doing so, life is cold, cruel and meaningless, this takes it to a whole other level. The Sacred might actually be real. I mean, really real. Experientially real, just as it was to the prophets of revelation. It might really “speak” to us, and, if we are listening, we might really “hear” it.

And THEN what?

I don’t know yet. I’m going to sit with this for a while and see where it goes.

But I challenge you to at least play the game with me and ask yourself, “What if it’s actually true?”

You never know what secrets might be revealed.