Is Revelation A Source Of Knowledge?

This is not about the Book of Revelation, though as I typed it I realised it sounded like I was about to do some exegesis on the last book of the Bible. No, it means revelation in the sense of an experience of divine origin. The other thing is, this is something which I’ve been trying to sort out in my own mind for about fifteen years.

This may actually be quite a short post as it merely aims to pose a question, not to answer it.

I’ll start with a popular analytic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. A re-statement of this is that knowledge is belief which cannot rationally be doubted. There seem to be two sources of knowledge at this standard. One is direct experience. That is, although one might be dreaming, one cannot deny that one is currently experiencing a particular sensory quality when it’s happening. These are known as qualia: qualities or properties as experienced or perceived by a person. The singular is “quale”. Although the ringing in one’s ears may not reflect an actual sound and the odour of burning may be the result of an imminent stroke, the fact remains that one does have the relevant experience. This is not in doubt and cannot in fact be doubted rationally.

The other source of knowledge is logic and mathematics, or at least it seems to be. For instance, 2+3=5. This can be known. It can also be known that if it’s raining then it’s raining. One might also go on to claim that two parallel lines never meet by definition, but this is where a possible flaw in this source of certainty emerges, because it famously turned out that this was not so. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, which attempts to establish this fact through logic, is oddly wordy and unwieldy, and this is because it turned out that the parallel line claim was not axiomatic but based on observation, and it further turned out that in actual physical space, parallel lines don’t always stay the same width apart and do in fact tend to meet at an enormous distance. Likewise, logic’s reliance on bivalent truth values may be a similar flaw as these may not be enough. There might be meaninglessness, for example, or tense-based truth: something might be true now but false in the future. All that said, logic and mathematics seem to be a good basis for certainty independent of experience: multivalent logic exists and so does non-Euclidean geometry. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the number of things which can be known from this source alone is infinite, so it isn’t true that a fairly extreme form of scepticism leaves one with knowledge of almost nothing.

Suppose, though, that you believe in an omnipotent source of reliable knowledge such as God. It doesn’t have to be God but I am of course theist myself. If you’re not, this will probably sound highly arcane and theoretical to you but you could look at this more as a thought experiment or perhaps something that can be applied to another force acting on consciousness and it may mean that it’s logically possible that what I’m about to suggest can happen. Anyway, here it comes:

If an omnipotent and omniscient entity exists, that entity would be able to create knowledge in the human mind. Henceforth I’m going to call that entity, theoretical or otherwise, God. Putting it simply, God can do anything, so God can make people know things. That means that God can remove doubt when something is true, and if there is a God, revelation can be a source of knowledge.

However, there’s a caveat here. God doesn’t do everything God can do. When I was a child, I saw a graffito on a fence post saying “I hate you”, and for some reason interpreted it as God’s message to me. Don’t ask me why. I rushed home rather distressed and came into the kitchen, where my mother was listening to a song on cassette called ‘Our God Reigns’. In my perturbed state I heard this as “Our God hates”. I asked her if God hated me and she laughed, replying, “No! God is incapable of hate!”. This didn’t reassure me much because I was aware that the concept of God included omnipotence, meaning that if God so chose, God could indeed hate. This is the prototype of a belief about God I have today that God is capable of anything, but doesn’t invariably act on that capacity. Hence God can hate but doesn’t, or at least God chooses not to hate humans. Applying this to the matter at hand, that would mean that God might be able to force us to know things but does not choose to do so. Hence we are left with confident belief at most rather than actual knowledge in the sense that God provides us with anything it’s rationally impossible to doubt.

To me, it seems quite invasive and controlling for God to cause this to happen in one’s consciousness. It seems to violate the principle of free will. However, it could be that God would respond to one giving consent to bring this about in some way. “God I believe: help my unbelief.” Would it happen then? Prayers are not always answered the way one might expect. It’s undoubtedly also true that omnipotence means God could create a feeling of complete confidence in something which isn’t so, which is not knowledge.

I think that’s the issue stated as clearly as I can, but there’s another approach to this based on the general use of language. In many cases, if we were to insist on exact meanings for words, they’d end up not referring to anything. Nothing physical is perfectly spherical, perfectly flat or perfectly smooth. Hence if I were to say something like “Here is a smooth one metre sphere resting on the flat upper face of a two metre cube”, it would fail to refer to any real situation because the “sphere” wouldn’t be perfectly spherical, exactly a metre in diameter or perfectly smooth, and it wouldn’t be resting on a perfectly flat perfect cube exactly two metres on an edge. Nonetheless I might seem to have referred to a situation correctly and usefully, and to be that nitpicky about language and reference is plainly silly. Now for the situation with God causing me to know something. Maybe my standard of what constitutes knowledge is too high with justified true belief. Maybe knowledge is just belief that is near enough to certainty that it would make no odds. Otherwise we’d be stuck with a concept of knowledge useless for a wide variety of practical situations.

So that is basically the question I’m asking and a few considerations related to it. It’s also something I asked a few times on Yahoo Answers of all places in the vain hope of getting a sensible answer. All I got in the long run was some legalistic moderator saying I shouldn’t ask the same question more than once, even though I asked it several years after failing to get a helpful answer. Ah well.