Is Religion Irrational? by Keith Ward

Author:Keith Ward [Ward, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2011-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

What is Revelation?

It would be very odd to believe that there was a God who created the universe in order to achieve a specific purpose, and who created intelligent beings to co-operate in achieving that purpose, but who did not in any way communicate to those beings what the purpose was or how they might best help to achieve it. Revelation is the communication by God of the purpose of creation and of human life, and of the way to achieve it. If there is a God, it is highly probable that there will be some form of divine revelation.

Such revelations must occur in specific historical contexts, and they, or human interpretations of them, will be subject to the general processes of historical development as human knowledge and experience change and grow. There will, no doubt, be some sorts of revelation in human prehistory, but naturally it is very difficult to recover any evidence for what that they might have been.

Many anthropologists and ancient historians do not believe in God, and so their problem is to account for the rise of religious beliefs in purely naturalistic terms. Those who believe in God, however, will look at the data that students of early human history provide and ask if and how the activity of God might be discerned in them. Believers and unbelievers alike can fruitfully think of religions as human attempts to contact a higher spiritual reality and to use such contact to avoid human harm and encourage human welfare. Believers might find it natural to think that God would take some initiative in stimulating such attempts, and would be responsive to them in some way.

It is not hard to interpret the data of anthropology in this way, though it requires acceptance that God’s acts, if there are such, can be accommodated to the knowledge and understanding of pre-literate human tribal societies, and that humans interpret God’s acts in culturally conditioned ways. Anthropologists think that the earliest recoverable human societies would have been small tribal groups of hunter-gatherers. In such groups there would have been stories of the origins of the world around them, rituals for consolidating social morality and tradition, and tribal symbols for the varied groups of spirit-powers believed to lie behind the perceived local environment.

Some individuals would become go-betweens, liaising between the spirit-world and the tribe. Sometimes using hallucinogenic substances, these “seers” might have visions of the spirits, be possessed by them, and claim enhanced powers to heal, to bring good luck in hunting and in childbirth, and to solve difficult personal problems. There might or might not be one supreme spirit, but there would typically have been many lesser spirits which were known to the seers and which could act through them for good or evil.

If some such account is correct, then the religious life of humanity has developed from an interpretation of spiritual reality as very diverse (many spirits), both beneficent and dangerous (good and evil spirits), accessible by exceptionally gifted individuals (seers or,

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