The Primacy of Revelation

The anti-essentialism of most posthumanist theory results in the untenability of any theory of ethics or morality based on a moral subject (human or otherwise) realising an objectively prescriptive essence or nature that determines what it means for a being of that kind to flourish. Without a metaphysics of essences, there is just no principled difference between an act or process that goes to fulfil some intrinsic reason for being and one that is irrelevant or contrary to that intrinsic purpose.

Posthumanist theorists do not necessarily concede this point completely, instead arguing from the denial of any strict dichotomies between fact and value or subjectivity and objectivity to the idea that socially constructed or otherwise historically situated essences can yield a sufficient sense of intrinsic purpose and, deriving from that, moral obligation. However, the continuing ethical function of essences in a contingent and defeasible guise ends up being so fluid and changeable when allowing for the variety of such essences that must be afforded to myriad posthumanist ‘others’ that it is too weak predictively to yield anything like systematically intelligible or situationally discernible moral obligations.

The response of a thoroughgoing theocentric posthumanism to the moral neutrality of the natural order, according to consistent anti-essentialism, is to connect all moral obligation with the will of God strictly. That is, there is no sense that anything is right or wrong except that God wills it so. From this follows the further principle that scientific investigation of natural and human behaviour cannot yield knowledge of moral or ethical truth. This could be qualified by the idea that God imbues every creature who is a moral subject the faculty of a conscience to tell right from wrong, but consciences often differ radically as between culturally and temporally separated communities. For example, there may be a recurring taboo against murder, but what counts as murder and what is otherwise a justified killing varies markedly.

So, by process of elimination, the moral imperative can only be known with sufficient certainty and clarity to guide action in the form of divine revelation, i.e. God telling humanity and any other moral subjects exactly what is required of them. Unfortunately, there is strong disagreement evident throughout human history as to both the identity and interpretation of divine communications with creatures. Then again, if it is right that we can only acquire knowledge of moral demands that are already be upon us by correctly understanding God’s revealed will, and the consequences of not doing so could be overwhelmingly adverse, then identifying and interpreting any divine revelation takes on an urgency that we cannot ignore. Even if we might be living our lives well based on our sense of a conscience, we cannot be sure that we are not getting it completely wrong, and the stakes are very high (or it aint really morality).

This means that, though the arguments about revelation are messy and there is no one entirely unproblematic religious tradition, there is good reason to do the hard work to identify the best candidate text/s for the status of divine revelation and the best candidate interpretation of that text. The idea that we can simply look at the messy morass of purported revelations and, with an apathetic swipe of the hand, declare that they all must be wrong/right because there is no way to decide between them, fails to consider and evaluate the criteria used by adherents of faith themselves to decide between them. Furthermore, apathetic religious pluralism/eliminativism is, on its face, a more obviously irrational position than any religious adherent can be presumed to have adopted, so an engagement with their reasons is warranted. Having said that, monotheistic viewpoints have the upper hand, in my view, because the motivation for inquiring into religious viewpoints that I have suggested concerns determining the divine revelation of a singular moral law.

There is also reason to believe that we can interpret texts, including candidates for divine revelation, is such a way as to know the mind of an author, contrary to contemporary textual scepticism due to the influence of poststructuralism. The textual interpretation as a means to know the minds of others is guaranteed by the same parallelism as the interpretation of observation and perception, dealt with in this previous post. However, this analogy with perception generally suggests that texts that are candidates for divine revelation must be attributed their natural and ordinary meaning, just as we would do with our perceptual experience, in order to have a chance of engaging any such divine guarantee of objectivity. For example, it would be methodologically questionable to argue that a text is a divine revelation, because God has blessed you with a special ability to interpret the text in a different way, so that it now reads in a way more likely to pass as divine revelation. Perhaps, you now read it retrospectively as predicting a certain later historical event quite accurately, so as to suggest a divine level of prescience. That is not going to fly.

Expanding on this methodological need for parity between natural and ordinary interpretations of our perception, and natural and ordinary interpretations of texts, I think that any need to be deeply sceptical about the findings of our best science in order to preserve the plausibility of a text as divine revelation is questionable. Even if it is a bit of a leap from our trusting in our perception to trusting in science, it is a leap of degree and not a difference in kind. Having said that, this does not apply to the assertion of miracles, because God does, after all, have the ability to suspend all physical laws. Yet, if no miracle is asserted or clearly implied, and the text gets the facts very wrong according to our best science, that is grounds to doubt the status of the text as divine revelation. Then again, grounds to doubt are not the same as conclusive defeaters, and such grounds merely form part of an all-things-considered assessment of purported divine revelation.

Finally, it should not be assumed that ancient texts that are extant candidates for the status of divine revelation lack the capacity for radical social critique. For example, once the humanism and humanistically derived ideologies that have been read into Judeo-Christian texts through forced interpretation are purged, the resulting cultural critique of Western political and social hegemony can be just as far-reaching as any critical theory.