Requisite Revelation?

It can be rather humorous when we, many times, encounter premises so obviously flawed that the proponent of an argument appears clueless. I recently was reading an article by Albert Mohler on infamous contrarian, Chris Hitchens.

Dr. Mohler must be an intelligent man. He really must. However, he fails to see the fatal flaw in the following reasoning:

The question of belief in God is inescapably linked to the question of revelation. He is on absolutely firm intellectual ground when he insists that anyone who claims to believe in God must "also claim to have at least an inkling of what that Supreme Being desires."

Of course, Hitchens sees all claims to divine revelation as evidence of "arrogance and illogic." Nevertheless, he does understand the basic structure of the Christian truth claim – a claim that the one true and living God has indeed spoken and has revealed Himself to His human creatures...

At the center of this conflict stands the doctrine of revelation and the existence of Scripture as the Word of God. Without this Word, we would have no basis for belief in God, Christ, the Gospel, or any hope for the future.

Let us imagine for a moment that a God exists: by definition all-knowing/powerful/good. Let us also imagine for a moment that this God wants us to know that it exists, and wants us to believe in it, for whatever reason. Why is it, I must ask our educated friend, that this God would not reveal itself via either 1) incontrovertible general revelation, or 2) irrefutable, individual special revelation?

1) In 1, we can have the case that, for instance, this God writes its message of hope/revelation to all human kind in such a way that it is clearly a divine message [rather than one crafted by human minds, fraught throughout with anthropomorphic caricatures of this deity and psychological projection, etc.]. My argument is thus:

P1) God exists
P2) God wants all humans to know this in an objective way
P3) God has available at its disposal a plethora of means and ways to reveal itself
C1) God will ensure that humans have sufficient evidence of its existence such that unbelief in God is completely implausible

This is, with minor variation, the argument from unbelief. One way to accomplish this would be to write out the message in stars in the sky, or to have set on some part of the earth a divine "placard" if you will, made of some exotic material (say solid platinum, or one of the least abundant of materials on earth), and make it impervious to destruction [via magic or whatever]. A sort of sorcerer's stone, if you will, in which is not planted the sword of Arthur to give power to one man, but is planted the message of God to all humankind. Keep in mind, also, that the message could be as fluid and animated as our imaginations will allow, and beyond. If the stars were being rearranged constantly to spell and re-spell new messages and sound bytes from God, who could doubt it?

Could skeptics still exist? It is logically possible. However, the level of deniability which exists when presented with the Bible, versus such a proposal as I made in 1, is much much higher. So, in God's supposed choice to use men to tell other men of Itself, this leads to an inexorable difficulty in getting others to believe and accept the message, to the supposed peril of fellow human beings. Not to mention the flaws in the medium chosen.

Let us imagine that this God still chooses to use other persons, and its special revelation to and through them, in addition to the sort of skeptic-reduction method of general revelation described. Surely this would be a "1-2 punch" for theism? Imagine that the Bible had included predictions of science and mathematics which could in no way have been vague or retroedited, rather than the vague and often inaccurate portrait it actually paints: let's imagine that the Bible said, "And God says to you, a day will come when you will understand this -- energy and matter are related to one another by the speed which light travels squared. Preserve this saying and it will be a sign of God's revelation to you." My choice here is arbitrary, but its point obvious--if God wants to reveal itself, it has available at its disposal a basically infinite number of choices which are powerfully undeniable.

From applying reductio ad absurdum to our argument, we can surely rule that P2 is the weakest link in the chain, since C1 is not observed. It is rational to say that "Sure, God might exist, but if God does, and is all powerful (P3), then, since unbelief is pervasive throughout the globe, P2 must not hold." What then might we conclude? Before ruling out P1, we can change P2 such that general revelation via objective means is no longer a part of our argument.

2) The second point involves special revelation. Special revelation is God interacting with an individual in some individualized way. For instance, this would include God talking to someone, or using Balaam's donkey to talk to them, or showing them a sign such as an axe-head floating on water. Let us consider the revised argument:

P1) God exists
P2) God wants all humans to know this
P3) God has available at its disposal a plethora of means and ways to reveal itself
C1) God will ensure that humans have sufficient evidence of its existence such that unbelief in God is completely implausible

Now, we have taken away the restriction of objectivity, which makes a revelation "general" rather than "special". Have we, though, really limited God? Of course not. In point of fact, if God is all-powerful, then there is no reason why both general and special revelation methods cannot be employed concurrently.

Let us consider that God, in wanting to make itself known via special revelation, simply chooses at some point in each individual's life to give them an experience with itself that transcends all doubt. Some people would argue that doubt could creep in to any experience, but I argue that reasonable doubt requires a lack of substance to an experience. For instance, I can recall fairly clearly a very bad ATV accident I had at 13 years old. Why do I recall it so clearly? Why is there no reasonable doubt in my head that it happened? I still bear the scar on my leg, for one thing. For another, the leg required washing, and wrapping and unwrapping, numerous times over the course of a few weeks. In this sense, it wasn't just an instantaneous, or short-term, event, but a protracted agony over weeks. In the same sense, God's special revelation need not be a one-time event, but could have effects which impress the reality of the event in our mind so clearly that to deny their reality would strain credulity.

Perhaps one of the simplest ways to bring convergence to special and general revelation is to have the general revelation give a sort of algorithmic prediction capability -- for instance, that you assign a number to each of the letters of your name according to some code. You then take those numbers, and those of both of your parents, and your birthday, and those of both of your parents, and plug them into this algorithm, which spits out a very specific "prophecy" for you: let us say, it predicts the dates that it will rain wherever you are on the earth, or the day you'll meet your spouse...or whatever.

The point is, given God's omniscience and omnipotence, these sorts of possibilities abound in making unbelief hard. But, since it's rather easy not to believe in God, then we must conclude that both general and special revelation are sorely lacking. This is, itself, evidence that God either does not exist, or does not care if we know if God exists. QED
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