Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?

1. The problem here is epistemological and is an aspect of the more general problem of revelation. The general problem concerns the criteria whereby we judge whether a putative bit of revelation such as a putative divine command is a genuine bit. 'Putative' is from the Latin, putare, to think. So a putative bit of revelation is a deliverance that is supposed to be or thought to be a bit of revelation, but might in fact not be a bit of revelation at all. Thus 'putative' is an alienans adjective: if x is a putative F, it does not follow that x is an F. (The general problem of revelation is itself a special case of the still more general problem of the validation of any source of knowledge whatosever, whether it be sense-perception, testimony, memory, inference, whatever. But let's stick to the problem of revelation.)

2. It is important to understand that the having of an experience does not guarantee the veridicality of the experience had. Suppose you are having an out-of-the-body experience right now. You see yourself lying on the couch from the point of view of the ceiling. (I am not using 'see' as a verb of success whereby that which is seen eo ipso exists; I am using it in the phenomenological sense which allows that that which is seen may or may not exist.) Your having of the experience will be indubitable to you. But the indubitability of the experience is no guarantee that you are in fact out of your body. The having of the experience is consistent both with being out of your body and being in your body. The same goes for an experience of being commanded by God to do something. A person who has such an experience cannot doubt that he is having it while he is having it. It does not follow, however, that the experience is veridical. So the subject of the experience can and perhaps should question whether the experience is of anything real.

3. But why should one question the veridicality of the experience of being commanded by God or otherwise spoken to by God or by any supernatural being? The answer should be obvious if we reflect on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham has an experience as of a command by God to kill Isaac. Now it could be that the experience is veridical: it could be that God really exists and is really commanding Abraham to kill his son, and that somehow it is morally obligatory that Abraham kill Isaac. But since the content of the command directly contradicts the ordinary moral deliverance that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill innocent children, a deliverance that is also in line with the presumably divine command "Thou shall not kill," there is an excellent positive reason to doubt that the experience is veridical.

4. I suggest that our immanent moral sense must serve as a check on religion with its propensity for excess and fanaticism. We need revelation, but we also need to evaluate whether it be true revelation. With respect to putative divine commands, is it not self-evident that we must check their source? Perhaps we need to subordinate ourselves, submitting ourselves to the Higher, and perhaps without such 'Islam' (submission) there is no religion at all; but not in such a way as to abdicate our autonomy and responsibility.

One can see that there is a tension here. How balance our autonomy and our creatureliness? It is but another form of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The tension between morality and religion shows once again the unavoidability of philosophy. For only philosophy can mediate this dispute.