THE PARADOX OF A VEILED REVELATION
[This is about how religion calls vague scriptures and messages from God revelation. A revelation that reveals badly is not a revelation]
Excerpts from the Gifford Lectures Brand Blanshard
https://www.giffordlectures.org/books/reason-and-belief
Suppose, however, that a consistent body of Scriptural teaching were at last
achieved. Suppose that by identifying some passages as quotations merely, others
as metaphorical, others as interpolations, by contracting the scope of
revelation to faith and morals, and by using adroitly the extensive armoury of
Catholic apologetics, we could put together the pieces of the vast picture
puzzle, collected from many places and many centuries, into some sort of unified
whole; what then? Looking at this effort in the large, we could see that we
should still be committed to a strange and improbable hypothesis. For our
hypothesis would then be that a Deity who desired to communicate the truth to
his creatures, and who possessed all the means of doing so, chose to bury that
truth beneath such layers of obscurity, ambiguity, and apparent contradiction as
to baffle nearly everybody. One cannot refute that theory, because it will
absorb every new difficulty placed in its way as just another obstacle planted
there by Deity for reasons that are in the end beyond us. It is like the
scientific theory held by Edmund Gosse's father, who was a geologist of some
repute, though a fundamentalist in religion and an opponent of evolution. When
there came to light in deep-lying strata fossils that must have been deposited
there before the date when on his reckoning the world was created, he explained
them by suggesting that they had been placed there by the Creator to puzzle us,
deceive us if deceivable, and so test our faith. Such a theory cannot be
disproved, for it is consistent with any evidence that might be adduced against
it, but for that very reason also it carries no conviction. Furthermore, a
theology of this kind seems really self-defeating. For if God were what it
implies that he is, if he were the kind of being who, able to vouchsafe a saving
revelation to all mankind, reserved it for a small minority even of those then
living, a being who, by granting it at a late stage of life on earth, cut off
from it the earlier millions who might have been illumined by it, and even then
chose to hide much of it under deceptive veils from those anxious to understand
it, he must have a character different from that which in human beings we call
good. A theology that offers itself as rational should not drive us into
irrationality on the cardinal point of God's goodness.