revelation

   A revelation is a divinely given cognitive disclosure of information and/or non-cognitive experience. For the cognitive conception, revelation principally involves the transfer of new propositional knowledge. For the noncognitive conception, revelation is something like an ineffable encounter with divine otherness. One classic question concerns how revelation relates to reason, and thus whether it can be rational to form beliefs from revelation. John Locke argued that a putative revelation must always be judged by reason, but this seems to place an unacceptable limit on what God could successfully reveal. A more moderate approach to the problem is to draw parallels between revelation as a doxastic process and non-revelatory doxastic processes. For instance, one could argue that the reception of revelation is sufficiently analogous to sense perception that if beliefs from the latter are rational to accept, so are beliefs from the former. A third option is to regard revelation as irrational but to embrace it as a more fundamental (epistemic) virtue than rationality. This is one construal of Kierkegaard's 'knight of faith'.

   See Enlightenment; fideism; Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye; Locke, John; postmodernism; reason

   Further reading: Alston 1993; Plantinga, Alvin 2000; Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983; Swinburne 1991