The trouble with prophets

This house believes that if someone were to claim to be a prophet nowadays, they would be roundly mocked by most of the very people who follow prophets of their own, and followed only by desperate or crazy people. Perhaps this says something about the first followers of the great world religions?

Mr A and Mr B debate the nature of prophets, including whether any of them can be believed and if so, must all of them be believed, whether their existence might reduce God’s epistemic distance, and much more.

A. What is a prophet? A prophet is someone who steps onto the scene with a (truly or apparently) revolutionary message, inspires people with their rhetoric and zeal, and eventually, hopefully, gains very many followers. But let us look at their “inspiration” for these messages. It is invariably a divine source which is impossible, almost by definition, to refute. Jesus claimed to be the son of God, and hence, if you accept that premise, everything else he says must be true. Mohammed claimed to receive his message from the angel Gabriel: if you accept that, then you have to believe what he says. But what reason do we have to believe that? After all, before they revealed to society their message, to most people they were normal human beings (or at least not divinely inspired ones). Given that their contemporaries had their own sets of beliefs, usually incompatible with the prophet’s message, it should have been impossible to convince anyone of the veracity of their claims. And yet now, billions of people around the world believe their claims, with hardly a reason to doubt them: after all, they were raised to believe their claims, and those claims are the exact equivalent of the beliefs that the contemporaries of the prophets had before they were converted. Given that to most Romans and Jews it would have been ridiculous to believe that Jesus was the son of God, and that in the eyes of Christians they were definitely wrong, if a new prophet were to arrive, espouse a new message, spread it like wildfire around the world, Christians would have to accept that history has repeated itself, but this time not in their favour. And of course, they would have to accept that Christianity was wrong. So to conclude my little introduction, it is impossible to believe the words of any “prophet”, self-proclaimed or otherwise, if they claim that their revelations have come from a divine source that only they have access to, because if you accept that one of them is speaking the truth, you have no reason to deny that the others are also speaking the truth, and if you believe that they are all speaking the truth, you are left with countless contradictions to deal with.

B. I am of the belief, as I’m sure you are, that the truth is waiting to be discovered, and that we must search for it. There are many discoveries we can make that fall within the category of science, and these are all perfectly possible to stumble across by merely human methods. But I also believe that there are many things in this universe of ours that are not within our mortal power to discover. Assuming that we are meant to discover them, how can we have access to them if we are incapable? The answer is that they have to be “revealed” to us by a higher power. God (assuming that he is the higher power) cannot reveal himself to us directly, because then we would have no cause to doubt his existence, and as such we wouldn’t have the chance to prove our faith. And so, one way for him to reveal higher truths is by communicating them through prophets. I grant that it may be difficult to argue why one prophet is genuine and others are not, but just because it is difficult, that does not make it impossible.

A. God does indeed seem to move in mysterious ways. One of these ways, and he seems to be quite consistent in this, is that he sends his indirect messages in such a way that reasonable people would have the most trouble believing them. It is not that unreasonable, in the context of being brought up in a religion, to believe the “words” of a prophet or a holy book. But what if you were around at the time? I put it to you that if you were a reasonable person, it is highly unlikely that you would believe a word they said. What does the almighty have against reasonable people? Besides, you are making one massive assumption, namely: that prophets are mediums through which God sends his message to the people. But that only begs questions.

Firstly, why choose only one person to pass on the message? Surely an international conglomerate of prophets would be more effective? If you argue that the single prophet is chosen for particular virtues that he might have, then what are those virtues? These can hardly be said to be consistent across all prophets! Also, choosing a single person to pass on the message has the obvious weakness that there is no way to guarantee that it will spread to everyone in time for them to make their own minds up about it. Clearly, the supposedly universal religions are in fact very local if they are true at all.

Secondly, why choose a person to pass on the message at all? Given that it is inevitable that there won’t be universal agreement, would it not be better to divinely inspire each person individually but subtly, not necessarily with a vision, but by some kind of revelation that could be viewed as having natural origin? That way, each person would take it upon themselves to interpret what they have personally seen, and it would be their responsibility to heed it or not. There would still not be universal agreement, but at least there would be less reason to call God’s methods into question.

B. You say that an international conglomerate of prophets would be more effective. If this is the method that God used, and presumably you mean that all these prophets spoke at the same time (otherwise there would be very reasonable questions about their legitimacy), then the fact that God had inspired them would be so self-evident to each successive generation that it would be near-impossible to deny them. That is simply not how God operates. If he wanted to convince everyone that he existed, he could of course do so easily. But the whole point is that we should not be certain of his existence, because if we were, we would certainly not act badly, knowing the punishment that awaits us.

The same argument would apply to your other point about God divinely inspiring each of us individually. Either the inspiration is so subtle that it would be comparable to the feeling we have when we see something beautiful in nature, in which case it would not be powerful enough to sense God’s presence, or it would be powerful enough that we could not reasonably doubt God’s existence, which removes the epistemic distance that God maintains. I cannot see how there can be a middle ground between the two.

A. You say that if there were to be an international conglomerate of prophets it would be nearly impossible to deny God’s part in it. This idea that God must maintain epistemic distance otherwise his whole eschatological plan is ruined is a modern one, designed to accommodate both science and religion into the same room. This partly works to reconcile science with God, but it emphatically does not work with religion, which is built on the foundation of miracles. Christianity would hardly be Christianity if there were no feeding of the multitude, if there were no changing water into wine, and certainly not if there were no resurrection. These are all events which, if you saw them and it was logically impossible to find any explanation for them, would leave you in very little doubt that some supernatural power were at work. So much, then, for epistemic distance. It is interesting that, even if these events happened, they should have been recorded in the Gospels: after all, without the miracles, Christ would have been a great moral teacher but still mere mortal, leaving nothing supernatural to believe in, and with the miracles, followers of Christ are forced to believe that God shortened the epistemic distance uncharacteristically massively.

The epistemic distance idea has another weakness: namely, that it is not certain that if we all knew that God definitely existed, we would all act morally perfectly. This assumes that all people who commit sins do so knowingly and willingly. However, there are people in this world who commit sins out of a complete lack of either cognitive or empathetic capacities. This is biological and cannot be helped. Granted, that may be a slight simplification, but the basic point remains: if they knew – if they were capable of knowing – that God definitely existed, how could that affect their behaviour? The answer is that it wouldn’t, unless God intervened, and so those people are doomed to punishment for all eternity (depending on your beliefs) through no real fault of their own.

B. The question of whether people who lack cognitive or empathetic capacities can reform their ways is a difficult issue, and I think a separate one. Of course, if God intervened by showing his presence, it would not be unreasonable for him to further intervene by mending the defects of the people you describe. In fact, I think it very unlikely that he wouldn’t do such a thing.

But we have drifted somewhat from the original statement, which was: “if someone were to claim to be a prophet nowadays, they would be roundly mocked by most of the very people who follow prophets of their own, and followed only by desperate or crazy people.” I doubt that this is the case. No doubt there would be many desperate or crazy people who would follow the “prophet”, as we have seen with the Branch Davidians and the countless other cults that have popped up in recent times. But I believe that most followers of religion would treat the new “prophet” with an element of caution – thinking it unlikely that they are truly a messenger of God, but keeping an open mind nonetheless. After all, the Judeao-Christian tradition has had many prophets. Not all of these have been ascribed the same status as Jesus or Moses, but they are all important all the same. It is entirely possible, though unlikely, that a new prophet might come along with a new and important message for us all to heed.

A. That is patently untrue. Firstly, the Jews do not believe in Christ even though Christians believe in the Jewish prophets. Christians do not believe in Mohammed even though Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet. The belief only appears to work in one direction. A new prophet can encourage belief in past prophets, but in so doing he places himself at the end of the line, as the perfection of his ancestry, and none can come after him.

I’m afraid we’ve come to the end. Now gentlemen, if you would, your closing statements please.

A. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no reason whatever to believe the words of any prophet. The whole exercise is fraught with contradictions and logical impossibilities. Even if you could absolutely convince me that God exists and that he had decided to go about spreading a certain religious message by means of a prophet, there is no way you could convince me that any given prophet is the true one. After all, if I were to go to Speakers’ Corner tomorrow and tell everyone that I was the other son of God, or that I was divine or that I am communicating the words of God, by what right should I expect to be believed by anyone? There is no reason why any Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh or anyone else should convert to my new religion. By the same logic, why should the original Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs have converted? The answer is that there is no reason.

The faith argument falls down at the first hurdle. You cannot say, “it’s not about reason, but about faith.” It is very much about reason. To be sure, many of the original adherents of any religion had great faith in their prophets, in large part because of the miracles that were allegedly performed. But we, standing at a distance of centuries or millennia, look at all prophets equally if we look at them properly. We ourselves are not convinced in the least by the words of the prophets themselves, but by the words of our parents, and our community and religious leaders. Given that these people are clearly not divine, what reason do we have to believe them? After all, they themselves were convinced by their generation’s parents, community and religious leaders! We have no access to the relevant prophets, so we must employ reason in the place that it may have been understandable that the prophets’ contemporaries employed faith.

B. Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent would have you believe that all prophets are equal. That is not what their followers believe. My opponent would have you believe that we can judge all prophets by standards that he has devised, or that apply to other things of this earth. As if, were we to see Jesus or Mohammed in person, we would not be amazed by them, not by a merely earthly charisma but by an indefinable sense of the holy and sublime. What else can explain the ardour with which their first devotees followed them? It goes without saying that there are many false prophets. But these prophets may have started small movements; they did not found international religions encompassing many billions of people, and inspiring each new generation of followers with timeless truths and high ideals by which to live their lives. This was achieved by the great monotheistic religions, all of which were built on the foundations laid by their early prophets.

Now of course, we might argue all day, or indeed for many days, about which prophets were truly divinely inspired, but the basic point remains: just like we need visionary scientists to take us forward in the realm of science, and visionary artists to see the world anew, so we need divinely inspired prophets to help us see what is otherwise concealed from us. As I have tried to show, prophets are the best way for God to pass on these truths to us. If he gave us miracles that made his part in them undeniable, we would have no reason to doubt his existence or the truth of his message. But prophets give us the perfect combination: they show us the miraculous, but not to such a degree that we cannot reasonably doubt God’s part.

Mr A and Mr B, thank you very much.