I have always been fond of the word "epiphany". It's just a great word. And, of course, it refers to something that happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Here's how the Bible (King James, Acts, Chapter 9, verses 3-7 with punctuation cleaned up) describes the event:
And as he journeyed he came near Damascus and suddenly there shined around about him a light from heaven. And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" And he said "Who art thou lord?". And the lord said "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." And he, trembling and astonished, said "Lord what will thou have me do?" And the lord said unto him "Arise and go into the city and it shall be told thee what thou must do." And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless hearing a voice but seeing no man.That's the event that the word "epiphany" was coined to describe. Now there is a bunch of more business. And, in fact, it isn't Saul, later Paul, who gets the word, it's a guy called Ananias, but that's all detail. The idea is that God chooses to talk directly to a mortal. As a group these mortals are usually called prophets. And this "epiphany to a prophet" mechanism is common to a lot of religions.
God talks to various prophets and we get the Jewish religion. He talks to some more prophets and we get Christianity. (I'm not sure where to slot Jesus into all this business but we're talking about a similar mechanism). And the third "religion of the book" works the same way. God talked directly to Mohammad and the result is Islam. But it is not just religions of the book or ancient times. God (through the angel Moroni) talks to Joseph Smith and we get Mormonism. God talks to Mary Baker Eddy and we get Christian Science. And still more recently God talks to L. Ron Hubbard and we get Scientology.
So is all this "epiphany" stuff unscientific? Not at all. Scientists' job is to figure out what the rules are, not create the rules themselves. So if God created the universe, he can certainly include an "epiphany exclusion" rule. And, since his is all powerful, he can certainly use this "epiphany exclusion" rule whenever and wherever he wants to. And, trust me, scientists believe lots of things that are way weirder than an "epiphany exclusion" rule. So if the "epiphany exclusion" rule is not unscientific (I know, double negative, but justified in this case), does that mean that Science has nothing to say on the subject? No! (Sorry for the second double negative but again justified). Again, Scientists spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things that are a lot weirder than the "epiphany exclusion" rule.
The first thing to say from a Scientific perspective is that this happens a lot. It is not the foundation of all religions but it is the foundation of a lot of them. All of the above examples I have cited are what are generally called "western" religions. But the rule is used in eastern religions too. Buddhism is founded by the "prophet" (my characterization) Buddha. There are probably others but I am too ignorant to be able to cite any. Interestingly, Confucianism does not conform to the model. Confucius did not claim any extraordinary knowledge. He just said "we need to get back to that old time religion". Since that old time religion already existed, he didn't need to create anything new so he did not need divine inspiration.
Getting back to the main point, there sure have been a lot of these prophets. And they all say something different. In fact, the general message of all prophets, with the possible exception of some of the first ones is "Those older prophets got it wrong. Here's the real story." This is definitely true of the 19th and 20th century prophets. But Jesus fixed Judaism and Mohammad fixed Christianity, at least according to their adherents. And with the modern prophets, the amount of doctrine that needs fixing becomes even greater. The Scientology "origin story" (description of where we came from), for instance, bears no resemblance to the "origin story" of Christianity or any of the other religions of the book. What can we make of all this?
It turns out that from a Scientific perspective, the situation is far from hopeless. Christianity and a lot of other religions are "one God" religions. They believe that there is one God and one world. So let's assume that this is true for a moment. Does it make sense that this one God, who created the one universe, would download (this is my shorthand for the whole "epiphany" process, no matter what the specific details are) different contradictory sets of facts into the minds of different prophets?
There is one hypothesis that is consistent with God doing this, that God is a liar and that the data he downloads is not all true. Its a valid scientific hypothesis. But if God is a liar then we can't depend on what he downloads into any particular prophet being true. In fact, there is no prophet whose words we can depend on under this scenario. If this scenario is correct then we need to develop outside means of verification for whatever prophets say. And that outside verification system is Science.
Now most believers do not buy this hypothesis. They believe that whatever God downloads is the truth. So let's discard our earlier "God is a liar" hypothesis and adopt the alternative, namely "God tells the truth". We still have the problem that there are a lot of prophets out there and, since they contradict each other, they can't all be telling the truth. But, in fact, this gets us by a slightly different path to the same point. Now it's not God who is lying but the prophets. So we need a mechanism for determining which prophets are lying. And again, the best mechanism is Science. We can carefully examine the "revelations" of each prophet and see which ones are true. And we quickly find problems with all of them.
Now there is a non-scientific approach that can be adopted. We can "have faith". Maybe God gave us some "faith based" mechanism that does not depend on Science to ferret out the truth. Here I observe that no religion, hence no specific prophet, is believed in by a majority of the world's population. So, at a minimum, we can say that the "faith based" approach is inefficient. And if you drill down, if you ask not how many people are Christian or Muslim say, but how many people adhere to a specific strain of Christianity (say Methodist) or Islam (say Wahhabi) then the number of people that got it right shrinks to a small population, less than 1%. And if you drill down further to the subsect level where everyone believes exactly the same thing then no religion claims the adherence of more than a tiny percentage of the population. So God is very inefficient and he has not provided people with an effective mechanism for ferreting out the truth. Now why am I supposed to believe in God?
None of the above depends on any specific beliefs in any specific religion. The epiphany of St. Paul is used merely for explanatory purposes. The argument does not depend on whether you believe in Christianity in general or in the truth of the epiphany of St. Paul in particular. It is all the result of applying the scientific perspective to a large general class of religions. And it does not depend on any specific scientific belief like Evolution. The whole argument is constructed from a religious not a scientific perspective. And that is the power of scientific thinking. I believe that a lot of religious people understand this at a subconscious level. And so they fear science for the very real reason that scientific thinking is a very powerful tool for undermining the belief in specific religions and religion in general.
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