Defending Revelation
A Reply to Ricky Gervais
Ricky Gervais likes to say (h/t
) that if we wiped away all human knowledge and started civilization from scratch, science and mathematics would eventually re-emerge, but religion would not.It’s a clever line. Gervais means it as a knock on religion: if something can’t be rediscovered through reason alone, it must not be real.
But Gervais’s argument doesn’t refute religion so much as it presupposes a mind most of us simply don’t have. The average human being isn’t a rationalist philosopher. We learn through trial and error, by repeating stories and rituals, by copying role models, peers, and mentors, by stumbling forward. Even the greatest thinkers are prone to bias, to gaps in knowledge, to overreaching their syllogisms. If reason were all it takes, we’d have moral utopia by now—and we clearly don’t.
That’s why revealed religion isn’t failed science; it’s calibrated mercy. It’s the world’s most sophisticated operating system for creatures who can grasp principles but can’t live by them unaided.
In Judaism, Maimonides understood this better than anyone. In the Guide for the Perplexed he escorts the philosophical few to the limits of negative theology—showing us that we can’t say what God is, only what God is not. And then, with no fanfare, the same Maimonides gives us the Mishneh Torah, a compendium of hundreds of laws about meat and milk, planting and prayer, tithes and mourning laws.
Why would the same mind produce both books? Because truth isn’t a private club, and reason—by itself—doesn’t feed a society or sanctify a heart. Leo Strauss argued that modern philosophy lost sight of this: by elevating reason as the sole path to truth, it abandoned the very mysteries that give life depth. Maimonides never made that mistake. He trusted reason to show us our limits, and revelation to show us the way forward.
Revelation meets us where we are (it was given to creatures “of flesh and blood”): flawed, impatient, brilliant only in bursts. Revealed religion is premised on the idea that we don’t need perfect brains to pursue holiness; we just need to improve on our current situation. That’s what Torah provides, uniquely, for every Jew. As Deuteronomy declares, “וְאַתֶּם הַדְּבֵקִים בַּה' אֱלֹקֵיכֶם חַיִּים כֻּלְּכֶם הַיּוֹם”—“But you who hold fast to the Lord your God are all alive today.” Kulchem: all of you. Not just the rabbis. Not just the academicians. All of you.
Ricky Gervais might counter: fine—religion works for ordinary people, but philosophers would build something better. Yet Strauss again teaches us that every age needs revelation even for its brightest minds. He shows how revelation preserves community and shared values, anchoring reason so it doesn’t drift into nihilism.
Even for the rare soul who can re-derive Euclid, the question remains: how do you cultivate mercy, humility, gratitude?
Gervais imagines a world rebooted by reason. But who would reboot moral imagination?
Revelation is the interpretive guide that turns raw experience into wisdom, not by forbidding thought, but by channeling it through lived practices and inherited traditions.
So yes, if we erased the libraries, science might re-emerge and Torah might not. But that’s an argument for Torah and for the originality and non-commodification of Torah, rightly recognized as a gift.
If Torah were lost, it would have to be given again, and perhaps that’s the point.
God didn’t give us perfect brains so we might learn from experience.
Revelation is mercy for suboptimal minds, a communal curriculum for learning to be human.
Machines will be able to do math and science better than most humans, but they can’t be better at doing that which was given to humanity for the sake of expressing and discovering its humanity.