Satanic verses or an epistemic dilemma?
Satanic verses or an epistemic dilemma?

Summary/Abstract: How does a prophet as a recipient of revelation know that his or her experience of revelation is genuine or hallucinatory? The theme of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is basically a fictional version of this epistemological concern. In many a theological worldview, revelation is considered a legitimate epistemic means of acquiring knowledge – a type of knowledge that may not be accessible through human faculty of reason. Defenders of revelation as a bona fide source of knowledge attempt to account for its epistemic propriety through either a heilsgeschichte or a propositional model of revelation. The purpose of this paper is to probe the viability of such defenses and argue that neither model is successful in overcoming serious epistemological challenges. Specifically, the heilsgeschichte or non-propositional model fails to proffer any epistemic insight into the content, let alone the justifiability of, revelatory occurrences; and the propositional model owes both the propositional for

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