We need revelation from God

Some people worship nature as if it is God. Others believe nature is the authority to tell us the truth about God. However, nature by itself is contradictory and would have us believe in an inconsistent God. How can we can we trust a conflicted source to tell us 100% truth?! It can’t. We will be deceived from the start. Snakes with forked tongues are apt symbols of liars.

If we have no other information that what we observe in nature, then how can we explain life and death, pain and pleasure, coexisting together? What is the purpose of such inconsistency? Where did that contradiction come from? Nature’s confusion, without any explanation, points to a God mixed with good and evil, strength and weakness.

A truly infinite good person would not need death to create life, nor would he need pain to make pleasure. Both life and pleasure are good in and of themselves. They do not need their opposites for us to enjoy and appreciate them.

The miracle of birth could continue to grow in immortality. Death would be unknown and no one would miss it.

Life could be full of pleasure and joy and health. No one would complain that they had no reason to shed a tear.

The eagle could be designed to eat plants rather than fish. The lion could lay down with the lamb, rather than eating the lamb.

An infinite good person could easily make trees that never die and flowers that never fade.

Perhaps there is perfection out there in the far away galaxies, but our instruments could not detect it and we would not be able to recognize it. Right now, the unexplained universe convinces us that we need a special revelation—a miraculous communication—from an infinite good person. Finite inconsistency cannot prove boundless goodness, nor even tell us where to find it. Nature locks us into a small gray cave with no window into paradise.

Social media is full of cleverly shot videos telling you to trust yourself; you are powerful; everything you need is in you. Yes, we need to think independently of other people otherwise we become peer-pressured puppets, but I am not God. I don’t have foreknowledge, omniknowledge, or complete knowledge of even any single issue. I am a bundled package in human skin of rational and irrational thought, selfish and unselfish motives, and helpful and hurtful behavior.

My experience is contradictory.

And so is yours.

Therefore, so is ours. This is true on all levels: community, national, global, and denominational. No matter how many experts, authorities, and sages we throw at a problem, we are still inconsistent and incomplete.

We have eternity before us. We have countless spiritual dimensions above us. Yet we take pride in the possession of a few pebbles of knowledge in our hands.

We are in a universe without a map. We venture a few steps from the front door of home, retrace our path using breadcrumbs, then consider ourselves conquerors. What childish thinking by those who call themselves “adults"!

We are sheep without a shepherd. We are lost students without a guide. Nobody has come anywhere close to the horizon of eternity, then returned to show us the way. We can build a car and keep it running without repair for five or ten years, but what is that compared to the intricate complexities and exquisite joys of making a happy-ever-after?

We need celestial communication. We need Infinite Guidance. We need revelation from God.

Science is just the confluence of nature and human curiosity. It is the organization of our discoveries and the cataloging of our failures. It is the tower of data that we collect as we record and analyze our experiences. Then we use that tower to refine our measuring tools and expand our data buckets. The tower grows even faster.

However, the data we collect is not only a mix of accurate and inaccurate, it is also a mix of successful and degraded. And because we cannot see to the end of eternity, we cannot fully tell the difference. Things could be getting worse, when we think they are getting better, or vice versa. Theories and models we depend on like a house needs it foundation, could be riddled with so many exceptions to the rule that the exceptions are now our rule, but we cannot or will not see the truth.

Science is not superhuman. It is human. It is subject to all the frailties and limitations that plague humanity. It is great at developing a working understanding of the present, but it cannot see the future much less control it. Science makes our lives easier, but not infallible.

We worship peer review and we tremble before the supposed power of AI, but no matter how tall we build our tower of data, it is still earthbound and easy to topple when the new space-age Columbus comes along and shows us the universe is round, not flat.

Skyscrapers feel secure until an earthquake sways them. Science is just a tower built by kids in a tiny blue-green playground in a remote corner of the cosmos.

We need revelation from God.

What if we stacked all the planet’s mountains on top of each other? Then on top of that we stacked all the world’s ladders. Finally, we have all the tallest people climb those ladders and stand on each others‘ shoulders. How close to seeing and understanding eternity would we be?

It is commonly believed that if the world’s smartest people stand on the largest collections of data that they become near infallible. This belief appeals to the average person because they don’t have confidence in their own thinking abilities. Therefore, they look up to heros and leaders so they can feel safe. It’s the best they feel humanity can do, so humanity has become comfortable in that popular belief. But what leader, standing on the shoulders of all other leaders, can see past the horizon, much less to the end of eternity?

We need miraculous communication from God.

Even if the universe were perfect and immortal right now, we still could not tell what was ultimately good because we can’t see forever into the future. We could not even be sure that the universe would be immortal forever. We could only know that in the present, as far as we can observe, we do not see any death or suffering in progress. We are incapable of reasoning beyond our limits.

We need an infinite good person to tell us what is infinitely good. Therefore, we need revelation from God.

Do we need special revelation from God to know eternity?

Do we need revelation from God to fully know this current life?

Are there situations when we do not need revelation?

What role should science (not?) play in determining truth?

Is your experience sufficient to guide you in your life?