The Gift of sensation
Most folks divide revelation into only two categories general revelation which includes the truths available to everyone for instance mathematical truths, and special revelation which are the truths not universally available like the Bible. Although this distinction is technically correct it often leads to the grave error of believing that general revelation is objective fact and special revelation is merely subjective faith.
For our purposes I will begin with the contention that all truth is the result of revelation and that all revelation is objective fact. We can think of revelation as a continuum from low to high that begins with the basics that are shared by all animals like the necessity of nourishment for life and then proceeds to things that are revealed to the higher animals like the taste and color of objects then it moves higher in unregenerate man to such things as mathematical truths then even higher to the things that God has chosen to reveal to his Church and finally to the highest truths that only known to God himself.
How Does God reveal truth to his creatures? The most common way is though sensation. I know that there is a computer in front of me because I feel the keys with my fingers and see the monitor with my eyes and hear the hum of the CPU with my ears. Sensation is so commonplace that we take it for granted. But it’s nothing short of a profound miracle.
For one thing how does the physical act of touching keys with my fingers convey knowledge to the spiritual entity that is me? It’s my fingers that tough the keys but it’s my mind that “feels” the keyboard. A modern car has many sensors that record physical data about the environment and feed that information to the cars computer which then makes adjustments according to the program that was installed at the factory but no one would say that the car “feels” anything. The fact that we do is a profound mystery.

How do we know what we sense about the world is true

I’ve often herd skeptics say something like “How do we know that we can rely on what we learn from our senses since we’ve all had the experience of being fooled about what we thought our eyes or ears revealed to us“. This question is fatally flawed because it begins with the creature instead of the creator. It treats our sensations as neutral evidence to be weighed and evaluated by our minds instead of gifts from our creator. What we should ask is “What sort of facts would we expect If God chose to reveal through our senses”.
The answer to this question is obvious first we would expect God to reveal only those things that he designed our senses to receive. Often our senses are deceived when we are using them to do things they were never intended to do like when we strain our eyes to see objects that are clearly beyond our field of vision.
Some times our sense organs are defective for various reasons. Amazingly God has given us the additional blessing of being able to compare one sensation with others. for example we can compare the appearance of an object with its feel. In this way our sense organs are self correcting and verifying. God could have given us just one sense but then we would never be able to trust what we learned from it.
Perhaps we receive the correct information from our senses but our mind interprets it incorrectly but this is not a problem with our senses it is a problem with our fallen rebellious minds.

More later

It’s been a long time coming but I’ve decided to work at doing what I set out to do here at the start. I wanted to begin with a subject that is truly at the center of the challenge that Christians face today the issue of Truth and how we come to know it.

We truly live in a postmodern age. Radical skepticism and relativism have moved from the environment of college philosophy classes to the mainstream of our society. It has now become common to encounter the opinion that objective truth is a myth

Attempts to share our faith in the world often end with statements similar to this “That is good for you but not for me” or “that’s just your opinion”. How should we deal with such responses? How do we make a credible defense of the gospel in the pluralistic environment we live in? More importantly are the postmodernists right? Is truth really relative? How do we know anything for sure?

The answers to these questions are too important to be left to the experts and anyone with a mind is qualified to think deeply about subjects like this no matter their educational background. So I think I will add my small amateur voice to this debate. This is a big subject and vastly more intelligent folks than I have devoted their lives to it. Obviously it will take a few posts for me to explain what I know and don’t know and why. So please bear with me

First off it is crucial to keep in mind that

All knowledge starts with God

This fact should be obvious to the Christian however too often when we begin to explore how we can be sure of the truth of our beliefs we start with ourselves. This is exactly the opposite of where we should begin and I believe it explains much of the confusion and difficulty we find our selves in today.

We look at our limited brain power and we know that our senses have deceived us before so we reason that we are doomed to always have incomplete and biased information and since this is so we assume that we have no objective way to determine if we are being deceived now.

But if we understand that to God all true facts are self evident a way out of this dilemma begins to present itself. If God so chose he could reveal to us truth and we could know it for sure. It’s important to realize that God is under no obligation to do this. He could chose to not reveal reality to us and he would as our Creator still be completely within his rights. Or he could reveal some things to us completely and infallibly and others only in part. It is his prerogative

In light of this it is a great blessing that God sees fit to give all his creatures true reliable knowledge of the world to some extent. This wonderful gift of knowledge is entirely due to His Grace and its end result will be for his glory.

The personification of God’s knowledge is Jesus Christ; he is the Word of God and wisdom of God. Anytime God reveals truth to us his creatures it will in some way be a revelation of Christ. And anytime a falsehood is believed it is in some way contrary to Christ who is truth. This is the case in mundane facts as well are deep doctrinal axioms

It is also important to realize that when God reveals truth to us it is nothing short of a miracle in which the spiritual is somehow joined to the physical. It simply can’t be accounted for by the materialistic explanations of science. In some ways it is a shadow of the miracle that happened when The Word became flesh. The fact that we can know anything for sure is proof of a loving powerful God.

No wonder the world so quick to deny this possibility.

More later