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