Quotes & Sayings About Natural Revelation

Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one's ignorance.

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of this great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation. — George Spencer-Brown

Revelation in matters where reason cannot judge, or but probably, ought to be hearkened to. First, Whatever proposition is revealed, of whose truth our mind, by its natural faculties and notions, cannot judge, that is purely matter of faith, and above reason. — John Locke

believe firmly that all truth is God's truth, and I believe that God has not given revelation only in sacred Scripture. Scripture itself tells us that God reveals Himself in nature, which we call natural revelation. I once asked a seminary class, a conservative group, "How many of you believe that God's revelation in Scripture is infallible?" They all raised their hands. I then asked, "And how many of you believe that God's revelation in nature is infallible?" No one raised his hand. It's the same God giving the revelation. — Keith A. Mathison

These divisions are illusory. What we call "nature" is merely one mode of the disclosure of the "supernatural," and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason's ascent into the light of God. — David Bentley Hart

In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue; but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by direct revelation. This according to my dream, was sometimes done to improve a cosmical design; but, more often, interference was included in his original plan. — Olaf Stapledon

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. — William James

No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of necessity, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; still it places the existence and personal attributes of the Deity on such grounds as to render doubts absurd and atheism ridiculous. — John Herschel

The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors? — Eric Voegelin

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God's existence apart from divine revelation. — William Lane Craig

When you're a child, your best friend in the world is the kid who lives next door. It doesn't occur to you then that this is a matter of arbitrary circumstance. When you grow up you like to imagine that your friendships have a more substantial basis - common interests, like-mindedness, some genuine affinity. It's always a sad revelation that when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that,for them, your friendships was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don't need you anymore. There's nothing especially cynical about this; people are drawn to each other because they're giving each other something they both need, and they drift apart when they aren't getting it or don't need it anymore. Friendship have natural life spans, like love affairs or favorite songs. — Tim Kreider

We are often lost in our thoughts and only superficially in touch with the reality and intensity of our inner and outer experiences. How often are our minds focused, calm, clear, or open enough to discern the exquisitely profound interplay of inspiration, intuition, and revelation that are a natural, though very subtle, part of our lives? How — Joel Levey

Natural theology, in other words, is in no way a step on the way toward the theology which takes God's self-revelation as its starting point. It is more likely, in fact, to lead in the opposite direction. — Lesslie Newbigin

In our country [US] equality means your liberal and freedom means you're conservative. That tension is there and it can't be handled on its own terms. It can't be handled as you go out of that and go back into natural institutions or natural law or divine revelation. Something outside of the system has to tell you the system has gone wrong. — Francis George

Because it was natural, could he not see that it was marvelous? Poor creature! — Andre Gide

THE LAW OF OPPOSITION "To him who overcomes ... " Revelation 2:7 Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm. It is a fact that there is a continuing struggle in the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual areas of life. — Oswald Chambers

The Great Pyramid was a fractal resonator for the entire Earth. It is designed according to the proportions of the cosmic temple, the natural pattern that blends the two fundamental principles of creation. The pyramid has golden ratio, pi, the base of natural logarithms, the precise length of the year and the dimensions of the Earth built into its geometry. It demonstrates.... As John Michell has pointed out in his wonderful little book, City of Revelation, 'Above all, the Great Pyramid is a monument to the art of 'squaring the circle'. — Alison Charlotte Primrose

Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal father of light, and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God ... — John Locke

The life of faith brings the two into a right relation. Common sense is not faith, and faith is not common sense; they stand in the relation of the natural and the spiritual; of impulse and inspiration. Nothing Jesus Christ ever said is common sense, it is revelation sense, and it reaches the shores where common sense fails. Faith must be tried before the reality of faith is actual. — Oswald Chambers

Men have a great deal of pleasure in human knowledge, in studies of natural things; but this is nothing to that joy which arises from divine light shining into the soul. This spiritual light is the dawning of the light of glory in the heart. There is nothing so powerful as this to support persons in affliction, and to give the mind peace and brightness in this stormy and dark world. This knowledge will wean from the world, and raise the inclination to heavenly things. It will turn the heart to God as the fountain of good, and to choose him for the only portion. This light, and this only, will bring the soul to a saving close with Christ. It conforms the heart to the gospel, mortifies its enmity and opposition against the scheme of salvation therein revealed: it causes the heart to embrace the joyful tidings, and entirely to adhere to, and acquiesce in the revelation of Christ as our Savior. — Jonathan Edwards

We are entitled to personal revelation, especially when it concerns our own or our children's lives and what has been foreordained for them. This is true whether our children number one or ten, and whether the Lord sends them to us through natural means or adoption. This is a glorious knowledge. — Richard M. Eyre

Any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious. — Julian Huxley

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete. — Edwin Gaustad

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language. — James K.A. Smith

While the darkness of the interior concealed her body, the streetlight behind them illuminated the pale oval of her face, gilding her cheeks in shades of amber and ghostly blue. The effect was . . . arresting. Vermeer had used natural light to paint women in this way, faces emerging from the shadows, forcing the viewer's eye to focus on what was most important: the look of grace. The mouth firmed in determination. The eyes poised to behold a revelation. — Meredith Duran

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

If God did not reveal himself with word-by-word
precision, then He has placed the revelation of
truth into the incompetent hands of fallen man.
That would prove hopelessly imbecilic. He who
revealed Himself with exactness in "natural" creation
chose the precise words, sentences and paragraphs to compile one Book in which we have His perfect Word. — Ron Susek

Ontologically, chocolate raises profoundly disturbing questions: Does not chocolate offer natural revelation of the goodness of the Creator just as chilies disclose a divine sense of humor? Is the human born with an innate longing for chocolate? Does the notion of chocolate preclude the concept of free will? — David Augsburger

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being. — Russell Sherman

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation ... natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just. — Ilana Mercer

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

For theology to remain formally one as a science, all the natural knowledge it contains must be directed and subordinated to the point of view proper to the theologian, which is that of revelation. Thus incorporated into the theological order, human learning becomes a part of the sacred doctrine which is founded on faith. — Etienne Gilson

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside
from others. We do not accept it willingly. — Simone De Beauvoir

As to the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in those books [the Bible], they make no part of this pretended thing, revealed religion. They are the natural dictates of conscience, and the bonds by which society is held together, and without which it cannot exist; and are nearly the same in all religions, and in all societies. The Testament teaches nothing new upon this subject, and where it attempts to exceed, it becomes mean and ridiculous. When it is said, as in the Testament, 'If a man smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,' it is assassinating the dignity of forbearance, and sinking man into a spaniel. — Thomas Paine

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation. — Murray Rothbard

Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself. Hence there is no reason why those things which may be learned from philosophical science, so far as they can be known by natural reason, may not also be taught us by another science so far as they fall within revelation. Hence theology included in sacred doctrine differs in kind from that theology which is part of philosophy. SECOND ARTICLE [I, Q. — Thomas Aquinas

The moral and political principles that govern men are derived from three sources: revelation, natural law, and the artificial conventions of society. With regard to its main purpose, there is no comparison between the first and the others; but all three are alike in that they all lead towards happiness in this mortal life. — Cesare Beccaria