General revelation: How to (wrongly) deduce God from nature.

GENERAL REVELATION 'dʒɛn(.ə).rəl rɛv.ə'leɪ.ʃən noun. The universal, natural knowledge about God and divine matters. (Also called universal revelation, or natural revelation.)

2. What the universe, nature, or the human psyche reveal to us about God.

A number of Christian apologists love, love, LOVE the idea of general revelation. And I always wind up on their bad side, because as a theologian I have to point out it’s a wholly unreliable form of revelation. It’s so useless it actually does pagans more good than Christians.

This, they really don’t wanna hear. Because they’ve pinned so many hopes on it.

Y’see, apologists love to debate nontheists—people who don’t believe there’s such a being as God, and therefore are mighty sure he’s never interacted with them. Apologists try to prove God has so interacted with them. If the nontheist can’t remember any particular events, the apologist will often point at nature and claim, “See, that’s a way God interacted with you!” God created a really impressive sunset! Or God not-all-that-supernaturally cured ’em of a disease. Or God created one of their kids. Or they had any sort of warm fuzzy feeling which kinda felt divine.

Or, if we’ve got a more philosophically-minded apologist, they’ll try to argue certain cultural or scientific beliefs in a westerner’s brain can’t properly work unless there’s a God-idea somewhere deep in that brain. Absolutes of right and wrong supposedly can’t exist unless there’s an absolute authority (like, say, God) to define these absolutes. Or the unfulfilled desire for a higher power has to be based on an actual Higher Power out there somewhere.

Apologists like to regularly tap the idea of general revelation, then use it to springboard to special revelation—the stuff God has personally revealed about himself, particularly through Jesus.

Me, I figure all this general revelation stuff is quicksand. That’s why I prefer to leapfrog it and straightaway talk about Jesus. Apologists waste way too much time trying to argue in favor of God’s existence by pointing to nature, reasoning, and the human conscience. And while they’re busy trying to sway skeptics—often unsuccessfully—you realize we coulda just prophesied over the skeptic, proving there’s a Holy Spirit who knows all and empowers prophecy, and suddenly we’re talking about the Jesus the Spirit points to. While the prophesied-upon skeptic’s head is spinning from this unexpected, dumbfounding new revelation of a God who loves her… the apologist is still trying, and failing, to convincingly explain why intelligent design isn’t merely wishful thinking.

Why is general revelation quicksand? Because every religion does general revelation. Every religion says, “Look at the universe!—how beautiful and complex it is! Surely it proves there’s a creator behind it!” Then they try to point to the being they consider the creator—but they’re not talking about the LORD. They’re not talking about Jesus. It’s a whole other god. Ọlọrun, perhaps. Or Ahura Mazda, Brahma, Amun-Ra, etcetera.

Likewise people try to deduce God from creation. We begin with the assumption creation kinda resembles its creator; that it has his fingerprints all over it, so we can sorta figure out what God’s like. Look at the people he created, and the way we think and reason. Look at the intelligence which had to go into some of the more complex things in the universe. Look at the attention to detail, the intricacy, the mathematical and scientific precision, the way everything all neatly fits together. Tells you all sorts of profound things about the creator, doesn’t it?

Well… not if you’ve read your bible. You forget this universe isn’t as God originally created it. It fell.

Doesn’t work without special revelation!

God originally created the cosmos and determined it good. Ge 1.31 Then humans sinned. So rather than letting the universe perpetually repair itself and last forever, God’s letting things run down. Things now deteriorate from order to chaos. We call it entropy; scientists even call it the second law of thermodynamics. Eventually God’s gonna fix everything… but meanwhile he only fixes things as needed. Or prayed for.

How do I know this? Not through general revelation! The universe doesn’t tell me it’s no longer as it originally was; I can’t deduce that through scientific observation. (I mean, it may be possible, in a way which hasn’t yet been discovered. Science discovers new stuff all the time. But right now, it doesn’t do that.) I can’t look at other galaxies through a telescope and conclude, “Hmm, looks like humanity fell 10,000 years ago, and brought our world down with it.”

General revelation tells me nothing. No hints. In fact, if I presume God’s like his creation, and his creation appears to be decaying, with his creatures violently fighting one another for survival, I might falsely conclude God wants decay. Wants us to fight one another to the death for resources and dominance.

Years ago I read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Paine wasn’t Christian; he was deist and wrote his book to defend deism and object to Christianity. In it, he looked at nature and concluded from it that we have a good God. And I concluded Paine was projecting what he wanted God to be like, upon nature. Because I’ve looked at nature too. (And nature books, and nature documentaries.) There’s some cool stuff in the world! It indicates we absolutely have a creative God. But there’s an awful lot of death in our ecosystem. Frequently violent death. Lots of suffering and pain. And if we didn’t know about the fall of creation, we’d naturally assume God meant for all this suffering and pain to be part of his system. That he wants his creatures to suffer and hurt.

How do I know God wants otherwise? Special revelation! It’s in the bible.

So when I look at nature, it’s not with no preconceptions or biases; I’m fully aware I have a whole lot of ’em. (Thomas Paine should have been just as self-aware, but it sure doesn’t look that way.) And a bunch of my preconceptions came from bible. I know nature doesn’t reflect its creator. It reflects his creation: Us. We wayward humans, who bollixed everything. Who are destroying it even faster than it’d decay naturally, thanks to our pollution and other selfish behaviors—however much we’d like to imagine no, nature is hardier than that.

And nature doesn’t wholly reflect us humans either. There’s still quite a lot of God’s brilliance mixed in there.

Now, what if you don’t believe in special revelation? What if, like Paine, you believe in God, but don’t believe the Christians nor the ancient Hebrews? What if you don’t believe God talks through prayer and prophets, or makes appearances, or performs miracles? What if you figure he created the cosmos… then sat back and watched it run, like a proud inventor whose perpetual-motion machine seems to be working perfectly?

Well, where’d you get those beliefs? ’Cause they surely didn’t come from bible.

See, nobody really comes to natural revelation with a truly blank slate. Everybody already has some beliefs about God. Nontheists figure there’s no such being as God. Pagans figure there’s a God, but when it comes to what he’s like, they’re all over the place. Christians have either Christianity, or pop-culture Christian mythology which we use to cover up the fact we don’t know our bibles. Other religions have other dogmas.

Yeah, you might quote some bible at me to try to prove God can so be deduced entirely by general revelation. Apologists have definitely tried it.

Psalm 19.1-4 NET

1The heavens declare the glory of God;

the sky displays his handiwork.

2Day after day it speaks out;

night after night it reveals his greatness.

3There is no actual speech or word,

nor is its voice literally heard.

4Yet its voice echoes throughout the earth;

its words carry to the distant horizon.

Romans 1.20 NET

For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.

And I will point right back that in context, the scriptures always show us natural revelation paired with special revelation. Lookit nature!—now, thus saith the Holy Spirit about it.

Psalm 19 may begin with the heavens declaring God’s glory, but pretty quickly it transitions into God’s Law declaring his glory too.

Psalm 19.7-11 NET

7The law of the LORD is perfect

and preserves one’s life.

The rules set down by the LORD are reliable

and impart wisdom to the inexperienced.

8The LORD’s precepts are fair

and make one joyful.

The LORD’s commands are pure

and give insight for life.

9The commands to fear the LORD are right

and endure forever.

The judgments given by the LORD are trustworthy

and absolutely just.

10They are of greater value than gold,

than even a great amount of pure gold;

they bring greater delight than honey,

than even the sweetest honey from a honeycomb.

11Yes, your servant finds moral guidance there;

those who obey them receive a rich reward.

Yeah, we see God’s activity in the sky and clouds and outer space. But more importantly, more specifically, we see God’s special revelation. God has commands and rules and precepts and judgments. And they’re more valuable than gold and honey, i.e. nature.

The only way to make sense of what nature might report, is through what God does report.

As for God’s invisible qualities in Romans 1… wait, where’d you hear there’s a God who has invisible qualities? Oh yeah, special revelation.

Romans 1.19-20 NET

19because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.

Pagans can deduce God’s invisible characteristics because at some point in their lives, God revealed God-knowledge to them. That’s as basic a definition of special revelation as there is. And now they can look back at the universe he made, and see things are precisely as he describes them.

See, God talks to everybody. God grants special revelation to everybody. And since God talks to everyone, sometimes people mistake this for general revelation—’cause if God generally reveals himself to everyone, isn’t this type of revelation general? No. Because it’s not something he just built into people, like a conscience pre-programmed to feel bad when we sin. It’s a personal communication. God’s not just sprinkling knowledge throughout humanity; he’s trying to start dialogues. He wants relationships.

But when people ignore him, turn a deaf ear to him, and imagine he doesn’t talk to anyone… it means the stuff we see in nature is open to all sorts of interpretation. Without the Holy Spirit to guide and correct these interpretations, we’re gonna go wrong. Always. Without exception.

And you’ve seen what happens when people try to deduce God from nature, yet reject Christianity. Usually we wind up with nature religions. People stare at nature long enough, they start worshiping nature itself. Ro 1.22, 25 Give it a name, like Pan, Astarte, Aranyane, Eostre, or Gaia. Or, when they figure the people who populate nature religions are a bunch of weirdos, they stick to calling it “mother nature” or “God” and spend a crazy amount of time outdoors, exploring. Or if they don’t really care for the outdoors, they’ll spend a lot of time indoors, studying it from afar, with math and controlled experiments.

The beliefs of nature-loving theists.

Back to Thomas Paine. He rejected Christianity, but couldn’t embrace nontheism. He’s been accused of being atheist, but when you read his works, you realize nope; he did believe in God. Just not our God.

But he couldn’t imagine a universe without a God behind it. And he liked the idea God is good, so that’s the idea he proclaimed, and defended. Tried to claim he got it from nature, but as I pointed out, he can’t have. If he actually studied nature properly—like Charles Darwin did, or for that matter anyone who goes hunting—he’d have correctly recognized the concept of survival of the fittest. Nature red in tooth and claw. Nature is inherently competitive, and not at all benevolent to the losers.

Humans might be benevolent… but that’s because we learned about benevolence from other sources. Certainly not from instinct. Paine’s views likewise came from someplace other than nature: From the culture which raised him, and taught him Christianism at the very least. He got benevolence from that, not nature. He projected benevolence upon nature… then projected it upon God. Whatever Paine valued, he found ways of “finding in nature,” then concluded God is the same way.

He’s hardly alone. Most pagans assume God is good because they want God to be good. Not because they truly found goodness in our fallen world.

This happens all the time when people—Christians included!—try to deduce God from nature. They assume they’ll find evidence of his activity. Clues he’s left behind. Fingerprints. God-tracks, so to speak.

Now if I leave tracks in nature, what’re you gonna find? Well, if I rode a bike or motorcycle or ATV, you’re gonna find tire tracks. Which won’t tell you anything about me personally. Just that for some reason, I didn’t walk. Was I tired? Injured? Lazy? In a hurry? Seeking the thrill of riding through the woods way too fast? Without knowing or speaking to me, you don’t know my motives, and are gonna fill in the blanks with your own attitudes: “If it were me, I’d consider myself too important to touch the dirty ground with my feet. So that’s what Leslie must be like too.” Nope; not even close.

Gets even worse when it comes to God. All our unhealthy obsessions with power and control and sovereignty come into play. All our standards of good and evil, right and wrong, proper and improper, clean and unclean, get mixed up in our interpretations. Even with special revelation we misinterpret God. If we presume there is no special revelation, and we’re tracking a mysterious silent God? Billion times worse.

Pagans make that mistake regularly. “Nature’s God” conveniently believes all the very same things they do. He shares all the same values: He’s kind (like they imagine themselves) and benevolent (but only as benevolent as they are). He either believes in freedom from a heavy-handed government and a legalistic church, or he believes society is duty-bound to provide aid and comfort to everyone no matter the cost—depending on their politics, of course.

Lots of projection. Zero humility. “Nature’s God” is secretly, self-delusionally them—writ large, justifying themselves.

In short, deducing “nature’s God” takes all the behaviors we’re attempting to eliminate from the practice of theology, and falls back on ’em. It’s wholly untrustworthy because we’re wholly untrustworthy. It’s why Christians—those of us with half a brain, anyway—stay far, far away from general revelation. If God isn’t in it, we can’t trust it.