Читать книгу When People Speak for God - Henry E. Neufeld - Страница 13

The role of each type of revelation seems obvious to me, provided that we simply look at how each functions. We look at nature and observe its facts. Facts of the physical world and explaining how they fit together are the province of scientific observation. We have repeated demonstrations of the effectiveness of this process in functioning technology, such as the computer and word processor I'm using to produce this book.

On the other hand, the why is not so clear from such observations. We can fit quite a number of different motivations and moral systems into the physical nature of the universe and the way in which our lives function in it. What is true? Here is where special revelation comes in.

There are two fairly obvious ways in which one can be misled, both of which result from applying the wrong type of revelation to the problem. Using special revelation to gain information about the physical world has resulted in young earth creationism, the doctrine that the earth (and the universe) is a mere 6,000 years old, and was created in six literal days. An overwhelming mass of scientific evidence stands against this conclusion. Everything we can learn from the natural world contradicts it, yet advocates hang onto it simply because they believe it is what the Bible teaches. The special revelation, in this case, trumps the revelation of the physical world in an area in which it should not.

The reverse case is Social Darwinism. Here simply because we observe that those most fit to fill an environmental niche will survive, while those less suited fail, we decide that in society this is what ought to be. In this case observations from science are abused to produce a moral conclusion.