"This is our world," David Petersen writes in his On the Wild Edge:  In Search of  Natural Life, and "it is all that ever will be."  This is a classic statement of naturalism, the idea that this world represents the sum of all that we can know, all to which we can go to discover purpose and meaning.  We do not need anything outside of or beyond this world to decide what is real, valuable, and true; we only need this world, this  remarkable sphere of materiality and undeserved grace on which we live to know what life is all about.
     On the surface, this assertion seems to make sense.  Why, if we live in this world, do we need to look anywhere else for what this world means?  Why, given that this world is the foundation of all that we think and do, must we suppose that we should look in other places to decide what it really means?  We're here and, as the writer Joan Didion put it in a university commencement address few years ago, "should get on with it."
     However attractive this perspective may seem, it overlooks one very important fact:  we cannot know, with absolute certainty, whether this world is indeed "all that is"  Finite creatures that we are, we simply cannot honestly conclude that, without any doubt, what we see and experience every day is all that we will ever experience, or that it is all from which we may draw any ideas for determining truth and meaning.  It is beyond our capacity to fully discern and see.
     Moreover, if we indeed insist that this world is all that we need to explain this world, then we are forced to ask another troublesome question:  how we can use a world whose precise meaning we do not know, a world we ourselves did not make, in order to decide what it means?  We're proving meaning on the basis of what is we already think--without any proof--is meaningful.  It is circular through and through.
     What can we do?  As the writer of Proverbs (Proverbs 29:18) suggested many millennia ago, we must look to a source of information and content beyond the world to find what the world--and us  in it--means.  We look, as the writer proclaims, to God.  We look to revelation, divinely inspired truth that we did not manufacture or make, divinely rendered truth that we did not previously know to make sense of this joyful yet bewildering (and unrequested) existence.  Without revelation, without input from a being who created and grounded truth and purpose in the world we occupy, we will never know what is really true.  How could we?  Truth is only genuine if it is absolute, and a mercurial and shifting and ebbing world will never be absolute.  It will always be contingent.
     We need revelation to really see.