Suppose your mother makes a magnificent cake as a surprise for you. Suppose also you have a colleague who is a fanatical advocate of scientism – the belief system that science alone can answer all questions.

If you asked questions related to the cake, your colleague would summon a battalion of science specialists. For example, dieticians to answer questions about calories and nutritive values of the cake’s ingredients; chemists, about the bonding of those ingredients; mathematicians, about the equations describing the behavior of the involved fundamental particles.

Yet none of them would be able to tell why the cake was made. For that, you would have to ask your mother. Suppose your colleague rejected such an “unscientific” source of knowledge and instead adjudged: “Because science hasn’t found the purpose for which the cake was made, it has no purpose – it just happened.”

How would your mother’s respond to such dismissal of her labor of love by a “just-happened” hypothesis?

Disbelief, dismay, outrage.

Suppose instead that your mother, being a levelheaded lady, dismisses the hypothesis and calmly informs: “Today was the day twenty-seven years ago when your first tooth emerged. To commemorate that day, I wanted to make something soft and sweet and special for you – hence this cake.”

There’s no way the world’s best scientists would have been able to figure that out. Does their inability invalidate this information?

Not at all; it still remains valid and valuable.

A similar dynamic applies to the study of the universe. The world’s best scientists according to their specialties determine what it is made of and how it works. Their intellectual zeal notwithstanding, they won’t be able to find out the purpose of the universe. And this inability is not their fault – it’s the fault of the overzealous proponents of scientism who have unfairly cornered scientists with such out-of-syllabus questions.

To know the universe’s purpose, we need to turn to the maker of the universe: God. He offers answers through revelation in the form of scriptural wisdom. Revelation thus grants us access to vital information that unaided reason cannot reach.

Skeptics may object, “By accepting revelation, you will end up rejecting reason – the source of all our scientific knowledge.”

Such alarmist objections stem from a stereotyped conception of revelation as opposed to reason.

But actually it is reason that helps us recognize the need for revelation and to comprehend it.

Going back to your mother’s purpose for making the cake, you would still need reason to understand her “revelation.” Your pet dog, lacking the reasoning faculty, wouldn’t understand it.

Thus, reason and revelation work in tandem to further our quest for knowledge.