Perhaps you asked the question in too broad terms for your intent to denigrate spiritual revelation, but here are a couple or three examples of what you asked for as 'personal revelation' ... the creative 'aha' phenomenon is precisely personal revelation, personal perspective upon the universe which brings our instruction in body, soul, and spirit:
Watson and Crick imagining the double helix from their background research and the radiographic data of their lady colleague
The revelation/discovery of the benzene ring
Newton's conceptualization of gravity as the 'glue for holding the solar system together'
Einstein's special relativity revelation from the several concepts percolating his age (such as equations for frame of reference transformations)
Lister's concept of disease
... and there are many more one could cite. The point is, personal revelation is akin to spiritual awareness, both are based upon the accumulated learning of the mind (and stored and accessed via the brain for our current spacetime reality) which inspires the soul and enlivens the human spirit ... and in the case of scientific revelations, manifests in feedback phenomena we receive as scientific revelations regarding the nature of our universe of spacetime phenomena.
That’s right, IMHO. Every advance in science starts with nothing more nor less than revelation, every revelation being personal. Science itself is the content of the scientific journals, which is public recognition of the subjective as now objective.
Your definition of “revelation” would cover every original idea, whether right or wrong. I agree that we do not know how novel ideas occur, just as we do not know everything about how genetic variation occurs.
What makes science different than previous methods of acquiring knowledge is what happens after the revelation or inspiration.
Stephen Gould once wrote that he could have a dozen new ideas a day, but almost none would become productive.
There’s a joke that covers this: A mathematician needs only a pencil, paper and a wastebasket in order to work. A philosopher doesn’t need the wastebasket.
Inspiration is nothing but trouble without a way of discarding useless and unproductive ideas. It is the method of testing ideas that distinguishes science from philosophy and religion.
My take on JS question is that no monkey or ape ever attempted to worship “a” spiritual god.. but man EVOLVED to do that in every place man has gone.. Unless man didn’t EVOLVE at all, he was made that way.. Why would man evolve that quale?..
Seems to me that mathematics even more so than science except perhaps physics is especially advanced by such personal revelations. Mathematicians and physicists deal in theory and universals all the time.
As Wigner observed, mathematics is unreasonably effective in the sciences.
My favorite example is Reimannian geometry which was developed with no application for it. The geometry was envisioned in the mind of Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann and he described it, mathematically. And yet Einstein was able to pull Reimannian geometry off-the-shelf to describe the structure of space/time, i.e. general relativity.
Fair answer.
But bad religion isn’t the only thing that threatens science. Science curriculum, especially in high school, is being overtaken by all sorts of oddities that don’t belong, e.g., sentimental ecology, race, and gender topics.
At the same time it informs our values and cements our affections as a people, or a culture.