The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:1.1The work of the Thought Ad­juster con­sti­tutes the ex­pla­na­tion of the trans­la­tion of man’s prim­i­tive and evo­lu­tion­ary sense of duty into that higher and more cer­tain faith in the eter­nal re­al­i­ties of rev­e­la­tion. There must be per­fec­tion hunger in man’s heart to in­sure ca­pac­ity for com­pre­hend­ing the faith paths to su­preme at­tain­ment. If any man chooses to do the di­vine will, he shall know the way of truth. It is lit­er­ally true, “Hu­man things must be known in or­der to be loved, but di­vine things must be loved in or­der to be known.” But hon­est doubts and sin­cere ques­tion­ings are not sin; such at­ti­tudes merely spell de­lay in the pro­gres­sive jour­ney to­ward per­fec­tion at­tain­ment. Child­like trust se­cures man’s en­trance into the king­dom of heav­enly as­cent, but prog­ress is wholly de­pen­dent on the vig­or­ous ex­er­cise of the ro­bust and con­fi­dent faith of the full-grown man.

102:1.2The rea­son of sci­ence is based on the ob­serv­able facts of time; the faith of re­li­gion ar­gues from the spirit pro­gram of eter­nity. What knowl­edge and rea­son can­not do for us, true wis­dom ad­mon­ishes us to al­low faith to ac­com­plish through re­li­gious in­sight and spir­i­tual trans­for­ma­tion.

102:1.3Ow­ing to the iso­la­tion of re­bel­lion, the rev­e­la­tion of truth on Uran­tia has all too of­ten been mixed up with the state­ments of par­tial and tran­sient cos­molo­gies. Truth re­mains un­changed from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, but the as­so­ci­ated teach­ings about the phys­i­cal world vary from day to day and from year to year. Eter­nal truth should not be slighted be­cause it chances to be found in com­pany with ob­so­lete ideas re­gard­ing the ma­te­rial world. The more of sci­ence you know, the less sure you can be; the more of re­li­gion you have, the more cer­tain you are.

102:1.4The cer­tain­ties of sci­ence pro­ceed en­tirely from the in­tel­lect; the cer­ti­tudes of re­li­gion spring from the very foun­da­tions of the en­tire per­son­al­ity. Sci­ence ap­peals to the un­der­stand­ing of the mind; re­li­gion ap­peals to the loy­alty and de­vo­tion of the body, mind, and spirit, even to the whole per­son­al­ity.

102:1.5God is so all real and ab­so­lute that no ma­te­rial sign of proof or no dem­on­stra­tion of so-called mir­a­cle may be of­fered in tes­ti­mony of his re­al­ity. Al­ways will we know him be­cause we trust him, and our be­lief in him is wholly based on our per­sonal par­tic­i­pa­tion in the di­vine man­i­fes­ta­tions of his in­fi­nite re­al­ity.

102:1.6The in­dwelling Thought Ad­juster un­fail­ingly arouses in man’s soul a true and search­ing hunger for per­fec­tion to­gether with a far-reach­ing cu­rios­ity which can be ad­e­quately sat­is­fied only by com­mu­nion with God, the di­vine source of that Ad­juster. The hun­gry soul of man re­fuses to be sat­is­fied with any­thing less than the per­sonal re­al­iza­tion of the liv­ing God. What­ever more God may be than a high and per­fect moral per­son­al­ity, he can­not, in our hun­gry and fi­nite con­cept, be any­thing less.