The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:6.1The philo­sophic elim­i­na­tion of re­li­gious fear and the steady prog­ress of sci­ence add greatly to the mor­tal­ity of false gods; and even though these ca­su­al­ties of man-made de­i­ties may mo­men­tar­ily be­fog the spir­i­tual vi­sion, they even­tu­ally de­stroy that ig­no­rance and su­per­sti­tion which so long ob­scured the liv­ing God of eter­nal love. The re­la­tion be­tween the crea­ture and the Cre­ator is a liv­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, a dy­namic re­li­gious faith, which is not sub­ject to pre­cise def­i­ni­tion. To iso­late part of life and call it re­li­gion is to dis­in­te­grate life and to dis­tort re­li­gion. And this is just why the God of wor­ship claims all al­le­giance or none.

102:6.2The gods of prim­i­tive men may have been no more than shad­ows of them­selves; the liv­ing God is the di­vine light whose in­ter­rup­tions con­sti­tute the cre­ation shad­ows of all space.

102:6.3The re­li­gion­ist of philo­sophic at­tain­ment has faith in a per­sonal God of per­sonal sal­va­tion, some­thing more than a re­al­ity, a value, a level of achieve­ment, an ex­alted pro­cess, a trans­mu­ta­tion, the ul­ti­mate of time-space, an ide­al­iza­tion, the per­son­al­iza­tion of en­ergy, the en­tity of grav­ity, a hu­man pro­jec­tion, the ide­al­iza­tion of self, na­ture’s up­thrust, the in­cli­na­tion to good­ness, the for­ward im­pulse of evo­lu­tion, or a sub­lime hy­poth­e­sis. The re­li­gion­ist has faith in a God of love. Love is the essence of re­li­gion and the well­spring of su­pe­rior civ­i­liza­tion.

102:6.4Faith trans­forms the philo­sophic God of prob­a­bil­ity into the sav­ing God of cer­tainty in the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Skep­ti­cism may chal­lenge the the­o­ries of the­ol­ogy, but con­fi­dence in the de­pend­abil­ity of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence af­firms the truth of that be­lief which has grown into faith.

102:6.5Con­vic­tions about God may be ar­rived at through wise rea­son­ing, but the in­di­vid­ual be­comes God-know­ing only by faith, through per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence. In much that per­tains to life, prob­a­bil­ity must be reck­oned with, but when con­tact­ing with cos­mic re­al­ity, cer­tainty may be ex­pe­ri­enced when such mean­ings and val­ues are ap­proached by liv­ing faith. The God-know­ing soul dares to say, “I know,” even when this knowl­edge of God is ques­tioned by the un­be­liever who de­nies such cer­ti­tude be­cause it is not wholly sup­ported by in­tel­lec­tual logic. To ev­ery such doubter the be­liever only replies, “How do you know that I do not know?”

102:6.6Though rea­son can al­ways ques­tion faith, faith can al­ways sup­ple­ment both rea­son and logic. Rea­son cre­ates the prob­a­bil­ity which faith can trans­form into a moral cer­tainty, even a spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence. God is the first truth and the last fact; there­fore does all truth take ori­gin in him, while all facts ex­ist rel­a­tive to him. God is ab­so­lute truth. As truth one may know God, but to un­der­stand—to ex­plain—God, one must ex­plore the fact of the uni­verse of uni­verses. The vast gulf be­tween the ex­pe­ri­ence of the truth of God and ig­no­rance as to the fact of God can be bridged only by liv­ing faith. Rea­son alone can­not achieve har­mony be­tween in­fi­nite truth and uni­ver­sal fact.

102:6.7Be­lief may not be able to re­sist doubt and with­stand fear, but faith is al­ways tri­umphant over doubt­ing, for faith is both pos­i­tive and liv­ing. The pos­i­tive al­ways has the ad­van­tage over the neg­a­tive, truth over er­ror, ex­pe­ri­ence over the­ory, spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties over the iso­lated facts of time and space. The con­vinc­ing ev­i­dence of this spir­i­tual cer­tainty con­sists in the so­cial fruits of the spirit which such be­liev­ers, faithers, yield as a re­sult of this gen­uine spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence. Said Je­sus: “If you love your fel­lows as I have loved you, then shall all men know that you are my dis­ci­ples.”

102:6.8To sci­ence God is a pos­si­bil­ity, to psy­chol­ogy a de­sir­abil­ity, to phi­los­o­phy a prob­a­bil­ity, to re­li­gion a cer­tainty, an ac­tu­al­ity of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Rea­son de­mands that a phi­los­o­phy which can­not find the God of prob­a­bil­ity should be very re­spect­ful of that re­li­gious faith which can and does find the God of cer­ti­tude. Nei­ther should sci­ence dis­count re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence on grounds of credulity, not so long as it per­sists in the as­sump­tion that man’s in­tel­lec­tual and philo­sophic en­dow­ments emerged from in­creas­ingly lesser in­tel­li­gences the fur­ther back they go, fi­nally tak­ing ori­gin in prim­i­tive life which was ut­terly de­void of all think­ing and feel­ing.

102:6.9The facts of evo­lu­tion must not be ar­rayed against the truth of the re­al­ity of the cer­tainty of the spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence of the re­li­gious liv­ing of the God-know­ing mor­tal. In­tel­li­gent men should cease to rea­son like chil­dren and should at­tempt to use the con­sis­tent logic of adult­hood, logic which tol­er­ates the con­cept of truth along­side the ob­ser­va­tion of fact. Sci­en­tific ma­te­ri­al­ism has gone bankrupt when it per­sists, in the face of each re­cur­ring uni­verse phe­nom­e­non, in re­fund­ing its cur­rent ob­jec­tions by re­fer­ring what is ad­mit­tedly higher back into that which is ad­mit­tedly lower. Con­sis­tency de­mands the rec­og­ni­tion of the ac­tiv­i­ties of a pur­po­sive Cre­ator.

102:6.10Or­ganic evo­lu­tion is a fact; pur­po­sive or pro­gres­sive evo­lu­tion is a truth which makes con­sis­tent the oth­er­wise con­tra­dic­tory phe­nom­ena of the ever-as­cend­ing achieve­ments of evo­lu­tion. The higher any sci­en­tist pro­gresses in his cho­sen sci­ence, the more will he aban­don the the­o­ries of ma­te­ri­al­is­tic fact in fa­vor of the cos­mic truth of the dom­i­nance of the Su­preme Mind. Ma­te­ri­al­ism cheap­ens hu­man life; the gospel of Je­sus tremen­dously en­hances and su­per­nally ex­alts ev­ery mor­tal. Mor­tal ex­is­tence must be vi­su­al­ized as con­sist­ing in the in­trigu­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence of the re­al­iza­tion of the re­al­ity of the meet­ing of the hu­man up­reach and the di­vine and sav­ing down­reach.