The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:7.1The Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, be­ing self-ex­is­tent, is also self-ex­plana­tory; he ac­tu­ally lives in ev­ery ra­tio­nal mor­tal. But you can­not be sure about God un­less you know him; son­ship is the only ex­pe­ri­ence which makes fa­ther­hood cer­tain. The uni­verse is ev­ery­where un­der­go­ing change. A chang­ing uni­verse is a de­pen­dent uni­verse; such a cre­ation can­not be ei­ther fi­nal or ab­so­lute. A fi­nite uni­verse is wholly de­pen­dent on the Ul­ti­mate and the Ab­so­lute. The uni­verse and God are not iden­ti­cal; one is cause, the other ef­fect. The cause is ab­so­lute, in­fi­nite, eter­nal, and change­less; the ef­fect, time-space and tran­scen­den­tal but ever chang­ing, al­ways grow­ing.

102:7.2God is the one and only self-caused fact in the uni­verse. He is the se­cret of the or­der, plan, and pur­pose of the whole cre­ation of things and be­ings. The ev­ery­where-chang­ing uni­verse is reg­u­lated and sta­bi­lized by ab­so­lutely un­chang­ing laws, the habits of an un­chang­ing God. The fact of God, the di­vine law, is change­less; the truth of God, his re­la­tion to the uni­verse, is a rel­a­tive rev­e­la­tion which is ever adapt­able to the con­stantly evolv­ing uni­verse.

102:7.3Those who would in­vent a re­li­gion with­out God are like those who would gather fruit with­out trees, have chil­dren with­out par­ents. You can­not have ef­fects with­out causes; only the I AM is cause­less. The fact of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence im­plies God, and such a God of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence must be a per­sonal De­ity. You can­not pray to a chem­i­cal for­mula, sup­pli­cate a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion, wor­ship a hy­poth­e­sis, con­fide in a pos­tu­late, com­mune with a pro­cess, serve an ab­strac­tion, or hold lov­ing fel­low­ship with a law.

102:7.4True, many ap­par­ently re­li­gious traits can grow out of non­re­li­gious roots. Man can, in­tel­lec­tu­ally, deny God and yet be morally good, loyal, fil­ial, hon­est, and even ide­al­is­tic. Man may graft many purely hu­man­is­tic branches onto his ba­sic spir­i­tual na­ture and thus ap­par­ently prove his con­tentions in be­half of a god­less re­li­gion, but such an ex­pe­ri­ence is de­void of sur­vival val­ues, God-know­ing­ness and God-as­cen­sion. In such a mor­tal ex­pe­ri­ence only so­cial fruits are forth­com­ing, not spir­i­tual. The graft de­ter­mines the na­ture of the fruit, not­with­stand­ing that the liv­ing sus­te­nance is drawn from the roots of orig­i­nal di­vine en­dow­ment of both mind and spirit.

102:7.5The in­tel­lec­tual ear­mark of re­li­gion is cer­tainty; the phil­o­soph­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tic is con­sis­tency; the so­cial fruits are love and ser­vice.

102:7.6The God-know­ing in­di­vid­ual is not one who is blind to the dif­fi­cul­ties or un­mind­ful of the ob­sta­cles which stand in the way of find­ing God in the maze of su­per­sti­tion, tra­di­tion, and ma­te­ri­al­is­tic ten­den­cies of mod­ern times. He has en­coun­tered all these de­ter­rents and tri­umphed over them, sur­mounted them by liv­ing faith, and at­tained the high­lands of spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence in spite of them. But it is true that many who are in­wardly sure about God fear to as­sert such feel­ings of cer­tainty be­cause of the mul­ti­plic­ity and clev­er­ness of those who as­sem­ble ob­jec­tions and mag­nify dif­fi­cul­ties about be­liev­ing in God. It re­quires no great depth of in­tel­lect to pick flaws, ask ques­tions, or raise ob­jec­tions. But it does re­quire bril­liance of mind to an­swer these ques­tions and solve these dif­fi­cul­ties; faith cer­tainty is the great­est tech­nique for deal­ing with all such su­per­fi­cial con­tentions.

102:7.7If sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy, or so­ci­ol­ogy dares to be­come dog­matic in con­tend­ing with the proph­ets of true re­li­gion, then should God-know­ing men re­ply to such un­war­ranted dog­ma­tism with that more farsee­ing dog­ma­tism of the cer­tainty of per­sonal spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, “I know what I have ex­pe­ri­enced be­cause I am a son of I AM.” If the per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of a faither is to be chal­lenged by dogma, then this faith-born son of the ex­pe­ri­en­ci­ble Fa­ther may re­ply with that un­chal­lenge­able dogma, the state­ment of his ac­tual son­ship with the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

102:7.8Only an un­qual­i­fied re­al­ity, an ab­so­lute, could dare con­sis­tently to be dog­matic. Those who as­sume to be dog­matic must, if con­sis­tent, sooner or later be driven into the arms of the Ab­so­lute of en­ergy, the Uni­ver­sal of truth, and the In­fi­nite of love.

102:7.9If the non­re­li­gious ap­proaches to cos­mic re­al­ity pre­sume to chal­lenge the cer­tainty of faith on the grounds of its un­proved sta­tus, then the spirit ex­pe­ri­encer can like­wise re­sort to the dog­matic chal­lenge of the facts of sci­ence and the be­liefs of phi­los­o­phy on the grounds that they are like­wise un­proved; they are like­wise ex­pe­ri­ences in the con­scious­ness of the sci­en­tist or the philoso­pher.

102:7.10Of God, the most in­es­cap­able of all pres­ences, the most real of all facts, the most liv­ing of all truths, the most lov­ing of all friends, and the most di­vine of all val­ues, we have the right to be the most cer­tain of all uni­verse ex­pe­ri­ences.