The Reality of Religious Experience

103:8.1Al­though both sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy may as­sume the prob­a­bil­ity of God by their rea­son and logic, only the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of a spirit-led man can af­firm the cer­tainty of such a su­preme and per­sonal De­ity. By the tech­nique of such an in­car­na­tion of liv­ing truth the philo­sophic hy­poth­e­sis of the prob­a­bil­ity of God be­comes a re­li­gious re­al­ity.

103:8.2The con­fu­sion about the ex­pe­ri­ence of the cer­tainty of God arises out of the dis­sim­i­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions and re­la­tions of that ex­pe­ri­ence by sep­a­rate in­di­vid­u­als and by dif­fer­ent races of men. The ex­pe­ri­enc­ing of God may be wholly valid, but the dis­course about God, be­ing in­tel­lec­tual and phil­o­soph­i­cal, is di­ver­gent and of­ten­times con­fus­ingly fal­la­cious.

103:8.3A good and no­ble man may be con­sum­mately in love with his wife but ut­terly un­able to pass a sat­is­fac­tory writ­ten ex­am­i­na­tion on the psy­chol­ogy of mar­i­tal love. An­other man, hav­ing lit­tle or no love for his spouse, might pass such an ex­am­i­na­tion most ac­cept­ably. The im­per­fec­tion of the lover’s in­sight into the true na­ture of the beloved does not in the least in­val­i­date ei­ther the re­al­ity or sin­cer­ity of his love.

103:8.4If you truly be­lieve in God—by faith know him and love him—do not per­mit the re­al­ity of such an ex­pe­ri­ence to be in any way less­ened or de­tracted from by the doubt­ing in­sin­u­a­tions of sci­ence, the cav­il­ing of logic, the pos­tu­lates of phi­los­o­phy, or the clever sug­ges­tions of well-mean­ing souls who would cre­ate a re­li­gion with­out God.

103:8.5The cer­tainty of the God-know­ing re­li­gion­ist should not be dis­turbed by the un­cer­tainty of the doubt­ing ma­te­ri­al­ist; rather should the un­cer­tainty of the un­be­liever be might­ily chal­lenged by the pro­found faith and un­shak­able cer­tainty of the ex­pe­ri­en­tial be­liever.

103:8.6Phi­los­o­phy, to be of the great­est ser­vice to both sci­ence and re­li­gion, should avoid the ex­tremes of both ma­te­ri­al­ism and pan­the­ism. Only a phi­los­o­phy which rec­og­nizes the re­al­ity of per­son­al­ity—per­ma­nence in the pres­ence of change—can be of moral value to man, can serve as a li­ai­son be­tween the the­o­ries of ma­te­rial sci­ence and spir­i­tual re­li­gion. Rev­e­la­tion is a com­pen­sa­tion for the frail­ties of evolv­ing phi­los­o­phy.