First Cause

98:2.6Xeno­phanes taught one God, but his de­ity con­cept was too pan­the­is­tic to be a per­sonal Fa­ther to mor­tal man. Anaxago­ras was a mech­a­nist ex­cept that he did rec­og­nize a First Cause, an Ini­tial Mind. Socrates and his suc­ces­sors, Plato and Aris­to­tle, taught that virtue is knowl­edge; good­ness, health of the soul; that it is bet­ter to suf­fer in­jus­tice than to be guilty of it, that it is wrong to re­turn evil for evil, and that the gods are wise and good. Their car­di­nal virtues were: wis­dom, cour­age, tem­per­ance, and jus­tice.

195:6.5Sci­ence is a quan­ti­ta­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, re­li­gion a qual­i­ta­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, as re­gards man’s life on earth. Sci­ence deals with phe­nom­ena; re­li­gion, with ori­gins, val­ues, and goals. To as­sign causes as an ex­pla­na­tion of phys­i­cal phe­nom­ena is to con­fess ig­no­rance of ul­ti­mates and in the end only leads the sci­en­tist straight back to the first great cause—the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther of Par­a­dise.

196:3.1Per­sonal, spir­i­tual re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence is an ef­fi­cient sol­vent for most mor­tal dif­fi­cul­ties; it is an ef­fec­tive sorter, eval­u­a­tor, and ad­juster of all hu­man prob­lems. Re­li­gion does not re­move or de­stroy hu­man trou­bles, but it does dis­solve, ab­sorb, il­lu­mi­nate, and tran­scend them. True re­li­gion uni­fies the per­son­al­ity for ef­fec­tive ad­just­ment to all mor­tal re­quire­ments. Re­li­gious faith—the pos­i­tive lead­ing of the in­dwelling di­vine pres­ence—un­fail­ingly en­ables the God-know­ing man to bridge that gulf ex­ist­ing be­tween the in­tel­lec­tual logic which rec­og­nizes the Uni­ver­sal First Cause as It and those pos­i­tive af­fir­ma­tions of the soul which aver this First Cause is He, the heav­enly Fa­ther of Je­sus’ gospel, the per­sonal God of hu­man sal­va­tion.

4:4.7In sci­ence, God is the First Cause; in re­li­gion, the uni­ver­sal and lov­ing Fa­ther; in phi­los­o­phy, the one be­ing who ex­ists by him­self, not de­pen­dent on any other be­ing for ex­is­tence but benef­i­cently con­fer­ring re­al­ity of ex­is­tence on all things and upon all other be­ings. But it re­quires rev­e­la­tion to show that the First Cause of sci­ence and the self-ex­is­tent Unity of phi­los­o­phy are the God of re­li­gion, full of mercy and good­ness and pledged to ef­fect the eter­nal sur­vival of his chil­dren on earth.

8:1.10And we thus por­tray the se­quen­tial ori­gin of the Third Source and Cen­ter as an in­ter­pre­ta­tive con­de­scen­sion to the time-bound and space-con­di­tioned mind of mor­tal crea­tures. The mind of man must have a start­ing point for the vi­su­al­iza­tion of uni­verse his­tory, and I have been di­rected to pro­vide this tech­nique of ap­proach to the his­toric con­cept of eter­nity. In the ma­te­rial mind, con­sis­tency de­mands a First Cause; there­fore do we pos­tu­late the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther as the First Source and the Ab­so­lute Cen­ter of all cre­ation, at the same time in­struct­ing all crea­ture minds that the Son and the Spirit are co­eter­nal with the Fa­ther in all phases of uni­verse his­tory and in all realms of cre­ative ac­tiv­ity. And we do this with­out in any sense be­ing dis­re­gard­ful of the re­al­ity and eter­nity of the Isle of Par­a­dise and of the Un­qual­i­fied, Uni­ver­sal, and De­ity Ab­so­lutes.

118:6.2To ad­vo­cate the om­nif­i­cence of pri­mal De­ity would be equal to dis­en­fran­chis­ing well-nigh a mil­lion Cre­ator Sons of Par­a­dise, not to men­tion the in­nu­mer­able hosts of var­i­ous other or­ders of con­cur­ring cre­ative as­sis­tants. There is but one un­caused Cause in the whole uni­verse. All other causes are deriva­tives of this one First Great Source and Cen­ter. And none of this phi­los­o­phy does any vi­o­lence to the free-will­ness of the myr­i­ads of the chil­dren of De­ity scat­tered through a vast uni­verse.

101:2.3Rea­son, through the study of sci­ence, may lead back through na­ture to a First Cause, but it re­quires re­li­gious faith to trans­form the First Cause of sci­ence into a God of sal­va­tion; and rev­e­la­tion is fur­ther re­quired for the val­i­da­tion of such a faith, such spir­i­tual in­sight.

101:2.7Sci­ence ends its rea­son-search in the hy­poth­e­sis of a First Cause. Re­li­gion does not stop in its flight of faith un­til it is sure of a God of sal­va­tion. The dis­crim­i­nat­ing study of sci­ence log­i­cally sug­gests the re­al­ity and ex­is­tence of an Ab­so­lute. Re­li­gion be­lieves un­re­servedly in the ex­is­tence and re­al­ity of a God who fos­ters per­son­al­ity sur­vival. What meta­physics fails ut­terly in do­ing, and what even phi­los­o­phy fails par­tially in do­ing, rev­e­la­tion does; that is, af­firms that this First Cause of sci­ence and re­li­gion’s God of sal­va­tion are one and the same De­ity.