science

• cannot prove existence of God, soul

1:2.7The ex­is­tence of God can never be proved by sci­en­tific ex­per­i­ment or by the pure rea­son of log­i­cal de­duc­tion. God can be re­al­ized only in the realms of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence; nev­er­the­less, the true con­cept of the re­al­ity of God is rea­son­able to logic, plau­si­ble to phi­los­o­phy, es­sen­tial to re­li­gion, and in­dis­pens­able to any hope of per­son­al­ity sur­vival.

• religion is mother of s.

5:5.5Evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion is the mother of the sci­ence, art, and phi­los­o­phy which el­e­vated man to the level of re­cep­tiv­ity to re­vealed re­li­gion, in­clud­ing the be­stowal of Ad­justers and the com­ing of the Spirit of Truth. The evo­lu­tion­ary pic­ture of hu­man ex­is­tence be­gins and ends with re­li­gion, al­beit very dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties of re­li­gion, one evo­lu­tional and bi­o­log­i­cal, the other rev­e­la­tional and pe­ri­od­i­cal. And so, while re­li­gion is nor­mal and nat­u­ral to man, it is also op­tional. Man does not have to be re­li­gious against his will.

• engaged in agelong contest between truth and error

12:9.5Your re­li­gion is be­com­ing real be­cause it is emerg­ing from the slav­ery of fear and the bond­age of su­per­sti­tion. Your phi­los­o­phy strug­gles for eman­ci­pa­tion from dogma and tra­di­tion. Your sci­ence is en­gaged in the age­long con­test be­tween truth and er­ror while it fights for de­liv­er­ance from the bond­age of ab­strac­tion, the slav­ery of math­e­mat­ics, and the rel­a­tive blind­ness of mech­a­nis­tic ma­te­ri­al­ism.

• cannot create matter or life

36:6.1Life is both mech­a­nis­tic and vi­tal­is­tic—ma­te­rial and spir­i­tual. Ever will Uran­tia physi­cists and chemists pro­gress in their un­der­stand­ing of the pro­to­plas­mic forms of veg­etable and an­i­mal life, but never will they be able to pro­duce liv­ing or­gan­isms. Life is some­thing dif­fer­ent from all en­ergy man­i­fes­ta­tions; even the ma­te­rial life of phys­i­cal crea­tures is not in­her­ent in mat­ter.

• cannot prove existence of God, soul

42:1.3There is in­nate in mat­ter and pres­ent in uni­ver­sal space a form of en­ergy not known on Uran­tia. When this dis­cov­ery is fi­nally made, then will physi­cists feel that they have solved, al­most at least, the mys­tery of mat­ter. And so will they have ap­proached one step nearer the Cre­ator; so will they have mas­tered one more phase of the di­vine tech­nique; but in no sense will they have found God, nei­ther will they have es­tab­lished the ex­is­tence of mat­ter or the op­er­a­tion of nat­u­ral laws apart from the cos­mic tech­nique of Par­a­dise and the mo­ti­vat­ing pur­pose of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

• cannot create matter or life

42:1.4Sub­se­quent to even still greater prog­ress and fur­ther dis­cov­er­ies, af­ter Uran­tia has ad­vanced im­mea­sur­ably in com­par­i­son with pres­ent knowl­edge, though you should gain con­trol of the en­ergy rev­o­lu­tions of the elec­tri­cal units of mat­ter to the ex­tent of mod­i­fy­ing their phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions—even af­ter all such pos­si­ble prog­ress, for­ever will sci­en­tists be pow­er­less to cre­ate one atom of mat­ter or to orig­i­nate one flash of en­ergy or ever to add to mat­ter that which we call life.

• philosophy cannot be predicated on observations of

42:9.4But not all the sup­po­si­tions of nat­u­ral phi­los­o­phy are valid; for ex­am­ple, the hy­po­thet­i­cal ether, which rep­re­sents an in­ge­nious at­tempt of man to unify his ig­no­rance of space phe­nom­ena. The phi­los­o­phy of the uni­verse can­not be pred­i­cated on the ob­ser­va­tions of so-called sci­ence. If such a meta­mor­pho­sis could not be seen, a sci­en­tist would be in­clined to deny the pos­si­bil­ity of de­vel­op­ing a but­ter­fly out of a cater­pil­lar.

• final physical discoveries made in era of light and life

55:4.8Act­ing as in­ter­preters for the se­raphic guard­i­ans and the fi­nal­i­ters are the ex­alted and lib­er­ated mid­way crea­tures. One of the last acts of the Trin­ity Teacher Sons on their ter­mi­nal mis­sion is to lib­er­ate the mid­way­ers of the realm and to pro­mote (or re­store) them to ad­vanced plan­e­tary sta­tus, as­sign­ing them to re­spon­si­ble places in the new ad­min­is­tra­tion of the set­tled sphere. Such changes have al­ready been made in the range of hu­man vi­sion as en­able mor­tals to rec­og­nize these here­to­fore in­vis­i­ble cousins of the early Adamic regime. This is made pos­si­ble by the fi­nal dis­cov­er­ies of phys­i­cal sci­ence in li­ai­son with the en­larged plan­e­tary func­tions of the Mas­ter Phys­i­cal Con­trol­lers.

• cannot create matter or life

65:6.1It is im­pos­si­ble ac­cu­rately to de­ter­mine, si­mul­ta­ne­ously, the ex­act lo­ca­tion and the ve­loc­ity of a mov­ing ob­ject; any at­tempt at mea­sure­ment of ei­ther in­evitably in­volves change in the other. The same sort of a para­dox con­fronts mor­tal man when he un­der­takes the chem­i­cal anal­y­sis of pro­to­plasm. The chemist can elu­ci­date the chem­istry of dead pro­to­plasm, but he can­not dis­cern ei­ther the phys­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion or the dy­namic per­for­mance of liv­ing pro­to­plasm. Ever will the sci­en­tist come nearer and nearer the se­crets of life, but never will he find them and for no other rea­son than that he must kill pro­to­plasm in or­der to an­a­lyze it. Dead pro­to­plasm weighs the same as liv­ing pro­to­plasm, but it is not the same.

• teachings of Prince’s staff

66:5.238. The plan­e­tary coun­cil on art and sci­ence. This corps did much to im­prove the in­dus­trial tech­nique of early man and to el­e­vate his con­cepts of beauty. Their leader was Mek.

66:5.24Art and sci­ence were at a low ebb through­out the world, but the rudi­ments of physics and chem­istry were taught the Dala­ma­tians. Pot­tery was ad­vanced, dec­o­ra­tive arts were all im­proved, and the ide­als of hu­man beauty were greatly en­hanced. But mu­sic made lit­tle prog­ress un­til af­ter the ar­rival of the vi­o­let race.

66:5.25These prim­i­tive men would not con­sent to ex­per­i­ment with steam power, not­with­stand­ing the re­peated urg­ings of their teach­ers; never could they over­come their great fear of the ex­plo­sive power of con­fined steam. They were, how­ever, fi­nally per­suaded to work with met­als and fire, al­though a piece of red-hot metal was a ter­ror­iz­ing ob­ject to early man.

66:5.26Mek did a great deal to ad­vance the cul­ture of the An­don­ites and to im­prove the art of the blue man. A blend of the blue man with the An­don stock pro­duced an ar­tis­ti­cally gifted type, and many of them be­came mas­ter sculp­tors. They did not work in stone or mar­ble, but their works of clay, hard­ened by bak­ing, adorned the gar­dens of Dala­ma­tia.

66:5.27Great prog­ress was made in the home arts, most of which were lost in the long and dark ages of re­bel­lion, never to be re­dis­cov­ered un­til mod­ern times.

• thrives best in cities

68:6.5Fron­tier so­ci­ety de­vel­ops the un­skilled side of hu­man­ity; the fine arts and true sci­en­tific prog­ress, to­gether with spir­i­tual cul­ture, have all thrived best in the larger cen­ters of life when sup­ported by an ag­ri­cul­tural and in­dus­trial pop­u­la­tion slightly un­der the land-man ra­tio. Cities al­ways mul­ti­ply the power of their in­hab­i­tants for ei­ther good or evil.

• honest search for true causes gave birth to

81:2.9When asked where fire came from, the sim­ple story of An­don and the flint was soon re­placed by the leg­end of how some Prometheus stole it from heaven. The an­cients sought a super­nat­u­ral ex­pla­na­tion for all nat­u­ral phe­nom­ena not within the range of their per­sonal com­pre­hen­sion; and many mod­erns con­tinue to do this. The de­per­son­al­iza­tion of so-called nat­u­ral phe­nom­ena has re­quired ages, and it is not yet com­pleted. But the frank, hon­est, and fear­less search for true causes gave birth to mod­ern sci­ence: It turned as­trol­ogy into as­tron­omy, alchemy into chem­istry, and magic into med­i­cine.

• confers increasing liberty on mankind

81:2.14The sav­age is a slave to na­ture, but sci­en­tific civ­i­liza­tion is slowly con­fer­ring in­creas­ing lib­erty on man­kind. Through an­i­mals, fire, wind, wa­ter, elec­tric­ity, and other undis­cov­ered sources of en­ergy, man has lib­er­ated, and will con­tinue to lib­er­ate, him­self from the ne­ces­sity for un­remit­ting toil. Re­gard­less of the tran­sient trou­ble pro­duced by the pro­lific in­ven­tion of ma­chin­ery, the ul­ti­mate ben­e­fits to be de­rived from such me­chan­i­cal in­ven­tions are in­es­timable. Civ­i­liza­tion can never flour­ish, much less be es­tab­lished, un­til man has leisure to think, to plan, to imag­ine new and bet­ter ways of do­ing things.

• benefited most from printing press

81:6.9Knowl­edge is power. In­ven­tion al­ways pre­cedes the ac­cel­er­a­tion of cul­tural de­vel­op­ment on a world-wide scale. Sci­ence and in­ven­tion ben­e­fited most of all from the print­ing press, and the in­ter­ac­tion of all these cul­tural and in­ven­tive ac­tiv­i­ties has enor­mously ac­cel­er­ated the rate of cul­tural ad­vance­ment.

• purifies religion by destroying superstition
• teaches man language of mathematics

81:6.10Sci­ence teaches man to speak the new lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics and trains his thoughts along lines of ex­act­ing pre­ci­sion. And sci­ence also sta­bi­lizes phi­los­o­phy through the elim­i­na­tion of er­ror, while it pu­ri­fies re­li­gion by the de­struc­tion of su­per­sti­tion.

• confers increasing liberty on mankind

81:6.22Sci­ence, guided by wis­dom, may be­come man’s great so­cial lib­er­a­tor. A me­chan­i­cal age can prove dis­as­trous only to a na­tion whose in­tel­lec­tual level is too low to dis­cover those wise meth­ods and sound tech­niques for suc­cess­fully ad­just­ing to the tran­si­tion dif­fi­cul­ties aris­ing from the sud­den loss of em­ploy­ment by large num­bers con­se­quent upon the too rapid in­ven­tion of new types of labor­sav­ing ma­chin­ery.

• emancipated woman

84:5.7Sci­ence, not re­li­gion, re­ally eman­ci­pated woman; it was the mod­ern fac­tory which largely set her free from the con­fines of the home. Man’s phys­i­cal abil­i­ties be­came no longer a vi­tal es­sen­tial in the new main­te­nance mech­a­nism; sci­ence so changed the con­di­tions of liv­ing that man power was no longer so su­pe­rior to woman power.

84:5.8These changes have tended to­ward woman’s lib­er­a­tion from do­mes­tic slav­ery and have brought about such a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of her sta­tus that she now en­joys a de­gree of per­sonal lib­erty and sex de­ter­mi­na­tion that prac­ti­cally equals man’s. Once a woman’s value con­sisted in her food-pro­duc­ing abil­ity, but in­ven­tion and wealth have en­abled her to cre­ate a new world in which to func­tion—spheres of grace and charm. Thus has in­dus­try won its un­con­scious and un­in­tended fight for woman’s so­cial and eco­nomic eman­ci­pa­tion. And again has evo­lu­tion suc­ceeded in do­ing what even rev­e­la­tion failed to ac­com­plish.

• religion is mother of s.

92:3.9Re­li­gion fa­cil­i­tated the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal; it fos­tered work of cer­tain kinds; the leisure of the priests pro­moted art and knowl­edge; the race, in the end, gained much as a re­sult of all these early er­rors in eth­i­cal tech­nique. The shamans, hon­est and dis­hon­est, were ter­ri­bly ex­pen­sive, but they were worth all they cost. The learned pro­fes­sions and sci­ence it­self emerged from the par­a­sit­i­cal priest­hoods. Re­li­gion fos­tered civ­i­liza­tion and pro­vided so­ci­etal con­ti­nu­ity; it has been the moral po­lice force of all time. Re­li­gion pro­vided that hu­man dis­ci­pline and self-con­trol which made wis­dom pos­si­ble. Re­li­gion is the ef­fi­cient scourge of evo­lu­tion which ruth­lessly drives in­do­lent and suf­fer­ing hu­man­ity from its nat­u­ral state of in­tel­lec­tual in­er­tia for­ward and up­ward to the higher lev­els of rea­son and wis­dom.

• destroyed childlike illusions, materialistic faith

99:3.7The great weak­ness of all this un­rec­og­nized and un­con­scious type of re­li­gious ac­tiv­ity is that it is un­able to profit from open re­li­gious crit­i­cism and thereby at­tain to prof­itable lev­els of self-cor­rec­tion. It is a fact that re­li­gion does not grow un­less it is dis­ci­plined by con­struc­tive crit­i­cism, am­pli­fied by phi­los­o­phy, pu­ri­fied by sci­ence, and nour­ished by loyal fel­low­ship.

• has no lasting quarrel with true religion
• weakened only religions dependent upon fear, superstition, and emotion

99:4.8Man’s great­est spir­i­tual jeop­ardy con­sists in par­tial prog­ress, the predica­ment of un­fin­ished growth: for­sak­ing the evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gions of fear with­out im­me­di­ately grasp­ing the rev­e­la­tory re­li­gion of love. Mod­ern sci­ence, par­tic­u­larly psy­chol­ogy, has weak­ened only those re­li­gions which are so largely de­pen­dent upon fear, su­per­sti­tion, and emo­tion.

• facts set forth in Urantia Papers do not anticipate new discoveries

101:4.2Man­kind should un­der­stand that we who par­tic­i­pate in the rev­e­la­tion of truth are very rig­or­ously lim­ited by the in­struc­tions of our su­pe­ri­ors. We are not at lib­erty to an­tic­i­pate the sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies of a thou­sand years. Rev­e­la­tors must act in ac­cor­dance with the in­struc­tions which form a part of the rev­e­la­tion man­date. We see no way of over­com­ing this dif­fi­culty, ei­ther now or at any fu­ture time. We full well know that, while the his­toric facts and re­li­gious truths of this se­ries of rev­e­la­tory pre­sen­ta­tions will stand on the rec­ords of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our state­ments re­gard­ing the phys­i­cal sci­ences will stand in need of re­vi­sion in con­se­quence of ad­di­tional sci­en­tific de­vel­op­ments and new dis­cov­er­ies. These new de­vel­op­ments we even now fore­see, but we are for­bid­den to in­clude such hu­manly undis­cov­ered facts in the rev­e­la­tory rec­ords. Let it be made clear that rev­e­la­tions are not nec­es­sar­ily in­spired. The cos­mol­ogy of these rev­e­la­tions is not in­spired. It is lim­ited by our per­mis­sion for the co-or­di­na­tion and sort­ing of pres­ent-day knowl­edge. While di­vine or spir­i­tual in­sight is a gift, hu­man wis­dom must evolve.

• the more s. one knows, the less sure one is

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.

• discoveries not real until unraveled and correlated in scientist’s consciousness

102:2.5Even the dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence are not truly real in the con­scious­ness of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence un­til they are un­rav­eled and cor­re­lated, un­til their rel­e­vant facts ac­tu­ally be­come mean­ing through en­cir­cuit­ment in the thought streams of mind. Mor­tal man views even his phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment from the mind level, from the per­spec­tive of its psy­cho­log­i­cal reg­istry. It is not, there­fore, strange that man should place a highly uni­fied in­ter­pre­ta­tion upon the uni­verse and then seek to iden­tify this en­ergy unity of his sci­ence with the spirit unity of his re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Mind is unity; mor­tal con­scious­ness lives on the mind level and per­ceives the uni­ver­sal re­al­i­ties through the eyes of the mind en­dow­ment. The mind per­spec­tive will not yield the ex­is­ten­tial unity of the source of re­al­ity, the First Source and Cen­ter, but it can and some­time will por­tray to man the ex­pe­ri­en­tial syn­the­sis of en­ergy, mind, and spirit in and as the Su­preme Be­ing. But mind can never suc­ceed in this uni­fi­ca­tion of the di­ver­sity of re­al­ity un­less such mind is firmly aware of ma­te­rial things, in­tel­lec­tual mean­ings, and spir­i­tual val­ues; only in the har­mony of the tri­unity of func­tional re­al­ity is there unity, and only in unity is there the per­son­al­ity sat­is­fac­tion of the re­al­iza­tion of cos­mic con­stancy and con­sis­tency.

• identifies, analyzes, and classifies segmented parts of the cosmos

102:3.10Sci­ence seeks to iden­tify, an­a­lyze, and clas­sify the seg­mented parts of the lim­it­less cos­mos. Re­li­gion grasps the idea-of-the-whole, the en­tire cos­mos. Phi­los­o­phy at­tempts the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the ma­te­rial seg­ments of sci­ence with the spir­i­tual-in­sight con­cept of the whole. Wherein phi­los­o­phy fails in this at­tempt, rev­e­la­tion suc­ceeds, af­firm­ing that the cos­mic cir­cle is uni­ver­sal, eter­nal, ab­so­lute, and in­fi­nite. This cos­mos of the In­fi­nite I AM is there­fore end­less, lim­it­less, and all-in­clu­sive—time­less, space­less, and un­qual­i­fied. And we bear tes­ti­mony that the In­fi­nite I AM is also the Fa­ther of Mi­chael of Neb­a­don and the God of hu­man sal­va­tion.

• should not discount religion on basis of credulity

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.

• discoveries not real until unraveled and correlated in scientist’s consciousness

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.

• approaches universe from outside

103:6.2When man ap­proaches the study and ex­am­i­na­tion of his uni­verse from the out­side, he brings into be­ing the var­i­ous phys­i­cal sci­ences; when he ap­proaches the re­search of him­self and the uni­verse from the in­side, he gives ori­gin to the­ol­ogy and meta­physics. The later art of phi­los­o­phy de­vel­ops in an ef­fort to har­mo­nize the many dis­crep­an­cies which are des­tined at first to ap­pear be­tween the find­ings and teach­ings of these two di­a­met­ri­cally op­po­site av­enues of ap­proach­ing the uni­verse of things and be­ings.

• imagination and conjecture extend borders of

103:6.11Sci­ence must al­ways be grounded in rea­son, al­though imag­i­na­tion and con­jec­ture are help­ful in the ex­ten­sion of its bor­ders. Re­li­gion is for­ever de­pen­dent on faith, al­beit rea­son is a sta­bi­liz­ing in­flu­ence and a help­ful hand­maid. And al­ways there have been, and ever will be, mis­lead­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the phe­nom­ena of both the nat­u­ral and the spir­i­tual worlds, sci­ences and re­li­gions falsely so called.

• study continues in celestial worlds

103:7.3But as as­cend­ing man reaches in­ward and Par­adis­e­ward for the God ex­pe­ri­ence, he will like­wise be reach­ing out­ward and space­ward for an en­ergy un­der­stand­ing of the ma­te­rial cos­mos. The pro­gres­sion of sci­ence is not lim­ited to the ter­res­trial life of man; his uni­verse and super­uni­verse as­cen­sion ex­pe­ri­ence will to no small de­gree be the study of en­ergy trans­mu­ta­tion and ma­te­rial meta­mor­pho­sis. God is spirit, but De­ity is unity, and the unity of De­ity not only em­braces the spir­i­tual val­ues of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and the Eter­nal Son but is also cog­nizant of the en­ergy facts of the Uni­ver­sal Con­trol­ler and the Isle of Par­a­dise, while these two phases of uni­ver­sal re­al­ity are per­fectly cor­re­lated in the mind re­la­tion­ships of the Con­joint Ac­tor and uni­fied on the fi­nite level in the emerg­ing De­ity of the Su­preme Be­ing.

• often too self-confident and dogmatic

103:7.7What both de­vel­op­ing sci­ence and re­li­gion need is more search­ing and fear­less self-crit­i­cism, a greater aware­ness of in­com­plete­ness in evo­lu­tion­ary sta­tus. The teach­ers of both sci­ence and re­li­gion are of­ten al­to­gether too self-con­fi­dent and dog­matic. Sci­ence and re­li­gion can only be self-crit­i­cal of their facts. The mo­ment de­par­ture is made from the stage of facts, rea­son ab­di­cates or else rapidly de­gen­er­ates into a con­sort of false logic.

• thought domain of mathematics; assumes matter, motion, and life

103:7.11All di­vi­sions of hu­man thought are pred­i­cated on cer­tain as­sump­tions which are ac­cepted, though un­proved, by the con­sti­tu­tive re­al­ity sen­si­tiv­ity of the mind en­dow­ment of man. Sci­ence starts out on its vaunted ca­reer of rea­son­ing by as­sum­ing the re­al­ity of three things: mat­ter, mo­tion, and life. Re­li­gion starts out with the as­sump­tion of the va­lid­ity of three things: mind, spirit, and the uni­verse—the Su­preme Be­ing.

• materialistic s. harbors seeds of own destruction

132:1.3Un­less the moral in­sight and the spir­i­tual at­tain­ment of man­kind are pro­por­tion­ately aug­mented, the un­lim­ited ad­vance­ment of a purely ma­te­ri­al­is­tic cul­ture may even­tu­ally be­come a men­ace to civ­i­liza­tion. A purely ma­te­ri­al­is­tic sci­ence har­bors within it­self the po­ten­tial seed of the de­struc­tion of all sci­en­tific striv­ing, for this very at­ti­tude presages the ul­ti­mate col­lapse of a civ­i­liza­tion which has aban­doned its sense of moral val­ues and has re­pu­di­ated its spir­i­tual goal of at­tain­ment.

133:5.1They shortly ar­rived at the olden cen­ter of Greek sci­ence and learn­ing, and Ga­nid was thrilled with the thought of be­ing in Athens, of be­ing in Greece, the cul­tural cen­ter of the one­time Alexan­drian em­pire, which had ex­tended its bor­ders even to his own land of In­dia. There was lit­tle busi­ness to trans­act; so Gonod spent most of his time with Je­sus and Ga­nid, vis­it­ing the many points of in­ter­est and lis­ten­ing to the in­ter­est­ing dis­cus­sions of the lad and his ver­sa­tile teacher.

133:5.2A great uni­ver­sity still thrived in Athens, and the trio made fre­quent vis­its to its halls of learn­ing. Je­sus and Ga­nid had thor­oughly dis­cussed the teach­ings of Plato when they at­tended the lec­tures in the mu­seum at Alexan­dria. They all en­joyed the art of Greece, ex­am­ples of which were still to be found here and there about the city.

133:5.3Both the fa­ther and the son greatly en­joyed the dis­cus­sion on sci­ence which Je­sus had at their inn one evening with a Greek philoso­pher. Af­ter this pedant had talked for al­most three hours, and when he had fin­ished his dis­course, Je­sus, in terms of mod­ern thought, said:

133:5.4Sci­en­tists may some day mea­sure the en­ergy, or force man­i­fes­ta­tions, of grav­i­ta­tion, light, and elec­tric­ity, but these same sci­en­tists can never (sci­en­tif­i­cally) tell you what these uni­verse phe­nom­ena are. Sci­ence deals with phys­i­cal-en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties; re­li­gion deals with eter­nal val­ues. True phi­los­o­phy grows out of the wis­dom which does its best to cor­re­late these quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tions. There al­ways ex­ists the dan­ger that the purely phys­i­cal sci­en­tist may be­come af­flicted with math­e­mat­i­cal pride and sta­tis­ti­cal ego­tism, not to men­tion spir­i­tual blind­ness.

133:5.5Logic is valid in the ma­te­rial world, and math­e­mat­ics is re­li­able when lim­ited in its ap­pli­ca­tion to phys­i­cal things; but nei­ther is to be re­garded as wholly de­pend­able or in­fal­li­ble when ap­plied to life prob­lems. Life em­braces phe­nom­ena which are not wholly ma­te­rial. Arith­metic says that, if one man could shear a sheep in ten min­utes, ten men could shear it in one minute. That is sound math­e­mat­ics, but it is not true, for the ten men could not so do it; they would get in one an­other’s way so badly that the work would be greatly de­layed.

133:5.6Math­e­mat­ics as­serts that, if one per­son stands for a cer­tain unit of in­tel­lec­tual and moral value, ten per­sons would stand for ten times this value. But in deal­ing with hu­man per­son­al­ity it would be nearer the truth to say that such a per­son­al­ity as­so­ci­a­tion is a sum equal to the square of the num­ber of per­son­al­i­ties con­cerned in the equa­tion rather than the sim­ple arith­meti­cal sum. A so­cial group of hu­man be­ings in co-or­di­nated work­ing har­mony stands for a force far greater than the sim­ple sum of its parts.

133:5.7Quan­tity may be iden­ti­fied as a fact, thus be­com­ing a sci­en­tific uni­for­mity. Qual­ity, be­ing a mat­ter of mind in­ter­pre­ta­tion, rep­re­sents an es­ti­mate of val­ues, and must, there­fore, re­main an ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­di­vid­ual. When both sci­ence and re­li­gion be­come less dog­matic and more tol­er­ant of crit­i­cism, phi­los­o­phy will then be­gin to achieve unity in the in­tel­li­gent com­pre­hen­sion of the uni­verse.

133:5.8There is unity in the cos­mic uni­verse if you could only dis­cern its work­ings in ac­tu­al­ity. The real uni­verse is friendly to ev­ery child of the eter­nal God. The real prob­lem is: How can the fi­nite mind of man achieve a log­i­cal, true, and cor­re­spond­ing unity of thought? This uni­verse-know­ing state of mind can be had only by con­ceiv­ing that the quan­ti­ta­tive fact and the qual­i­ta­tive value have a com­mon cau­sa­tion in the Par­a­dise Fa­ther. Such a con­cep­tion of re­al­ity yields a broader in­sight into the pur­pose­ful unity of uni­verse phe­nom­ena; it even re­veals a spir­i­tual goal of pro­gres­sive per­son­al­ity achieve­ment. And this is a con­cept of unity which can sense the un­chang­ing back­ground of a liv­ing uni­verse of con­tin­u­ally chang­ing im­per­sonal re­la­tions and evolv­ing per­sonal re­la­tion­ships.

133:5.9Mat­ter and spirit and the state in­ter­ven­ing be­tween them are three in­ter­re­lated and in­teras­so­ci­ated lev­els of the true unity of the real uni­verse. Re­gard­less of how di­ver­gent the uni­verse phe­nom­ena of fact and value may ap­pear to be, they are, af­ter all, uni­fied in the Su­preme.

133:5.10Re­al­ity of ma­te­rial ex­is­tence at­taches to un­rec­og­nized en­ergy as well as to vis­i­ble mat­ter. When the en­er­gies of the uni­verse are so slowed down that they ac­quire the req­ui­site de­gree of mo­tion, then, un­der fa­vor­able con­di­tions, these same en­er­gies be­come mass. And for­get not, the mind which can alone per­ceive the pres­ence of ap­par­ent re­al­i­ties is it­self also real. And the fun­da­men­tal cause of this uni­verse of en­ergy-mass, mind, and spirit, is eter­nal—it ex­ists and con­sists in the na­ture and re­ac­tions of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and his ab­so­lute co-or­di­nates.

133:5.11They were all more than as­tounded at the words of Je­sus, and when the Greek took leave of them, he said: “At last my eyes have be­held a Jew who thinks some­thing be­sides racial su­pe­ri­or­ity and talks some­thing be­sides re­li­gion.” And they re­tired for the night.

133:5.12The so­journ in Athens was pleas­ant and prof­itable, but it was not par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful in its hu­man con­tacts. Too many of the Athe­ni­ans of that day were ei­ther in­tel­lec­tu­ally proud of their rep­u­ta­tion of an­other day or men­tally stupid and ig­no­rant, be­ing the off­spring of the in­fe­rior slaves of those ear­lier pe­ri­ods when there was glory in Greece and wis­dom in the minds of its peo­ple. Even then, there were still many keen minds to be found among the cit­i­zens of Athens.

• cannot prove existence of God, soul

133:6.7“The hu­man soul, when ma­tured, en­no­bled, and spir­i­tu­al­ized, ap­proaches the heav­enly sta­tus in that it comes near to be­ing an en­tity in­ter­ven­ing be­tween the ma­te­rial and the spir­i­tual, the ma­te­rial self and the di­vine spirit. The evolv­ing soul of a hu­man be­ing is dif­fi­cult of de­scrip­tion and more dif­fi­cult of dem­on­stra­tion be­cause it is not dis­cov­er­able by the meth­ods of ei­ther ma­te­rial in­ves­ti­ga­tion or spir­i­tual prov­ing. Ma­te­rial sci­ence can­not demon­strate the ex­is­tence of a soul, nei­ther can pure spirit-test­ing. Not­with­stand­ing the fail­ure of both ma­te­rial sci­ence and spir­i­tual stan­dards to dis­cover the ex­is­tence of the hu­man soul, ev­ery morally con­scious mor­tal knows of the ex­is­tence of his soul as a real and ac­tual per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence.”

• destroyed childlike illusions, materialistic faith

155:3.6Je­sus warned his be­liev­ers that, if their re­li­gious long­ings were only ma­te­rial, in­creas­ing knowl­edge of na­ture would, by pro­gres­sive dis­place­ment of the sup­posed super­nat­u­ral ori­gin of things, ul­ti­mately de­prive them of their faith in God. But that, if their re­li­gion were spir­i­tual, never could the prog­ress of phys­i­cal sci­ence dis­turb their faith in eter­nal re­al­i­ties and di­vine val­ues.

• destroyed childlike illusions, materialistic faith

195:6.4At the time of this writ­ing the worst of the ma­te­ri­al­is­tic age is over; the day of a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing is al­ready be­gin­ning to dawn. The higher minds of the sci­en­tific world are no longer wholly ma­te­ri­al­is­tic in their phi­los­o­phy, but the rank and file of the peo­ple still lean in that di­rec­tion as a re­sult of for­mer teach­ings. But this age of phys­i­cal re­al­ism is only a pass­ing episode in man’s life on earth. Mod­ern sci­ence has left true re­li­gion—the teach­ings of Je­sus as trans­lated in the lives of his be­liev­ers—un­touched. All sci­ence has done is to de­stroy the child­like il­lu­sions of the mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of life.

• has no lasting quarrel with true religion
• should extend man’s horizon
• weakened only religions dependent upon fear, superstition, and emotion

195:7.2Sci­ence should do for man ma­te­ri­ally what re­li­gion does for him spir­i­tu­ally: ex­tend the hori­zon of life and en­large his per­son­al­ity. True sci­ence can have no last­ing quar­rel with true re­li­gion. The “sci­en­tific method” is merely an in­tel­lec­tual yard­stick where­with to mea­sure ma­te­rial ad­ven­tures and phys­i­cal achieve­ments. But be­ing ma­te­rial and wholly in­tel­lec­tual, it is ut­terly use­less in the eval­u­a­tion of spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties and re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ences.

• atheistic s. was father of secularism

195:8.2Mod­ern sec­u­lar­ism has been fos­tered by two world-wide in­flu­ences. The fa­ther of sec­u­lar­ism was the nar­row-minded and god­less at­ti­tude of nine­teenth- and twen­ti­eth-cen­tury so-called sci­ence—athe­is­tic sci­ence. The mother of mod­ern sec­u­lar­ism was the to­tal­i­tar­ian me­dieval Chris­tian church. Sec­u­lar­ism had its in­cep­tion as a ris­ing protest against the al­most com­plete dom­i­na­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion by the in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized Chris­tian church.