Episode:Religion in Depth—Foundations of Faith (Part 6)
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. 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.
Keywords: Urantia, Religion, Certainty, Conviction, Certitude
Summary by Kermit
Commentary on Review
The SoS team shared some reflections on the idea of “purposive potential” being all pervasive in the cosmos, extending to every element of reality, down to the individuated purposing pattern of creature personality. As an individuated purposive potential, a person can choose to identify with the greater purpose afoot, or lacking such identification, become part of the summative purposing of the Supreme lacking identity. Regarding God’s requirement of persons to give him all allegiance or none, this refers to the binary fork in the road, one path leading to eternity, the other leading to oblivion. Our good news is that this “either/or” condition is buffered by grace and the time lag of mercy. Interestingly, shadows of this absolute condition appear in contemporary fundamental Christianity’s requirements for salvation, being acceptance of Christ as personal savior prior to death. Such is a pitfall of exalting a thread of truth to the status of totality of truth. We also revisited God-knowingness, as a faith-certainty in contrast to a belief-conviction. We are encouraged to seek the factualization of the truth of God we are given by grace, that is God-knowing, bringing elements of the superconscious down into consciousness.
102:6.6
God is the first truth and the last fact. We are being challenged to seek the factualization of the truth of our God of grace through the superadditive consequences of simultaneously engaging reason AND faith. Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between the truth of God and the facts of the universe of universes. Such harmony is achieved by supplementing reason and logic with faith.
And again, in our examination of the phenomena of belief and faith, only faith can triumph over doubt and withstand fear. Here we have a litmus test for distinguishing between faith and belief. The outward evidence of the victory of faith over doubt is found in the social fruits of genuine spiritual experience for all to see, the demonstration of loving your fellows as Jesus has loved us.
The final three paragraphs of the section are devoted to a discussion of the evidence for the recognition of a purposive Creator behind the process of organic evolution, in the face of the puerile arguments of scientific materialism to the contrary. The section ends with a most encouraging picture of mortal existence 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.
102:7. The Certitude of the Divine
This paper (102) is the only place in the revelation the authors use the word “certitude”. Its meaning is essentially identical to “certainty”, yet it connotes an additional aspect of gravitas over the word “certainty”. Such is the emphasis being made by the revelators in characterizing the faith-certainty that allows the believer to simply know the truth of God without a doubt. This certitude comes from the personal experience of sonship. Logically sonship implies the existence of a father, which when extended and applied to others leads to the awareness of human brotherhood.
This section underscores a cosmic complexity of reality worthy of understanding by an adult of God. The secret of the dynamic complexity of universe phenomena is suggested by the revelators’ reference to such transcendent facets of Deity as the Ultimate and Absolute. Thus is magic, the refuge of childish thought replaced by an absolute, infinite, eternal, and changeless cause, God, secret of the order, plan, and purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. Creation and creator are not identical, rather is the creator cause and the universe effect. Effects cannot be had without causes.
The personal experience of sonship also implies the personal nature of the Father. Humanists demonstrate that without a concept of God, man can be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. However, such a world view and practice is without survival values, God-knowingness and God-ascension. Such a life path yields only temporal social fruits. As our last paragraph reads “the intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love and service.”
Notes by Brad
- The phrase "leap of faith" is accurate and telling. You cannot extrapolate upward from the bottom up. You must let go of the bottom up, be born again, and grasp things from the top down.
- Feeling convicted is not faith. Conviction is just amped up belief, more bottom-up stuff.
- There's a quiet place where a new beginning lies, a quiet place that doesn't have the noise and din of conviction.
- Interesting: the word certitude is used only in Paper 102. Paper 102 is a very big paper.
- The end of section 6 is another scathing critique of materialism in the context of biological evolution. These things show up throughout the book, but quite notably in [Paper 195].
