© 2001 Ken Glasziou
© 2001 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Physics is actually a religion. A religion is based upon articles (axioms) of unproved faith. In physics these unproved articles are:
- There always has to be a reason.
- The body of reasons is fully self-consistent.
But even if past experience had been in full accord with these articles, this does not, in itself, assure continued compliance.
(from Lewis C. Epstein in, Relativity Visualized.)
Epstein goes on:
The facts are that past experience has not confirmed the two articles. At any time, past or present, there have always been things for which reasons have not been invented. And internal contradictions have always been there, haunting us.
Thus, belief in these two major articles at the very basics of physics is, in reality, unproved faith.
It is heartening to see statements of this kind being freely expressed from within the ranks of a profession that, over the last few hundred years, has either claimed, or been granted, something approaching the divine right formerly granted only to kings and popes.
The position taken in the Urantia Papers that, for us mortals, truth is, of necessity, evolutionary and progressive, and can never be absolute, is gradually penetrating the “noosphere” of human knowledge and displacing the concept that, through reason and logic, all is ultimately knowable.
In a work in 1929 that is slowly (very) becoming famous, logician Kurt Godel demonstrated that no system of axioms (articles), complex enough to be useful, can ever be both fully self-consistent and complete. A possible hole in Godel’s work was plugged by Paul Cohen in 1963 and no significant challenge has since been mounted.
Thus the foundation of human knowledge of all, any, and every kind, is faith.
Can revelation alter the situation?
Since nothing (almost) is impossible to God, then presumably it could. However, the moment that the revelation of revelation becomes in any way dependent upon other than divine agency, the divine authority of that revelation is lost and acceptance becomes dependent upon personal faith.
Jesus himself informed us (p.1768), “Mark you well my words, Nathaniel, nothing which human nature has touched can be regarded as infallible. Through the mind of man divine truth may indeed shine forth, but always of relative purity and partial divinity.”
The known alterations and additions to the text of the Urantia Papers since their first publication confirm what Jesus said to Nathaniel. The fact of such alterations was denied for many years by those who made them.
And that leaves us only with their word that they did not make other changes prior to the first printing! Can that word really be trusted?
Like physics, all religion is dependent upon unproved faith. It appears that God meant it to be that way. “Faith, simple, childlike belief, is the key to the door of the kingdom.” (1861) And truth is personal—confirmable only with the God-Spirit within.