Urantia Book 

1928 

6. MATERIALISM 

Scientists have unintentionally precipitated mankind into a materialistic panic; 

they have started an unthinking run on the moral bank of the ages, but this bank 

of human experience has vast spiritual resources; it can stand the demands being 

made upon it. Only unthinking men become panicky about the spiritual assets of 

the human race. When the materialistic-secular panic is over, the religion of 

Jesus will not be found bankrupt. The spiritual bank of the kingdom of heaven 

will be paying out faith, hope, and moral security to all who draw upon it "in 

His name." 

No matter what the apparent conflict between materialism and the teachings of 

Jesus may be, you can rest assured that, in the ages to come, the teachings of 

the Master will fully triumph. In reality, true religion cannot become involved 

in any controversy with science; it is in no way concerned with material things. 

Religion is simply indifferent to, but sympathetic with, science, while it 

supremely concerns itself with the scientist. 

The pursuit of mere knowledge, without the attendant interpretation of wisdom 

and the spiritual insight of religious experience, eventually leads to pessimism 

and human despair. A little knowledge is truly disconcerting. 

At 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. 

Science 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. 

The violent swing from an age of miracles to an age of machines has proved 

altogether upsetting to man. The cleverness and dexterity of the false 

philosophies of mechanism belie their very mechanistic contentions. The 

fatalistic agility of the mind of a materialist forever disproves his assertions 

that the universe is a blind and purposeless energy phenomenon. 

The mechanistic naturalism of some supposedly educated men and the thoughtless 

secularism of the man in the street are both exclusively concerned with things; 

they are barren of all real values, sanctions, and satisfactions of a spiritual 

nature, as well as being devoid of faith, hope, and eternal assurances. One of 

the great troubles with modern life is that man thinks he is too busy to find 

time for spiritual meditation and religious devotion. 

Materialism reduces man to a soulless automaton and constitutes him merely an 

arithmetical symbol finding a helpless place in the mathematical formula of an 

unromantic and mechanistic universe. But whence comes all this vast universe of 

mathematics without a Master Mathematician? Science may expatiate on the 

conservation of matter, but religion validates the conservation of men's 

souls--it concerns their experience with spiritual realities and eternal values. 

The materialistic sociologist of today surveys a community, makes a report 

thereon, and leaves the people as he found them. Nineteen hundred years ago, 

unlearned Galileans surveyed Jesus giving his life as a spiritual contribution 

to man's inner experience and then went out and turned the whole Roman Empire 

upside down. 

But religious leaders are making a great mistake when they try to call modern 

man to spiritual battle with the trumpet blasts of the Middle Ages. Religion 

must provide itself with new and up-to-date slogans. Neither democracy nor any 

other political panacea will take the place of spiritual progress. False 

religions may represent an evasion of reality, but Jesus in his gospel 

introduced mortal man to the very entrance upon an eternal reality of spiritual 

progression. 

To say that mind "emerged" from matter explains nothing. If the universe were 

merely a mechanism and mind were unapart from matter, we would never have two 

differing interpretations of any observed phenomenon. The concepts of truth, 

beauty, and goodness are not inherent in either physics or chemistry. A machine 

cannot know, much less know truth, hunger for righteousness, and cherish 

goodness. 

Science may be physical, but the mind of the truth-discerning scientist is at 

once supermaterial. Matter knows not truth, neither can it love mercy nor 

delight in spiritual realities. Moral convictions based on spiritual 

enlightenment and rooted in human experience are just as real and certain as 

mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on another and 

higher level. 

If men were only machines, they would react more or less uniformly to a material 

universe. Individuality, much less personality, would be nonexistent. 

The fact of the absolute mechanism of Paradise at the center of the universe of 

universes, in the presence of the unqualified volition of the Second Source and 

Center, makes forever certain that determiners are not the exclusive law of the 

cosmos. Materialism is there, but it is not exclusive; mechanism is there, but 

it is not unqualified; determinism is there, but it is not alone. 

The finite universe of matter would eventually become uniform and deterministic 

but for the combined presence of mind and spirit. The influence of the cosmic 

mind constantly injects spontaneity into even the material worlds. 

Freedom or initiative in any realm of existence is directly proportional to the 

degree of spiritual influence and cosmic-mind control; that is, in human 

experience, the degree of the actuality of doing "the Father's will." And so, 

when you once start out to find God, that is the conclusive proof that God has 

already found you. 

The sincere pursuit of goodness, beauty, and truth leads to God. And every 

scientific discovery demonstrates the existence of both freedom and uniformity 

in the universe. The discoverer was free to make the discovery. The thing 

discovered is real and apparently uniform, or else it could not have become 

known as a thing. 

7. THE VULNERABILITY OF MATERIALISM 

How foolish it is for material-minded man to allow such vulnerable theories as 

those of a mechanistic universe to deprive him of the vast spiritual resources 

of the personal experience of true religion. Facts never quarrel with real 

spiritual faith; theories may. Better that science should be devoted to the 

destruction of superstition rather than attempting the overthrow of religious 

faith--human belief in spiritual realities and divine values. 

Science 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. 

The inconsistency of the modern mechanist is: If this were merely a material 

universe and man only a machine, such a man would be wholly unable to recognize 

himself as such a machine, and likewise would such a machine-man be wholly 

unconscious of the fact of the existence of such a material universe. The 

materialistic dismay and despair of a mechanistic science has failed to 

recognize the fact of the spirit-indwelt mind of the scientist whose very 

supermaterial insight formulates these mistaken and self-contradictory concepts 

of a materialistic universe. 

Paradise values of eternity and infinity, of truth, beauty, and goodness, are 

concealed within the facts of the phenomena of the universes of time and space. 

But it requires the eye of faith in a spirit-born mortal to detect and discern 

these spiritual values. 

The realities and values of spiritual progress are not a "psychologic 

projection"--a mere glorified daydream of the material mind. Such things are the 

spiritual forecasts of the indwelling Adjuster, the spirit of God living in the 

mind of man. And let not your dabblings with the faintly glimpsed findings of 

"relativity" disturb your concepts of the eternity and infinity of God. And in 

all your solicitation concerning the necessity for self-expression do not make 

the mistake of failing to provide for Adjuster-expression, the manifestation of 

your real and better self. 

If this were only a material universe, material man would never be able to 

arrive at the concept of the mechanistic character of such an exclusively 

material existence. This very mechanistic concept of the universe is in itself a 

nonmaterial phenomenon of mind, and all mind is of nonmaterial origin, no matter 

how thoroughly it may appear to be materially conditioned and mechanistically 

controlled. 

The partially evolved mental mechanism of mortal man is not overendowed with 

consistency and wisdom. Man's conceit often outruns his reason and eludes his 

logic. 

The very pessimism of the most pessimistic materialist is, in and of itself, 

sufficient proof that the universe of the pessimist is not wholly material. Both 

optimism and pessimism are concept reactions in a mind conscious of values as 

well as of facts. If the universe were truly what the materialist regards it to 

be, man as a human machine would then be devoid of all conscious recognition of 

that very fact. Without the consciousness of the concept of values within the 

spirit-born mind, the fact of universe materialism and the mechanistic phenomena 

of universe operation would be wholly unrecognized by man. One machine cannot be 

conscious of the nature or value of another machine. 

A mechanistic philosophy of life and the universe cannot be scientific because 

science recognizes and deals only with materials and facts. Philosophy is 

inevitably superscientific. Man is a material fact of nature, but his life is a 

phenomenon which transcends the material levels of nature in that it exhibits 

the control attributes of mind and the creative qualities of spirit. 

The sincere effort of man to become a mechanist represents the tragic phenomenon 

of that man's futile effort to commit intellectual and moral suicide. But he 

cannot do it. 

If the universe were only material and man only a machine, there would be no 

science to embolden the scientist to postulate this mechanization of the 

universe. Machines cannot measure, classify, nor evaluate themselves. Such a 

scientific piece of work could be executed only by some entity of supermachine 

status. 

If universe reality is only one vast machine, then man must be outside of the 

universe and apart from it in order to recognize such a fact and become 

conscious of the insight of such an evaluation. 

If man is only a machine, by what technique does this man come to believe or 

claim to know that he is only a machine? The experience of self-conscious 

evaluation of one's self is never an attribute of a mere machine. A 

self-conscious and avowed mechanist is the best possible answer to mechanism. If 

materialism were a fact, there could be no self-conscious mechanist. It is also 

true that one must first be a moral person before one can perform immoral acts. 

The very claim of materialism implies a supermaterial consciousness of the mind 

which presumes to assert such dogmas. A mechanism might deteriorate, but it 

could never progress. Machines do not think, create, dream, aspire, idealize, 

hunger for truth, or thirst for righteousness. They do not motivate their lives 

with the passion to serve other machines and to choose as their goal of eternal 

progression the sublime task of finding God and striving to be like him. 

Machines are never intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, moral, or 

spiritual. 

Art proves that man is not mechanistic, but it does not prove that he is 

spiritually immortal. Art is mortal morontia, the intervening field between man, 

the material, and man, the spiritual. Poetry is an effort to escape from 

material realities to spiritual values. 

In a high civilization, art humanizes science, while in turn it is spiritualized 

by true religion--insight into spiritual and eternal values. Art represents the 

human and time-space evaluation of reality. Religion is the divine embrace of 

cosmic values and connotes eternal progression in spiritual ascension and 

expansion. The art of time is dangerous only when it becomes blind to the spirit 

standards of the divine patterns which eternity reflects as the reality shadows 

of time. True art is the effective manipulation of the material things of life; 

religion is the ennobling transformation of the material facts of life, and it 

never ceases in its spiritual evaluation of art. 

How foolish to presume that an automaton could conceive a philosophy of 

automatism, and how ridiculous that it should presume to form such a concept of 

other and fellow automatons! 

Any scientific interpretation of the material universe is valueless unless it 

provides due recognition for the scientist. No appreciation of art is genuine 

unless it accords recognition to the artist. No evaluation of morals is worth 

while unless it includes the moralist. No recognition of philosophy is edifying 

if it ignores the philosopher, and religion cannot exist without the real 

experience of the religionist who, in and through this very experience, is 

seeking to find God and to know him. Likewise is the universe of universes 

without significance apart from the I AM, the infinite God who made it and 

unceasingly manages it. 

Mechanists--humanists--tend to drift with the material currents. Idealists and 

spiritists dare to use their oars with intelligence and vigor in order to modify 

the apparently purely material course of the energy streams. 

Science lives by the mathematics of the mind; music expresses the tempo of the 

emotions. Religion is the spiritual rhythm of the soul in time-space harmony 

with the higher and eternal melody measurements of Infinity. Religious 

experience is something in human life which is truly supermathematical. 

In language, an alphabet represents the mechanism of materialism, while the 

words expressive of the meaning of a thousand thoughts, grand ideas, and noble 

ideals--of love and hate, of cowardice and courage--represent the performances 

of mind within the scope defined by both material and spiritual law, directed by 

the assertion of the will of personality, and limited by the inherent 

situational endowment. 

The universe is not like the laws, mechanisms, and the uniformities which the 

scientist discovers, and which he comes to regard as science, but rather like 

the curious, thinking, choosing, creative, combining, and discriminating 

scientist who thus observes universe phenomena and classifies the mathematical 

facts inherent in the mechanistic phases of the material side of creation. 

Neither is the universe like the art of the artist, but rather like the 

striving, dreaming, aspiring, and advancing artist who seeks to transcend the 

world of material things in an effort to achieve a spiritual goal. 

The scientist, not science, perceives the reality of an evolving and advancing 

universe of energy and matter. The artist, not art, demonstrates the existence 

of the transient morontia world intervening between material existence and 

spiritual liberty. The religionist, not religion, proves the existence of the 

spirit realities and divine values which are to be encountered in the progress 

of eternity. 

8. SECULAR TOTALITARIANISM 

But even after materialism and mechanism have been more or less vanquished, the 

devastating influence of twentieth-century secularism will still blight the 

spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls. 

Modern 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. 

At the time of this revelation, the prevailing intellectual and philosophical 

climate of both European and American life is decidedly secular--humanistic. For 

three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. 

Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic 

exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are 

unwittingly actual secularists. 

It required a great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking and living 

of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a totalitarian ecclesiastical 

domination. Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it 

threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and 

minds of modern man. The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the 

direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophic secularism. 

Secularism no sooner frees man from the domination of the institutionalized 

church than it sells him into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state. 

Secularism frees man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray him into the 

tyranny of political and economic slavery. 

Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him; at least that was the 

earlier attitude. More recently, secularism has assumed a more militant 

attitude, assuming to take the place of the religion whose totalitarian bondage 

it onetime resisted. Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that man does 

not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead 

only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and world-wide disaster. 

Secularism can never bring peace to mankind. Nothing can take the place of God 

in human society. But mark you well! do not be quick to surrender the beneficent 

gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Western 

civilization today enjoys many liberties and satisfactions as a result of the 

secular revolt. The great mistake of secularism was this: In revolting against 

the almost total control of life by religious authority, and after attaining the 

liberation from such ecclesiastical tyranny, the secularists went on to 

institute a revolt against God himself, sometimes tacitly and sometimes openly. 

To the secularistic revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American 

industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. 

And because the secularistic revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true 

religion, there also followed the unlooked-for harvest of world wars and 

international unsettledness. 

It is not necessary to sacrifice faith in God in order to enjoy the blessings of 

the modern secularistic revolt: tolerance, social service, democratic 

government, 

and civil liberties. It was not necessary for the secularists to antagonize true 

religion in order to promote science and to advance education. 

But secularism is not the sole parent of all these recent gains in the 

enlargement of living. Behind the gains of the twentieth century are not only 

science and secularism but also the unrecognized and unacknowledged spiritual 

workings of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co-ordinate its 

forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and 

nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled 

materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force 

resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is 

the chief barrier to world peace. 

The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for 

politics and power. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of men while 

ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God. 

Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither 

freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace. 

The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society can 

lead only to disaster. During the first third of the twentieth century Urantians 

killed more human beings than were killed during the whole of the Christian 

dispensation up to that time. And this is only the beginning of the dire harvest 

of materialism and secularism; still more terrible destruction is yet to come. 

9. CHRISTIANITY'S PROBLEM 

Do not overlook the value of your spiritual heritage, the river of truth running 

down through the centuries, even to the barren times of a materialistic and 

secular age. In all your worthy efforts to rid yourselves of the superstitious 

creeds of past ages, make sure that you hold fast the eternal truth. But be 

patient! when the present superstition revolt is over, the truths of Jesus' 

gospel will persist gloriously to illuminate a new and better way. 

But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the 

uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the 

Master's life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is 

destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a 

world sway of mechanistic naturalism. Urantia is now quivering on the very brink 

of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral 

quickening, and spiritual enlightenment. 

The teachings of Jesus, even though greatly modified, survived the mystery cults 

of their birthtime, the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages, and are 

even now slowly triumphing over the materialism, mechanism, and secularism of 

the twentieth century. And such times of great testing and threatened defeat are 

always times of great revelation. 

Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend 

solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in 

neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social 

and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these 

new teachers of Jesus' religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual 

regeneration of men. And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the 

leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and 

political reorganization of the world. 

The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is inconsistent with facts 

and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. 

The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of 

present-day distorted and compromised Christianity--the real life and teachings 

of Jesus. 

Primitive man lived a life of superstitious bondage to religious fear. Modern, 

civilized men dread the thought of falling under the dominance of strong 

religious convictions. Thinking man has always feared to be held by a religion. 

When a strong and moving religion threatens to dominate him, he invariably tries 

to rationalize, traditionalize, and institutionalize it, thereby hoping to gain 

control of it. By such procedure, even a revealed religion becomes man-made and 

man-dominated. Modern men and women of intelligence evade the religion of Jesus 

because of their fears of what it will do to them--and with them. And all such 

fears are well founded. The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and 

transform its believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for 

a knowledge of the will of the Father in heaven and requiring that the energies 

of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of man. 

Selfish men and women simply will not pay such a price for even the greatest 

spiritual treasure ever offered mortal man. Only when man has become 

sufficiently disillusioned by the sorrowful disappointments attendant upon the 

foolish and deceptive pursuits of selfishness, and subsequent to the discovery 

of the barrenness of formalized religion, will he be disposed to turn 

wholeheartedly to the gospel of the kingdom, the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity--the best of the 

religions of the twentieth century--is not only a religion about Jesus, but it 

is so largely one which men experience secondhand. They take their religion 

wholly as handed down by their accepted religious teachers. What an awakening 

the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on 

earth and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings! Descriptive words of 

things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight thereof, neither can creedal words 

inspire men's souls like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But 

expectant faith will ever keep the hope-door of man's soul open for the entrance 

of the eternal spiritual realities of the divine values of the worlds beyond. 

Christianity has dared to lower its ideals before the challenge of human greed, 

war-madness, and the lust for power; but the religion of Jesus stands as the 

unsullied and transcendent spiritual summons, calling to the best there is in 

man to rise above all these legacies of animal evolution and, by grace, attain 

the moral heights of true human destiny. 

Christianity is threatened by slow death from formalism, overorganization, 

intellectualism, and other nonspiritual trends. The modern Christian church is 

not such a brotherhood of dynamic believers as Jesus commissioned continuously 

to effect the spiritual transformation of successive generations of mankind. 

So-called Christianity has become a social and cultural movement as well as a 

religious belief and practice. The stream of modern Christianity drains many an 

ancient pagan swamp and many a barbarian morass; many olden cultural watersheds 

drain into this present-day cultural stream as well as the high Galilean 

tablelands which are supposed to be its exclusive source.