Editorial October 22, 1955 Issue

LOGICAL REASONING

Helen Wood Bauman

A religious survey recently made in the United States of America indicated that 96 per cent of the inhabitants believe in God. Questioning revealed that most of these people believe in Deity because they recognize the order of the universe. Without order there is chaos. But where does order originate? Can mindless matter originate order? Surely order can emanate only from one central governing intelligence, one all-embracing Mind. It takes more than materialistic reasoning to understand that a governing Supreme Being exists; it takes a higher intelligence—reason based upon spiritual intuition—to acknowledge this great truth. One can readily see that order has come and still comes to the world in the measure that God has been acknowledged and His law of goodness has been obeyed.

Unlike dialectical materialism, which reasons from matter as the basis of all effect. Christian Science reasons logically from the creator to the thing created. But it cites God, and not matter, as cause. It recognizes the fact that changeable and often flimsy material phenomena cannot possess the essentials of cause. The folly of humanity has been to call matter cause, to believe that life and law originate in matter and are inherent in it.

Beginning with the Supreme Being as cause, Christian Science reaches the only possible conclusion—that every real effect must be as perfect as the source from which it springs. Matter, being imperfect, is nothing more than the supposed effect of a supposed imperfect cause—the carnal mind. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 467, 468): "Reasoning from cause to effect in the Science of Mind, we begin with Mind, which must be understood through the idea which expresses it and cannot be learned from its opposite, matter. Thus we arrive at Truth, or intelligence, which evolves its own unerring idea and never can be coordinate with human illusions."

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