Is there anything we can be certain of?

Some skeptical people will answer no. Yet to live a life with no fully reliable points of reference, a life of intermeshed uncertainties, can be unsettling and sometimes depressing. But there are some certainties, Christian Science affirms. Spiritual certainties. By exercising spiritual intuition we can find out what they are and demonstrate them to be certain.

In the world that belongs to the personal senses there are few things, if any, we can be absolutely sure of. Human beings have always been faced with what is sometimes called the problem of knowledge. For the human intellect, one difficulty in establishing the absolute truth of something is that the test of its truth requires some previously established criteria against which to measure the thing whose validity we would check—the criteria themselves may not be true.

The Science of Truth urges that we break out of the limitations of mortal intellect, and it illustrates the way of doing this. Science teaches that God is Mind and that immortal Mind is the only Mind. To Mind, all is Mind and there is no opposite—no limited consciousness, no constricted mortal intellect. Unconfined Mind—we can acknowledge—is the only Mind of man, hence man's Mind, being omniscient, is not confronted by dilemmas, conundrums, uncertainties. Divine Mind is totally certain of its own allness and laws. Conceding these metaphysical truths does heal, as the disciples were shown millennia ago. Mrs. Eddy states: "Jesus' students, failing to cure a severe case of lunacy, asked their great Teacher, 'Why could not we cast him out?' He answered, 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.' This declaration of our Master, as to the relative value, skill, and certainty of the divine laws of Mind over the human mind and above matter in healing disease, remains beyond questioning a divine decision in behalf of Mind." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 190;}

The material wealth and power now available open "supermarkets" of options to individuals, groups, governments. (What career to take up? Where to live? What welfare policy to adopt?) While in many ways there is great value in having multiple options, a wide variety of choices can bring with it a lot of uncertainty. Spiritual certainties—for example, the omnipotence of infinite Mind and the goodness of its ideal, man—can be identified through Christian Science and can be applied in times and situations of uncertainty. We can prove the infallible intelligence of Mind.

When we're anxious about a decision, when several imponderables seem to need resolution before we can confidently move, we can remind ourselves of sureties that are scientifically demonstrable. We may not be clear, say, whether or not to sell our house and to shift to another area in the hope of getting better employment. But we can be utterly sure that home is a spiritual idea, that man includes it because he includes all substantial ideas. We can be categorically assured that the idea of Life—our true selfhood—is permanently employed being Life's witness. We can be confident that "the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his." ^{II Tim. 2: 19;} Such certainties, identified and realized, are the basis for demonstrating Life's plan and for making sound judgments.

To most people life itself seems to be one big uncertainty. From a merely human point of view none of us know just how long our lives are going to last. In some instances a medical prognosis may be that life is limited to a more or less specified time. But reasoning from foundations established by the Science of Truth—rather than from a material sense of being and speculations based on it—we can be certain that life is inevitable because real life is the expression of eternal Life, or God. True life is not something in the physical body for either a specified or an unspecified time. Of this we can be certain, that the permanence of Life is inescapable. For man, Life's expression, death is not only not inevitable, it is entirely unreal.

How sure of this can we be? Perhaps we're discouraged because we know of an individual who has not ideally demonstrated the truths of being as they're taught in Christian Science. How can we be sure that Mrs. Eddy's writings on God and man and healing are right?

She herself gives us a sound explanation of her own certainty in the validity of Science, writing, "My conclusions were reached by allowing the evidence of this revelation to multiply with mathematical certainty and the lesser demonstration to prove the greater, as the product of three multiplied by three, equalling nine, proves conclusively that three times three duodecillions must be nine duodecillions, —not a fraction more, not a unit less." ^{Science and Health, p. 108.}

Over the last one hundred years many have arrived at a "mathematical certainty" in the rightness of the Science of Life.

Geoffrey J. Barratt