Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1616

1616. And having outgrown this world picture, the human being has reached the culmination of the creation of the concept of God in its own likeness or image. With this image of God in human form, the creation of the image of God or world view enters an entirely new epoch. The old form of the image of God in the being's own image begins to die. This death is promoted by people's growing doubt about the traditional concept of God or world view modelled in the image of the imperfect human being. And this doubt is in turn promoted by the human being's growing intelligence, its experiences acquired within the field of natural science. It begins to discover that Nature is a cohesive whole, a great unit that is not in any way directed by a being in a more elevated human form sitting on a throne. But for the time being it can view this unit only from the findings of purely material research. These findings provide the human being with an exceedingly great amount of material knowledge. But this knowledge is not knowledge of the whole; it is merely local knowledge, which in this case means knowledge of the purely physical phenomena in the structure of the universe. This knowledge thus contains no true knowledge of this universe's mental or spiritual aspect. This mental or spiritual aspect therefore remains a mystery, if its existence is not simply denied. Since the human being is thus prepared to use its growing intelligence to do research, and it has been possible to apply this research only to material phenomena, to purely temporal or perishable things, the temporary result of this research is merely physical answers in terms of weights and measures. This knowledge or science is thus purely one hundred per cent materialistic. Within this science of temporality, based as it is on answers in terms of weights and measures, there can therefore be ascertained no "eternal" living being that, as regards its will and consciousness, can be thought to actually be behind the structure of the universe with all its physical phenomena that the researcher meets everywhere and in everything, phenomena that are subject to having a "beginning" and an "end". So the researcher who is preoccupied with matter and is materialistically minded cannot possibly accept something that is neither physical nor temporal in any other way than as fanaticism, naivety and superstition and thereby to the very highest degree as something "unscientific".