The Articles of Faith: The Principal Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. James E. Talmage

The multiplicity of evidence upon which mankind rest their conviction regarding the existence of a Supreme Being, may be classified, for convenience of consideration, under the three following heads:

      I. The evidence of history and tradition.

      II. The evidence furnished by the exercise of human reason.

      III. The conclusive evidence of direct revelation from God Himself.

      4. I. History and Tradition.—History as written by man, and tradition as transmitted from generation to generation prior to the date of any written record now extant, give evidence of the actuality of Deity, and of close and personal dealings between God and man in the first epochs of human existence. One of the most ancient records known, the Bible, names God as the Creator of all things,49 and moreover, declares that He revealed Himself to our first earthly parents and to many other holy personages in the early days of the world. Adam and Eve heard His voice50 in the Garden, and even after their transgression they continued to call upon God and to sacrifice to Him. It is plain, therefore, that they carried with them from the Garden a knowledge of God. After their expulsion they heard "the voice of the Lord from the way toward the Garden of Eden," though they saw Him not; and He gave unto them commandments, which they obeyed. Then came to Adam an angelic messenger, and the Holy Ghost inspired the man and bare record of the Father and the Son.51

      5. Cain and Abel learned of God from the teachings of their parents, as well as from personal ministrations. After the acceptance of Abel's offering, and the rejection of that of Cain followed by Cain's terrible crime of fratricide, the Lord talked with Cain, and Cain answered the Lord.52 Cain must, therefore, have taken a personal knowledge of God from Eden into the land where he went to dwell.53 Adam lived to be nine hundred and thirty years old and many children were born unto him. Them he instructed in the fear of God, and many of them received direct ministrations. Of Adam's descendants, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech the father of Noah, each representing a distinct generation, were all living during Adam's lifetime. Noah was born but a hundred and twenty-six years after the time of Adam's death, and moreover lived nearly six hundred years with his father Lamech, by whom he was doubtless instructed in the traditions concerning God's personal manifestations, which Lamech had learned from the lips of Adam. Through the medium of Noah and his family, a knowledge of God by direct tradition was carried beyond the flood; and Noah held direct communication with God,54 and lived to instruct ten generations of his descendants. Then followed Abraham, who also enjoyed direct communion with the Creator,55 and after him Isaac, and Jacob or Israel, among whose descendants the Lord wrought such wonders through the instrumentality of Moses. Thus, had there been no written records, tradition would have preserved and transmitted a knowledge of God.

      6. But even if the accounts of the earliest of man's personal communion with God had become dimmed with time, and therefore weakened in effect, they could but give place to other traditions founded on later manifestations of the Divine personality. Unto Moses the Lord made Himself known, not alone from behind the curtain of fire and the screen of clouds,56 but by direct face to face communication, whereby the chosen high-priest beheld even "the similitude" of his God.57 This account of direct communion between Moses and God, in part of which the people were permitted to share,58 as far as their faith and purity permitted, has been preserved by Israel through all the generations of the past. And from Israel the traditions of God's existence have spread throughout the world; so that we find traces of this ancient knowledge even in the most fanciful and perverted mythologies of heathen nations.

      7. II. Human Reason, operating upon observations of the things of nature, strongly declares the existence of God. The mind, already imbued with the historical truths of the Divine existence and its close relationship with man, will find confirmatory evidence in nature on every side; and even to him who rejects the testimony of the past, and assumes to set up his own judgment as superior to the common belief of ages, the multifarious evidences of design in nature appeal. Every observer must be impressed by the proofs of order and system among created things, and by the absence of superfluities in nature. He notes the regular succession of day and night providing alternate periods of work and rest for man, animals, and vegetables; the sequence of the seasons, each with its longer periods of labor and recuperation, the mutual dependence of animals and plants, the circulation of water from sea to cloud, from cloud to earth again, sustaining the fertility of the soil. As man proceeds to the closer examination of things, he finds that by study and scientific investigation these proofs are multiplied many fold. He may learn of the laws by which earth and its associated worlds are governed in their orbits; by which satellites are held subordinate to planets, and planets to suns; he may behold the marvels of vegetable and animal anatomy, and the surpassing mechanism of his own body; and with such appeals to his reason increasing at every step, his wonder as to who made all this gives place to inexpressible admiration for the Creator whose presence and power are thus so forcibly proclaimed; and the observer becomes a worshiper.

      8. Everywhere in nature is the evidence of cause and effect; on every side is the demonstration of means adapted to end. But such adaptations, says a thoughtful writer, "indicate contrivance for a given purpose, and contrivance is the evidence of intelligence, and intelligence is the attribute of mind, and the intelligent mind that built the stupendous universe is God."59 To admit the existence of a designer in the evidence of design, to say there must be a contriver in a world of intelligent contrivance, to believe in an adapter when man's life is directly dependent upon the most perfect adaptations conceivable, is but to accept self-evident truths. These axioms of nature ought to require no demonstration; the burden of proof as to the non-existence of a God ought to be placed upon him who questions the solemn truth. "Every house is builded by some man, but he that built all things is God." So spake the Apostle of old,60 and plain as is the truth expressed in these simple words, there are among men a few who profess to doubt the evidence of reason, and who deny the Author of their own being. Strange, is it not, that here and there one, who finds in the contrivance exhibited by the ant in building her house, in the architecture of the honey-comb, and in the myriad instances of orderly instinct among the least of living things, a proof of intelligence from which man may learn and be wise, will yet question the operation of intelligence in the creation of worlds and in the constitution of the universe?61

      9. Man's inborn consciousness tells him of his own existence; his ordinary powers of observation prove the existence of others of his kind, and of uncounted orders of organized beings; from this he concludes that something must have existed always, for had there been a time of no existence, a period of nothingness, existence could never have begun, for from nothing, nothing can be derived. The eternal existence of something, then, is a fact beyond dispute; and the question requiring answer is, what is that eternal something—that existence which is without beginning and without end? The skeptic may answer, "Nature; matter has always existed, and the universe is but a manifestation of matter organized by forces operating upon it; however, Nature is not God." But matter is neither vital nor active, nor is force intelligent; yet vitality and ceaseless activity are characteristic of created things, and the effects of intelligence are universally present. True, nature is not God; and to mistake the one for the other is to call the edifice the architect, the fabric the designer, the marble the sculptor, and the thing the power that made it. The system of nature is the manifestation of that order which argues a directing intelligence; and that intelligence is of an eternal character, coeval with existence itself. Nature herself is a declaration of a superior Being, whose will and purpose she portrays in all her varied aspects. Beyond and above nature, stands nature's God.

      10. While existence is eternal, and therefore to being there never was a beginning, never shall be an end, in a relative sense each stage of organization must have had a beginning, and to every phase of existence as manifested in each of the countless orders and classes of created things, there was a first, as there will be a last; though every ending or consummation in nature is but the beginning of another stage of advancement. Thus, man's ingenuity has invented theories to illustrate, if not to explain, a possible sequence of events by which the earth has been brought from a state of chaos to its present habitable condition; but by those hypotheses, this globe was once a barren ball, on which none of the innumerable forms of life that