Claim. Despite eighty percent of humanity’s uncertainty, the spirit world clearly exists; Unification Church members know this not as belief but as experience.
Elaboration. SMM frames belief in the spirit world as defective knowledge: “Eighty percent of the world’s population does not know about the spirit world. Even believers are unsure about its existence and that of God, but it is there” (2.2. The spirit world clearly exists, 15-149, 1965.10.7). For Unification Church members the epistemic status is upgraded: “Unification Church members clearly know that the spirit world exists. They do not just believe it – they know it. Why? They know it through countless spiritual experiences. Viewed against the backdrop of the global foundation the Unification Church has established today, we have evidently undergone a process of many spiritual experiences. Therefore, Unification Church members are in no position to deny the existence of the spirit world” (ibid, 140-121, 1986.2.9). The doctrine is not abstract — it claims to rest on a corpus of accumulated members’ experiences treated as collective evidence.
See also. csg-spiritual-experiences-replace-faith-with-knowledge