"He honored religious teachers who did not use mystifications to gain illegitimate power, eventually believing Jesus the greatest of these. He appreciated the role of religious institutions. But he was very leery of any priesthood and had almost no involvement with any organized religious sect, possibly because he found the options available to him so uninviting... Jefferson never doubted such a creative and providential god, even when he tried without success to understand the views of authentic atheists. This cosmology remained the foundation of his private religious beliefs and a support both for objective knowledge and moral confidence. He was so certain of his beliefs in such a creative god, in a planned and ordered universe, and in a divinely implanted moral sense in each person, that he assumed, quite incorrectly as we know, that such beliefs were universal, at the heart of all religions. When anyone challenged such beliefs, he easily and routinely referred to the evidence of design in nature and in the human mind. Such evidence made belief in a creative and purposeful god unchallengeable, self-evident."