Roughly: if you do not make a serious effort to understand the rational beauty of this world into which you are born you do not deserve to live in it.
The cultural context in which this remark was made was one in which it was considered almost impious to try to predict or understand anything because God could perform a miracle at any moment without notice. (Did the people who thought this think that Eve was a bad precedent, an Awful Caution?). This idea, that it is our reverent duty, as God's creatures (creature = created-thing) to attempt to understand His Creation, was radical and — one would have thought — quite disruptive; indeed — as one of my mediaevalist colleagues pointed out — it is actually quite striking that Adelard wasn't roundly told off for it and packed off to a 12th century equivalent of Siberia... perhaps Bath was such a place already so no further steps were required.... One might well wonder where it comes from. It seems to be Islamic, or at least to have reached us via Islam. Certainly at Adelard's time (12th century) Europe was beginning to emerge from the Dark Ages (wonderfully described by Russell in his History of Western Philosophy as an age ``exceeding all others in cruelty and superstition'') as a result of exposure to Classical and Islamic learning coming out of Spain.
(By the way I have never known whether the Dark Ages are so-called because we have very little information about them, or because they were A Dark Time. Perhaps some kind person can tell me..?)

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