Testimonies

Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?
Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God. (John 6:67-69.)

I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the words of eternal life, and I find the spirit of God here. I believe that this church helps me be a better person. I find good people outside this church who do not seem inclined to join, but who may be better than I am at showing love to others. It may be that God has another path for them, but He hasn’t found it necessary to tell me.

When it became known that I planned to go to the University of Utah, a well-intentioned ward member took me aside and warned me that the professors there would try to steal my testimony. I took an historical geology course from Dr. William Lee Stokes, head of the Geology Department and an active church member. By this time I accepted the abundant evidence for evolution, but wondered if there was room for compromise. Could this Earth have been made of parts of other planets where these fossilized animals had lived? Dr. Stokes answered, Only if the parts were the size of continents and had been added to the Earth without greatly distorting them–both unlikely prospects. It seemed to me then that if you needed to create bodies for mankind, a good way to do it would be through evolution.

I earned a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics and began teaching. Some asked me how an otherwise intelligent person could believe in God. On the contrary, I find it reasonable to suppose that at least there might be a god, and I make the argument for this from large numbers. There are an estimated 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy ,with perhaps 20% of those, or eighty billion, being more or less like the Sun.

Astronomers believe that planets are usually formed along with stars, and if we suppose that each star has one earth-like planet (the Sun had three: Earth, early-Venus, and early-Mars), then there are eighty billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. (I ignore non-earth-like planets as too much of an unknown.) Life arose on the Earth after only 200 million years, almost as soon as it could. This suggests that life should be common, occurring wherever conditions are right. That life more complex than simple bacteria-like cells did not occur before the Earth was 3.8 billion years old suggests that this step was more difficult. Indigenous complex life may be relatively rare on these planets.

Particle physicist Murray Gell-Man’s Totalitarian Principle states, “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” Applied here to an infinite number of worlds, the principle means that anything that can happen with a world and its inhabitants must happen sometime, somewhere. Of course we do not have an infinite number of possible planets, but a large number–and we can make it far larger by considering that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe. I suggest that if it is possible for an intelligent race to arise and to become like gods, it probably has already happened somewhere, sometime. I say happened because we are latecomers. It seems to have taken 4.5 billion years for man to arise on Earth and for us to reach our current stage of progress, but the universe is three times that old, 13.75 billion years.

Consider the progress humankind has made in the last hundred years. What might we do in a thousand years, or in a hundred thousand years? Will we be able to make ourselves immortal? Quite possibly. If civilization stretches into millennia, will people become more righteous, or will we kill ourselves? In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker shows that world-wide violence as measured by murders per capita has steadily decreased over the millennia and more certainly over the last few centuries. That is hopeful. If we had a million years, could we become god-like? I suggest that the answer is yes, and if it is possible, I suggest that it has already been done, since, as has been said, we are latecomers.

I have been blessed with an abiding faith (detractors might say with a persistent blindness). Ever since I was a young teenager, whenever I wished to, I have been able to reach out and feel what I interpret to be the peaceful burning reassurance that God lives. Usually that reassurance comes immediately, although sometimes I must wait. My earliest recollection of this reassurance came in a Sunday School class as the teacher related Joseph Smith’s first vision. It was in the old 32nd Ward building, in Pioneer Stake, in Salt Lake City. The back half of the building had two stories, and we were in an upstairs classroom, seated around the perimeter of the room. The teacher, Sister Drechsel, told us that Joseph was only a little older than we were when God appeared to him. As she told us the story, the peaceful, burning reassurance of the spirit whispered to me the refrain, “It is true, it is true!” Sixty years later I still picture a glow filling the room and I feel the reassurance of the spirit as I relive this memory. As time passed, I had several experiences that reinforced my belief. I will relate a few of them.

I was about fifteen when our Boy Scout troop camped for a week in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I was with an older group that helped shepherd the younger boys. As the camp ended we got everything packed up and were waiting for cars to come from the city to take us home. Since we had a couple of hours, four of us decided to take a short hike without the younger boys while we waited. Jim was about my age, Jay a year or two younger, and John two years older. After obtaining permission from the adult leaders, we followed a stream into a narrow canyon thirty or forty yards wide. We walked up the canyon and soon came to a glacier covering the floor of the canyon, and saw that the stream flowed out of an ice cave in the face of the glacier. We wanted to explore the cave, but we would have had to wade in the stream, and the cave ceiling was low. It did not look too promising, so we climbed on top of the glacier. We decided to hike up the glacier a bit and then return to camp, but we soon came to a stack of tools, a couple of shovels and a pick, beside a fifty-foot rope that hung down the side of the cliff–and, of course, we had to investigate.

The rope tested strong enough and anchored well enough to hold, and it looked like there was some rubble and maybe a mine entrance near the top of the rope. John decided to go up and have a look, but he wouldn’t go into the mine, of course, since that might be dangerous. Well, there wasn’t anything to see at the top of the rope, and there wasn’t room for more than one there. Jim and Jay were soon up the rope, and they all jumped over to another ledge where the rubble was, and maybe a mine. I waited at the bottom, thinking that going up might be a bad idea. But what could go wrong? I could climb up, have a look around, and then we would go back to camp. Not wanting to miss out, I went up. The rope was anchored to a bump that jutted out from the cliff, and as I stood on this bump, the other boys started yelling at me, but I couldn’t understand them. I jumped over to them, and as my foot left the rock from which I jumped, that rock came loose and fell down to the glacier below.

It turned out that the other boys had been yelling to me not to jump, since they didn’t think that they could jump back to the rope safely–the landing area was small (smaller since my jump), and there was no way to safely stop if you overshot. On the other hand, we thought we could trace out a route up the several hundred feet to the top of the cliffs with the hope that going down the other side would be easier. After a very fervent group prayer, we felt we ought to go up and over, so we did. John had a ten-foot length of rope, but otherwise we had no climbing equipment. I believe we had canteens. It became a spiritual experience in that we reached for a hand hold, and finding none, prayed harder, and then found a hold. As we worked our way up a chimney, we had to take turns climbing because of the loose rocks we dislodged. On one occasion, the climber above me started again before I was out of the chimney. I heard a rock rattling down the chimney and looked up to see a double-fist-sized rock hurtling towards my head. I thought I could hang on tight and lean outward and let it hit me in the chest or I could hug the cliff and it would probably hit my head. I hugged the cliff. The rock hit just above my head and bounced out into space.

It took about three hours, but we made it to the top, and as we had hoped, the other side was much less steep. As we trotted down a deer trail, Jay tripped and cartwheeled off into space. He later told us that he saw a rock coming at him and that he felt if he could just grab onto that rock, he would be all right. He caught the rock and came away bruised and badly shaken, but alive. Had Jay not caught that rock, he would have plunged another forty feet onto a jumble of granite boulders. Some may say that we deluded ourselves and that the good outcome was the result of a series of coincidences, but we felt that God was watching over us and helping us.

I was a missionary in Germany when the Berlin wall was built. Elder Henry D. Moyle, counselor in the LDS Church’s First Presidency, visited the wall with Elder Theodore Burton, European Mission President, and others. Elder Burton related to us missionaries that Elder Moyle said that the Berlin wall would fall, and the time would come when missionaries would be so busy teaching those on the east side of the wall that those on the west side might need to wait before they could be taught. At that time the Communists looked very powerful and immovable, and I expected the wall to stand for fifty years or more, but the prophecy has already been mostly fulfilled. The wall has fallen, and missionaries are quite busy teaching those on the east side of the wall, but they still teach those on the west side. This is consistent with my experience that inspiration generally comes as impressions that we must then put into words, and we do not always get the words just right. Since we are fallible, that seems reasonable to me.

I believe I received a revelation that left no room for misinterpretation. Once as a missionary I was put with a companion who had a very different idea than I had about what we ought be doing. Things had been getting worse for weeks when he did something that left me completely and utterly frustrated. When I was alone, I knelt in prayer and told the Lord that I did not see how I could continue on. I heard a voice tell me not to worry, that the matter was being taken care of. The voice was so real and immediate that I opened my eyes and looked around to see if I was still alone. I was. That afternoon a telegram came transferring me to work on a different task with a different companion.

Some might explain away the experiences I have related as coincidences and selective memory where I remember experiences that confirm my belief and ignore experiences that do not. A common explanation for answers to prayer is that we pray until we get something that we can interpret as what we wanted, but I have an example that counters that. While teaching physics and astronomy at the local university, I served in various capacities in the Clinton Oklahoma Branch (now Clinton Ward), including seven years as Branch President. The Branch covered about 5,000 square miles. There were members in all the far corners, but most of them lived in three towns along I-40: Weatherford, Clinton, and Elk City. The church building is in Clinton, but my family lives in Weatherford, so we travel fifty miles round-trip to church. Some travel twice that far. The long distances make church attendance a trial of faith. I was Branch President during the late 70s and early 80s, the years of the “oil boom.” Attracted by oil-field jobs, new members strained the capacity of our phase one building. We even had classes in the baptismal font and in the furnace room. Attendance was high enough to qualify us to add some classrooms and a real chapel to the Clinton building, or we had almost enough to build phase one buildings in Weatherford and Elk City. I greatly favored the second choice and had the support of my counselors and of the Stake President in this. We saw it as a way to mitigate the distance problem.

We got some portable classrooms, and that helped until a fellow from the building department in Salt Lake showed up. He looked at the portable classrooms and announced that they had to go. “They project an image of impermanence; we don’t want that.” I felt terribly frustrated. A few more weeks of good attendance and we would qualify for the other two buildings. I prayed that the building representative would have a change of heart and help us rather than hinder us. An image came to my mind of our three daughters walking together down the aisle of a real chapel, with organ music in the background. Suddenly I knew that we should build the chapel. Still concerned about driving distances, I interviewed each active member and asked for their input. Almost without exception they answered that they had been driving the distance for many years and a few years more wasn’t going to make a difference. While we were building the chapel, the oil boom went bust, and so many members moved out that had we had buildings in Weatherford and Elk City, we would have lost them. I believe that I had an answer to prayer that certainly wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I believe that God lives, and wonder of wonders, He concerns Himself with our welfare.

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Biographical note:

I fulfilled an eight-year obligation with the Utah National Guard. I also served a mission in West Germany, and was there when the Berlin Wall was built. I graduated from the University of Utah in 1965 with a B.A. in physics, and then attended Oregon State University where I received an M.S. in physics in 1968 and a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics in 1971. I spent one year as a visiting assistant professor at Louisiana State University before coming to Southwestern Oklahoma State University. I have taught over 8,000 students during forty years at the university. I have just retired and am now an emeritus professor at Southwestern.

I have written about a hundred popular-level articles on subjects from Nobel Prize winners to nuclear weapons. I was the technical editor for two encyclopedia volumes and for a set of children’s encyclopedias. I have conducted numerous observatory viewing sessions for area public schools and the general public and have been guest speaker on such topics as astronomy, nuclear war, and the dangers of too much UV. My wife JoAnne and I have three daughters who are now grown and have families of their own.

Posted December 2012

There is an enormous amount that we all have in common. Whether you are a strict atheist skeptic, a devout Muslim, an anti-science protester, a lapsed Hindu, or a Mormon-basher, you and I have many shared beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and experiences. I am happy to call you a brother or sister. You may have a different opinion, but I believe that all of humankind is a family and that we are all brothers and sisters, children of Our Heavenly Father. Though I am not perfect, my goal is to love you and the whole human family with a perfect love like Our Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. While my love often falters, Their love is pure and perfect and deeper than we can imagine.

We’re all in this together, but we do have different worldviews. Understanding one another will both increase our mutual respect and broaden our own thoughts, almost always in a beneficial way. We can and should learn from each other’s experiences; this is a key sentiment of both science and the Mormon faith. Both have a strong emphasis on teaching and learning (often in a classroom setting) and in sharing our best estimates of what is true and real, with the goal of helping others to gain an improved understanding. For this reason, I have chosen to express my thoughts in this testimony (a statement of what I consider to be true) and I will express the few aspects that are unique to my experience rather than the innumerable common beliefs which you and I share. That is the nature of this venue. I hope you understand that I write in the spirit of love and education and not divisiveness.

One thing that makes me relatively unique is that I am a devout and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka a Mormon or LDS) and an astrophysicist working in planetary science (though I’m certainly not the only person who matches this description). For this reason, I feel to talk specifically about my personal thoughts on science and religion, with some discussion of astronomy and planets around other stars towards the end.

Latter-day Saints have a different mindset and thought process when it comes to evaluating religion and it is one that scientists can appreciate. We come to religion (and life) asking “Is this true and good?” That is the paramount criterion for judging our spiritual experiences. This is in contrast with many other Christian faiths; for example, some religions embrace “sola scriptura,” meaning “by the scriptures [Bible] alone,” recognizing that the Bible is clearly one of God’s main methods for communicating truth to men. For me personally, the LDS emphasis on the search for truth has been an enormous blessing in both my spiritual and academic lives, both of which often focus on my search for truth. I like the practical definition for truth given in the Doctrine and Covenants (a part of the LDS scriptural canon that includes revelations from God to the founder of the LDS Church, the Prophet Joseph Smith) Section 94, verse 23: “And truth is knowledge of things as they [really] are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” (See also the Book of Mormon, Jacob 4:13, Alma 32:35).

In my life, I have come to learn that there are two major ways of obtaining truth: reason and faith. The first, reason or logic, often employed using the scientific method, emphasizes obtaining truth through objective mechanisms; objective here means something that is independent of the individual. Gaining truth through faith works differently, focusing more on gaining an empirical understanding that is unique to every individual and leads to subjective knowledge.

Objective truth can be agreed upon by a group of people and is “outside” of any one individual. You and I and billions of others can agree: there are stars, they are shiny and are seen at night. Objective truth has the fantastic power that it can be immediately applied to everyone: I guarantee that if the atmospheric and lighting conditions are right, you can go outside tonight and see the stars. Science can be applied in powerful ways (e.g., engineering) allowing for the development of new technologies (though this is not the only goal or outcome). Science is best when it avoids or characterizes biases and uses rigorous statistical evidence to identify objective truth. (Throughout this document, when I refer to science, I mean the “hard” or physical sciences, those which have the strongest ability to identify and rigorously prove universal objective truths.) For all its positives, just because science works and works well does not imply that it is the only method for obtaining truth.

The hard sciences have a rule of identifying hypotheses that are objectively testable by experimentation of cause and effect (e.g., Popperian falsifiability). We use statistics and control groups to identify correlations and make them unique, respectively. However, even in very controlled and apparently clear-cut circumstances it is sometimes difficult to rigorously prove hypotheses with much certainty (and actually it is usually only technically possible to disprove alternate hypotheses). Despite the zeal of those who have fully embraced science as the only way to interact with the world, strict objective methodology is not possible in most aspects of real life. I agree that it is used less often than it should be (especially by the media, which care more about hype than reality or truth), but there are countless everyday circumstances where scientific methods are inconclusive at best and inapplicable in general. This is because, among other things, 1) there is no “control group” for most problems, 2) many systems are chaotic in the scientific sense of the word, i.e., they have literally unpredictable outcomes, and 3) humans are irrational and emotional and predicting deductively their behavior is a fruitless exercise. There’s no mathematical treatise on how a specific friendship will develop (some suggestions maybe, but certainly not the rigor we require in physics). There’s no predicting the details of the stock market. You can’t set up a scientific experiment to test different geopolitical policy options. There’s no equation that can identify who you should marry. And on and on. Science cannot do it all (though it should be consulted when possible).

(In fact, most non-scientists are often shocked when they learn how much of scientific progress is actually governed by emotion, intuition, and irrational feelings, even in the most objective problems. While good scientists have a mindset of self-skepticism to make sure their work is more than simply a reflection of their own biases, in the end scientists are people and are governed by subjective thoughts and experiences, even in their most objective endeavors.)

Therefore, to augment our intellectual interaction with the world around us, we need something more than science. About that, there should be no question. And, frankly, hard science gives us very little insight on how we are to fill this gap. How do we manage? Well, we draw upon our personal knowledge and experience: how we were raised, our own insights into how things work, cultural values and expectations, the expertise of those whom we respect, etc. I’ll call this personal knowledge “subjective,” meaning it is based on individual knowledge that cannot generally be transferred to another person. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I call “experiential” knowledge, knowledge gained by experiencing something that goes beyond the facts encountered; this is one form of subjective understanding that can lead to truth. Ideally, we would test these assumptions in the most objective way possible, but usually we just do the best we can and figure things out (for ourselves personally) as we go along.

Faith, properly defined and exercised, is a powerful route to obtaining subjective knowledge of the truth. It is an empirical method, meaning that it is guided by experimentation and focused on actual experienced results (as opposed to theoretical outcomes). A general definition of faith (applicable even outside the religious sphere) is that of an expectation that something is true (e.g., Hebrews 11:1). How strong this personal, subjective expectation is depends on a lot of factors, but having faith implies that there is some non-zero level of expectation, but that the expectation is not 100%. (When we have direct patent evidence that something is true, it becomes “knowledge.” See Alma 32:34; this whole chapter is a fantastic treatise on faith.) One common example used in the scriptures to illustrate faith is that of planting a seed (Alma 32, Matthew 13). When you plant a seed, you don’t know for sure that it will grow, nor do you know if it will eventually be successful and bear fruit. (Keep in mind that the scriptures were written in ancient times, when, I suspect, seeds had lower probability of success than the seeds we would today buy at a store.) Without faith in the idea that there is a possibility that the seed will be successful, there is no reason to plant the seed; the expectation that planting and investing in the seed could eventually yield a satisfactory return on investment is faith. In my opinion, it is this meaning that Joseph Smith had in mind when he said that faith is “the moving cause of all action” (from his excellent Lectures on Faith). With this definition, you can see that even the most irreligious are constantly using faith. My scientist colleagues may frame this same concept in terms of probabilistic expectation values or Bayesian priors; I think this captures a similar feeling to this general definition of faith.

LDS theology has a unique understanding of faith. We define faith as a principle of action (doing something, often without direct evidence that it will yield a positive result) and which is distinguished from “belief” which is a more passive “this is what I think.” It is important to recognize, however, that everyone uses the words faith, belief, and knowledge differently.

While faith as a principle can lead us to truth, there is a specific kind of faith that is most powerful: faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In the LDS Church, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is identified as the first principle of the gospel (the gospel being the set of teachings necessary for producing salvation) and this is true in many other Christian churches as well. When we have an expectation that Jesus Christ is real and true (in the supernatural and not historical sense), we initially aren’t 100% sure that His teachings and His gospel will work. There is no objective reason for us to identify something He taught as true or real and to, therefore, adopt it in our lives. Let’s pick a specific principle to make this concrete: having faith in the Lord Jesus Christ means that you have an expectation that appealing to the Atonement of Jesus Christ will allow you to obtain forgiveness for past misdeeds about which you feel seriously guilty. The process required for gaining God’s forgiveness is called “repentance” and I won’t go into the details here, but it is much deeper than simply uttering “Father, forgive me.” Without faith, there is no expectation that the burden of guilt for something you have done and feel sorry about can be lifted and that you can feel forgiven. With faith in Jesus Christ, you give yourself an expectation that, if you repent in the way He has designated, He truly can heal you and forgive you. I have experienced this directly in my life and can confirm that the Atonement of Christ is real, in that it has had a real effect on my life and happiness and that it can have a real effect for you too if you have faith in Him and properly repent.

This method of putting faith into action by doing something based on an expectation instead of knowledge (or even apparently contrary to observed knowledge) is called “exercising faith.” The promise is that, when we exercise faith, God will give us to know that the principles in which we are exercising faith are true. This confirmation comes as a subjective feeling called inspiration or personal revelation and it comes from the Holy Ghost, also known as the Spirit. It usually comes as the result of both exercising faith and asking God, through heartfelt and sincere prayer, i.e., asking God to give us true knowledge.

Rarely will this result in a vision or an audible voice. There is an ability to recognize personal revelation (defined as [subjective] truth that comes from God) that needs to be developed. . . . I’m still working on mine. Although I can describe some basics here, if you are sincerely interested in how to do this, you need to get in touch with someone who can help you. I would be willing to talk with you directly, if you think that would help. In the LDS Church, when there is a desire to learn more about how to receive subjective religious/spiritual knowledge, especially if you are not currently a member of the church, the best reference is the LDS missionaries: young men or young women who have put their lives on hold to go out and help others to understand the principles of gaining subjective spiritual confirmation regarding the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you meet with them, I hope that you will have the humility to look past their youth to the eternal principles and truths they will convey.

When I pray for guidance, I usually get a feeling (often a reminder of an answer or feeling I have previously had) that I need to do something or change something in myself. The feeling may not be qualitatively different from what seems to you as your own personal idea, although it is often much more spiritual and deep. I have experienced revelation from God many times myself and testify that God does hear and answer prayers for our benefit.

I have put forth the idea that faith in Jesus Christ is the most powerful method for obtaining truth. To gain a truth by this method, you first have to have an idea of what the truth is (Lectures on Faith) and be guided by someone more experienced in that truth (e.g., Acts 8:26-39).

So, how do we know, how can we know, which of the thousands of interpretations of religion to investigate for truthfulness? I admit, this is a daunting problem as simple metrics like “Which religion has the most members” or “Which religion is oldest” or “Which religion has people who appear to have the most firm faith” may or may not correlate with the truthfulness of that religion (and for many religions, there is no single answer to even these straightforward questions). Undoubtedly there is some truth and value in practically all religions, though I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that some religions have more truth than others.

Interestingly, it is this very question that founded the LDS Church. A young man in upstate New York named Joseph Smith was in an area receiving a spiritual “upheaval” which he described as a “contest of religions and a tumult of opinions.” Recognizing his need for forgiveness for past mistakes and his utter inability to determine which Church was the one to join either by study or by the Bible alone, Joseph came across a powerful scripture in the New Testament book of James, chapter 1, verses 5 and 6. It reads, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth [chastises] not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” The advice is to communicate with God (in what is called prayer) with an expectation that God will answer and with a true willingness and intent to do whatever God says.

The claim of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that it is the only true and living Church (D&C 1:30). The “only true Church” part means that it encompasses more divine and saving truth than any other religion. The “only living Church” part means that it is actively receiving more truth through the direct guidance of Jesus Christ to a living Prophet, equivalent to a modern day Moses, Peter, or Muhammad. We do not believe that we have a monopoly on truth, that other religions are fruitless, that we have exclusive access to God, or that people cannot be happy elsewhere. We do not believe that anyone will be condemned for not living in accordance with truths that they did not know; through God’s grace, such will be forgiven as He sees fit and will eventually (potentially in the next life) have the opportunity to learn and accept all truths necessary for ultimate happiness. However, we know that learning and accepting our unique truths as soon as possible will allow people to become better, happier, and closer to God.

Therefore, we invite all men and women to learn more about Jesus Christ. We plead with those who will listen, hoping that they will open their minds and their hearts to gaining spiritual knowledge through faith in the principles of the gospel. We exhort others to familiarize themselves with our unique and powerful doctrines, which confirm the truthfulness of the Bible and expand our understanding of our purpose on this Earth and how we can return to our Heavenly Father (i.e., go to heaven). We send tens of thousands of young men and young women into around a hundred countries to declare the truth and to follow Christ’s injunction to “go ye to all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15).

(I will note that I have used the word we to suggest that I am speaking for the Church itself, but I am not an officially endorsed spokesperson. For an official point of view—which I believe will not be substantially different—go to mormon.org or lds.org or talk to the missionaries.)

One of the best ways to exercise faith in order to gain a knowledge of whether the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its teachings are true is to learn more about the Book of Mormon. Its purpose is to testify of Christ and to allow us to gain a spiritual confirmation that He lives and loves us. Through the process of studying the Book of Mormon, you can determine whether or not the LDS Church is true.

Let me describe my knowledge and testimony about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.

Scientists should be expert skeptics (e.g., Feynman’s Caltech graduation address) and, as a scientist and a debater, I am a trained and expert skeptic. I know all about biases like confirmation bias, fallacies like post hoc ergo propter hoc, statistical uncertainties, expectation values, systematic errors, and other relevant aspects of skepticism and objective scientific proof. I believe that virtually all pseudoscience is incorrect and/or misguided and am extremely skeptical of “science” that doesn’t come with a well-written peer-reviewed journal article. In fact, those who have submitted astrophysics journal articles where I was selected to be the peer reviewer would corroborate that I provide extensive, thorough, multi-faceted reviews.

So, I’m often savvy to issues that arise from the Atheist (used in the sense of the philosophy that denies anything supernatural) Skeptic concerning religion. When it comes to the Book of Mormon, however, I just can’t find any serious argument against its reality, but see dozens or hundreds of reasons to accept it. I am clearly biased by my upbringing and by the fact that I have received subjective, spiritual, and emotional confirmation from God that the Book of Mormon is true. I believe I have a strong ability to mostly step outside of my biases and present nearly objective evidence (though I understand if you doubt this ability), following the scientist’s objective rules, and in that role, the Book of Mormon continues to stand as inexplicable without invoking the influence of God.

The key question is, “Where did the Book of Mormon come from?” The goal of the skeptic is to show that there is a plausible naturalistic explanation for its origin. I won’t go over the various theories here, but none of them stand up to serious investigation.

One of the most amusing theories about the Book of Mormon is that it was plagiarized directly from other extant sources. Proponents of this untenable idea point to portions of the book that quote (or appear to quote) from other sources and use this to justify their straw man conclusion. The reality is that there are AT LEAST dozens of chapters and scores of pages that are completely original (though they usually draw on pre-existing themes, as would be expected from scripture whose purpose is to confirm the Bible). My testimony of the Book of Mormon comes from, in large part, the awesome sermons and discourses of these ancient inspired prophets. There’s Nephi’s vision of the Tree of Life, Nephi’s psalm, Jacob’s treatise on the Atonement, Nephi’s concluding chapters, Jacob’s Allegory of the Olive Tree, Enos’s repentance story, King Benjamin’s sermon, Abinadi’s testimony, the story of the people of Zeniff, the conversion of Alma the Younger, Alma’s discourses to Zarahemla and Gideon, Alma and Amulek’s preachings in Ammonihah and later to the Zoramites, Ammon and Aaron’s missionary preaching, Alma’s advice to his sons, Helaman’s teachings of his sons, Nephi and Lehi’s experience in the temple, Mormon’s frequently interjected commentary, Samuel the Lamanite’s prophecies, the story of Nephi preaching on his garden tower, Mormon’s mourning over his people, the origin of the Jaredites, Ether’s preachings, Mormon’s epistles to Moroni, and Moroni’s final words. And these amazing, doctrinally rich, and powerful sermons are dwarfed by the visit of Christ Himself and His teachings at the Temple at Bountiful.

All of these stories provide the substance of the Book of Mormon and practically their entire content is original in the Book of Mormon (though some of the prophets occasionally quote their scriptures, i.e., the Old Testament of the Bible). It is these beautiful chapters that cannot be explained away with any theory of plagiarism whatsoever. Anti-Mormon arguments avoid these sections like the plague because there is no alternative explanation for these most powerful sections of scripture. (And don’t even get me talking about the other scriptures authored by Joseph Smith: the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price). These are the parts of the Book or Mormon that particularly bring the Spirit into my heart, confirming the truth of the Book of Mormon.

If you want to argue against the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon (from the atheist or non-Mormon religious point of view), start with these passages and not random phrases. If you sincerely want to know whether the Book of Mormon is true, start with these passages and ask God, the Eternal Father, if they are true, with sincerity, faith (the expectation that you truly can and will receive an answer), and real intent (meaning that you are open to acting on whatever answer you receive, even if it is not the one you expect) and He will manifest the truth of these passages unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost (Moroni 10:5). By that subjective, spiritual, and personal method, I know that the Book of Mormon is true, besides the objective reasoning, only a tiny part of which I’ve mentioned here (which further convinces me). One good place to start is chapter eleven from the book of 3 Nephi, which is the beginning of Christ’s visit to the people of ancient America. Chapter 17 is particularly powerful.

I think the evidence for the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is overwhelming and that there is no plausible alternative explanation for its origin other than the divine origin given by Joseph Smith. As always, reaching this conclusion requires subjective judgment on what is acceptable evidence and how compelling it is. But by reading it yourself, exercising faith, and praying, you can gain a subjective truth that is deeper than any objective argument concerning its authenticity.

My conviction of the truth of the Book of Mormon is one of the main pillars of my testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though these pillars are based on subjective personal experiences, the knowledge I have of these is more real to me personally than the objective truths of science. Of course, each pillar inter-supports the others, but these are truths that, in my testimony, could readily stand on their own. The other pillars of my personal testimony are my knowledge that Heavenly Father lives and loves me and my family; that I have received forgiveness of my sins through Christ’s Atonement and that His Atonement is real; that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God called to restore His truth to the Earth; that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true and living Church on the Earth; that we are led by a prophet and apostles today who share with us God’s will (particularly through “General Conference”); that paying tithing (a charitable donation of 10% of your income to the Church) leads to financial protection; and that God has restored His authority on the Earth, which we call the Priesthood, and that it has actual power including the ability to give efficacious priesthood blessings.

Most active Latter-day Saints have similar testimony pillars; I am one of literally millions who can testify to the validity of these principles. We have gained our knowledge through subjective faith. You can too. I hope you will seriously consider planting the seed of faith in Jesus Christ in your life.

Now I will turn my attention to another unique aspect of my personal experience which I can share here, that of the LDS astrophysicist.

If there is one thing that I would want everyone to know about astronomy, it is to have a feel for the unimaginably immense distance and time scales that are seen in the universe. (This is one of my favorite visualizations of the size of the universe.) There are no analogies that are adequate to grasp an understanding of these scales: if the Sun is a pea a few feet away from the Earth (at this scale, the size of a grain of salt), then the nearest star is 120 miles away. The galaxy is millions of miles wide with billions of stars, most smaller than a pea in size. As we will discuss below, there are likely billions of billions of worlds like our own in the observable Universe. As mind-bogglingly large as this is, it may be only a microscropic fraction of God’s creations. Joseph Smith restored God’s revelation to Moses in the scripture we now call the Book of Moses, a part of the LDS scriptural canon contained in what we now call the Pearl of Great Price, although this is effectively a prelude to Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Before discussing the creation of this Earth, God tells Moses: “Worlds without number have I created… by the Son.” Even if you do not believe in God, the awe-inspiring size of the Universe serves to provide perspective that should bind us together as the human family. (I enjoy Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” quotation in this regard.)

Heavenly Father is so amazingly infinite, why would He possibly care about someone as insignificant as me with all my comparatively nanoscopic problems? The reason is given in this same passage from Moses: “For behold, this is my work and my glory – to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” Psalm 8 in the Old Testament shares a very similar message: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Psalms 8:3-5). One of the top leaders of the LDS Church, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, recently called this contrast a “Paradox of Man”:

“And while we may look at the vast expanse of the universe and say, “What is man in comparison to the glory of creation?” God Himself said we are the reason He created the universe! His work and glory—the purpose for this magnificent universe—is to save and exalt mankind. In other words, the vast expanse of eternity, the glories and mysteries of infinite space and time, are all built for the benefit of ordinary mortals like you and me. Our Heavenly Father created the universe that we might reach our potential as His sons and daughters. This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to God. While against the backdrop of infinite creation we may appear to be nothing, we have a spark of eternal fire burning within our breast. We have the incomprehensible promise of exaltation—worlds without end—within our grasp. And it is God’s great desire to help us reach it.”

Why does God care for us in the vastness of creation? Because we are His children and He loves us with an infinite love, as evidenced by Christ’s Atonement. Besides that, LDS theology confirms that, just as children one day become like their parents, we have the potential to become like God. That is, we have infinite potential. This makes us the most important and valuable of all the creations of the Universe. I like the pictures of beautiful nebulae and colorful star-forming clouds as much as anyone, but (like most astronomers), I put far more value on intelligent life. God does too. He has a plan for His children, called the Plan of Salvation or the Plan of Happiness, that allows us to grow and progress and become more like Him. This wonderful piece of LDS doctrine clarifies our role in the universe, where we came from before this life, who we are, and where we are going after death.

Besides organizing the Plan of Salvation for the whole human family, I testify that He knows each of us by name, understands us more deeply than we understand ourselves, answers our individual prayers, and is close to each of us. The claim that our Heavenly Father knows, cares for, and interacts with ALL of His children in every age, around the world, and then around the universe, tends to create two responses. The faithless see such a Grand Being as impossible because the very idea is unbelievable and/or incomprehensible. On the other hand, those who have taken the time and effort to establish a relationship with their Heavenly Father and who examine their lives for Heavenly Father’s influence discover numerous examples of His hand of guidance and arm of mercy and must admit to the truth that He knows them personally. I know that Heavenly Father is aware of and cares for me and for my family through the many ways in which He has blessed our lives. (And, believe me, I’ve corrected for observational and confirmation bias.) For me and others, the fact that God is able to be an influence in a personal way to billions upon billions serves to exalt God and verify His Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence. (On the other hand, rejecting something just because you don’t know how it works is not particularly scientific; it is prideful and awful hubris which leads people to believe that the universe cannot possibly contain anything that much more impressive than themselves. [Perhaps amoebas feel the same way].)

While astronomers identified the terrific scale of the universe over the past century, one of the most interesting current developments is the identification of planets just like Earth around other stars. I am an astronomer who studies planets around other stars (extra-solar planets or exoplanets), and am currently working with the Science Team of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. In a short time from this writing (October 2012), Kepler will undoubtedly announce the discovery of a nearly Earth-sized, potentially habitable planet. In some ways, this will be a completion of the Copernican Revolution, which started the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe or special by suggesting that the planets orbited the Sun instead. After identifying a few examples, it is the main goal of the Kepler Mission to then draw statistical conclusions about the prevalence of such planets in our Galaxy (with preliminary estimates already ranging from millions to billions). While Kepler will identify planets that are at the right distance from their stars to have liquid water, whether or not actual water is present requires a large host of other assumptions about the properties of that planet (primarily, that it has a small and well-behaved atmosphere). Although Kepler will bring us closer than ever to identifying planets just like our own in the universe, it will be ten to forty years until these assumptions can be seriously tested; these will remain only “potentially” habitable worlds for decades to come.

Still, with the imminent discovery of potentially habitable worlds and the decades-long search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) via direct efforts to search for intelligent signals, some groups, religious and secular, are thinking about the strength of the fundamental philosophical shift such discoveries may eventually have. Superficial investigations wonder if religions will crumble under such news, but I think that ignores the complexity of the question. I am saddened to say that there are undoubtedly many religions and individuals who will simply ignore any scientific progress on this problem, refusing to take the time to think about the philosophical and cosmographical implications for them personally. (Indeed, most of us don’t currently appreciate on an everyday basis the unimaginably huge universe and our ridiculously small part of it.)

In particular, LDS teachings have always affirmed that there are a grand multiplicity of worlds and that “the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God” (D&C 76:24). As we discussed earlier about the Pearl of Great Price, God clearly reveals to Moses that He has created worlds without number through His Only Begotten Son. In this passage, He also explains that some worlds had already passed away, that some were currently going, and that others would yet be created. This is entirely consistent with the modern scientific understanding of planet formation: there are many habitable worlds in the galaxy (Kepler is going to give a precise estimate, but no one doubts that the answer will be in the millions to billions range.). New stars and planets are currently forming (and will form in the future); other planetary systems have died. Note that this was somewhat contrary to the predominant astronomical understanding of the early 1800’s, which usually imagined the universe as static and unevolving. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first to suggest the idea of large numbers of inhabited planets (see Prof. Michael Crowe’s excellent investigation of LDS thought in a historical setting in Extraterrestrial Life Debate: 1750 – 1900) or a continually evolving universe. Still, though, it is interesting that modern astronomy strongly validates the cosmological worldview presented in chapter one of Moses, a central theological tenet of the LDS church.

Although I have unique experience as a devout Mormon astrophysicist, in the end, I see no conflict between true science and true religion. While there are religious teachings and scientific results that sometimes appear to be in conflict, there are no fundamental principles of one or the other that require one to make a choice. Like most scientists that are presented with two seemingly incompatible sets of evidence (it happens regularly when you’re at the edge of discovery), I am content to wait until we can get more data. Actually, I cannot wait for the amazing and joyous opportunity I will have (presumably after this life) to learn true Astronomy, Physics, and Planet Formation from the Creator of the Universe. In the meantime, I will gladly contribute to the scientific endeavor to learn more about the worlds He has created and I am grateful for the talents, abilities, and inspiration He has given me that allow me to be a scientist.

I testify that He loves each of us individually, that Christ’s Atonement is real, that we can learn truth through confirmation by the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ, and that we are all brothers and sisters and children of God.

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Darin Ragozzine is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy Department at the University of Florida. His research focuses on the orbital dynamics of planetary systems, particularly systems of multiple transiting planets and Kuiper belt objects in the distant solar system. He has co-authored several publications as a member of the NASA Kepler Space Telescope Science Team, which continues to be his main research focus. He has published other astrophysics journal articles as well, on topics relating to exoplanets and the dwarf planet Haumea.

Darin has a Ph.D. from Caltech in planetary science and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in physics and astrophysics. He is currently serving in the Sunday School Presidency in the Gainesville 2nd Ward, in the Gainesville Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Posted October 2012

I grew up in an active LDS family in a small LDS community in southern Idaho. My father was a political conservative, and served as an LDS bishop. In looking at my genealogy, it appears that almost any way you go back through my family line my ancestors have been members of the LDS Church pretty much since the restoration. I even had a lot of ancestors cross the plains as pioneers. After leaving Oakley, Idaho, I went on an LDS mission, got married in an LDS temple, and graduated from BYU. Thus, I’m about as LDS as they come in terms of my background.

But, for some reason I decided to go into psychology. I liked how it was sort of a mix of philosophy and science. I also liked the many real-world applications. However, psychology is a field primarily made up of liberal atheists. In fact, almost all psychological theories assume that God does not exist, as do most methods for studying psychology. Thus, the reality of God is denied or, at best, ignored. Most people in the field, even people who study religion, think religion is an evolutionary accident, an evolutionary adaptation, or a social construction. There is no reality behind it. Besides, psychology is grounded in naturalism, which assumes that everything can be explained in terms of natural laws. So, everything happens due to natural forces, which means there is no need for “supernatural” beings or forces. All of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can ultimately be traced back to two sources: our genes and our environments.

So here I am—a conservative believer in a field of liberal atheists. I obviously think the field of psychology has value. I also think there are a lot of great psychological theories out there, and a lot of good psychological research is being conducted. Nevertheless, it is unsatisfactory because there is a disconnect between what is happening in the field and what I truly believe. I believe I am a son of a loving Father in Heaven. I believe I lived with Him before this life. I hope to live with Him and my family after this life. I know that we are not simply constrained to our short existence on this earth, as most in the field of psychology believe.

I also believe agency is important to God’s plan, and thus an important part of our lives. We have the ability to choose—we are not simply products of our genes and environments. Obviously our genes and environment play an important role, and we cannot escape them; but, they do not determine who we are. We do. This goes starkly against what most people in psychology think.

I also believe that there are forces of good and evil that are present in our lives that are not of this world. God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, and angels in heaven can have a positive influence on us. In particular, the Holy Ghost can change us—it can change our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and even our physiology. The Atonement of Christ can also not only comfort and heal us, but make us better people. On the other hand, Satan and his helpers can try to lead us off the path. They are a reality and not just a figment of our imagination. Thus, a lot more goes into who we are than just genes and environment.

Lastly, not only do I have a testimony of the gospel, but, I support the church. This church and the doctrines therein are true, and are from God, regardless of any blemishes in the history books, limitations of the leaders, or failings of the church members. Further, I believe in supporting church leaders regardless of the trends of the day, the philosophies of man, or the winds of political thought. We are asked to bend our life to fit the gospel, not bend the gospel to fit our life.

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Sam Hardy is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Brigham Young University. He grew up in a farm town in southern Idaho and served an LDS mission in San Bernardino, California. He completed his B.S. in Human Development at BYU, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Following graduate school he worked for two years as a postdoctoral research fellow in Longitudinal Data Analysis and Lifespan Development at the University of Virginia. His research overlaps developmental and personality psychology, and is specifically focused on investigating the ways in which morality, identity, and religiosity develop, interrelate, and predict behaviors in adolescents and adults. Additionally, he is interested in theory and philosophy, particularly issues related to agency, ethics, and religion. He regularly teaches classes on psychological statistics, adolescent development, personality, and moral development. Sam is married with two children and lives in Spanish Fork, Utah.

Posted September 2012

As an academic, I view myself as an empiricist. I find data from experimental research most compelling. Though theory is foundational to all inquiry, theory tested and applied to a variety of contexts is where theory takes life, gains nuanced insight, and finds its real value.

As with academic inquiry, I believe spiritual inquiry requires much more than passive “armchair theologizing.” Someone who is serious and sincere about wanting to learn spiritual truth must be willing to conduct applied experiments. With regard to inquiry about God and the truthfulness of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, relying only on mental processing of evidence alone leads to an inevitable stalemate, leaving us exactly where I believe God wants us to be—dependent on learning in a way that requires us to sincerely seek Him, draw close to Him, to apply what we are learning, and become something more than we are.

Unfortunately, this is a path that some will not accept because it is harder. The Savior said, “If any man will do [God’s] will he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself” (John 7:17). Doing and knowing are interconnected with regard to gaining knowledge of God or anything related to the real questions of life. Trying to apply, even if imperfectly, the principles or truth we are seeking to understand is how we show “real intent” (Moroni 10:4) and the promised fruit of the Gospel is experienced (i.e., blessings, peace, soul expansion, bridling of our lesser selves, and the Holy Ghost’s confirmation). Armchair theologizing will never bring this type of learning. Principles and doctrines must be lived to know their value and the value of their source.

So, when I say that I know that the restored Gospel (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and the Book of Mormon are true this knowledge has come both from spiritual confirmation of the truthfulness of these things through the power of the Holy Ghost and from my attempts to apply these principles in the laboratory of life. The observed results for me have been conclusive. The promised blessings for Gospel principles have consistently accompanied their application.

Through my experiences, I am particularly thankful for the marvelous freedom that comes from living the Word of Wisdom, the comprehensive and clear answers to the fundamental questions of life (“Where did I come from?”, “Why am I here?”, and “Where am I going?”), and the blessings of having a system of living and belief that enables the “better angels of our natures” (Abraham Lincoln) to be the dominant and expressed force in one’s life. I am deeply thankful for the renewing and cleansing power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and the restored Gospel’s enriching influence on family life. I am very thankful for the knowledge I have that God, our Heavenly Father, lives. He hears us, loves us, is anxious to help us, and wants us to choose to return to Him. I know He sent His Son Jesus Christ to be our Redeemer and that God speaks to man today, personally and through ordained prophets.

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Bradley P. Owens is an associate professor of Business Ethics at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. He received his B.A. in Marriage, Family, and Human Development at Brigham Young University (2002); his Masters of Public Administration at Brigham Young University (2004); and his Masters and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the University of Washington (2007, 2009); and held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Michigan (2009-2011). He has published research on relational energy, work-life balance, and the impact of humility on individual performance, team processes, and in the role of leadership.

Posted September 2012
Updated April 2020

In Mormonism, we’re supposed to ‘bear our testimonies’ that the ‘Book of Mormon is true,’ that the ‘Church is true’ and that we’re led by ‘a prophet on the earth today.’ In fact, saying we believe in God is considered inadequate: we ‘know God exists and that He has restored His Church to the earth today.’ I know all those phrases, have used them in Church my whole life. But the more I think about them—and I do think about them, about the language of our worship—the more strange they seem, even divorced from reality, and that seems a shame, because Mormonism strikes me as a fundamentally practical religion. There’s even a sort of earthiness to it, not least because we are unique among Christian faiths in thinking God has a body.

‘Bear my testimony’ suggests a legal proceeding: I ‘bear witness’ of events I presumably personally experienced. But is that really what we do when we bear testimonies in Church? What are testifying to? It seems to me that we’re testifying to a certain narrative: the First Vision, the Restoration of the Church, the Golden Plates and their translation. We’re saying, in essence, that certain historical events really happened. We weren’t there, and all the people who were there are long dead. But they happened, we attest that they happened, and in the officially approved versions published by the Church. We can’t really say any of that, can we? Surely, at most, what we’re saying is ‘I received a spiritual manifestation that persuades me that these events took place.’ We’re saying that we prayed, and feelings resulted that seemed to us to have been externally generated.

We also testify that the Book of Mormon is true. Again, this seems to me a rather strange thing to say. We don’t talk that way about any other book. I don’t say ‘Middlemarch is true,’ or ‘Hamlet is true.’ We don’t really even say that something like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is true, or Newton’s Principia is true. We might think Kant’s discussion of the categorical imperative is enlightening; we might even think he got it right. But we don’t really say ‘that book is true.’ We may have also noticed that a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force. But we don’t say the book describing that principle is ‘true.’

When we say the Book of Mormon is ‘true,’ in other words, we’re saying something pretty complicated. The Book of Mormon might be ‘true’ in the sense that it describes people who really lived, a civilization that actually existed. It might be ‘true’ in a theological sense—the sermons included in its pages accurately describe God and how He wants us to serve Him and each other. It might be ‘true’ in an existential sense—this book came into being in a particular way, involving Golden Plates and an angel and a Urim and Thummim. It might be ‘true’ in a spiritual sense. In fact, I think that’s how we generally understand it. Of course, we also think there really were Golden Plates and that there really were Nephites. But that’s all just assumed, unexamined. We’re supposed to read the Book of Mormon for a certain amount of time each day—fifteen minutes, a half hour—as an act of devotion. It’s how we develop spiritual discipline. It’s our rosary, it’s our mantra. It’s not like other books. We’re not supposed to read it for pleasure, for a story, for its prose. We can, of course, but that’s not the point.

In the earliest days of the Church, the fact of the Book of Mormon was probably more important than anything in it. Someone, Brigham Young or Heber C. Kimball or Edward Partridge, would be given a copy of the Book of Mormon, they’d read it in one sitting, and they’d immediately ‘know’ it was ‘true.’ The Spirit spoke to them.
On my mission, thoughts sometimes popped into my head unbidden, suggesting that I act in certain ways, that I do something or other. Usually, I would do it, and usually it would work out pretty well. The same thing happens now—thoughts just pop into my head. My daughter has a fever and a sore throat, but it’s the weekend, we can’t see our regular doctor for a day or so. Should we take her to emergency? I lay my hands on her head, and a thought occurs to me—she’s pretty sick, but we can wait until Monday. Meanwhile, we should go to the store and get a can of chicken noodle soup. We should give her ibuprofen and a fruit smoothie. Would I have reached those conclusions anyway, on my own? Quite possibly. But they did pop into my head while I was praying, my hands laid on my daughter’s head.

Sometimes when I read the Book of Mormon, it seems pretty obviously to be a nineteenth-century text. When I read Mosiah 2-4, however, I think I’m reading the words of a real man. King Benjamin lives for me. So does the Jacob of 2 Nephi 2-4, and the Nephi of 2 Nephi 25-33. So does the heartbreaking Mormon of Moroni 9. But Moroni 8? Why on earth would a Mesoamerican worry about infant baptism? So do I believe the Book of Mormon is ‘true?’ Can that conclusion remain tentative forever?

I feel like Saint Augustine, cheering in his school of philosophical disputes whenever those arguing for the immortality of the soul won the day. I have a rooting interest. I think the notion that the Book of Mormon is genuinely an ancient text is, at best, improbable. But that’s the side of the story I want to have win. Meanwhile, my daughter’s fever is in fact subsiding. And so that worked again.

Or it didn’t: I can talk myself out of a testimony pretty easily. It’s harder to talk myself into one. I can’t read scripture purely, uncomplicatedly. Fifteen minutes a day doesn’t work for me; I’m filled with too many questions. It’s better to just read, like I’d read any book, just let the narrative flow. So do I ‘know’ the Book of Mormon is ‘true?’ No. I believe that by reading it, I will feel things I don’t ordinarily feel. Some tranquility, perhaps, some compassion, some connection to Nephi and Benjamin and Ammon and the Savior. Characters in a story, words on a page. But also thoughts in my head, feelings in my heart.

I can’t just feel the spirit. I have to work through doubt, come to the edge of the cliff and see the white water break on the rocks below. That’s when I can sometimes close my eyes and jump. When I most need God to catch me, He does. Like a high soprano descant on top of a four-part chorus, I hear Him, beauty layered over doubt.

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Eric Samuelsen is a playwright, director, and critic. His plays include Gadianton, Family, The Way We’re Wired, and Amerigo. He’s been on the faculty at BYU since 1992, and has headed the playwriting program since 1999. He has a PhD from Indiana University, and is a recognized Ibsen translator and critic. Professor Samuelsen served two terms as president of the Association for Mormon Letters. He’s been married for thirty years, and he and his wife, Annette, have four children.

Posted May 2012

I am a convert to Mormonism. I grew up attending a mainline Protestant church where both my parents served in leadership positions. We were close to our ministers, and we participated in many activities in our church. I also attended numerous worship services in the Catholic Church and in the Jewish faith as well. As I left for college, my mother became more attracted to Eastern philosophies. So over the years I have read numerous sacred works in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. All of these faiths have a great deal to offer, and I value my exposure to them.

However, as a student at Dartmouth College, I came in contact with Latter-day Saints. They were bright, happy, energetic, involved, kind, caring, and sincerely spiritual. I was very drawn to them. When I was with them, I felt things that I had not felt much—if at all—before. I began to learn that there is much more to life than meets the eye. There is much that is non-physical, but spiritual. There is a grand dimension to us that is beyond biology, chemistry, or physics.

The feelings that grew within me were discernibly distinct, too, from physical and emotional feelings that I knew. They were not of my mind—I did not seek them; I did not want them, and I resisted them. I had every reason to not give in to these promptings from the Holy Ghost.

Yet I had to be intellectually honest. I had had questions about the nature of God, and the authority to represent Him, for years. In my prior religious exposures, I did not get answers that made sense. I had been told that God was everywhere, but nowhere, and I was taught repeatedly that God had no resemblance to us. Yet clearly those precepts had no relation to the God of the Old and New Testaments.

I also had been told that men could represent God due to their scholarship, or they could represent God because councils authorized them to do so, or they had authority from God through the Bible. But again, these things had no validity in the Bible itself.

On the other hand, the experiences of Joseph Smith receiving divine revelation, authority, and ongoing direction surely were aligned with Biblical patterns and prophecies. The universal apostasy, the restoration of the Priesthood, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the doctrine of the Godhead and Mankind, the doctrines of life, salvation, and exaltation, the commandments, the ordinances, temples and redemption for the dead, missionary work, ongoing revelation, and more—all were perfectly Biblical and sensible.

My mind reasoned, and the Bible confirmed: If there is indeed more to us than mere chemistry and physics, this spiritual dimension must have come from something other than the physical. It is reasonable then that there is a living God, Father of our Spirits. If He is our Father, then He loves us. If He loves us, then He wants us to be happy, and to have all that He enjoys.

Surely, a loving Father would teach us how to become like him; He would give us commandments, ordinances, and divine helps that likely run counter to our limited reason—surely His ways are much higher than, and different from ours. Because we are far from godly, we must need help beyond that which is human. We must need a divine Redeemer. Jesus of Nazareth fits that role of Messiah (Christ) perfectly. He taught the perfect way. He offered the perfect sacrifice.

Surely He would have mankind record His perfect way. The Bible is a much better guide to God’s ways than man’s feeble intellect. Scripture is always preferred to human intellect.

However, human interference corrupted Christ’s perfect truths. Doctrines and ordinances were changed and perverted. God’s authority was lost. Religions retained parts of the truth, and semblances of ordinances and authority, but they were not fully as God knows we need in order to inherit all that He wants for us.

With the fullness of Christ’s pure Gospel corrupted, perverted, and lost, mankind could not construct a living Heavenly tree of life from a dead branch. God would have to restore it directly. I saw that a reformation would have been insufficient; a restoration was clearly called for.

The coming of God and His Son to a boy made sense too. How could the great ones receive a fullness that they had a vested interest in holding back?

And of course it made perfect sense to me that because Jesus is the Savior of the (entire) world, then He must have offered salvation to more than just the people of Palestine. Would not God have sent the Gospel to all His children able and willing to receive it? Would they not record it too? Would not the stories of ancient Americans make sense vis-à-vis the Book of Mormon?

Now came the important part. My mind was satisfied, but that alone was not sufficient. My spirit, my heart, my will, my very nature had to be converted. As my reason became satisfied, I grew willing to humble my will, and then to be touched by God’s Holy Spirit. I felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing me deeply. I was being reborn through faith in Jesus Christ.

In all my pursuits of various other faiths, I have never been saved, converted, and brought to Father in Heaven as I have been through my Mormon faith. It is singular in its origin, its truth, and its saving, redeeming power. It is true—wholly and completely. I know that better than I know anything else.

To know that I am a son of a real Heavenly Father who has a plan of happiness and salvation for me is the rock-solid foundation of my life. To know that we have a Savior from death and the bondage of sin brings such great relief. To understand Jesus’ example and to strive to follow it brings me closer to my family, friends, neighbors, and all mankind. To love the scriptures and to feast upon them feeds me with delicious nourishment unavailable anywhere else. And they are an iron rod through all mists of darkness, doubt, and despair. To serve within, and to be led and served by, the authentic priesthood of God warms me and keeps me in balance. To know of the restoration of the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith is exciting to me; I thrill at his example. To be able to walk in the House of the Lord, his holy temple, and to be sealed to past and future generations, allows me to touch a bit of Heaven. To have full faith in prayer, to see prayers answered miraculously, and to have access to personal revelation, is true happiness. And to share this knowledge, these gifts and these blessings with others is not only my duty, but my joy.

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Gordon F. Holbein is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Leadership at the University of Kentucky. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Geography from Dartmouth College (1978), his Master of Business Administration in Organization and Management from Syracuse University (1983), and his Ph.D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University (1996).

Posted May 2012

Witness

“Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that side. All that is generous, elegant, rich, wise, looks that way. But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 17 September 1833

“Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind
& in the mind’s mirror, the world.”
–David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Since first being asked to write this testimony, I have given considerable thought as to what it means to testify, to bear witness, to say those most sobering of words, “I know.” I have come to the conclusion that bearing witness is one of the most meaningful and perhaps ponderous of human acts, one that carries with it enormous responsibility. People tend to listen more attentively and seriously and to trust more completely words spoken as testimony or witness. Think of the words of the messenger in Job— “I alone am escaped to tell you . . . ”; of Holocaust survivors— “I was there and saw it with my own eyes”; or of John, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. . . . That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1-3).

When we say with conviction and passion that we “know” something is true, our words have a moral weight. When we bear witness it focuses others’ attention in a way that mere report or opinion do not. On the other hand, as recent research on the reliability of eye witnesses demonstrates, what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears is not only not infallible, it can be seriously distorted by subjectivity. Although Mormons tend to rely more on inspiration, spectral evidence, and the witness of the Spirit as confirmation of truth, I would guess that most of us hear testimonies on fast Sundays (and possibly every day) the veracity of which we have cause to doubt. We are all witnesses to those who bear witness casually and irresponsibly, even insincerely. I admit to having been guilty of this myself: As a young missionary I bore witness to things I later learned were unfounded. Serving an extended senior mission with my wife during my sixties, I was more cautious but still clear in my testimony. As a Mormon scholar, I begin this invitation soberly, thoughtfully and with some trepidation. I hope that whatever I can say as a witness here is honest and responsible—and open to examination and challenge.

One of the problems with bearing witness is that it can be a learned expression. It isn’t that I am against modeling, since that is a constant human activity; from one another we learn, to borrow J. V. Cunningham’s lines, “not only what to say/but how the saying must be said.”¹ Nevertheless, ultimately not only the words but the conviction behind them must be ours and ours alone. I must confess that I am not always comfortable with little children bearing their testimonies in sacrament meeting. While I sometimes find it charming and occasionally touching (and sometimes humorous), usually when four and five year olds say they “know the gospel is true” or that “Thomas S. Monson is a prophet,” what they likely are doing is either parroting what others have said or repeating verbatim what their parents are whispering in their ears at that moment. It may be that this is a good thing, but I often feel uneasy about it. It reminds me of a panel I was once on that included a convert from a Communist country. He said he didn’t see much difference between such recitations and those he and others made as “young pioneers” in the Soviet Union, dutifully and happily voicing formulaic propaganda. Hopefully, children in our testimony meetings grow up to bear their own sincere and hard-won testimonies.

What do I “know”? Clearly not nearly as much as I once did or thought I did—not as much as I at times have claimed or in my youth hoped I knew. Nevertheless, after considerable thought, after examining my heart and mind, the following are a few of the truths to which I can testify at this seventy-fifth year of my life:

I know that God lives. I say this as someone who wrestles every day with issues of theodicy—questions relating to God’s justice and therefore his existence. I cannot say with Emerson (as I did say twenty-five years ago²) that “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”³ I can say that some of what I see leads me to that conclusion, but some does not. I do not understand the design of a world in which every year millions suffer and die from malnutrition, starvation, and disease; in which thousands of young girls are sold into sexual slavery; in which girls and women in some cultures are raped with impunity; in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are tortured and brutalized; in which innocent people are imprisoned sometimes for life or cruelly executed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In addition , I am unable to harmonize the idea of a just and caring deity with the blind indifference of natural disasters, so called “acts of God” in which tens of thousands are drowned in the depths of sea, buried in mud or volcanic ash, sucked into whirlwinds, or their famine-stricken bones left to dry on desert sands. Equally perplexing is the seeming randomness and capriciousness of birth disorders, crippling disabilities, and disease. I have no way to reconcile such things—or others like them—with a just and loving God, and yet I believe in a just and loving God.

What makes such acts and phenomena more challenging are the testimonies that people bear that these are indeed conscious acts of God (set in motion, we are often told, to humble us and make us stronger or, more troubling, to punish or destroy the wicked—even though the righteous are often destroyed in greater numbers). Equally disturbing are the assertions (even testimonies) that God acts in individual lives in minor, even trivial, matters but not in dramatic, ultimate ways in the lives of millions of others. I cannot make the equation work in which God apparently saves one child from abduction (as some Latter-day Saints feel he did with Elizabeth Smart⁴) and yet allows another child—equally innocent and precious to God–to be abducted, held in captivity for over twenty-four years and repeatedly raped by her captor father (as happened with Elizabeth Fritzi⁵).

It makes even less sense to me to argue, as some did, that God acted in the case of Elizabeth Smart because she was a Latter-day Saint. Equally inexplicable are those who assert that God allowed/approved of (perhaps even inspired) the United States to go to war in the Middle East because it opened the way for Mormon soldiers to preach the gospel in “the Land of Abraham.”⁶ If indeed such capricious or seemingly capricious events can be attributed to God then we must conclude, as did Mark Twain, that he is the “Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance.”⁷ But he is not. Rather, he is the loving, suffering God who, though God, or perhaps because of that fact, has his heart broken continuously by the wickedness and suffering of his children. Further, and this too is a sobering realization, if we are worthy of exaltation and inherit all that the Father has promised (D&C 84:35, 37–38), then one of the things we inherit is some inescapable degree of suffering; that is, we too will continue to suffer as long as we love and as a consequence of that love ensure our children’s agency, the exercise of which leads to their suffering. Thus, our suffering, like God’s, can never end, although, presumably, it will be tempered by a greater measure of joy and glory. This is one of the profound paradoxes of Mormon Christianity.

In my twenties I came to the conclusion that agnosticism is a defensible, even in some ways a persuasive position. Though less defensible and persuasive, even atheism has its convincing arguments. And yet I am neither an atheist nor an agnostic but a believer, perhaps even a true believer, if by that term we mean “one who is strongly attached to a particular belief.”⁸

I know that love is the most powerful, essential and inexhaustible force in the universe. I bear witness that in all of its divine and human manifestations love makes mortal life worth living—and enduring—and eternal life worth hoping for. Love is the clearest definition of and evidence for God. Without love God would cease to be and without love, humans wither and die. I bear witness that in ways we only dimly understand, love and light are somehow, physically, metaphysically and spiritually related. When God said, “Let there be light,” he could just as easily have said, “Let there be love,” for that love which shines in the darkness lights our lives because its ultimate source is God’s heart and mind, and when we allow it in, such love lights the dark chambers of our own hearts and minds.

I can say with utmost confidence that our Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother and their son, Jesus Christ, love us with a love beyond our capacity to fully understand—or imagine, or reciprocate, except as we attempt to do so from our own limited wholeness. And yet we can feel the reality of it in our bones and in our cells and, especially, in the deepest recesses of our hearts. I don’t believe that the multiple manifestations of love, especially in a world in which so many forces seem bent on denying and countering it, can be explained by naturalistic causes, forces, or processes. We are capable of loving beyond the edges of evolution, beyond our own need for love, astonishing even ourselves at times with spontaneous, unbidden, and abundant love in acts that Fay Weldon calls “the unexpected lurch of the heart toward others which can take the heart by surprise.”⁹

I can truly bear witness to the truth of the Restoration. That is, I know that something powerful and transcendent happened in that grove of trees in 1820. Part of that conviction is related to the conviction that the spiritual fruit from that grove has taken root, both in my own heart and in the hearts of others all over the world, and flowered like the white, luminous fruit on Lehi’s tree, which is, after all, as the angel tells Nephi, the love of God. When I consider how much love has resulted from young Joseph’s courageous voyage into that foreboding wood, including the enormous blessing of love in my own life, I cannot pronounce it as anything but good, even though I acknowledge that, as with all human acts, sorrow and tragedy have also flowed from that astonishing vision of light and love. That is, such light is always filtered through the imperfect prisms of our mortal, that is our fallen, natures. Nevertheless, it is light, however diminished by human limitations.

Over the course of a lifetime, including six years of fulltime missionary service for the Church, I have borne witness to the truth of the restored gospel to thousands of people, including some of my own colleagues, students, and professional associates. When my students have asked how I could possibly believe the things I do, my response typically has been, “As honestly as I am able to evaluate the totality of my experience, I have to say that if what I have experienced as deep spiritual experience is not real then perhaps nothing is.” I remember a conversation with Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsberg during meetings I was responsible for organizing between distinguished writers from China and the United States. When I told them of my belief about Joseph Smith’s experience in the Sacred Grove and the Book of Mormon, they were incredulous that a UCLA professor could seriously hold such beliefs. Ginsberg, who later became a friend, asked skeptically, “This is believed?” I assured him that it was, by me and many others.

An extension of that witness is a witness of the fact that the Book of Mormon derives from the history of actual ancient peoples. After a lifetime of serious study of the Book of Mormon, including an earnest and honest consideration of the critical literature challenging the book’s claim as an authentic ancient sacred text, I can come to no other conclusion than that it is what it purports to be: a history of several groups of real people who migrated to and flourished in the New World BCE. I have seriously considered the arguments of those who contend that it is a fictive invention by Joseph Smith or others living in nineteenth-century United States, but conclude that the construction of such a book in such a time and place was impossible given the book’s intricate and complex structure; its nuanced, even convoluted composition; and the depth and consistency of its spiritual messages.

I am not qualified to discuss archeological, anthropological, geographical or linguistic issues related to the Book of Mormon, nor am I a specialist in genetics and mitochondrial DNA analysis. What I can claim is expertise in rhetorical and textual analysis—the study of the actual language and narrative structure of the book. In “Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and the American Renaissance,” I examined the Book of Mormon in relation to the foundational literary texts of the American Renaissance, a literary period roughly parallel to the Mormon restoration. My conclusion was that in comparison with his more illustrious contemporary authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Hawthorne), Joseph Smith lacked the education, literary imagination, talent, maturity as a writer, time necessary for composition, knowledge base, and sophistication necessary for writing the Book of Mormon. I further stated, “I don’t believe that Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman, colossal writers that they were, together could have written the Book of Mormon. Further, I don’t believe that if all the scholars in the world in the mid-1820s had gathered in a large room and had had access to every extant book and manuscript and had a decade of work on it, that they could have written such a book. That is my seriously considered, scholarly opinion. There is simply too much that the book points to that no one in the nineteenth century knew or could have known.”¹⁰

I don’t by any means wish to suggest that questions about ancient inter-continental migrations, archeological artifacts, anthropological patterns, linguistic connections, biblical borrowings, nineteenth-century parallels, or DNA traces are irrelevant; indeed, I believe that any serious exploration of and about the Book of Mormon is legitimate. What I am suggesting is that what should have primacy in approaching this good book is the book itself, its narrative styles, rhetorical patterns, vocabulary, images, symbols, and allusions—and what all of these reveal about its essential, stated purpose—to be a witness of Jesus Christ in our time, to our world.

I bear witness that God’s truth and love are found in many places beyond Mormonism. One of the things I find most assuring and affirming in teaching at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley is how much my students enlighten me, expand my knowledge of our shared and sometimes unique sacred texts, and, at the same time, deepen my spiritual understanding, including my understanding of God and Christ. These are gifts from other believers that I cherish. As Rumi says,

We can’t help being thirsty.

Moving toward the voice of water
Milk drinkers draw close to the mother.
Muslims, Christians, Jews,
Buddhists, Hindus, Shamans—
Everyone hears the intelligent sound
And moves with thirst to meet it.¹¹

As Coleman Barks, Rumi’s American translator, summarizes, “If you think there is an important difference between a Muslim and a Jew and a Christian and a Buddhist and a Hindu and a Shamanist then you are making a division between your heart and your ability to act in the world.”¹² While I believe there are important differences between what I believe and what others believe, I do not want there to be a division between what my heart knows and how I act in the world. So I believe that in spite of important differences, what is at the heart of every religion is not different—that the highest form of worship is to love God with all of our hearts, minds, and souls and to love others as we would want to be loved. Wherever we find these practices, we find fellowship.

There are many other things to which I could testify, but perhaps these will suffice for this purpose.

——
Notes:

¹“To a Friend, on Her Examination for the Doctorate in English,” The poems of J.V. Cunningham, ed. and with an introduction and commentary by Timothy Steele (Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, 1997), 27.
²Robert A. Rees, “Monologues and Dialogues,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 20:2 (Summer 1987)
³“Immortality,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Edition. Vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1904).
⁴Pat Reavy, “Elizabeth’s life a ‘miracle’,” Deseret News, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/600116661/Elizabeths-life-a-miracle.html; accessed 20 April 2012. See also, Alex Tresniowski, “The Miracle Girl,” People Magazine, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20139640,00.html; accessed 20 April 2012.
⁵“’House of horror’ children never saw daylight,” http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/28/austria.cellar/index.html, accessed 20 April 2012.
⁶Robert A. Rees, “The Cost of Credulity: Mormon Urban Legends and the War on Terror,” Sunstone 144 (Dec. 2006),
⁷Notebook, 1904, http://www.twainquotes.com/God.html; accessed 23 April 2012.
⁸http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_believer; accessed 20 April 2012.
⁹Introduction to “Corinthians,” Pocket Canon Bible (New York: Grove Press, 1999), xii.
¹⁰Robert A. Rees, “Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon and the American Renaissance,” Dialogue 35:3 (Fall 2002), 83-112.
¹¹In Bill Moyers, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 57.
¹²As quoted in Bill Moyers, The Language of Life, Season 1, Episode 2, “Love’s Confusing Joy,” PBS television program directed by David Grubin; original broadcast 23 June 1995. Available in DVD.

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Robert A. Rees (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is an educator, scholar, and poet.

Dr. Rees has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin; the University of California at Los Angeles, or UCLA (for twenty-five years); the University of California at Santa Cruz; (as a Fulbright professor) at Vytautaus Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania; and the California State Universities at Northridge and Los Angeles. He has lectured at universities in China, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Kaliningrad, and has been a visiting scholar at the Centers for Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. Currently, he teaches religion at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Professor Rees has extensive experience in international education. He established and was the Director of Studies for three UCLA Extension programs in England—with Cambridge University and with the Royal Colleges of Art and Music. He was also involved in education initiatives in London, Paris, and the former Soviet Union, and led two delegations of distinguished American writers to China.

In 1998 he was named Director of Education and Humanities at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California.

Dr. Rees has served as bishop of the Los Angeles 1st Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he and his wife Ruth served as education, humanitarian, and service missionaries in the Saint Petersburg Russia and Baltic States missions of the LDS Church. In October 1992, Dr. Rees and his wife became the first LDS Church missionaries to work in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union.

For the past twenty years, he has been active in humanitarian and interfaith work. He was Director of Humanitarian Services for Deseret International Charities in the Baltics (1994-96), President of the University Religious Council at UC Santa Cruz (1998-2000), and a member of the Santa Cruz Interfaith Council (1998-2001). Currently he serves on the Advisory Board of S.A.F.E. (Save African Families Enterprise), a non-profit organization providing antiviral drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women in Zimbabwe. He is also a founding member and vice president of the Liahona Children’s Foundation, an organization that provides nutrition and education to children in the developing world, and serves as a director of the New Spectrum Foundation.

From 1971 to 1976, he was the second editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Posted April 2012

Beginning in my teens, I was quite certain that scientific (medical) research would be my chosen profession. Schoolteachers and parents were very supportive, and I studied chemistry at Brigham Young University, from which I received a BS in 1968. As an undergraduate, I had my first real research experience, a project that eventually resulted in my first scientific publication, and this further fortified my desire to pursue this path to the fullest. I was fortunate to study at the Rockefeller University in New York City, where, in 1974, I obtained my PhD in biochemistry under the guidance of subsequent Nobel Prize laureate R. Bruce Merrifield. I obtained my MD from Cornell University Medical College in 1976, and then completed a three-year residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in California.

My ultimate interest in research was stronger than ever, and was now focused in the medical specialty of endocrinology. At the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, I took on faculty duties as an assistant professor of medicine. Although I continued seeing patients and teaching during my entire career, my research focus occupied the vast majority of my time, throughout my career. I spent a few more years in laboratory research early on, but I subsequently developed (perhaps partly attributable to the exposure of my medical training) a strong interest in clinical research, and spent most of my mature career in this discipline. The most important and significant pursuit of my career was a fifteen-plus-year project, completed at Lilly Research Labs in Indiana, during which I developed a chemical entity known as raloxifene hydrochloride into a human preventative medicine targeted at the prevention of osteoporosis and the prevention of breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Eli Lilly and Co. has marketed this entity under the trade name Evista for the past fifteen years, and to date, more than 70,000,000 women worldwide have been treated with Evista. My development studies on the safety and efficacy of raloxifene hydrochloride involved more than 10,000 study subjects, many treated for five years or more, and resulted in numerous scientific publications.

Throughout this time I also developed a great love for and a deep interest in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have served in my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in numerous positions, including missionary, teacher, elder and bishop, and some of the most glorious times of my life have been with my family as we have been involved in all aspects of this religious service.

I remember hearing quite frequently about the “great debate” or the “conflict” between science and religion, but I never understood it. For me, the more I learned in my scientific studies, the more I appreciated my religious beliefs. The deeper I became immersed in my religion, the more I appreciated the wonders of science and their true perspective in life. I became convinced that the “conflict” arose either because the person involved in the conflict did not properly understand science or because he/she did not truly understand the glorious truths of religion as I understood them—or, most frequently, had both problems. Throughout my subsequent career, I have never found conflict between my scientific knowledge and my religious beliefs. My experience has fortified my conviction that the principles of my religious beliefs, and the proper understanding of our current scientific knowledge, are all a part of the great body of truth with which we live here on earth, and which continually governs our lives.

There were two specific episodes during my education that significantly affected my feelings on these issues. While I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I joined and eventually became president of the campus Chemistry Club. On a couple of occasions, we traveled as a group to Salt Lake City and met with Henry Eyring, Sr., then professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Utah. Professor Eyring, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and one of the most distinguished Americans in science, was most gracious to host us and to sit and chat about science and other topics. I came away from my interactions with him convinced that the strongest knowledge of Truth I would ever gain would be my knowledge of my Savior and His gifts to me. As a scientist, it would additionally be an honor to catch small glimpses into other parts of that great Truth, via my scientific pursuits.

While I was a graduate student at Rockefeller University, I attended an unforgettable symposium held on the University campus. The University had invited distinguished Professor Gerald Holton, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, to preview a soon-to-be-published manuscript on the history of early-twentieth-century physics. This was, of course, the age of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, and other notables in the world of theoretical physics. Professor Holton stood at a podium on one side of the stage to read his manuscript. On the other side of the stage, seated informally in comfortable armchairs, were three senior Rockefeller faculty in physics and mathematics, all of whom had known one or more of the “greats” during their lifetimes and had had significant interactions with them on the major discourses in modern physics. For over three hours, Professor Holton read his manuscript and the others would break in spontaneously with comments like “Ah yes, I remember sitting with Einstein on a train headed to Copenhagen, and we discussed that very point . . .,” or “Niels Bohr and I had several conversations about that topic between lectures at the ———- meeting in Paris.” This was one of the most interesting scientific evenings I have ever spent. I came away with a deep and humbling understanding of the tenuous nature of scientific theory and “truth.” Theoretical physics underwent a convulsive upheaval about every ten years in the early twentieth century, and what was “truth” at one point was rejected or modified a few years later. Only appropriate humility permits the true scientist to appreciate the wonders of scientific progress while at the same time realizing how fragile our theories always remain.

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Michael W. Draper (Ph.D., Rockefeller University; M.D., Cornell University), now retired from the Indiana University School of Medicine, has also been associated with Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the Veterans Administration Hospital of San Francisco, the University of California at San Francisco, and, for many years, as a researcher, advisor, and director in endocrinology and internal medicine, with the Lilly Research Laboratories of Eli Lilly and Company.

He is the author or co-author of scores of scientific papers and abstracts, and the holder of a dozen patents, and he and his wife Margie are the parents of five children.

Posted April 2012

If there is one thing I have learned on my journey through this mortal probation, it is this: while it’s impossible to study secular knowledge too much, it is all too possible–and far too easy–to neglect the study of sacred knowledge in the process. The Doctrine and Covenants counsels us (in two separate places, no less) to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (88:118, 109:7). This is not an “either/or” option; to be spiritually well-rounded we must seek enlightenment through our minds and our hearts. “Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation . . .” (Doctrine and Covenants 8:2-3). In other words, our ability to receive revelation is dependent upon both reason and faith, working together.

Regrettably, there are some in the Church who seem to be afraid of the intellect. They would eschew the “philosophies of men” completely, as if they were inextricably antithetical to the revelations of God. I find this anti-intellectual strain in the Church and anywhere else both lamentable and dangerous. Isn’t this the great lesson that was learned by Oliver Cowdery, when he tried his hand at translation? “Behold, ye have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it to you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore you shall feel that it is right” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-8, emphasis added).

But I am even more concerned by so-called “Intellectuals” in the Church (anyone who thinks of himself as such is probably not!), who seem to perceive the whisperings of the Spirit, the counsel of inspired leaders, and the scriptures themselves as somehow inferior to “objective, scientific reality.” As we learn in sacred places, truth is to be circumscribed into one great whole and truth is truth and should be eagerly sought, regardless of its apparent origin. To do that takes more than a modicum of humility, which is all too often sadly lacking among those of us blessed with a great deal of formal education.

Throughout my life, I have found great comfort in combining secular and religious study–in joining rational meditation with fervent prayer. Whenever I have neglected secular study I have become intellectually flabby; when I have neglected my study of the scriptures and meaningful prayer I have suffered spiritually. When I have combined the two, letting one approach to knowledge both challenge and support the other, I have been at my best.

To be sure, some of those challenges have been rather daunting. I’ll admit that my “faith shelf” has, at times, sagged a bit under the stress of many unresolved issues. And there are certainly questions for which I still do not possess completely satisfactory answers. But as time marches on, I have found that many of my issues have found resolution and I have faith that, sometime in the eternities before me, all will come together in a most satisfactory way. In the meantime, I try not to sweat the small stuff.

So, what is it, exactly, that I have come to believe through my own study and faith? Following are a few of my personal “articles of faith.”

• I believe that Joseph Smith was, indeed, a Prophet of God and that the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price are all inspired texts. I do not worry about how these texts came about or even if every word within them is literally accurate. It’s the great teachings and principles therein that speak to and guide my soul. Nor do I concern myself with whether everything Joseph taught was true. (I am grateful that I am not faced with the great challenge of polygamy, for instance). But I am convinced he saw God the Father and God the Son and that the Holy Priesthood was restored through him. Based on that conviction, I am comfortable proclaiming that I know this is the true church of God on the earth today. At the same time, I am quick to acknowledge that we hardly have a monopoly on truth. With John Stuart Mill, I fervently believe that it is through the clash of competing ideologies that ultimate truth is discovered and appreciated.
• I believe in modern-day Prophets, who are charged with the responsibility to lead us in paths of righteousness. I do not believe for a moment that any of them are perfect, nor do I believe they always speak with authority. But I do know that, on the whole, following their counsel will bring all of us great happiness. One could do much worse than pay attention to them.
• I believe that I have the ultimate responsibility to make right choices and that any kind of “blind faith”–whether to an institution or to a particular individual–can (and has been in our history) very dangerous. At the same time, I know that leaning too much on my own understanding is unwise. Relying on the “arm of flesh”–especially one’s own–is fraught with jeapardy.
• I believe that my Heavenly Father will never let me down and that, to the extent I earnestly seek direction from Him, I shall receive it. At times I may see through the glass very darkly, but I know He helps me to see much better than I ever could on my own. Although one can all too easily “hear what one wants to hear” if one isn’t careful, I believe in personal revelation.
• I believe that through temple ordinances I can be sealed to my family through all eternity and that through those same ordinances all who have ever lived on the Earth will have an equal opportunity to return to God’s presence. (I choose not to obsess over the vestiges of Masonry that have found their way into the endowment ceremony.) As suggested in the preface to the Book of Mormon, “if there are faults, they are the mistakes of men, condemn not the things of God. . . .”
• I believe that I and all others are co-eternal with God and that while He was instrumental in helping us progress from one type of existence to the next (a sort of “spiritual evolution,” if you will), none of us can either be created or destroyed.
• I believe that agency is a fundamental necessity for all existence (which to me explains the real reason Satan and his third were cast out of heaven) and that it is absolute. While many exigencies may, and do, impinge on agency, we are–in the ultimate analysis–free to choose how we react to the vicissitudes of existence. And with Jean Paul Sartre, I believe that choice is unavoidable: even to choose not to choose is to choose.
• I believe that there has been only one Perfect Man to walk this earth and that it is only through the grace of God and the atonement of Jesus Christ that any of us can be “saved.”
• Finally, I believe in the very real possibility of being highly and delightfully surprised by many assumptions I and others have held dear once we get to “the other side.”

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Roger Robin Ekins is a professor emeritus from Butte College in Oroville, California, where he served as dean of instruction, director of the honors program, and charter advisor of the Phi Theta Kappa honor society, and taught courses in composition, creative writing, existentialism, and the history of ideas. Prior to the twenty-five years he spent at Butte College, he both taught and served in various administrative capacities at the Augusta campus of the University of Maine (seven years), Johnston College of the University of Redlands (two years), and Staten Island College, within the City University of New York (five years). Church callings include service as Bishop, several stints on the High Council, and what most people on this site would agree is the best calling in the Church: Gospel Doctrine teacher.

Ekins’s academic degrees include the Honors Bachelor of Arts in English (University of Utah), an M.A. in Creative Writing (U. of Utah), and a Ph.D. in Education through the Union Institute. His publications include Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon and the California Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857, which received the Best Documentary History Award from the Mormon History Association. Together with his wife, Helen Leonard Ekins, he is currently working on a trail guide titled The Flumes and Trails of Paradise, referring not to the more desirable section of the Spirit World, but to their home, in Paradise, California.

Posted March 2012

My testimony of the truth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that of the Book of Mormon is certain. I say without any hesitation that I possess a knowledge that there is a God in heaven and that He has revealed Himself to me. That knowledge has come not through physical demonstrations or by reason alone, but by God’s Spirit speaking to me personally, in a manner that could only have come from God. This knowledge and the relationship I have developed with my Maker have carried me through many difficulties and I am grateful beyond measure to know these things for myself. Without a doubt, knowing the reality of God and of the truthfulness of His Church is the greatest blessing of my life.

Although my belief is certain now, it was not always so, and answers to my inquiries about God and religion did not come immediately when I asked.

I gained my knowledge of the reality of God and the truth of the Book of Mormon at a time of personal struggle. At the age of eighteen, having just finished my freshman year in college, I came to feel that I needed to know for myself whether there was a God and whether the things I had been taught in Mormonism as a child were true. To that point, I had prayed intermittently and had read—though somewhat irregularly—from the Book of Mormon, with an occasional inquiry to God asking to know if it was true. No answer that I could recognize came, and I wondered why my asking did not produce the answer that the Book of Mormon promises and whether I was asking in the right way. However, despite the lack of an answer, I continued to believe in Mormonism since so many of its teachings made sense to me. The most compelling claims to me included the belief that God continues to send prophets to the earth in modern times, that God can and does speak by personal revelation to ordinary, lay members of the Church and not just to its leaders, and that spiritual gifts are available now, just as in ancient times. On this basis I formed a belief, yet I wondered when and whether my prayers to know definitively concerning God and religion would be answered; I was sure that if Mormonism was true, I too had claim on personal revelation. In my early teenage years, I made the determination to stay true to Mormonism for at least a period of time since I could not then decide if it was true or not. If, by the time I reached twenty-one, I had not experienced divine revelation, I planned to reevaluate these questions.

It is now clear to me that the primary reason I did not recognize any answers to my prayers or perceive a witness about the Book of Mormon as a young teenager was because I put forth little effort and had only a small desire for an answer. Though I did want to know, I did not put my heart and soul into prayer the way I did years later.

My freshman year in college was an exciting one, as I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of subjects I felt passionate about and also had the chance to interact with a wider range of individuals than I had grown up with. I attended the University of Utah, and although this campus is located in Salt Lake City, there were a large number of students who were not Mormons, and this was especially true in the sciences and in engineering.

I became good friends with a small group of atheists and agnostics and felt eager to share my beliefs with them, thinking that they would see the uniqueness of the tenets of Mormonism and would want to learn more about the Church. I am grateful for these friends and the discussions we had, because I have had dozens more since then with other sincere disbelievers among my classmates, colleagues, and friends in academia. My freshman classmates challenged my beliefs in ways that were often constructive, but also introduced me to the experience of being mocked and belittled for belief in God. Such is the persuasive device that some revert to in an attempt, if not to refute faith, then at least to intimidate faith’s adherents. (Paradoxically, atheism involves a unique style of faith that is not practiced by believers since, if God does exist, His presence has the possibility of being verified through divine communication, while a claim that there is no God cannot ever be substantiated by any kind of evidence.)

I came away from these discussions with a greater desire to know for myself—sooner rather than later—whether there was a God. If there was no God, I had no interest in aligning myself with a religious institution.

The questions that arose at this time served as a backdrop to a great challenge that came a short while later when I had a falling out with a close friend that left me feeling sad and somewhat lonely.

In these circumstances, my attitude regarding the question of religion and God was quite different than it had been in prior years. I turned to my Maker and to the scriptures—most especially to the Book of Mormon and other modern revelations—with an eager yearning to know whether God really lived. I asked in prayer more sincerely than I ever had before whether there was a God and whether the Book of Mormon was true. I read God’s word with more intensity and desire than ever before. I needed to know. And I felt certain that if there were a God and if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were true, I would receive an answer as I had heard so many other members of the Church describe having received.

Through the act of reading the Book of Mormon and praying concerning it, I was following the invitation contained in its pages to “experiment upon the word’” (Alma 32:27-37, 41-42). The book’s predicted outcome of this experiment is divine communication confirming that the book is of God and is true (Moroni 10:3-5).

I did not have to wait long before discovering a sweet peace flowing into my heart both as I prayed and as I read scripture. This peace contrasted sharply with the feelings of sadness and loneliness that were otherwise in my heart. Soon my desire to commune with God became frequent and deep. In the ensuing year, I often poured out my soul in private, seeking to know more of the Being who filled me with such peace and hope, feelings that otherwise seemed so elusive. The results of my experiment proved to be consistent with the outcome predicted in the Book of Mormon.

Through all of this I came to know that God does live and that He is the Father of my spirit; that He is a loving, tender, and devoted parent; and that He is keenly aware of me and my life. I came to know that God lives as certainly as I know that I exist. The spiritual manifestations that came were poignant, and so sharp and profound at times that I knew my own mind could not conjure them. When I felt a heaviness of heart, I would turn to my Father in Heaven and, shortly thereafter, I would come away feeling buoyed up, lightened, and hopeful about the future. Sometimes the state of mind I was in before seeking God’s support was heavy indeed and the lightness and strength that came into my heart and soul through earnest seeking were the polar opposite of what I had felt beforehand.

I am a witness to the reality of the promise given throughout scripture, “seek and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7-11). That phrase and other semantic equivalents are among the most common to occur in scripture. God is eager to reveal Himself to us. Despite His eagerness, however, God wants us to be clear—both to Him and to ourselves—that we really desire the manifestations we ask for. Receiving a knowledge that God lives has the power to fundamentally change the course of one’s life and carries with it some responsibility (Alma 32:17-19). Because God does not wish to burden an individual with the responsibility of knowing concerning Him without that person having a deliberate and earnest desire to know, His answers to some inquiries may be subtle and difficult to recognize.

In the varied conversations I have had with my disbelieving friends—and friends they are!—I have sometimes been accused of being brainwashed or deluded. I have considered these ideas very seriously because I know that our minds are complex and that self-deception is a possibility. Reflection has convinced me that my experience is simply too profound and too distinct from what I might envision by my own mental devices to be accounted for as springing from within me.

To some, this statement affirming a divine source of my spiritual experiences may not carry much weight. I offer three points in answer. First, one who dismisses my accounting of spirituality—or that of countless others—as delusional are deeming themselves better judges of my experience and psyche than I am, even though they were not present during these experiences. Second, if such persons have not sought or had spiritual manifestations for themselves, and if they have not experimented with prayer as I and others have, their pessimistic explanation about the fruitful results of others’ efforts is at best hollow. Third, there is simply no evidence that I or other believers are delusional. Those claiming delusion rely on blind faith—blind disbelief—to support their claims that another’s mental state is flawed.

The evidence I have in support of the truth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grows with time as I continue to seek to know God and to live by His teachings. The experiences I had when I was eighteen were only the beginning of what has become a rich and vibrant part of my life, and I now turn to God daily to deepen a relationship that provides me with support and answers to life’s challenges. The depth and persistence of my connection to God expands, though in a nonlinear way, as I strive to devote myself more and more to Him. Because of my faith, I see others on this earth as my spiritual brothers and sisters, with infinite divine potential. I vaguely glimpse the immensity of God’s love for His children and I am in awe of the Creator of the universe, our Heavenly Father.

I testify that God lives and loves us. I testify He knows your name just as He knows mine. He will answer any and all who earnestly seek a witness of His reality. You can know for yourself, independent of anyone else, that God lives and loves you. You can know that the Book of Mormon is true and that prophets are again on the earth, speaking boldly concerning proper morals and providing a code of conduct for life. As I have, you can feel a peace permeating through your heart that carries and sustains you and leads you to learn of God’s plan for your life.

Most fundamentally, what draws me to Mormonism is the claim that all can know for themselves—through “experimenting upon the word,” as the Book of Mormon invites—that God lives and that Mormonism is true. I invite all to experiment upon the word as I have.

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Amy Williams is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, studying population and medical genetics. She graduated with dual B.S. degrees in 2003 from the University of Utah in Computer Science and Mathematics, and received an S.M in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Computer Science. Her research focuses on leveraging computational techniques to empower genetic studies and to learn about patterns of genetic variation and evolution, with the aim of inferring human history and demography.

Posted February 2012