Testimonies

In My Hands . . .

As I consider my “scholarly” thoughts on God, the phrase that keeps coming back to me is one I have noticed at scientific seminars and conferences recently. “In our hands,” the speaker will say, “the experiments turned out like this, and that proves our hypothesis.” Often, adding the phrase “in our hands” means that the results are different than what another researcher has reported. It can indicate that the experiment in question is sufficiently complex or challenging that it would be impossible to control every variable in the experiment, and it could be one of these uncontrolled variables that leads to the unique reported observations.

In my experience, use of this phrase in science should, if anything, be more frequent. When I start collecting data on a new experiment, multiple repetitions often give results that don’t fit with my expectations. Sometimes the problem is a mistake I’ve made, while other times I just haven’t controlled all of the important variables accurately enough. Of course, once I figure everything out, the mess that previously seemed at best random or at worst contradictory now fits together in a coherent story. But even then, it doesn’t hurt to preface a recounting of my results with “In my hands”—while I may see a story in the data, it is likely that there are layers to the story that I haven’t yet uncovered, and levels of understanding I haven’t yet reached.

Why does this phrase keep coming back to me when I consider my thoughts on God? To see why, try reading this passage from the Book of Mormon, Alma’s passionate testimony to Korihor (Alma 30:37-44) about the existence of God, while imagining the exchange taking place at a scientific conference.

“And then Alma said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God? And he [Korihor] answered, Nay. Now Alma said unto him: Will ye deny again that there is a God, and also deny the Christ? For behold, I say unto you, I know there is a God, and also that Christ shall come. And now what evidence have ye that there is no God, or that Christ cometh not? I say unto you that ye have none, save it be your word only. But, behold, I have all things as a testimony that these things are true; and ye also have all things as a testimony unto you that they are true; and will ye deny them? Believest thou that these things are true? Behold, I know that thou believest, but thou art possessed with a lying spirit, and ye have put off the Spirit of God that it may have no place in you; but the devil has power over you, and he doth carry you about, working devices that he may destroy the children of God. And now Korihor said unto Alma: If thou wilt show me a sign, that I may be convinced that there is a God, yea, show unto me that he hath power, and then will I be convinced of the truth of thy words. But Alma said unto him: Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, Show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.”

In my mind, I can see Alma standing in the front of a darkened auditorium, laser pointer in hand, going through a slide with a bulleted list. “Look at all this data I’ve collected. It is proof that there is a God!” Although he specifically mentions the earth and the motions of the planets, I think that when Alma says all things witness to him that there is a God, he really means all things, including every individual experience he has in his life.

For Korihor, the world looks different. He sees the same data, but is not convinced that they have anything to do with God. And in my mind, Alma’s approach to convincing Korihor is a bit off the mark. I personally know a lot of scientists who would laugh me off the stage if I told them that a closer look at the motions of the planets will prove the existence of God.

When I talk about God, I can’t help but feel the need to preface my comments with “In my hands.” The experiment is complex, there are a host of uncontrolled variables, and previous researchers have come away with a variety of different conclusions. But if that qualified testimony is the best I can give to other scientists, is there any chance a person will change from a latter-day skeptic to a saint? My answer is yes, because my hope is not that others will believe my testimony, but that they will be try the experiment for themselves.

My personal journey is taking me away from Korihor’s and toward Alma’s view of the world. This journey has inspired me to make changes in my life that in turn allow me to see God’s hand in the world more and more. This is something you have to experience for yourself to believe. I love the description of this experience given by Mark Wrathall in his 2006 article “The Revealed Word and World Disclosure”:

“Philosophers from Aristotle to Hubert Dreyfus have shown how, in developing habits and practicing actions for dealing with a particular domain, we acquire skilful dispositions so attuned to that domain that we can perceive things of which we were oblivious before. As I practice baking bread, for example, I gradually become sensitized to notice things like texture and elasticity in the dough, fine variations in colour as the bread browns in the oven, etc. The skills allow me to experience the world in a way that I could not without them. . . . Faith is, then, the condition of one who has acquired the skills of religious living, and thus has the dispositions to feel and act appropriately in the world that appears when one has those skills. . . . Faith will then not be amenable to proof in the way one verifies a cognitive state or proposition (i.e. demonstrating that it is true). But it will have the kind of confirmation or success conditions that all other skills have. Baking skills are confirmed or successful when they allow me to cope with the kitchen. Religious faith will be confirmed or successful when it gives me the practices and dispositions I need to cope with the world as a whole. As Father Zosima notes in Dostoevsky’s classic depiction of existential Christianity, ‘one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.’”

In my hands, increased faith in God has brought more happiness and an increased ability to deal with life’s challenges. I hope you’ll try it in yours.

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Dula Parkinson is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.

Posted October 2010

I have had a very rich and happy life and, although I do not feel I have earned the many blessings that have come to me, I know that my saviour Jesus Christ and his church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the source and the reason for the great joy and excitement that fills my life.

My parents were kind and loving and I was privileged to grow up in the freedom that New Zealand allowed a boy in the 1940’s and 1950’s. However, I often felt, sometimes keenly, that something was missing. I knew that God lived but knew little about him—it seemed that there was a great gulf between us which I needed to cross but did not know the way.

My mother and father did not go to church but I was invited to go with my friends from time to time. However, although there were things I enjoyed at these meetings, it always ended in disappointment when they taught their concept of a distant God without a body of any kind that we could understand, who seemed to be everywhere but nowhere. Somehow I knew that was not true. Perhaps it was because of Genesis 1:20, where God said that man was made in his image (I had not got much further than that in reading the Bible), that I was so confident in that aspect of my knowledge of God. I think that this knowledge was something I was able to keep as I was born into mortality.

On one occasion I accompanied my aunty Doris to a baptismal service in a Baptist church where the minister said that if we wanted to know God all we needed to do was to declare in simple prayer that we accepted Jesus Christ. He was so convincing that I decided to do this. I believe that those were my first prayers. However, nothing notable happened. I certainly did not feel any closer to God. I continued these prayers for several days but it seemed that God was not interested and so I abandoned any hope of finding him in that way.

However God was interested—the next religious experience I can remember was the arrival of two LDS missionaries, Elder Merril Dean Briggs and Elder Robert E. Walgren. When they tracted our home at 90 Fitzroy Street, Palmerston North, my mother invited them to come back in the evening when the family would be there. My father did not join the discussion but very quickly I was sure that what they taught was what I needed to know, that this would show me the way back to God. They told us about Joseph Smith’s first vision when God the Father and his son Jesus Christ visited him. They then explained what this taught us about God, using stick figures drawn with a pencil—God had a body of flesh and bone and so did his Son Jesus Christ. They were two separate beings. I had always believed this and now I knew it to be true, right then and there, before the lesson ended or a prayer was said. Had they asked me to be baptised that very evening I would have done it. I was convinced and totally confident that they spoke only the truth. However it was twelve days later that my mother, my sister, and I were baptised in the Manawatu River about a kilometre downstream from the bridge at the end of Fitzherbert Avenue, Palmerston North. It was March and the water was cold but I was infused with an inner warmth.

Since that pivotal event in my life, more than fifty years ago, my faith in Elder Briggs and Elder Walgren and what they taught us has been vindicated many times. I have been blessed with many experiences and each has reinforced my knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, for indeed it has passed from belief to knowledge. I truly know! I have been shown the way and have been led across the gulf that separates man from God. That way is through the atonement of Jesus Christ. It requires faith in him, repentance, a forsaking of all one’s sins, entering into a binding covenant to serve God and obey his commandments, and continuing in faith to the end of our mortal lives. We are given the gift of the Holy Ghost to guide, warn, and comfort us during this often difficult and perilous journey.

I know that God lives. He is the father of our spirits. We lived with him before we were born into this mortal life and it is his purpose that we should return to him to be crowned with glory and eternal life. We are created in his image and he has a body of flesh and bones, although it is glorified far beyond our mortal bodies. I know that he is kind and loving, with an intense interest in and compassion for his children here on earth. He knows us individually. He does hear our prayers and they are answered according to our faith and sincerity. He is more involved in our lives than most people realise.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the only son begotten in the flesh. He is our saviour and all shall be resurrected because he atoned for Adam’s transgression. He also bore our sins, illnesses, and troubles, and if we trust him he will give us rest from them. Through the resurrection we will be brought before him to be judged and his judgement will be righteous. He is merciful and gracious.

I treasure the wonderful gift of the Holy Ghost. Its quiet whisperings to our minds and our hearts are real and how blessed are they who learn to recognise and obey its urging and encouragement. It is only through the Holy Ghost that we can obtain a strong abiding testimony of the Saviour and his Church. And through the Holy Ghost we can have the peace and confidence to face all the illness and troubles in our lives.

Joseph Smith was visited by God the Father and his son Jesus Christ. They spoke to him and he was chosen and called to receive the priesthood and all its keys, to restore the fullness of the gospel, and to translate and publish the Book of Mormon. He deserves our gratitude and respect. Revelation and prophets continue today in the leadership, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Book of Mormon is the word of God as are the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. It was written by revelation and inspiration and was translated by revelation, and it is an instrument of revelation to all who diligently and prayerfully study it.

These things are true. I know by experience, by practising them and enjoying the blessings they bring. This knowledge has made my life rich and joyous.

I offer no objective evidence to support this testimony—I believe that scientific method with its insistence on objective measurement is poorly equipped to help people to discover God, just as we do not use rulers or scales to measure love.

I am not worried that I am offending against my scientific training by making declarations without objective evidence. There are many things of great importance to us that are not amenable to objective measurement—we do not have objective measures for love, pain, taste, or smell but they are real and central to our experience as humans. The spiritual experiences which have brought me to know the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ are no less real and are of critical importance in my life.

I have little concern that my children and grandchildren should know my height, weight and eye colour but I am most anxious to share many experiences with them so that we know one another. Jesus Christ taught that God is the Father of our spirits. Would having an objective measure of God’s height and weight help us to know God? My experience is that through spiritual encounters, especially through the aid of the Holy Spirit, we can come to know God. If you want to know God, I recommend the Book of Mormon as a great place to start. If you read it with an open mind and, through sincere prayer, ask God if it is true, he will respond through the Holy Ghost and you will know.

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Personal:

I am a citizen of the small city of Palmerston North in the North Island of New Zealand, born there in 1942 to James August Dunlop and Loloma Emily Palmer.

In 1965 I married Frances Mary Gerrand and together we have five children and twenty one grandchildren.

Apart from my professional life I have been heavily involved in service in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Francie and I now serve as the President and Matron of the Hamilton New Zealand Temple of the Church.

As times allows (and occasionally in spite of some responsibilities) I enjoy escaping into old fashioned black and white photography. And I enjoy infusing all the above with music.

Education:

Victoria University of Wellington

• 1963 BSc – chemistry
• 1965 MSc (Hons) – chemistry

Aberdeen University, Scotland

• 1970 PhD Thesis – “The movement of potassium ions to the xylem of maize roots.”

Employment:

• 1960 Technical trainee, Grasslands Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Zealand.
• 1965 – 1967 Scientist, Grasslands Division, DSIR.
• 1970 – 2009 Scientist, Senior Scientist, Research Leader, Grasslands Division, DSIR (subsequently amalgamated and reorganised as AgResearch).

Professional:

Areas of research –
Biophysics applied to plant mineral nutrition and membrane function. Specific research topics include

• mechanisms of ion absorption of mineral nutrients by plant
• genetic differences in plant mineral nutrition
• competition for nutrients between pasture plants
• enzyme based potentiometric and amperometric biosensors
• ion channels in plant cell membranes
• bioelectric assessment of fruit maturity
• expression and isolation of mammalian of functional ion channel proteins
• biomimetic membranes on supports
• toxin detection using reconstituted ion channels in biomimetic membranes
• mechanism of action of lolitrem toxins from plant endophyte toxins

Organisations and distinctions –

• Member, International Council on the Genetics of Plant Mineral Nutrition.
• Member, Council of the New Zealand Society of Plant Physiologists.
• Principal Investigator, MacDiarmid Institute of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, New Zealand.
• Leader of multi-institute research programmes on phosphate fertiliser use and biosensor development.
• Prince and Princess of Wales Fellow.
• New Zealand – German scientific exchange fellow.
• Invited speaker at international conferences on plant nutrition, plant physiology, plant breeding, biosensors and bioelectronics.

Publications –
Over seventy papers published in international refereed journals and book chapters on the topics listed above.

Posted October 2010

I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, into what in those days was called a part-member family. My mother was a member of the Church but my father, although he was supportive of our activity in the Church, was not. So from a young age I attended Church and enjoyed the support and friendship of a small community of LDS people that in time grew to be quite large. My first memories of Sunday meetings are of an Odd Fellows Hall in Beaverton, which served as our meeting house at the time. Often there were little brown beer bottles left on the window sills from some Odd Fellows activity from the night before, and I remember going around with other members collecting them and putting them in the trash can. Over the years, our little branch grew into a ward and our ward into a stake, and I remained active in the Church.

I cannot say when I first knew that I had a testimony of the gospel. One thing I do remember is the sweet, peaceful feeling I had one summer afternoon as I sat in Sacrament Meeting in our ward—by then known as the West Hills Ward—listening to a talk. At the time I must have been a deacon or a teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood, because I was sitting on the front bench in the chapel, after the Sacrament had been administered. It was a warm day, and the side door was open, and as I listened to the speaker I was looking out and up into the leaves of a tree outside. I didn’t hear an angelic voice or see anything out of the ordinary—just the rustle of the leaves and the sight of the sunlight playing its usual games of light and shadow. But as I sat there I had a sense that this was the place I should be, maybe even the place I was meant to be.

This feeling, and support and encouragement from my mother and ward leaders, sustained me through adolescence. At that time I knew I loved books and schoolwork, but I had no dream of becoming a scholar. Only after serving a mission in Japan and beginning my studies again at BYU did I start to think that I might become a college professor. A few years of graduate school at UC Berkeley clinched the issue for me. But by then I was married and had a small family and enough sense to know that the road I had chosen would not be an easy one—not only because scholars don’t make much money but because I knew from my experience as a student that for a member of the Church, the academic world presented a constant challenge to one’s faith.

I cannot pretend that even now, more than thirty-five years after a determined to make my living as a scholar, I do not meet occasional challenges to my religious beliefs and affiliations—both from without and from within. But long years of coping with that problem have taught me the efficacy of exercising faith even in the presence of doubt, which is a crucial thing for someone in the doubting business, which for good or ill (both, I think) is what the academic life is. And in my mind I always remember the story, in the Gospel of Mark, of a man who came to the Savior asking for help for his afflicted son. When the Lord, no doubt knowing the state of his heart as a father desperate for help, said to the him, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth,” we are told that “the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” I am greatly encouraged that despite this honest expression of doubt, the Lord accepted the man without rebuke and healed his son. Whenever I think of that story I remind myself, first, that there are those who depend upon me, whatever my limitations, to seek the Lord’s blessing in their behalf; and, second, that if I go to the Lord honestly, not dissembling, he will not turn me away—although how he chooses to answer my requests must of course be left to Him. Not all children will be healed, but all fathers must have the courage to ask.

When I first decided to pursue a doctoral degree, I did so with the rather stern counsel of Jacob (in 2 Nephi 9:28-29) in mind: “O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. / But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsel of God.” All in the household of faith who aspire to be learned should heed that counsel, and I am glad that I had the benefit of it from the very beginning of my career as a scholar. I am happy to say that over the years I have found echoes of that counsel in the writings of scholars, too. One of my favorite quotations is from Pascal, who in his Pensees says, “The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.”

No truer words were ever spoken. The older I get and the more I experience the vagaries of human existence, the more I am also aware of the “infinity of things” beyond the power of empirical and analytical methods to adequately define or comprehend. Despite all my strivings, I do still have doubts. I am fortunate, however, that that feeling of peace I first experienced as a young man still comes over me often in my activity as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints striving for help with his unbelief. I know this is not an accident; I know that it comes from exercising faith even in times of doubt. I hope and intend to continue, then, to do precisely that, hoping that in time the Lord may say to me what John was asked to write the church in Philadelphia (Revelation 3: 8): “I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.”

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Steven D. Carter (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) holds the Yamamoto Ichihashi Chair in Japanese History and Civilization at Stanford University, where he has also headed the Department of Asian Languages. His research and publications focus on Japanese poetry, poetics, and poetic culture; the Japanese essay (zuihitsu); travel writing; historical fiction; and the relationship between the social and the aesthetic.

Posted October 2010

“It is I; be not afraid.” (John 6:20)

“Theology is the science of communication, or of correspondence between God, angels, spirits, and men, by means of visions, dreams, interpretations, conversations, inspirations, or the spirit of prophecy and revelation.” – Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology

Having been born of goodly parents who consistently chose the good part, I was taught from a young age about revelation, the power of prayer and fasting, and the reality of the Atonement of Christ. Great students of the scriptures, my parents inculcated in me many gospel principles and gospel teachings.

One of my earliest memories is consciousness of a Heavenly Father with whom I could communicate. The possibility of dialog with God has been a constant presence in my life. I have heard his voice from time to time speaking to me through the Holy Scriptures, and on other occasions He has whispered to my soul about things I should do or not do.

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I began to pray about the Book of Mormon and the prophet Joseph Smith. During this time I consistently read and re-read the Book of Mormon, but I never had a witness through prayer that the book was true. I sincerely wanted a witness for myself that these things were true, but I wanted it for the asking. Nearly five years of indifferent asking passed, and still nothing.

When I moved away to college at the University of Wyoming I found myself living in a dorm room alone. The loneliness of that first week cannot be exaggerated, but I was fortunate to meet Ryan Carrington, who would become my friend and roommate, my second Sunday at church. Through the next year we would study, discuss, and pray together in anticipation of serving missions for the church.

Soon I made other friends through church. These friends were very helpful to me because, during my freshman year of college, in the quick succession of one month after another after another, my brother, aunt, and grandmother died. Each of these deaths felt like a giant wound, but in each case I found comfort through the Book of Mormon. I knew that God knew me, but still I did not connect this to a testimony of the restored gospel. I wanted Moroni’s promise fulfilled for me. I wanted an answer to prayer.

In the early months of 1994, in room 614, McIntyre Hall, on the campus of the University of Wyoming, the answer came. For the first time, my asking was different. In this prayer I called upon God for a witness that the Book of Mormon was true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God—as had done before—but the difference this time was a strong intention to abide by the answer—whatever it might be. All the earlier attempts had been a mere asking—this time I knocked with every intention of going through the door, if it was opened, or of walking away, if it wasn’t. This time was more like Abraham, for I was not only asking but arguing, claiming that I no longer wanted to know for curiosity’s sake, but because I intended to live it until I die. And the witness came. It was an overwhelming feeling in my heart that God loved me, had restored his church through Joseph Smith, and had given the Book of Mormon, and that what I had been taught by my parents was true.

On occasions too many to count since then I have been troubled by questions about my faith or my life that have led to prayer, study, and more prayer, study, and fasting. In every instance, my mind has been satisfied with what I have discovered. Understanding the things of God depends in equal parts on faith and knowledge—a testimony grows organically, with the proper nourishment and care. Without that, it withers and dies, like a vine without water, sunlight, and soil.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.” (John 15:1)

A testimony grows line upon line, precept upon precept, from grace to grace, until we receive a fulness—or not at all (D&C 93: 11-18). Until we receive a fulness—sometimes feels like an interminably long time. In the meantime, we may content ourselves with considering new perspectives on and trying to understand and practice the lines and precepts we’ve been given—even if they seem or feel like too little, or too late. A true dialog must always be open to new turns.

Like Nephi, I do not know the meaning of all things, but I know that God loves his children (1 Nephi 11:17). I have every confidence that one can get nearer to God by reading the Book of Mormon. I know that fasting is a divine principle that opens lines of communication between God and man. I know priesthood power can heal. I know God lives and prepared an infinite and eternal sacrifice to save us from our sins through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. I know the Lord can speak to us through the power of the Holy Ghost.

All of these things I knew before I had even the slightest pretense of being, or, some might say, posing as, a scholar. In the years since, while trying to make my way as a scholar and teacher of rhetoric I have not encountered good arguments for leaving my faith behind. Instead, I consistently encounter new knowledge, perspectives, and understanding that increase my faith and my awareness of being in the world. Likewise my faith has consistently benefited my scholarship and informed my understanding of the world.

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David Charles Gore is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is the son of Douglas Allen Gore and Margaret Christine Larsen (née). He was raised in Aurora, Colorado, where he graduated from Smoky Hill High School. In the fall of 1993 he attended the University of Wyoming on a swimming scholarship. From 13 July 1994 to 17 July 1996, he served for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the England Manchester Mission. He has a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Wyoming in Communications and Mass Media. He twice graduated from Texas A&M University, with an M.A. and Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Public Affairs. His research interests are in the Scottish Enlightenment, including the moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, as well as Mormon Studies. On 1 March 1997 he was sealed to Kathy Ann Foti, R.Ph., in the San Diego Temple. They are the parents of four daughters and one son.

Posted October 2010

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my theism. In 1990 I was an angry autodidact in semi-rural Utah, reading Sartre and announcing my agnosticism to audiences both willing and unwilling. I wore my hair long and my clothing torn as badges of adolescent independence.

Over a long summer, I came to a muted respect for the tradition of my family, for the clear-sighted and powerful faith of my mother. I remained agnostic but felt open to involvement in a church community and to the moral responsibilities of the adulthood I sensed before me. An experience involving the LDS sacramental prayers on the first Sunday in August provided my initial experience of the Divine in a formally religious setting. That numinous conversion—were I evangelical I think I would call it my rebirth or regeneration—forever altered the course of my life. Four weeks after my change of heart, I left the Rocky Mountains to begin college in the Northeast.

I arrived in Boston in the fall, surrounded for the first time by a critical mass of people who loved to read and argue and expatiate. I cherished this new environment of intellectualism and energetic debate, even as I found myself stretched as a neophyte believer. I attended church, bore testimony on most Fast Sundays, volunteered in a homeless shelter, expropriated food from the cafeteria in the Freshman Union to feed people busking near the subway stop. And I read books, constantly. Toward the end of my freshman year, I developed doubts about the intellectual integrity of Mormonism, realizing dimly that I had been converted to theism that Sunday morning in August but not to a specific tradition. Mormonism is not a religion born in the late twentieth century, and I believe in retrospect that I was experiencing with the vivid intensity of early adulthood the incongruity between the world I was learning to inhabit as a college student in Boston in 1991 and the world in which Joseph Smith revealed the faith tradition within which I had come to God just a few months earlier.

Like many aspiring intellectuals with religious yearnings, I turned to C.S. Lewis to locate myself within Christianity. There was something in the self-assurance of that strange man, of his love of words and books, that made me think that I could one day believe that Christ was Divine. I could not yet entirely imagine myself as a Latter-day Saint.

Having already submitted my application for LDS missionary service and taken a leave of absence from college, I decided that I would follow my hunch of August 1990 and serve an LDS mission. Following the prescribed sequence for missionaries in preparation, I soon found myself, an earnest theist beginning to imagine myself as a Christian, sitting in a comfortably dark room in the temple in Dallas, Texas, four seats from my mother. I understood that I was to learn the secrets of eternity in that endowment room, but instead I found the temple rites frustrating and disorienting. For two intensely painful weeks I debated leaving the Church. My mother, ever wise, expressed to me only her love, her confidence that I would find my way, and her support no matter where my paths would lead. I prayed energetically, and at the conclusion of the fortnight of struggle felt only that God would warn me if I were on the wrong path. He did not warn me against a mission for the LDS Church, so I continued on my charted course.

The Missionary Training Center (MTC) looms darkly in my memory to this day. Still smarting from the insult that had stolen from me a mission to Russia (I had studied Russian in college and always assumed I would serve there but was instead detailed to southern Louisiana), I found the MTC foreign and disorienting. The horrible, angry tension of the two weeks after my temple endowment returned. My branch president, sensing that I was a readerly boy who could still be saved by the bard of Mormon bookishness, loaned me copies of Hugh Nibley’s key works. Nibley allowed me to think that it was not wholly absurd to embrace Mormonism as the setting for my discipleship. Most importantly, no matter how tense my experience, I did not hear God tell me to leave. I remained in the MTC, and though I struggled for many months to feel that I belonged, I served diligently, even obsessively, in southern Louisiana.

There were times during my mission, moments of profound power, when I felt God communicating to someone else in my presence, perhaps even—though this was harder for me to believe—through me. As I counseled with and loved people drowning in multigenerational poverty, as I interacted with other missionaries and local Saints, I felt both love and the power of conscious commitment. I chose those people, chose to love them, to commit to them, to sacrifice for them, to see them as God saw them. In this sacred exercise of my will, I felt God’s divine affirmation. By the end of my mission, I found myself believing in the Jesus of the Latter-day Saints, committed to Christ and the Church, delighted at the cosmic and human mysteries explored in the temple. My initial conversion to theism was an urgent, visceral response to an overwhelming divine encounter. Though I had sought God, there was something inexorable in that first conversion. The transformation I experienced during my mission was anything but inexorable. My path from general theism to specific Mormonism represented a series of choices and commitments made, a network of relationships on which God’s seal rested. This belief in Mormonism was no less real, however, than my first belief in God.

Since those first turbulent years of commitment and belief, my faith has weathered many vicissitudes, bright days of dazzling light and cold winter nights of uncertainty and self-doubt. By acts of my divinely affirmed choosing, Mormonism has been my life these last two decades. I believe in God as much as I believe in my own consciousness, and I believe that he has called me to be a Latter-day Saint, a calling I have chosen to accept, a calling I have given my heart to.

Some Protestants, uncomfortable with traditional theology, have begun to advocate an extension of process theology that they term relational theology. Much of the writing on relational theology is muddled; some represents little more than pop psychology. Despite my misgivings about such applications in Protestantism, for me the concept of relational theology points toward something critical about the nature of religious truth and community. The God I worship is a God who relates, and the truths I seek are found within Divine relationships. Of all the various facts and propositions that can be entertained, accepted, or disputed about the nature of Divinity, it is those that serve relationships among humans and God that matter most to me.

In the two decades I have spent reading and digesting the documents of the earliest Restoration and its contexts, I have been increasingly struck by how radically and powerfully Joseph Smith preached a gospel of relatedness. From his model of scripture as the whispering of voices from the dust to his adoption theology, from the patriarchal priesthood and the power of Elijah to the creation of the “stakes” of Zion’s grand tabernacle, Joseph preached a Gospel of cosmic interconnectedness. When he encountered funerary papyri filled with Egyptian hieroglyphs, he found in them the promise of relationships among peoples and planets, tying connections between spheres of existence into the salvation narrative of the cosmos. Through long study of religious and cultural history, my mind has joined my heart, and my commitment to the LDS Church has expanded.

When I worship with the Saints, I feel God directing me to stay, telling me that these are my people, my ethnos, my Tribe of Israel. I feel with Paul the magnificent power of the “Spirit bearing witness” with my spirit that I am a son of God and that through my membership in the Church I stand in fellowship with the Saints as an heir of God, a joint-heir with Christ. I have come to think of the familiar distinction between the “Gospel” and the “Church” as reflecting relational networks—the Gospel represents our relationships with God, while the Church represents our relationships with each other.

Understanding truth and theology in terms of relationships serves for me as a natural analogy for understanding the role of the will in the exercise of faith. I believe that the image of Christ as the groom and the Church as the bride has more to teach us than the marital customs of Second Temple Judaism. New Testament images of marriage between God and people point out parallels between our intimate relationships and our religious faith. In marriage I understand more about my relationship to the Church. I love my wife; I believe in her. I am aware of her flaws and failings, her insecurities. I also see her glory, her brilliance, her kindness, her future. My marital love is not just the passionate attachment that first drew us together; it is my choice, my commitment. Not every moment is blissful, but we are more together than we are apart, our family is more than the sum of our experiences. Thus it is with my faith.

My relational testimony not only allows me to give my heart to other people and to the Church, it has left me free to pursue Truth at my own pace, to allow time for better information, to avoid snap judgments, to recognize that not every requirement of sense or logic will be satisfied the first time I encounter a problem. I find in this relational testimony a close parallel to the way I think our minds work. Though I am not trying to make a strong claim about cognitive science—the fluid and tentative maps academics draw from brain to active consciousness—I am struck by how readily our minds find order, meaning, relationships in the sensations presented to them. Our capacity to make connections, to see the mind of God in the song of a swallow or human fate in the magnificent orbits of celestial bodies, is at the core of our religious being. It is a capacity we should be reluctant to separate ourselves from.

Borrowing language from the Hebraist’s “cloud of witnesses,” (Hebrews 12:1) I see life, religion, and science as containing a “cloud of meanings.” We seek patterns within this cloud, but we do not exhaust its scope with any particular pattern we identify or propose. I do not believe in the extreme relativism that stands behind most expressions of postmodernism. That a phenomenon contains a cloud of meanings does not mean that it cannot be understood, that nothing about it is True, that it is entirely limited to the subjectivity of observers. I believe in Truth, believe in our need to pursue it methodically, earnestly, assiduously. Simultaneously, recognizing life’s cloud of meanings allows me to respect ways of understanding that do not rely on external validation through experimental reproductions of specific hypotheses.

Professionally I try to understand human bodies in states of severe physiological stress, life-threatening catastrophes in which multiple organs are failing. These organ systems are profoundly and irreducibly complex. Those of us who try to understand these systems recognize, in an aphorism popularized by statistician George E.P. Box that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” I seek patterns and rhythms that are not immediately apparent to the untrained eye in a quest to identify specific types of patient who may benefit from particular therapies and to understand which patients are likely to recover. I hope that these models will allow me to devise better treatments to improve the quality and quantity of human lives. I do not expect or require that those models be perfectly true, though I am glad to move closer to Truth with each of these approximations.

My work in biomedicine parallels my work in cultural history, in which I attempt to understand how worlds and ideas are interconnected, trying to envision the inner working of cultural and conceptual systems as people lived them in the past. I hope that my models will illuminate and expand our understandings of the human condition, that making rich conceptual connections explicit will allow us to situate our consciousness within a cosmic order. The same quest for connection and understanding motivates much of my religious life.

With specific reference to Mormon history a relational theology allows me to embrace a dialogic revelation in which prophetic ideas arise in a network of meanings. I am not forced to believe that the doctrines of the Restoration must not be found in the cultural milieu in which Joseph Smith lived and heard the voice of God. I can find meaning in the ways Joseph Smith, at God’s direction, altered and refracted ideas from other religious and intellectual traditions to uncover, restore, and expand the cosmic secrets of identity. I can also imagine the ways that God would continue to communicate with us as individuals and communities in our current era.

I am whole in the Gospel through the relationships it engenders with my wife, my children, my friends and neighbors, the members of my ward and extended family, even with strangers. I am whole in the Gospel through its illumination of the great connectedness of humanity, the sense I have from Joseph Smith that everyone with a “friend in eternity” will find her way to eternal blessedness. That is my testimony, a testimony standing at the core of my consciousness.

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Samuel Brown graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in Linguistics with a minor in Russian, then received his MD from Harvard Medical School, where he was a National Scholar and Massachusetts Medical Society Scholar. After graduation he completed residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained on faculty as an Instructor in General Medicine at Harvard Medical School before moving to the University of Utah, where he completed fellowship training. He is now Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Associate in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah, based at the Shock Trauma ICU at Intermountain Medical Center.

Samuel began his scholarly career studying the epidemiology of hospital-acquired infections in resource-limited settings within the former Soviet Union, a project funded by USAID that ultimately evolved into the development of outbreak detection algorithms with an MIT-trained group of engineers, which resulted in the successful development of a software package deployed in US hospitals to track and control hospital-acquired infections. More recently, his interests in serious infection, computer models, and complex analysis have led to scholarly work on the sepsis syndrome. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, he investigates patterns in cardiovascular function to identify markers of disease severity and responsiveness to treatment in patients with life-threatening infection. This work evaluates hidden rhythms in heart rate and blood pressure that may be able to guide the resuscitation of individuals in septic shock. He has published and presented widely on the epidemiology of infectious disease and critical illness.

In his off-hours Samuel tries to understand how believers have employed religious concepts in coming to terms with embodiment, sickness, and death, a quiet avocation that has yielded several publications. His book, In Heaven As It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011), explores tenets of the early Restoration that support an LDS relational theology within the context of the struggle to overcome the effects of death.

Samuel missionized in the Great Louisiana-Baton Rouge Mission in the early 1990s and has since served in a variety of roles in the church, including bishop’s counselor, ward mission leader, Gospel Doctrine teacher, physical facilities coordinator, sub-assistant scout master, and, most durably and importantly, husband, father, and home teacher.

Posted October 2010

As many Jews discussed who they thought Jesus was, our Savior asked his disciples, “Whom say ye that I am?” Peter readily responded, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”¹ Peter had received this confirmation through personal revelation from his Father in Heaven. The same question is asked of us, with the following addendum: Has the Son of the living God restored what he established during his ministry, but which was lost through apostasy? My answer to the question, like Peter’s affirmation, is “yes.” This personal testimony has been confirmed many times by the peace and assurance that have come to me through study, prayer, and experience in His service. It is true that by doing His will we come to know the truth of His doctrine.² My testimony prompts me to use a few more of Peter’s words. When some of his disciples took offense and “walked no more with him,” Jesus asked the twelve whether they, too, would go away. Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”³ These are my words, too.

Personal testimony is a source of comfort and motivation in a postmodern world that seems to have lost its moral compass and is drifting with whatever wind prevails. The knowledge we have received through the restoration of the Gospel provides us with principled direction and firm anchors in troubled seas. Much of the restored knowledge is in the form of modern scripture, and it supports, clarifies, and adds to what we have in the Bible. The Book of Mormon, for example, is a remarkable source of information that clarifies doctrines alluded to in the Bible.

I believe there is enough evidence in the content and structure of the Book of Mormon to convince any fair-minded jury, or individual, beyond reasonable doubt that it is an ancient text. Once that verdict is established, one must face the conclusion that Joseph Smith’s explanation of how he received the book is true. For nearly two centuries detractors have suggested other origins for the book, only to have their theories debunked. Their theories have not resulted from a study of evidence; rather they have been built on hope that the book is false and on attempts to find evidence to support that hope. It is telling that many of the book’s detractors dismiss the book out of hand, confessing that they haven’t even read it. I have read it, and I find it to be a marvelous source of truth, wisdom, guidance, and a testimony of our Savior’s mission. Its harmony with the Old and New Testaments is both exciting and satisfying.

I confess to personally receiving the guidance of the Spirit in unlikely and unanticipated ways that have blessed me in both professional life and in church service. A series of unlikely events led me to complete a PhD in linguistics, which in turn led to a rewarding professional career and to enjoyable Church service. In retrospect I, like the men on the road to Emmaus,⁴ can recognize the spiritual element in those events with more clarity now than I did at the time they took place. On the other hand, there are times when the spiritual element has been clearly obvious. Such was the case when, as a young missionary in Finland, I found myself in a challenging situation, with only rudimentary language ability, trying to explain a gospel principle to a member of another faith. Suddenly I found myself putting words together and expressing myself at a level that I had never experienced before or for some time thereafter. Somehow, I knew what I was saying was correct and that I was experiencing a gift of the Spirit. It was such an impressive event that, upon returning to our apartment, I thanked my Father in Heaven for the gift, and promised myself that I would never forget that wonderful moment. Perhaps it was an early indication of a career in linguistics that was one day to follow.

Many years later, as a mission president responsible for the welfare of over one hundred young missionaries in Finland, I experienced the guidance of the Spirit in making decisions that affected many lives. With the passing of time, it is gratifying to confirm that more wisdom than my own was involved in many of those decisions.

As I have studied the doctrines of other churches, I have found they contain much that is good and true. They have much to respect and emulate, but I have never found the spirit, or the fullness of understanding, that exists in the LDS faith. Its doctrine welds the Old and New Testaments and modern-day scripture together in a satisfying, complementing fullness that confirms for me that much, indeed, has been restored, that Christ is our Savior, and that in this church and in its temples are the “words of eternal life.” Where else would I go?

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Notes:
¹ Matthew 16:13-17.
² John 8:31-32.
³ John 6:66-68.
⁴ Luke 24:13-35.

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Melvin J. Luthy received his undergraduate degree from Utah State University and a PhD degree in linguistics from Indiana University. His teaching experience has been at Indiana University, Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh, and Brigham Young University. He served as a Captain in Military Intelligence in Washington D.C and Vietnam. He has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California; as a national officer in the Society for Scandinavian Studies; and as a linguistic adviser to WordPerfect and Novell Corporations. He has authored and coauthored books on Finnish linguistics, and has published chapters in textbooks as well as articles in journals such as Language Learning, Scandinavian Studies, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Finland and has received the designation of “Finland’s Ambassador of Goodwill.” At BYU, he has been the linguistics department chair, chair of the Faculty Advisory Council, associate dean of the College of Humanities, and founding director of the Center for Language Studies. In church service, he has held many positions of responsibility, including mission president and later temple president in Finland. He currently serves in the Provo Temple. He is married to the former Anne-Maj Savstrand and they are the parents of four children and grandparents of eleven.

Posted September 2010

The Story of My Conversion

I was born in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, right in the middle of the Italian peninsula. I was a happy, normal Italian girl, an only child with loving parents. I was reared in the Catholic Church, and, in our family, traditions and good moral principles were very important. I attended a Catholic elementary school, with nuns as teachers, who tried to convince all boys to become priests and all girls to become nuns! Well, that was not my vocation, because I always wanted to get married and have children.

Every morning we had Catechism, religious education for Catholic children, where we memorized many doctrinal principles, and we were also tested on them. During those classes, some questions started to come up in my mind: Why don’t we have a prophet today? Does the Lord still love us? Why do we have to repeat memorized prayers? Why can’t we use our own words to speak to the Lord? Why can’t we participate in the Sunday Mass instead of having to listen to the same priest every week? What is Paradise like?

My teachers told me that we didn’t need a prophet any more, because we were in modern times and we had a Pope who took care of us. They said that we are not wise enough to know how to address the Lord in prayer, so we had to rely on the words that others, much wiser than we, wrote; then the Lord would understand the needs of our hearts, so we didn’t need to say anything else. And then, in church, of course, we were not educated enough to preach or to participate, while our priest had studied and was well prepared to conduct the whole meeting. Well, I was a little rebellious, I guess, and I started praying with my own words at night, before going to bed. I was not taught how to pray in my own words, or how to address my prayers, so I started like “Dear God . . .” and ended up with a “. . . good night.” It was the best I could do, but those simple prayers gave me peace and happiness.

And as for my question on Paradise… that question got me into some trouble! My teacher said that Paradise was a beautiful place where we can go if we behave well during our life on earth, that it was a place like a great theater, where we can earn a seat that we occupy eternally to contemplate God. Well, to a seven- or eight-year-old girl, the promise of sitting and contemplating eternally is not what she thinks of as eternal happiness! So I responded that I didn’t like it, and that I preferred to go somewhere else, because I wanted more, I wanted to do things with my family, I wanted to be active even after this life. As a result, my teacher condemned me to stand facing a corner for what seemed an eternity to me….

In the meanwhile, I was growing up. My life was good, my daily prayers gave me peace, and I started missing the Sunday Masses more and more until I went just a few times a year. Even though I am also thankful to my former religion for the good principles it taught me, I had new feelings, or just different ideas, and I knew that I was going to be all right, that something was going to happen to me, and that I would have more, because what I had till then was not enough. In the meantime, I was growing up.

Then, one late August day in 1974, someone rang the bell in my apartment, on the seventh floor of our building. My mother was home alone; she looked through the peephole, and saw two young men in suits, white shirts, and ties. Through the closed door she talked to them and noticed a foreign accent. They looked like good people, but, the week before, her friend had been assaulted by strangers in her home, so she didn’t trust them and told them that she was the maid of the house, not allowed to let anyone in. Next day, the missionaries came back, and the same scenario happened. No luck for them. So they crossed our address off their book and went way.

About a week later, my mother was downtown and noticed a group of people in front of a street board. She approached them and saw some missionaries. She started talking to them, saw the pictures on the board, and was about to accept a copy of the Book of Mormon when it suddenly started raining. It was a downpour, and everybody ran away to shelter. Another week went by.

Then, as it often happens in Europe and Italy, there was a strike of public transportation. The first two missionaries that came by my home were tracting in a distant part of town, and had to walk home. My house happened to be along their way. As they were walking by my building, one of the two told his companion: “Elder, I feel that we need to enter this building again!” His companion answered that they had been there several times already, and that nobody was interested in their message, but the first missionary insisted. They went into the elevator, and chose one floor, the seventh, and the door on the right. They rang the bell. Again my mother answered through the door, looked through the peephole, recognized the missionaries, and opened the door. Up to this day, many years after, tears come to my eyes to see how the Lord had prepared the way, how one missionary was inspired to knock at my door a third time, how my mother was prepared to open her home to them. And they taught her the first lesson.

That evening, when I returned home, my mother told me: “The Mormons came today, and they’ll be back tomorrow.” I had no idea of who or what they were, but I had the feeling that I had to be home for that second appointment. Maybe it was curiosity alone, maybe inspiration, but I made certain that I was there for the second lesson. And they taught us the Joseph Smith story, the story of a modern prophet of the Lord, who restored His Gospel on the earth. Finally, I had found my prophet! Everything the Elders taught us seemed to me so normal, so natural, so true. They just confirmed the beliefs that I started having as a little girl in elementary school: prophets, prayers in our own words, activity in church, a Paradise where we continue working and learning together with our eternal families. What I had desired for such a long time was true and possible. A new dimension and perspective had been added to my life.

The missionaries invited us to church for the following Sunday. We went. I felt at home, just as after a long journey: I felt that I had finally arrived at my destination. I am so thankful to those two missionaries who didn’t give up, who followed their inspiration and knocked at my door that third time, till my mother let them in. Both my mother and I joined the church. Those missionaries listened to the promptings of the Spirit and found us.

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Cinzia Donatelli Noble (Dott. in Lett., Università G. d’Annunzio-Chieti e Pescara, Italy) is a teaching professor of Italian language and literature at Brigham Young University.

Posted September 2010

I am a Mormon Because I am a Feminist

I am a convert to the Mormon Church from Roman Catholicism, and gained my testimony as the result of spiritual experiences that I cannot deny. In this essay, however, I will discuss instead why, as a feminist, I remain a steadfast member of the LDS Church.

It is very difficult to be raised in one of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), as I was, and not come away with some fairly unpleasant conclusions about women. Depending on the religion and sect involved, one may be taught that the first woman was feeble-minded or a murderess and that all her daughters are marred by that fact, that a woman’s body is unclean, that God meant women to submit to their husbands and in general be subservient to men, and that divinity is male and male alone. (Of course, echoes of such teachings can be found in other faith traditions besides the Abrahamic, as well.)

After decades of studying LDS doctrine concerning women (and carefully distinguishing it from LDS cultural understandings and practices, which in quite a few cases contradict that doctrine), I have been liberated as a woman from the erroneous and harmful beliefs about women that haunt those raised in Abrahamic traditions. How remarkable and in some senses ironic it still seems to me to have experienced “women’s lib” by conversion to Mormonism!

I will first review the main points of doctrine that make Mormonism the most feminist of all the Christianities in my view, and then proceed to re-tell the story of the Garden of Eden from the vantage point of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Restored Gospel teaches that the term “God” means an exalted woman and an exalted man married in the new and everlasting covenant (D&C 132:19-20). We are taught that there is no God without men and women loving each other as equals. Heavenly Father is not an eternal bachelor; he is married to our Heavenly Mother. In fact, the one who’s an eternal bachelor is Satan.

Second, the Restored Gospel teaches that all will have their male or female body forever. It is not a curse, but a great gift and a blessing that each soul had to prove itself worthy to have. Women readers, your breasts, your womb, your ovaries, are not unclean cursings; they are blessings. And the Restored Gospel also teaches me that I will be married forever, and that I will have children forever, and that the life of being a woman married to my sweetheart and having children forever is the life that will bring me the fullest joy in the eternities—as it has here on earth.

Third, LDS doctrine teaches that men and women are equals before the Lord and before each other. “Equal” does not mean “identical”—for example, there are no two men who are identical, and yet they stand as equals before each other and before the Lord. Can we imagine an understanding of equality that means that a man and woman, though different, can be equals before the Lord and before each other? That is the vision of equality that the Restored Gospel teaches.

Elder L. Tom Perry, an apostle of the LDS Church, said in 2004: ““There is not a president and vice president in a family. We have co-presidents working together eternally for the good of their family . . . They are on equal footing. They plan and organize the affairs of the family jointly and unanimously as they move forward.”¹ What an incredible vision, especially for a Christian denomination, many of which believe in some type of doctrine of submission of wives to husbands. The LDS do not preach submission of wives.

In my opinion, we cannot fully understand this revolutionary doctrine of the LDS Church unless we go back to the story of the Garden of Eden. Again, let us start with three main points of difference in the telling of that story from the vantage of the Restored Gospel.

Number one: the LDS do not believe that the Fall was a great tragedy. Rather, we believe that the Fall was foreordained, that it was for our progression, and thus the Fall was a blessing. Number two, the LDS do not believe that Eve sinned in partaking of the fruit of the First Tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And number three, because the LDS do not believe Eve sinned, we also do not believe that Eve was punished by God for her role in partaking of the fruit, but rather rewarded.

The Great Plan of Happiness devised for the children of God mandated that they leave their heavenly home, receive a mortal body as a blessing, enter into full agency by being separated from God, and then return once more to their heavenly home to be judged for how they used their agency. That is, the Plan was to be a “round,” if you will: it would take us from our heavenly home and, if we walked that path well, the plan would bring us back to our heavenly home, now much more like our Heavenly Parents, with much more knowledge, a fuller agency, a desire to choose the right, with so much more than we ever could have acquired if we had stayed in heaven with a pale or dilute version of agency.

Only the children could choose to leave, and to bring to pass a separation from their divine parents. And so in the Garden were placed a son and a daughter of God, and two trees. Two persons, two trees.

Both Trees represented doorways along the journey of the Great Plan. The First Tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, symbolized the doorway leading from heaven, and the ordinances of entering mortality with a mortal body, gaining full agency, and having the light of Christ awakened within. The Second Tree, the tree of eternal life, symbolized the ordinances of salvation and exaltation, and the doorway back to our heavenly home.

Eve was created second, then, not because she was derivative of Adam: she was created second to highlight that the giving of the gift of the First Tree was the gift to be given by women in the Great Plan.² It is through women that souls journey to mortality and gain their agency, and in general it is through the nurturing of women, their nurturing love of their children, that the light of Christ is awakened within each soul. And we should include in that list of souls Jesus the Christ. Even Christ our Lord was escorted to mortality and veiled in flesh through the gift of a woman, fed at his mother’s breast, and awakened to all that is good and sweet in the world. Women escort every soul through the veil to mortal life and full agency. It is interesting to think that even Adam, who was created before Eve, entered into full mortality and full agency by accepting the gift of the First Tree from the hand of a woman. In a sense, Adam himself was born of Eve.

If Eve was foreordained to give this good gift as her stewardship in the Great Plan, then she did not sin—and that is LDS doctrine. As Elder Dallin H. Oaks, an apostle of the LDS Church, has said, “Some Christians condemn Eve for her act, concluding that she and her daughters are somehow flawed by it. Not the Latter-day Saints! Informed by revelation, we celebrate Eve’s act and honor her wisdom and courage in the great episode called the Fall.”³ We believe that our Heavenly Parents, and also all of the rest of God’s children, were happy and grateful that Eve offered her gift.

Eve, then, was not the worst among women; Eve was the best among women! She was the most courageous, the most full of faith. It was also right, then, that the first mortal being that the resurrected Jesus showed himself to was not a man; it was a woman. Jesus’ performance of the Atonement repaid Mother Eve’s faith in the Plan, her courageous opening of the door represented by the First Tree.

Did God curse Eve? We know that the ground was cursed for the sake of Adam and Eve—is this a cursing of Adam and Eve? In the teachings of the LDS Church, we do not believe that that was a curse meant to punish them—it was a curse meant to start that law of opposites that undergirds agency: virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, truth and lies (2 Ne 2:11-13). Eve was told she would labor in childbirth—was this a cursing of Eve? Again, from the LDS perspective, absolutely not. To have children, to be able to fully give the gift of Eve, is one of the most soul-satisfying parts of a woman’s life that she will either experience here or in the hereafter if circumstances have prohibited it here.

And then in the King James version of the BIble, we are told that Eve, as part of her punishment, was told that Adam would rule over her. Is that what the LDS believe? Actually not. Elder Bruce C. Hafen, a seventy in the LDS Church, says: “Genesis 3:16 states that Adam is to ‘rule over’ Eve, but… over in ‘rule over’ uses the Hebrew bet, which means ruling with, not ruling over…. The concept of interdependent equal partners is well-grounded in the doctrine of the restored gospel.”⁴

So the LDS alone among all Christian religions assert that not only did Eve not sin, but she was rewarded for her courage and wisdom, and God was assuring her that, just as she fulfilled her role in the Great Plan of Happiness, Adam would step up to the plate, and he would perform his role in the Great Plan of Happiness, and that would entitle him to rule with her. This is absolutely revolutionary and astounding doctrine among all the Christianities!

What gift will Adam give to further the Great Plan? The LDS believe that Adam and his sons will give the gift of the fruit of the Second Tree to the children of God, those who are worthy to receive it, just as Eve and her daughters give the fruit of the First Tree to all who are worthy to partake of it. The fruit of the Second Tree is the ordinances of salvation and exaltation administered by the sons of God. Just as the doorway through the veil into this life is administered and guarded over by the women, the daughters of God, so the doorway through the veil that brings us home is administered and guarded over by the sons of God. And those that have accepted the gift of the Second Tree from the hands of the sons of God will pass through that veil and back to that celestial place where they can be with their Parents once more.

Just as Adam was asked to hearken to Eve and received the fruit of the First Tree, Eve is asked by God to hearken to Adam in accepting the fruit of the Second Tree. We would be remiss if we did not see that there were two hearkenings, two gifts given, two gifts received, two stewardships.

That means that priesthood, in the LDS understanding, is not some extra given to men and denied women. Priesthood is a man’s apprenticeship to become a heavenly father, and it is clear from LDS doctrine that women have their own apprenticeship to become like their heavenly mother. The ordinances—and they are ordinances—of body and of agency—pregnancy, childbirth, lactation—the spiritual ordinances of the First Tree are not less powerful or spiritual than the ordinances of the Second Tree.⁵ Women have their own godly power.

Some have erroneously felt that the Church and its male leaders preside over the members’ families, and that somehow that means that men are to rule over women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Restored Gospel helps us see that the Church is intended to be the gift that the sons of God give to the family, just as the daughters of God give a great gift to the family. The Church, then, is but an auxiliary to the family, which stands above it in the eternal plan. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, an apostle of the LDS Church, has said, “There might be wards and stakes in heaven—I don’t know anything about them—or there may well be some other organization that we don’t know much about. What we do know will exist in heaven is families. And most of what has been revealed about our afterlife, our eternal life, our celestial life, focuses on family organization….”⁶ The family is the divine organization, and we know from LDS doctrine that, in the family, women and men rule as equals. President James E. Faust, of the First Presidency of the LDS Church, said: “Every father is to his family a patriarch and every mother a matriarch as coequals in their distinctive parental roles.”⁷ Notice the drumbeat, again, of equality.

I remain a steadfast member of the Mormon Church because, for the first time in my life, I understand why it is not a curse to be born a woman, and how it can be said with a straight face that men and women stand before God and before each other as true equals. I understand now that women are that they might have joy (2 Ne 2:25). And, odd as it may sound to some, I believe that one of the most profoundly feminist acts one can commit is to share the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ with others. The Restored Gospel not only restores right relations between man and God, but right relations between men and women, making it the strongest, most progressive force for women in the world today.

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Notes:
¹ L. Tom Perry, “Fatherhood—An Eternal Calling,” Church News, 10 April 2004,:15, hard copy version only; the original wording is in the audio version of the 2004 April General Conference address at http://broadcast.lds.org/genconf/2004/apr/4/4_2english.mp3
² Alma Don Sorensen, “The Story of Eve,” in Alma Don Sorensen and Valerie Hudson Cassler, Women in Eternity, Women of Zion (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 2004), pp. 68-101
³ Dallin H. Oaks, “The Great Plan of Happiness,” Ensign, November 1993, pp. 72-75
⁴ Bruce C. Hafen and Marie K. Hafen, “Crossing Thresholds and Becoming Equal Partners,” Ensign, August 2007, pp. 24-29
⁵ Analiesa Leonhardt, “The Sacrament of Birth,” SquareTwo, Vol. 3 No. 1, Spring 2010, http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleLeonhardtBirth.html
⁶ Worldwide Leadership Training Meeting, LDS Church, February 9, 2008, p. 12
⁷ James E. Faust, “The Prophetic Voice,” Ensign, May 1996, p.4

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Valerie Hudson Cassler (http://vmrhudson.org/) was born in Washington, D.C., and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1971. She attended Brigham Young University, where she received her B.A. in political science, with minors in International Relations and Russian. She obtained her Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University. She taught at Northwestern University and at Rutgers University before joining the political science faculty at BYU in 1987. She served for eight years as director of graduate studies at the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies, and is the recipient of several teaching honors, including the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Teaching Award.

Dr. Hudson Cassler is the author, co-author, or editor of many scholarly books and articles on international relations, national security, and foreign policy, including Foreign Policy Analysis: Classical and Contemporary Theory (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), Culture and Foreign Policy, Artificial Intelligence and International Politics, and, with Andrea Den Boer, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Populations (MIT Press, 2004). Among numerous academic distinctions, she won the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the American Sociological Association in 2004 and, in 2005, the prize for the Best Book in Political Science from the American Association of Book Publishers. In 2009, she was named among the 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine. She has written considerably on Mormons and Mormonism, as well, having, among other things, edited multiple books with Kerry M. Kartchner on Latter-day Saints and their relationships with United States foreign and security policies, and, with A. Don Sorensen, published a substantial article on Latter-day Saint views of feminist theology in David L. Paulsen and Donald W. Musser, eds., Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christianity (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2007). She is also one of the co-founders of the on-line Latter-day Saint forum SquareTwo (http://squaretwo.org/).

Valerie Hudson Cassler is married to the artist David Cassler, and they are parents to eight children. They reside in Orem, Utah.

Posted September 2010

I appreciate the invitation to participate in this “Scholars Testify” project. For me a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Savior’s atonement, and the restoration of God’s true Church on earth is above and beyond a witness of the Holy Spirit. Nor is it simply an inner feeling or confirmation of a set of truths, knowledge and facts. It’s more than rituals such as genealogy and temple work. It’s different than just a social movement, although Mormonism is greater than any in world history. It’s not simply attendance at Church and Sabbath rules, or adherence to the Word of Wisdom. Nor does it only signify that we are willing to sacrifice our time in local Church programs, pay tithing, or go on missions.

For me, my faith centers in the Savior Jesus Christ, His mission and great atonement for all people, the reality of His resurrection, and the promise we each have of eternal life. Another part of my testimony is the sure knowledge that Joseph Smith was the Prophet of the restoration and that the Church today is God’s kingdom on earth. No one can ever be more certain about these convictions than I am.

Born and raised in Utah, I was the son of an Ohio Protestant father who converted to the LDS Church, and a Mormon mother whose ancestors crossed the plains as early pioneers. Most of my youth was spent growing up in Salt Lake City. I was baptized under the historic Tabernacle on Temple Square, and when I was in high school my bishop and stake president sought to have me called as a missionary for the Church at age 16. I sat at the feet of a number of Church apostles in my youth as they would come to my ward, seminary class, or fireside, as well as when I would visit their offices at Church headquarters.

I read the scriptures voraciously, memorizing some 400 verses before becoming a missionary. I also continually sought Gospel books. I would scrounge used bookstores where I found, purchased, and read hundreds of hard-to-find volumes back in those days like Discourses of Brigham Young, the entire set of the Journal of Discourses, Parley P. Pratt’s Autobiography and Writings of Parley P. Pratt, George Q. Cannon’s Gospel Truths, John Taylor’s The Mediation and Atonement, Joseph Smith’s various volumes known as History of the Church and Lectures on Faith, Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, Sterling McMurrin’s The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, most of John A. Widtsoe’s dozen volumes, including A Rational Theology, Heber J. Grant’s Gospel Standards, Orson Pratt’s The Seer, and B.H. Roberts’ multiple volumes in his Seventies Courses in Theology, and other intellectual treatises. I think I read over a hundred books when including old as well as contemporary (1950s-60s) volumes by Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, Leonard Arrington, Hugh Nibley, Lowell Bennion, and other favorites.

I added notes from these books to my scriptures, and was always delving into the wide-ranging doctrines of the Gospel. Over the years I have read and pondered greatly the truths of the Book of Mormon, a volume written by ancient prophets which is the word of God. I came to appreciate what Joseph Smith meant, that “a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts than any other book.” I came to understand what the Doctrine and Covenants means when we are instructed to “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).

These intellectual and doctrinal expositions helped ground me in deep Mormonism, not just the stuff of Sunday School classes. But they were not sufficient. My soul longed for spiritual confirmation as to the veracity of my growing beliefs. Over the years, my faith solidified through daily prayer, much fasting, and meditation. How well I recall praying alone, not only in my boyhood room as I grew up, but also in the wilderness. In my mid-teens I worked each summer at a Scout Camp where I learned how to pray more intensely. Later, employed by the U.S. Forest Service up in Wyoming for a summer, I felt the sweet Spirit even more, including several times experiencing a burning in my bosom that not only erased all doubt, but confirmed the witness of Mormonism’s truth. On Sundays when I couldn’t get into a town, I would hold my own religious service while sitting along the rushing waters of a mountain stream, or a quiet beaver pond. I would read the scriptures aloud, and then call upon the same God who appeared to Moses and Joseph Smith. Such experiences are too sacred to discuss in public, but they were very real.

They fortified me as I served a two and a half year mission to Brazil, and through years of academic study at BYU, the University of Utah, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I learned to drink fully of the teachings of the Church and my numerous experiences in sacred places like the temples, as well as in chapels and at home, all served to strengthen my convictions. Over the years, I have been empowered through the priesthood to literally be a part of many miracles—whether healing the sick, blessing others with counsel from the Lord, lifting up the hearts of those who suffer, or similar things. I’ve been privileged to see blessings pour down upon the heads of those who repent and draw unto God. He reaches out to all His children if we only seek His blessings.

The greatest blessings in my life are the love and support I enjoy from ten children and especially from my wonderful wife, Kaye. Beyond our triplets, our adopted kids, and those born to us are others who lived in our home while going to college. We consider them each part of our family, as well as our growing tribe of grandchildren. Through many ups and downs over the decades, our eternal sealing in the holy temple has grounded our marriage and family in the rich soil of Mormonism. Years of early morning devotionals in our home, daily family prayer, weekly home evenings, temple attendance, opportunities to serve in the Church and make a difference have all made my life meaningful. We live in a quiet, peaceful neighborhood, surrounded by wonderful friends with whom we experience a genuine sense of community.

Early in my studies at the University of Utah and at Brigham Young University, I focused on many academic and religious fields. Philosophy, sociology, religion, political science, and psychology were my primary interests.

Later, in pursuing a master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, I moved into whole new arenas of higher education that included management and business, ethics, organizational behavior, and other interests. I learned what the Church teaches, that “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36). As I interacted with others of various backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and cultures I came to understand how inclusive our religion actually was.

Over the years I have labored long-term in the U.S. with Jewish rabbis, radical pastors in inner-city Detroit, Black Muslim leaders in Cleveland, Protestant ministers, Catholic priests in Hawaii, and evangelical pastors. Years ago in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I served on the interfaith community council where we sought to learn of and appreciate our spiritual traditions. In more recent years, I have represented the LDS Church on the Utah Valley Ministerial Association board, working to build bridges of mutual understanding and respect. The same openness may be said about my ongoing relationships with leaders of various political and social ideologies, whether their values emphasized communism, socialism, capitalism, Americanism, conservatism, libertarianism, or liberalism. I am at home with Latin American advocates of Liberation Theology, as well as Hutterite religious leaders in rural Canada. The same is true of my collaboration with Palestinians and/or Israeli kibbutzniks.

Thus, I am something of an ecumenical or inclusive Mormon who literally believes what the Prophet Joseph Smith argued: “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may” (Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 199). Further, he declared that we don’t ask those of different faiths to throw away the good they have, but to simply add our truths to theirs. Thus, I have been blessed to interact, learn from, and pray with countless individuals of other religious persuasions, and have done so comfortably. Whether they were disciples of Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam, it didn’t matter. We were and are brothers and sisters.

For some thirty-four years now I have been blessed to be a professor at BYU, where I have had the privilege of building communities of learning and faith with wonderful students from around the globe. I’m a Professor of Organizational Behavior (OB) at Brigham Young University where I teach Consulting and Organizational Change, Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility, Third World Development, Social Entrepreneurship, and Introductory OB for both MBAs and undergraduate students.

I carry out academic research designing and conducting studies, particularly doing action research, carrying out analyses, and writing/publishing them in appropriate journals. So far I have authored or co-authored ten books, over a hundred published articles, and some two-hundred-plus conference papers. In much of such work I have sought to integrate the spiritual and the secular, trying to figure out for myself and my students how a holistic education can be achieved. I have always sought to make my students critical thinkers, as well as, at the same time, become more grounded in Mormonism’s beliefs. Thus, I have pursued the ideal of which Elder Neal A. Maxwell spoke, that of becoming a “disciple-scholar.”

One of my great passions as a teacher is mentoring students in change projects, advising them on doctoral, master’s, and honors theses, and providing career counseling. A goal each year is to prepare and assist students to go on to graduate studies at top universities. Much of this is done by offering to sponsor students and collaborate in research and the production of papers for conferences and journals. This greatly facilitates their acceptance over other bright students from other schools who haven’t had the experience of actually designing research, collecting data, and getting to a finished product. Many of my students become partners in reaching out to civic engagement projects as we seek to improve the quality of life for those around us. Additionally, I provide pro bono citizenship services to various groups within BYU, and in national academic associations, and serve as a board member for various companies, community non-profits, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working throughout the world.

My approach to scholarship is that of action research, not passive theories and number crunching. I have more to do than just conceptualize, which explains why I spend way too many hours at work each day. I have a lot more on my plate than simply teaching students in a classroom or drafting articles. But it has been very edifying to see my student colleagues grow and develop intellectually, as well as spiritually. Many of them have found their own academic success, having begun careers at Harvard, MIT, Ohio State, Dartmouth, Michigan, Pitt, UCLA, Cornell, and a hundred schools elsewhere.

A core element of our action learning is to build the best models of organizational behavior we can. This involves envisioning how firms and nonprofits may be more effective, more efficient, and more ethical—enterprises in which people feel their work has meaning and significance beyond a paycheck. Criteria include an emphasis on organizational virtue, quality of working life for all members, and democratic values present in organizational culture. Too many jobs have merely become eight-hour rat races instead of a means by which employees may discover their true potential. Our goal in the discipline of OB is to liberate the human spirit at work.

This brings me to the Church as an organization. It was never intended to be a slick model of efficiency, but rather, a mechanism for building community. With congregations in size from 200-300 members, the “ward” is usually full of people who know each other by name, who band together to serve one another, to lift each other’s burdens. As such, the organization becomes a laboratory for connecting individuals into a single community, a fellowship “having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another” (Mosiah 18:21). Mormons aren’t just passive attendees at church, but active participants who collectively build the kind of social entity they want and need. The emphasis is not upon rituals and ceremonies, but the creation of covenant communities which serve to counter modern alienation.

The Church’s emphasis on the pragmatic, on action, not just doctrine or ideology, is a core value I greatly appreciate. We are taught to do the will of God, not just profess it. Many years ago, I shifted my life’s focus from simply reading, teaching, and writing about Mormonism to applying it in my personal life. I moved from preaching to practicing the Gospel. Ever since then, my life has been filled with amazing spiritual experiences among some thirty-four nations where human suffering and poverty were a way of life and early death. I have labored high in the Andes among the poor in the Sacred Valley of the Inca, where we built schools and other structures for impoverished villagers. More recently, I worked with an NGO implementing a Family Preservation Program among ten villages in Mozambique. My students and I have been privileged to assist in the recovery of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch destroyed the country in 1998, helped to rebuild three villages in Khao Lak, Thailand, following the terrible devastation of the Asian tsunami in 2004, and most recently raised funds, mobilized, trained, and took many young LDS volunteers to Haiti after the horrendous catastrophe of the 2010 earthquake.

These attempts to actually live our religion, rather than just cite its teachings, have given great meaning to my testimony. Thus, my professional career as an academician is given significance far beyond narrow conceptual and theoretical treatises read by a few scholars in an obscure journal. I have been privileged to speak to thousands of people annually, all over the planet, about how to change the world. A blessing to me has been the chance to improve society and witness lives getting better, children healthier, families becoming more self-reliant and sustainable through literacy programs we offer, microenterprise training, schools we build, economic development through tiny loans (microcredit), clean drinking water, family gardens, and so forth.

In the process, we have raised millions of dollars, trained hundreds of thousands of the poor, and now have over seven million clients receiving loans through microfinance. And we’re just getting started as many groups of Mormons and their neighbors are establishing their own action groups or family foundations to bless the global poor. Some two hundred NGOs have been launched by Latter-day Saints who seek to have personal impact among those who suffer, above and beyond what the institutional Church can offer. Such individuals heed the declaration to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness” (D&C 56: 27).

The highest level of Mormonism is that of Stewardship and Consecration, meaning we are called to practice what we preach. While some Mormons feel that such practices are reserved for some future date when the Church announces we should begin building consecrated lives, many of us understand on deeper levels that the time to do so is here and now. The bulk of my adult and family life has centered on offering all I have to God and His children. Related principles are equality, simplicity, sacrifice, pure motives, cooperation, and other United Order values which inspire us to serve the poor and needy. As saints of the latter days we are told to give of our time, money, and skills to building Zion, a condition in which there is no poverty, no tears, no sorrow.

While some U.S. Mormons seek successful careers, huge mansions, and designer clothing, many of the humble in our Church live simply, sharing their surplus with those in need. This becomes a conscious choice. The words of the Prophet Joseph have been the mission of my entire adult life. He declared: “A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race” (History of the Church, 4:227).

If I have done any good in the world, I must humbly acknowledge the hand of God, according to the spiritual values and principles of the Mormon tradition. All I have ever sought to do is serve a greater purpose, find and carry-out my own calling in life, and use my time, skills, and resources to bless those in need. Being prompted throughout my years by the Holy Spirit, I hope that the world is a tiny bit better.

My testimony is a matter of practice, a way of living. My life is my witness. Service to others is Warner Woodworth’s testimony.

In conclusion, let me affirm my commitment to the practices of the LDS Church. It is an article of my faith that I believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all. I believe all things, I hope all things, I have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, I seek after these things.

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Warner P. Woodworth (Ph.D., University of Michigan) teaches and carries out research at BYU in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Strategy within the Marriott School of Management. He is an author or co-author of a variety of books including Working Toward Zion, Small Really is Beautiful, Industrial Democracy, and Managing by the Numbers, among others. Founder of dozens of NGOs, he advises governments, corporations, and nonprofits in the social sector around the world. Although based at BYU in Provo, he has had a number of visiting scholar appointments which have enabled him to take his family so they could learn of other cultures, religions, and lifestyles—including back to Ann Arbor as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, the University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Vilnius University in Lithuania, the International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland, Hawaii, and most recently, as the first Peter Drucker Centennial Scholar at the Drucker School of Management, Claremont University in Southern California. He is joyously married to Kaye Colvin Woodworth, they are parents of 10 children and 16 grandchildren (so far). For more details, see http://marriottschool.byu.edu/emp/WPW.

Posted September 2010

I have a great many academic colleagues throughout the world who probably wonder if I am crazy because of my adherence to religion and my steadfast refusal to drink exotic draft beers and expensive vintages of wine. We live in an age when it is politically correct among academics to adopt a rational, secular, and often atheistic view of the world. I am writing this brief statement of beliefs with these non-religious colleagues in mind. I appreciate their friendship, their tolerance, their insights, and their outward acceptance of my apparent eccentricities. I am also grateful for the gallons of mineral water, sparkling apple juice, and diet soda they have provided in various social settings over the years. Now, I would like to tell them why I believe in God, the nature of the God I believe in, and why this belief is compatible with my work as a scientist.

God is a real, living individual who communicates with man. This I know, not because I have seen him, but because I have felt his influence in my life. Profound personal experiences, inspired thoughts, and deep feelings allow me to accept by faith what my religion teaches about God, and also to accept without reservation the words of credible witnesses called prophets who have spoken with God directly.

My religious views do not conflict in any way with my ability to function as a professor of Biology at a large (and famously liberal) university. I cherish the privilege of teaching the precepts, methods, and theories of biology and geology, including evolution and the age of an ancient earth, as they are understood by modern science. The Mormon Church allows me to do so without any reservations or restrictions. Many years ago, I was offered a job at Brigham Young University, a job that I ultimately turned down. One of my interviews was with one of the general authorities (worldwide leaders) of the Church, in an office just next door to the famous temple in Salt Lake City. I asked him if I would be allowed to teach evolution at BYU. His answer was something like this: “Of course. We want you to teach truth as you understand it, but please do so without damaging the faith of our young people.”

Faith has proven indispensable in my practice of science. Often I have turned to prayer when research puzzles seemed insurmountable, when facing formidable audiences of brilliant academics, when expeditions were beset with bad weather and personnel conflicts, when fresh ideas were needed for grant proposals, and when facing dangers on the shore or in the depths of the sea. My prayers have been answered consistently, most often with comfort and clarity of thought, but also with amazing events and circumstances. Perhaps I could share just one example. I was leading a research cruise in the Bahamas in which we were diving in a four-person submersible to the ocean floor. We needed a particular species of sea urchin in numbers sufficient for an experiment that was critical to the performance of our federal grant. We had sought these animals for several days in an area where we had seen them before, but they were not to be found. The end of the cruise was approaching and failure seemed virtually certain. That night, I said a silent but fervent prayer in my berth, asking God to help. In the early morning hours, I awoke suddenly with the clear thought in my mind that we should launch the sub on the North Side of Goulding Cay. I arose and went to the bridge, where I pointed to a spot on the chart and asked the mate on duty to steam to that particular place for an early morning launch. The other scientists were surprised to find themselves in a different area when they awoke, but we found our animals there in tremendous numbers. Such experiences have been far too numerous to explain away as statistically credible coincidences. Moreover, much of what I have accomplished in life should have been impossible for one of my limited intellect and modest abilities. I know from experience that we can receive divine help.

LDS (Mormon) doctrine tells us that if we were to see God, he would look like a man. We would be able to touch his physical body. Although he is capable of inspiring us internally by means of an emissary who goes by the name of “Holy Ghost,” it is entirely possible to converse with him directly “as one man speaks to another.” We know this because Moses and other prophets, credible witnesses all, have testified in writing of their direct conversations with God. How can one discount the moving and fervent testimonies of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and apostle Sidney Rigdon, who detailed a specific encounter with the resurrected Christ on February 16, 1832:

And now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, this is the testimony, last of all, which we give of him: That he lives! For we saw him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father—That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God. (Doctrine and Covenants 76:22-24).

Joseph Smith sealed this testimony with his blood, at the hands of an angry mob that refused to accept the claim that he had actually seen God.

Although we were created in His image and are thus similar to Him in form, God surpasses us in a number of essential attributes. Among these are omniscience and omnipotence. A unique insight of Mormonism is “The glory of God is intelligence, or in other words light and truth” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:36). Omniscience, or knowledge of all things, is therefore the attribute that gives God his glory. Imagine knowing all of the laws of nature, of physics, of chemistry, and of microbiology. Imagine knowing everything that ever happened in prehistory and throughout historical time. Imagine knowing every species of plant, animal, and microbe. Imagine knowing how all of these organisms function, what keeps them alive, and how they respond to challenges in their environments. Imagine understanding all of the geological processes by which the solid earth is formed, and the chemical reactions that power the stars and galaxies. God understands all of these things, whereas we understand only those small portions that we have learned through science and other human endeavors. In my opinion, the attribute of omniscience gives God his other key attribute of omnipotence, for it is axiomatic that knowledge is power. The concept of omnipotence has been used by generations of philosophers in their arguments against the possibility of God (“If God is all powerful, why does he let evil happen?” etc.) LDS theology, however, makes it clear that even God cannot do things that are impossible, such as creating something out of nothing or violating the eternal laws of nature.

We can’t begin to fathom how much God knows, but we can become ever more like God by learning as much as we can. I am thankful, therefore, for the opportunity to learn, and I am motivated by the prospect of approaching omniscience, even though it may be at an agonizingly slow rate. As a scientist and academic, I find it inspiring to accept the direction of the Lord to diligently learn and teach:

Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms. (D&C 88:79)

This instruction justifies my study in every field of natural science and human endeavor; indeed, it instructs me to explore all knowledge and all truth. God’s specific instructions are to learn these things by two different methods: study and faith. As I have progressed in my ability to learn throughout my life, it has become apparent to me that we cannot know everything unless we apply both approaches.

Some (perhaps even most) of my fellow biologists deny the usefulness of faith as an epistemology, a method of learning. They subscribe to the scientific method, a collection of approaches based on empirical observation and experimentation, as their only means of obtaining knowledge. I am dismayed when these individuals, including arguably some of the smartest and most articulate people on earth, display the arrogant attitude that all may be known with the use of one’s own limited senses. One long-standing example (not the only one) that has damaged both science and religion is the misuse of evolutionary theory. I freely confess to my religious brethren that I believe in the usefulness of evolution as an explanation of natural, observable phenomena. I also confess to my scientific colleagues that I believe in the usefulness of religious faith as a way of understanding things that cannot currently be learned by empirical means. When my colleagues use the true, but limited, observations of evolutionary biology to deny the existence of God, they abandon the very scientific method that they profess to espouse. Modern science progresses by falsifying hypotheses. Because the hypothesis of God’s existence cannot be falsified without searching every corner of the universe, vehement atheists resort to inductive arguments. Induction, or the drawing of conclusions by the preponderance of evidence, has been shown by philosophers of science to be limited in its usefulness. Bertrand Russell, one of the most notable atheists of the twentieth century, illustrated the fallacy of inductive reasoning with his analogy of the inductivist turkey, who concluded on the basis of personal experience that he would be fed every morning at the turkey farm. On Christmas Eve, his inductive conclusion proved to be wrong when he lost his head.

No amount of inductive evidence in science can disprove the existence of God. The persuasive arguments of Richard Dawkins et al. notwithstanding, atheism also cannot be justified by the positive facts that support evolution, no matter how convincing or correct these facts may be. Ironically, the only way one may be an atheist is to have faith in the atheist philosophy. This was understood by pioneering evolutionary biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (who coined the term ‘agnostic’) but is inexplicably denied by many of our modern scientists. The evidence for God is available, but it is conveniently rejected by those who don’t wish to believe it.

I have been teaching and investigating evolutionary biology for my entire career, which extends back more than thirty years. The word “evolution” appears repeatedly in my articles and books and I currently serve as an editor of a scientific journal with the word in the title. I have also been an actively participating member of the Mormon Church for my entire life, where I have had many opportunities to teach theology and provide ecclesiastical leadership. At no time has my belief in God been successfully challenged by the methods or conclusions of science. It is clear to me as a scientist that much of what we have learned about biology, including evolution, is correct and true. It is also obvious to me as a man of faith that principles received by revelation from God are true. The profitable approach to knowledge, therefore, is to accept the general statement that there is a creator, while also accepting the self-evident truth that all of his mechanisms are not outlined in the first chapters of Genesis. Just as science does not refute the existence of God, the scriptures do not refute the operations of natural processes.

I agree with my colleagues that “creationism” is not science and should not be taught as an “alternative paradigm” in our public schools. This does not mean, however that God does not live. To me, the important issue is that God and evolution are not alternative paradigms, but two approaches to understanding non-contradictory truths about the world and the universe.

When we think of God as an omniscient being, it becomes easier to visualize him as a creator who operates within the bounds of the natural laws he understands. Any thoughtful person who looks around can see that everything was not created “in the beginning.” Plate tectonics, volcanism, and erosion create new geological structures on an ongoing basis, just as cell division and a bewildering array of reproductive processes create new individuals all the time. On a longer time scale, processes such as natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and allopatry ”create” new species and varieties of organisms. Another doctrine unique to Mormonism leaves latitude for these natural processes to act on their own, without God’s intervention at every step:

And now, my sons, I speak unto you these things for your profit and learning; for there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon. (2 Nephi 2:14).

I don’t understand why some churchmen find it hard to believe in a God who understands nature and lets nature accomplish the creative process. I believe that God operates within the eternal principles of physics and chemistry. Unlike the God of fundamentalist Protestantism, who was virtually invented by committee at the time of Constantine, God is comprehensible and natural (part of nature) and not a supernatural (outside of nature) mystery with self-contradictory attributes. Thus, he is not everywhere and nowhere, without body parts or passions, large enough to fill the universe but small enough to dwell in the heart, etc. In a famous funeral sermon, the prophet Joseph Smith preached:

Now I ask all who hear me why the learned men who are preaching salvation say that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. The reason is they are unlearned . . . God had materials to organize the world out of chaos, chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory . . . pure principles of element are principles that can never be destroyed, they may be organized and reorganized but not destroyed.

Mormonism’s remarkable doctrine that “the elements are eternal” is repeated in section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a canonized book of scripture dating from the early nineteenth century. Even as fundamentalist Christianity holds tightly to the concept of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), the alternative espoused by Joseph Smith and attributed to revelation from God conforms perfectly with the laws of conservation of energy, conservation of matter, and equivalency of matter and energy as formulated by modern physics. That same section of modern scripture that tells us about the eternal nature of the elements also gives us a clear statement about how we may know God:

VERILY, thus saith the Lord: It shall come to pass that every soul who forsaketh his sins and cometh unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth my voice, and keepeth my commandments, shall see my face and know that I am;

This is not much different from the famous philosophy of Augustine—“I believe that I may know” —a principle elaborated by the ancient prophet Alma, who recommended that one “experiment” (his word, not mine) by exercising a tiny bit of faith. This small experiment, he said, is like planting a seed. If the seed grows and bears fruit, then it must be a good seed. If it keeps growing, one may eventually come to a perfect knowledge of the principle. One cannot know God from a position of non-belief. One cannot know God by arguing about his existence. A more thoughtful approach was advocated in the book of Psalms (46:10): “Be still and know that I am God.”

I look forward to the day when I may meet that scholar who knows all things about the natural world. In the meantime, I can testify from more than a half century of personal experience that one may draw close to Him through obedience and prayer. I am grateful for the privilege of learning about the world and the universe by the application of the complementary and non-competing epistemologies of intelligence, logic, study, observation, and faith.

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Craig M. Young is a Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon and the director of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, a beautiful marine lab campus on the Oregon Coast. He grew up in California, where he discovered tide pools and science books at an early age. Following an LDS mission in southern Italy, he studied at Stanford University and the University of Washington, receiving B.S. and M. S. degrees from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Alberta. He has held faculty positions at Florida State University and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, and adjunct academic appointments at Florida Institute of Technology, King’s College London, and Florida Atlantic University. He serves on boards and advisory committees for numerous state, national, and international organizations. Professor Young’s main field of interest is the reproduction, life-history biology, and embryology of invertebrate animals, particularly those living in the deep sea. This research has been supported continuously by the National Science Foundation for thirty years. He has visited the deep-sea floor dozens of times in eight different submersibles. His work takes him to marine laboratories and universities throughout the world, and he has led more than eighty research expeditions in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. He has published nearly two hundred peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, has served as editor of twelve books, and has worked as an advisor on documentary films for the BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. Dr. Young has a strong interest in the history of science and religion, and has published a number of articles on the history of marine science. He received the 2009 Honored Alumni Award from the College of Life Sciences at BYU.

Craig Young has been happily married for thirty-four years to his wife Robyn, and they have four children and two grandchildren. In the church, he has served as a missionary, a branch president, a counselor in three bishoprics, an elders quorum president, a high priest group leader, a youth leader, a scoutmaster, a gospel doctrine teacher, and a high councilor. His favorite church calling, however, was “nature counselor” at the church girl’s camp when he was seventeen years old. Robyn was one of the campers, and she participated enthusiastically in Craig’s nature hikes, swamp walks, and star studies.

Posted September 2010