Testimonies

As a scientist, I seek for truth, and as a believer in Jesus Christ and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I seek for truth. I believe that these two efforts are not exclusive of one another, but should come together when absolute truth becomes known. In fact, I have found that one enhances the other in a number of ways. For instance, the allegory of the seed told by Alma in the Book of Mormon (Alma 32) follows the pattern of the scientific method. The manner in which one searches for spiritual truth is pretty much the same as how one searches for scientific truth. The difference is in how the answer becomes known. Scientific observations become theories and eventually laws if the results from experimentation or testing always remain consistent. The more consistent the results are, the more believable is the law. Gaining spiritual truth also requires effort involving observations, testing, and consistency, but absolute verification comes by a manifestation of the Spirit. One can know a truth with certainty if it is verified by the Spirit.

I have performed many scientific experiments in my career as a university chemistry professor and researcher, and I have observed the results of many more experiments done by graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scientists. Some of these observations have led to what would be considered truths in the scientific world. They look right, they behave right, they feel right, and they are believable. I have also read, made observations, and been on my knees in prayer many times during the same period of time, searching for spiritual truths. These truths also look right, behave right, feel right, and are believable, but they eventually become known with more surety than any scientific truth I believe.

With this understanding, I testify with a surety that Jesus Christ lives and true religion is available for anyone and everyone to embrace. I have found truth in the doctrines taught in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is restored from the original church established by Jesus Christ in the old world (i.e., area around Jerusalem) and in ancient America as related in the Book of Mormon. These truths have become known to me by manifestations of the Spirit after study, testing, and prayer. Knowledge of these truths has brought me more satisfaction and happiness than any truths I have learned in scientific pursuits. In fact, they have enhanced my scientific career. There have been many times that I felt a divine influence in a scientific decision I made. I know without a doubt that I would not have been able to realize my scientific achievements without the guidance that comes from a sure knowledge of spiritual truth and the promptings of the Spirit.

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Milton L. Lee received a B.A. degree in Chemistry from the University of Utah in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Indiana University in 1975, after which he spent one year (1975-76) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Upon leaving MIT, he accepted a faculty position in the Chemistry Department at Brigham Young University, where he is presently the H. Tracy Hall Professor of Chemistry. Dr. Lee is an author or co-author of over five hundred scientific publications. Since 1980, he has given over seven hundred presentations on various aspects of his research, of which approximately one-third were invited lectures at major conferences and symposia. He is a member of the Scientific Committee for the International Symposia on Capillary Chromatography.

Dr. Lee is best known for his research in capillary separations and mass spectrometry detection. Among the scientific awards that he has received for his achievements in research and professional activities are the M. S. Tswett Chromatography Medal (1984), the Keene P. Dimick Chromatography Award (1988), the American Chemical Society Award in Chromatography (1988), the Russian Tswett Chromatography Medal (1992), the Martin Gold Medal (1996), the Latin-American Chromatography Congress (COLACRO) Medal (1998), the M. J. E. Golay Award (1998), the American Chemical Society Award in Chemical Instrumentation (1998), a Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa, from Uppsala University in Finland (1998), the Dal Nogare Award (1999), the Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Achievements in Separation Science (1999), the California Separation Science Society Award (2005), the Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award (2008), and the EAS Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Fields of Analytical Chemistry (2008).

Professor Lee is also an entrepreneur and has been involved in transferring technology from his university research laboratory to the private sector. In 1984, he co-founded Lee Scientific to manufacture and market supercritical fluid chromatographic instrumentation and, in 1991, he co-founded Sensar Corporation to manufacture and market unique time-of-flight mass spectrometric instrumentation. Most recently, he is a co-founder of Torion Technologies, which is developing novel ion-trapping devices. In addition, Dr. Lee acquired ownership of the Journal of Microcolumn Separations in 1991, and became the publisher as well as an editor for the next eight years. He is listed as a co-inventor on twenty issued or pending patents.

Posted August 2010

My name is Beth Vaughan Cole, and I am a nurse educator, wife, mother of four, and grandmother. I am currently the Dean of Brigham Young University’s College of Nursing.

I was asked to add my testimony of Jesus Christ and of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to this website. A bit awed by the task, I have prayerfully considered this effort and hope it will serve others as they grow in their understanding of Jesus Christ and His gospel.

History

I was baptized and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after I graduated from college with my baccalaureate degree in nursing from the University of Cincinnati. (It was on July 24th and I had no awareness of the historic significance of the date.) I met with the missionaries for about eight weeks.

My religious background up until I joined the Church was somewhat eclectic. My parents were Christian. My father was raised in a strong Catholic tradition, and my mother was raised Episcopal. My father was a professor, and twelve years older than my mother. They resolved their religious differences by not joining any church.

When I was in the third grade I went with a neighbor to a Methodist church. When the neighbor moved, I would go by myself. I was allowed to attend Sunday School but not the main Sunday service. I liked learning about Christ, and the teachings resonated deep within me. I would attend church with my friends and got a view of other churches. One summer I only went to the Catholic Church a few blocks from my home. They were all interesting. I was active in the Methodist Church through high school and part of college. I searched for my own testimony of Christ and read the Bible daily.

I had many questions about life during college. Should I be a nurse? How should I serve God? Should I choose another field? What was next? Why were people the way they were? And I had many other questions.

Joining the Church

After graduating from college, I had a few dates with an LDS returned missionary who asked the “golden questions.” My response was, “I already know about your church. I have read the encyclopedia.” But, I agreed to listen to the missionaries. Much of what they taught I already believed. The plan of progression and discussion of premortal life, while not new, resonated intensely within me. While reading the Book of Mormon (I read the whole book in a short time), I was very touched by what I read. King Benjamin and his sermon were deeply stirring. Nephi, Alma, the Stripling Warriors, Mormon, and Moroni were additional testimonies of Christ, and they affected me deeply.

Even though the precepts and church writings were good and would build my commitment to Christ, converting to a peculiar faith was troubling. I knew I would be ostracized by my family, even some friends, etc. The future in a new faith was so uncertain. I only knew a few people who were LDS, and I was moving to Boston, Massachusetts, later in the summer for graduate school. What if the people were strange there, or didn’t want me in “their” church? Even though I felt the Church, its teachings, and practices were how Christ would have wanted His Church to be if He were on earth, the decision to join the Church was very, very difficult. I don’t even have words for it. It was like giving up everything I knew or had been a part of so far in my life. Maybe that was why my mother was so upset when I did join the Church.

I am sure the missionaries knew from my prayers that I was struggling with the decision, and they were very kind and patient. It took several more weeks for me to be baptized. I was terrified. My brother attended my baptism. The terror leading up to baptism was totally countered on the day I was baptized. I was calm, reassured, and felt a wonderful confidence that all was well. I would even try to conjure up a feeling of anxiety, but kept being reassured. It was an incredible feeling of peace.

Journey after Baptism

I moved to Boston about a month after I was baptized. I went to Boston University’s School of Nursing, in the master’s program in child psychiatric nursing. I loved school; it was wonderful. I loved learning and was fascinated by what I was learning.

But, personally, it was the loneliest year of my life. There were two very good experiences with the Church. I was given a job leading music in the Primary (a mid-week activity), and worked with wonderful people. The second was that Elder Boyd K. Packer held an early morning class for all the LDS students in the area. I was so new to the Church, I was like a sponge, learning as much as I could.

There were only a few single LDS women in the ward, and we were all involved in graduate studies. After a couple of years, the ward had many singles; some were students and some were working. It had grown and divided several times by the time I moved to Utah six years later. I worked at the University of Utah Hospital and taught at the University of Utah College of Nursing for many years before being asked to be the Dean of the College of Nursing and moving my career to Brigham Young University. There is a lot to my story in the intervening years, but that is enough to help you understand the beginning of my religious journey.

My Testimony

Joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a life changing decision, and a wonderful gift. I have learned so much about Jesus Christ and how to live a more worthy life. I have learned how to serve others in a more Christ-like way. I have tried to give serious thought and effort to how I would dedicate my life to Christ. I married in my early thirties and had children in my late thirties and early forties. I had a PhD and tenure before I had children. After struggling to decide if I really wanted to be a nurse, after graduation I never looked back and never wished I had chosen something else. Full time or part time, I stayed with nursing and developed a career in academic nursing. I believe this was what the Lord wanted for me and the talents and gifts He had given me.

I love the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is my Savior and my Redeemer in every sense of the word. I have no question that He lived on earth as the Son of God. He is the Savior of the world and my Savior, who makes me whole and perfect with his healing redemption. Through the gift of the Holy Ghost I can receive inspiration and instruction. I won’t be instructed in everything, as I would not develop my own knowledge and capabilities if every decision were made by another. I believe that God the Father does care for us, for Jesus has told us so. The Prophets of old and the Prophets from Joseph Smith through President Monson have testified of Christ, of a Heavenly Father who loves us, and of the Holy Ghost. The Church is divinely organized and led by a Prophet today. I believe that prayers are answered, just not always the way we want. However, the answers are always to our benefit, if we choose to listen carefully, and trust the still small voice of the Holy Ghost.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is beautiful to me. Through its practices and teachings I can know, understand, and partake of an eternal perspective that fills my longing to know who I am and where I am going. The sacrament, Church activities, General Conference, from Relief Society to ward parties, I am enriched by them all. I have been blessed to share my journey with beautiful ward members. Most of all I am blessed by a righteous husband, who cares about me and our children. He works very hard to fulfill his gifts, talents, and role as husband and father. My children make me weep as I behold their divine beauty. Marriages have brought in new family members and, as the grandchildren join our family, I feel God’s trust in me grow, for I am part of a divine heritage.

I pray that you may feel the confirmation that you are a treasured, precious child of a Heavenly Father that loves you. I pray for those who hear the missionaries or find the message of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that they may have the sincere desire to ask if the message is true, and, after the confirmation by the still small voice of the Holy Ghost, have the courage to join and serve in the Church.

I pray for the leaders, the members, and especially for the children. Love the children, for they are precious and need our guidance to return to our Heavenly Father after this life’s journey.

I say this is the name of Jesus, Christ. Amen.

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Beth Vaughan Cole has been the Dean of the College of Nursing at Brigham Young University since 2007. Prior to assuming her present responsibilities, from 1993 to 2007, she was a professor of nursing at the University of Utah, where, among other things, she chaired the Acute and Chronic Nursing Division of the College of Nursing and coordinated the nursing doctoral program. She received her first degree in nursing from the University of Cincinnati, and subsequently earned a master’s degree in child psychiatric nursing from Boston University and a Ph.D. in family studies from Brigham Young University.

Her specialties include end of life issues, family, obstetrics (maternal, newborn), and psychiatric nursing. Her research and writing has appeared in such places as the Handbook of Families and Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi, 2006) and in such journals as Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, the American Journal of Critical Care, and the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, and she is the co-author of Family Nursing Practice (Philadelphia, 2003).

In 2000, Professor Cole was honored with the President’s Award of the International Society for Psychiatric Nursing; in 2001, she was named a “Hometown Hero” by Salt Lake City’s KUTV (Channel Two).

Posted August 2010

An Eternal Work in Progress:
A Personal Essay on Belief

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
– Rumi¹

It may seem a bit strange that a Latter-day Saint’s confession of faith would begin with a quote from a medieval Sufi mystic. I like the fact that our tradition allows us to find truth wherever it might be—even in thirteenth-century Konya if necessary. We are, as Rumi intimates, on a journey, a pilgrimage, and as Latter-day Saints we surely can be enriched in our quest by drawing on the intellectual insights and spiritual experiences from other knowledge traditions. We are instructed in our religion to do more than merely passively appreciate truth in all its forms, but rather “we should seek after these things” (Article of Faith 13). Seek after such things, not just casually peruse or dabble.

Much of Rumi’s writing reinforces my own beliefs of inclusive spirituality and the bliss of a direct and personal experience with God. In this passage, Rumi describes the pathos of the human circumstance in this alien world as we wrestle with distressing and often torturous questions of ultimate, eternal truth. But while we often only see through a glass darkly, our inner essence calls us to a higher dimension, and we hear whispers—if ever so faintly—that we are from somewhere else. And while our Latter-day Saint tradition shines its own distinctive shaft of light on Rumi’s uncertainties, humbly we must admit that we do not have perfect knowledge.

But before getting to a discussion of belief and truth-knowing let me provide a bit of personal context. I am what some would call a birthright or “DNA” Mormon. Mormons are my folk, my tribe. I belong here. I come from stock who were among the first pioneers to settle the Utah territories. I have a rich family heritage of sacrifice, faith, and unfathomable commitment to the building of the kingdom. I’m inspired and moved to read their stories of dispossession and fortitude, their suffering, and their uncommon gratitude. I honor my history. I am proud of it. I have faithful and believing parents, who worked hard to provide a spiritual framework in which I never felt myself insignificant or that the universe was a meaningless one.

My religious upbringing created an organic worldview that made God an everyday reality for me. I cannot imagine belonging to any other religious community. This is not to say I don’t struggle with some aspects of my religious village: the prevailing social, economic and political conservatism of our current membership; the sentimentality that is sometimes presented as spirituality in our testimony sharing; the occasional over-emphasis on church activities where the church itself risks becoming an object of worship. But I suppose it’s not unlike most family circumstances where the cords that bind are stronger then the tensions that divide. There is much that is right about my faith community, and thankfully there is sufficient diversity among believing Mormons that allows people like me to find a place under its tent. The church has given much to me. I find it a remarkable place in which selfless service is rendered and its lay leadership authentically tries to respond to the will of God as they best understand it. It is a place where I’ve witnessed many types of yearning made manifest: the need for social support; the need for peace, meaning, transformation, and redemption. And, for many, the message of the restored gospel generously meets their individual needs in profound, life-giving ways.

Ours is a consequential even though underestimated theology, and as a church we are a vital and divine instrument designed to bring about much good to the human predicament. But we are not a perfect church, and I don’t think we seriously claim to be. I have come to identify my own religious experience as a part of a grand assembly of God’s children whom he loves and mercifully blesses, continuing to reveal himself “unto all nations” in different ways and by different means (2 Nephi 29:12). I have come to view different religions as a deeply valued expression of the divine human family. Alma puts it nicely: “For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have” (Alma 28:8). Our Latter-day Saint tradition is a part of that broader fabric of human experience with its own distinctive and vibrant threads divinely woven by the greater designs of God.

A part of our theology that speaks powerfully to me, and, in a way, sets it apart from other religious philosophies, is its sheer spiritual imagination of eternity and the stirring potential of the human soul. I have yet to come across a grander and more exquisite vision of life’s purposes. If one measures the greatness of a particular philosophy by what possibilities it inspires in people, then I cannot think of a more aspirational or noble vision for humankind than to see ourselves as gods in embryo—to not just live forever in some blissful state, but to be eternally emergent, ever becoming something more than we are. Ours is not a shallow theology, but one that is rich, thoughtful, and unique, particularly as it relates to questions of life’s purposes and the vast individuated possibilities that lie ahead of us. Mormonism is an optimistic faith and a positive affirmation of life, an optimism that fosters courage to live more fully if we let it.

But my individual faith has experienced various transformations over the years, and it indeed continues to evolve with time and experience. I’ve witnessed the beliefs of my youth transform to a more earned and independent faith as I served a mission in Pennsylvania. Studying at Stanford and Oxford, I gained a greater appreciation of reason and intellect as tools to inform and add texture to my understanding of the world. And while these tools have limits, they are not to be feared or ignored. As I have lived in various cultural contexts, and as the aperture of my experience has broadened, I have found my faith in God again change but deepen as I witnessed His hand in the affairs of his children no matter their nationality or religious profession. But I confess that my “simple” faith has given way to something else much harder to define, and I have grieved over a loss of such simplicity.

Doubt and uncertainty have become much more a part of my spiritual landscape. But I don’t despair because I believe as Miguel de Unamuno once observed, “faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”² And maybe that is what Alma means when he writes: “if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe” (Alma 32:18). Ways of knowing are so highly individualized, and even our own scriptures speak of the differing gifts of the Spirit for each individual (Doctrine and Covenants 46:10-26; Moroni 10:9-17). But I have come to understand that perhaps there is no such thing as “certainty” for me in the way we often hear in our general conferences and fast and testimony meetings. I’m left with only evolving levels of knowledge and varying degrees of confidence in our system of understanding. I do not preclude the possibilities that others have such knowledge, but I have not been endowed to “know.” And while I have not been blessed with very many spiritual gifts, I can still say that I have felt God’s presence. I have had prayers answered. I have been reassured and guided. I have been witness to the unexplainable. But with so many unanswered questions, contradictions and paradoxes of life, I cannot claim to understand God very well. God, even though real to me, at times seems quite remote from many aspects of the human condition. His Spirit and influence seem as provisional as the breeze which “bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8). My experiences have made me much less trusting and gullible and far more skeptical. My sense of “realism” in this regard is a product of understanding that intellectual constructions continually alter, sensory knowledge can be manipulated, and even empiricism is ultimately subjective. Epistemology—or the philosophical analysis of how and what we know, and what the horizons of any particular way of knowing are—can be extremely useful to us in approximating reality as we currently understand the world, but the boundaries of our knowledge spheres are fluid and permeable rather than confidently fixed. All religious traditions, including our own, have their inconsistencies, their troubling histories, and their operational problems as they deal with the vagaries of the human beings they serve. Our own interpretation of scripture and prophetic authority still leaves many questions unanswered or uncertainly answered. In other words, all knowledge, whether in temporal or spiritual form, requires faith of one degree or another. This no longer troubles me unduly. Sure knowledge and faith for me cannot co-exist. To build one’s house of faith solely on intellectual constructs is as shifting sand wherein the borders of our understanding are ever fluctuating and never hermetically sealed. But it also seems to me to be problematic to anchor one’s conversion in single instances of miracles or answered prayers where by the prayer of faith one person receives health, and in spite of such prayer another dies.

I’ve come to be at peace with limited understanding, having faith that the mists will clear with time, and that faith is a large part of the purpose of life. The architecture of my faith is probably more durable as a result of my skepticism. I’m not shaken by “errors” or “controversies.” Having made the study of comparative religion a life-time endeavor, I am less perplexed by the problems and anomalies of our own church history because every religious tradition has its own set of specific historical questions or inconsistencies. Controversy seems to be a natural part of the human endeavor of constructing sense—whether scientific or theological. My academic experience in the social sciences has taught me that if we don’t have a perfect, linear, measurable view of a research subject, we must take what various perspectives we have available and, through triangulation, come to a reasonable context that is logical and internally consistent. In other words, we take bits of imperfect or incomplete knowledge and configure them in a way that supports a defensible thesis on the larger question. While I have always felt a tenuous connection to the Spirit as I try to understand God’s purposes, I have been left to harness other divine powers such as mind, logic, intuition, and even emotion in triangulating a clearer picture. This melding of “heart and mind” has given me a compelling and sufficient context for daily living and sustains my needs (Doctrine and Covenants 8:2) even in the hours of my darkest struggles. In a way, the quality of lived, interpretive experience is in itself a final test of “knowing,” because our own individual subjectivity is all we ultimately have. Spiritual evidence is inherently experiential. We cannot live through others, and they cannot live through us. Not all ways of knowing are always compatible at the same moment, and at times I have had to suspend, modify, and sometimes discard certain beliefs and other presuppositions. At times the best I can muster is hope.

But I also believe this is as it should be for such testing grounds as this. We are purposely left to find our way, drawing on whatever resources we can in this soul-stretching pilgrimage. The journey we are on is, by deliberate design, neither clear nor easy. One of the eternal principles my faith-tradition teaches me is that there is “opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). Individual growth only significantly occurs when we strain, struggle, labor. If God were too intrusive in our affairs, our individual freedom and diverse wills would be compromised and growth hindered. It’s what we fought against in the councils of the pre-existence. I’m OK with not having all the answers and being fully certain. To me there is a particular beauty in God’s mystery.

I guess I am more of what Richard D. Poll calls a “Liahona” Mormon, one who approaches faith issues somewhat differently than “Iron Rod” Mormons who represent the mainstream of our faithful.³ The two metaphors are, of course, drawn from the experience of the prophet Lehi in The Book of Mormon. In Lehi’s famous dream, the Iron Rod represents a sure way to God if we but hold on to His Word. The path is delineated by a hand-rail even when the mists of life consume us. It’s a single path, a “narrow way,” a path that has answers to every important question through scripture, prophetic authority, and the Spirit. In these sources the Iron Rod Mormon finds comprehensive direction to all aspects of life. And if answers are not immediately forthcoming they are either irrelevant, or the Lord will reveal His will in time and according to our faith. There is a certain safety and confidence that can be attained, not by asking questions but by looking for answers in the gospel—answers that only need to be revealed with sufficient prayer, study, and patience.

Liahona Mormons, by contrast, are represented by Lehi’s sacred compass that pointed the way but did not clearly delineate a single path. The users of the compass were left to navigate around and through obstacles on their own. Indeed, the clarity of the Liahona’s direction was dependent on the particular context of the user. Liahonas are suspicious of tidy answers, of either/or propositions. They are often preoccupied with questions and skeptical of answers that are universally applied. I suppose the longer I live and the more I experience, the more I see the world and humanity in vivid colors and in complex, transcendent hues, and, yes, sometimes gray—but rarely if ever, anymore, in black and white.

Perhaps my awareness of the faiths of diverse people and the complicated sufferings of a conflicted world has made me impatient of exclusive faith claims. A mounting realization for me is that absolutist claims in a religious sense are a form of spiritual death. We become unresponsive and insensitive to other possibilities when we have, or think we have, all the answers. It closes us off. In effect, it damns. Religious history teaches us that absolutism inevitably ends badly, fanatically, and at times even violently. Living and working many years outside of an urban-American Mormon experience gave me the opportunity of knowing and befriending others whose hearts and minds seemed very much like my own, but who had their own religious convictions, their own faith, that offered them as much peace, meaning, answers to prayers, miracles, and other transcendent spiritual experiences as my own religious tradition did for me. Are the religious experiences of others to be dismissed or minimized as something less than my own spiritual encounters? It seems ignorant, if not arrogant, to think so. I like Philip Barlow’s characterization of ours being a “uniquely true” church but not one that has the corner on all truth or goodness.⁴

So, in the end, I choose to believe in God. I believe He desires happiness for us. I believe Him when He generously unveils his own purpose and meaning when he says: “this is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). I have also grown to be thankful for God’s grace and patience. I’m convinced that He is in it with me for the long-run. The same being who took thirteen billion years to develop our galaxy has the patience for me to get it right. I have faith that he is not done with me after this life is over. This life is merely a provisional, transitional state for something else. And while I, like Rumi, do think much about where I came from and what my purposes might be, I do have one advantage over Rumi. I have, at least, been blessed with an idea of those answers because of the grace and the sublime imagination of this church. While many of my questions remain unanswered or uncertainly answered on this glorious, wondrous quest, I have a compass that tells me in a “voice of perfect mildness” that this is not all, that I am here in preparation for something larger and more significant (Helaman 5:30). I am an eternal work in progress. And, like Rumi, “my soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that. And I intend to end up there.”

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Notes:
¹ Barks, Coleman, The Essential Rumi (New York: Harper One, 1995), p. 2.
² de Unamuno, Miguel, La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) as found in Gerrish, B.A., & Stimming, M.T., The Pilgrim Road: Sermons on Christian Life (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 1971), p. 114.
³ Poll, Richard D., History and Faith: Reflections of a Mormon Historian (Signature Books: Salt Lake City, UT, 1989).
⁴ Barlow, Philip L., “The Uniquely True Church,” in A Thoughtful Faith, Philip L. Barlow (ed.) (Centerville, UT: Canon Press, 1986), pp. 235-258.

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Bradley J. Cook is the Provost at Southern Utah University and also Professor of History there. Prior to his current position he served as President of the Abu Dhabi Women’s College in the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Cook began his career in higher education in 1990 as the Special Assistant to the President at the American University in Cairo. After his stint in Egypt he became the Director of Government Relations for International Bechtel, Inc., in Kuwait.
Upon completing his master’s degree at Stanford University and his doctorate at the University of Oxford, he took a faculty position in the Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations at Brigham Young University. He also served as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Utah Valley University.
He is the author of the book Classical Foundations of Islamic Educational Thought, a part of BYU’s Islamic Translation Series. Some of his other publications can be found in such academic journals as International Review of Education, Comparative Education, Compare, the Comparative Education Review, Middle East Affairs Journal, and the Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction.

Posted August 2010

OUR CENTURY

One day, at or near the close of the twentieth century, my son Todd made a comment about that century, the one many of us spent the bulk of our lives in (therefore it’s “our” century), remarking that it was in so many ways a dark century. I suspect that in terms of world-wide destruction, no period has seen more bloodshed. The harnessing of nuclear energy seems more of a bane than a boon so far. Mentioning this in Church one Sunday, I unleashed varied reactions. Maybe I can articulate my views a little more clearly here than I did there.

It’s true that the philosophy that excludes God is not new. The atheist and anti-Christ are concomitants of every century and every society, but I believe I perceive a historical movement that has all the earmarks of organization and sequential empire-building. The Middle Ages seem, from our perspective at least, a bit chaotic, from both the light and dark viewpoints. Step by step, though, we know the Lord was moving toward the restoration. The reformers were all a part of His plan. Satan too was gathering his forces and resources, not the least of which was the notion advanced by Pope Gregory I when he borrowed certain anthropomorphic and zoomorphic characteristics from sundry pagan deities that gave the devil a somewhat bizarre identity among fundamentalists (horns, hooves, tail, smell, etc). In an unenlightened, benighted Middle Ages, this concept of the evil one may have served to identify him as evil and as an entity to be avoided, but time and enlightenment would expose the lie in his zoomorphic characteristics, and if an enlightened populace can reject the traditional trappings, they can also reject the entire concept of a devil with a real existence. The poet Baudelaire once remarked that “The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he does not exist.”

The nineteenth century gave us the restoration, but about the time Joseph Smith preached a new concept of God and warned that the old concepts were false, another, Friedrich Nietzsche, proclaimed simply that God was dead. As I acknowledged earlier, there’s nothing new in this, but Nietzsche had an audience. He came in the wake of Darwin, whose theory of natural selection and the notion that we are all products of heredity and environment plays neatly into the hands of Nietzsche’s followers. Auguste Comte’s positivism, which exalts science (the entity that can provide humanity’s panacea by discovering ways to control heredity and environment), evolves into other brief philosophies and everything seems to wind up in the epidemic triumph of existentialism, an atheistic philosophy that swept our century.

What we have in the twentieth century then (as I see it, of course), is a building toward a showdown. There is much of polarization in the great scientific enlightenment of our twentieth century, much (certainly not all) of which rejects the spiritual dimension of life. A much less spectacular factor in our century is the growth of the Kingdom, the stone cut without hands that is rolling and gathering size and momentum that the world does not recognize. This too is a part of our twentieth century, and it is the light. It has made strides at least as phenomenal as the dark, and there is much good in the very elements the devil uses to advance his cause. He uses television, internet, electricity, radio, mechanical advances—everything, in fact, that the Lord uses to propagate the truth—and he even tries to duplicate the workings of the Spirit for his lies. So our century is a marvelous admixture of light and dark.

COMPETITION IN THE WORLD

I am persuaded that the world we live in is not what the Lord originally planned for His children. I look for a world where there is universal trust, love, fellowship, and goodness. I have not seen such a world. The Lord has suggested that the terrestrial condition is glorious beyond our imagination, and since I can easily imagine a world far more agreeable than this one, I must conclude that better things are possible even within our present telestial circumstance. History seems to repeat itself as we practice predacity (predatoriness—both are legitimate words, even if my spell-checker doesn’t recognize either of them, but predacity is shorter) and selfishness, with civilization falling, disintegrating, and disappearing all about us. Destruction of our own system in this great nation is, according to prophecy, only a matter of time. Why? The Lord is constant, unchanging in His righteousness, and of His dominions there is no end. Why may we not expect some of that rich stability, if we are His?

We have distanced ourselves from Him, and He is therefore unable to give us all that He intended. We choose not to receive it, and indeed fail to grasp the concept of the superior system that would give us access to peace, harmony, and trust. We perhaps doubt that such a world exists. Is it possible to walk so long in a winter wasteland that we doubt the coming of spring? Or that spring ever was?

Where did it start? God gave Adam a different system, a different world at the beginning. Adam was obliged to abandon that system when he left the Garden, and perhaps that was the beginning of predacity. In the Edenic harmony, I doubt that predacity prevailed. I suspect that the millennial world we glimpse in Isaiah’s prophetic poetry, when God’s children, walking in the light of the Lord, shall beat swords into pruning hooks, and shall learn war no more, when the cow and the bear shall feed while their young lie down together and the lion eats straw like the ox, is much closer to what the Lord intended when He put us here. No one blames the lioness that kills the wart hog to sustain her own life and feed her young. Nature teems with species of life that depend for their sustenance on the ruthless ability to prey upon another species. We can’t blame them, but need we imitate them?

How do we imitate? I suspect that we have lived so long with predacity that it has become commonplace. We are still capable of mild outrage when it goes beyond the norms we have come to accept, but we have gone so far in certain cases as to glorify it. What are competitive games but the reflex of the predatory world about us? Consider the innocuous game of chess. It is a war game, played with symbolic warriors whose objective is to kill. We regard the Romans’ treatment of gladiator slaves as barbaric, yet we continue the basic format, countenancing competitive sports that cast a thin disguise over the concept. How far-removed are football and boxing from the rules followed by the gladiators?

We seem to believe in the world of competition. There is no dearth of defenders who will laud the sports arenas as builders of character. We organize and effect beauty pageants that pit young women, whose attributes they can scarcely take credit for, against each other. I know the argument that defends the practice as an opportunity for well-formed maidens to demonstrate other skills that enhance their physical attributes, but what growth comes from the competition?

I know that by now I have made myself quite offensive to a great many, who probably suspect that I am an utter wimp who never knew the thrill of combat, never understood the glory of victory, and probably never raised his voice to cheer a favored team. I’m afraid it isn’t really like that. What I am is a person who has felt all of those things. I have competed—I confess, with less success than many of you—in many sports. I have played a great deal of basketball and football, and engaged in wrestling, and I have enjoyed it all. I have lost my voice in my frenzied zeal to urge victory upon my favored team. I have even felt the exhilaration of victory, personal and collective. But my introspective character always forces questions upon me. When I am victorious, at whose expense do I achieve victory? And why must my victory always spell defeat for a fellow human being, a friend, a brother? And why must I ever make another man my foe?

I am not advocating a revolution. I’m not that ambitious. But maybe we can contemplate the possibility that there is a better method, a better guidepost for us than competition, and work slowly to discover what might replace and eventually surpass the joys of competitive encounters. I don’t pretend to know how to do it, but I have a personal experience that suggests something to me.

One of my sons loves sports. The other is quite indifferent to them. With the one, I used to play basketball with some frequency. When he was fourteen, a lad from Mexico came to live with us, and we would play together, the three of us. Both young men were adept and agile, but at that point, I could still win against them consistently. Then the Mexican lad went back home, and my son (Shawn) and I didn’t play together for a couple of years. On a 24th of July, my son-in-law arranged for a group of us to meet at his ward cultural hall for a game or two. Shawn was by then sixteen, and when we divided up for a three-on-three skirmish, we wound up on opposite teams, guarding each other. I discovered what two years can do in the development of a youngster. My discovery led me to the humiliating conclusion that I would never beat him again. But the amazing thing in that experience was that I felt no humiliation. I was more exhilarated in my son’s progress than any win of mine could have achieved. And I love to win. Defeat offers no comfort to me. Why, then, did I exult with the other team’s victory? Easy answer: Shawn had a great deal to do with their success, and my love for him was greater than my need to win. His sturdy development, his progress, meant more than my own ability.

The system God gave Adam is probably the circumstance we will return to when the Lord comes again. I can’t imagine a predatory Garden of Eden. We can glimpse a return to the Garden in Isaiah as he describes the world of Christ’s coming:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

The goal must be to build the Lord’s kingdom. When the vision of that glorious necessity dawns upon us fully, we will be able to exult in every person’s ability to contribute and we will rejoice in everyone’s talents without resentment or concern that they may exceed our own. Our personal growth will not depend on our ability to ascend over a foe; there will be no need to prove superiority, but the impetus for growth will come from our desire to be the best we can be in order to contribute to the growth and welfare of everyone.

PERSONAL

Joseph Smith had an experience so transcendentally sublime, so sacred, that he probably felt it would be best to savor that moment in silence and solitude, but he could not. We may have similar moments, probably never so supernal as his, but deeply personal and sacred, which we protect from public scrutiny that might include ridicule, holding them too sacred to put on display. That is appropriate and proper, and we are free to make that choice. Joseph, however, did not have that luxury; he was, with his vision, also called as a prophet, and was compelled to share his story and let the world know it should receive it. He could not choose to protect himself from ridicule, or protect the sacredness of the experience with his silence.

I can make the choice to protect the details, but I too am compelled to share testimony of the results of those moments in my life. I can tell you, and the world at large, that God lives, and I must never deny that He knows me by name. I bear witness of it. I know my Savior. I hope to know Him better. My acquaintance can improve. I hope it does, every day, but I am grateful that at this moment, I know Him. He is Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the world. I love Him, and have felt His love. I bear that witness in His name.

I also bear witness of the reality of the spiritual dimension of mortal experience. If I say “I know” that God lives, “I know” that the Book of Mormon is true, or that the Church is true, am I arrogating to myself a knowledge I cannot prove? What I know is that I needn’t prove it as I would be obliged to prove a scientific theory. I do not know it as I know that, in a base-10 system, two plus two equals four; I know it because the spiritual world is as real as the one that relies so heavily, or perhaps exclusively, upon the five senses. I know it because the Spirit is real, and I have had the Spirit’s confirmation. What has been revealed to me is true. The Church, as revealed and established by the prophet Joseph, is indeed true.

POSTSCRIPT

Why do we feel the urge to “testify” that the Church is “true?” What is so necessary about “witnessing” that the Book of Mormon is a ”true” book? What, incidentally, is a “false” book as opposed to a “true” one? I don’t sense any personal requirement to answer those questions, but I do acknowledge personal need to speak of, or “bear testimony” of my own conviction, notwithstanding the fact that bearing testimony has its confrontational aspects, and I detest confrontation.

Confrontational? How? As a point of departure for that assertion, an example:

Without having been in the recent High Priests group meeting on a particular Sunday when a very well-respected friend of mine taught the lesson, and another very close and revered friend was present, I understand that the class period was consumed in an effort to absorb all the teacher intended to convey regarding his disrespect and severe criticism of Richard Bushman’s book, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. As I have already confessed, I was not there to protest, but from all I can gather from the information that dribbles down to me, the teacher, whose intellect I have always admired, must not have read the same book I had read by that author and under that same title. The one I read was admirable in every substantial way. Bushman’s approach—scholarly, historical, thorough and inclusive—drew me closer to the Prophet as a human being, a man called out of obscurity to restore Christ’s Church, notwithstanding incredible challenges—rejection, persecution, false accusations, not to mention severe limitations in his educational, economic, and social circumstances. How can one read Bushman’s work with even minimal objectivity without occasionally pondering the question, “How is it remotely possible for anyone with Joseph Smith’s limitations to accomplish all he managed in one foreshortened lifetime?”

Bushman never interrupts his narrative to “bear testimony;” in fact, he reacts to that absurd expectation, given the scholarly venue he has adopted. (The article I quote from is one printed in the Deseret News “Mormon Times” section for Thursday, January 21, 2010. Its title: “Critics Couldn’t Touch Nibley’s Faith.”) The article quotes Bushman’s lecture honoring the centennial of Hugh W. Nibley’s birth and his monumental contributions, noting that Nibley took arguments against Joseph Smith and turned them around. “Nibley wanted to change the intellectual agenda. . . . He apparently came to the conclusion that vindication of the Prophet before authenticating his work was the wrong tactic. . . . and so we have the anomaly: Nibley battling ferociously to demonstrate the historical validity of the Book of Mormon, and yet apparently subordinating historical inquiry to a little-mentioned realm of faith that hardly ever entered his public discourse.”

The article goes on: “Bushman understands this anomaly and runs into it when he speaks to Mormon audiences about the history of Joseph Smith. Often someone will ask him to bear his testimony. ‘I am a little put off by this question,’ Bushman said. ‘The whole story of the Prophet, as I relate it, is a testimony of the truth.’ But Bushman said behind the request for a testimony performance is the real question: ‘All right, you have proven yourself to be a scholar . . . now we want to know if you are one of us . . . use our kind of speech and show yourself to be a brother as well as a scholar.’ To Bushman, however, it would be like having an attorney who is representing the LDS Church in court suddenly bear his testimony of President Thomas S. Monson to prove his point. It would have the opposite effect. Even though the testimony may be the lawyer’s deepest conviction, it is presented in the wrong venue and is connected to the wrong type of presentation.”

This is not the only kind of confrontation one can expect when he/she bears testimony. I have in mind one more personal. As a missionary, I have had many rejections, both from within the Church and from members of other faiths. If I affirm that I “know” the Church was restored as Joseph Smith said it was, I may—as has happened before—expect a reaction something like this one: “You know your church is “true,” do you? Tell me, how can you arrogate to yourself that knowledge? How can you hold a straight face and tell me you know that, knowing as you surely do that what you’re saying makes you right and me wrong?”

Even when my affirmation that includes the word “know” was, as I thought, offered gently and mildly, the reaction seemed explosive. Then, of course, I am hard-put to explain something that may never reach even minimal recognition: I do not know as I may know the accuracy and validity of a mathematical formula. I know, as I know the quality of friendship. I cannot explain how, or why, I am drawn to one individual and repulsed by another, neither of whom I perhaps know well, but it happens, and I would misrepresent myself and my feelings if I represented it otherwise. (I concede, the prudent measure would perhaps be to withhold any comment,) But when I speak of the Church, I must acknowledge a conviction. I can try to explain that there is a world beyond this sphere of physical perception. Intuitive? Perhaps intuition is related. But there is a spiritual world, not usually perceived with the senses we rely on here. If I have received something I cannot deny from a source I cannot see, I must acknowledge it, because I have received it. I must acknowledge my conviction that Joseph Smith’s mission was divine; the Church he was the instrument in restoring is also divine. Its management is entrusted to us mortals, and therefore may not always appear divine, since our imperfections may well obscure the Church’s true nature, but my conviction must stand, because it is as real as my need to take nourishment, to rest, to exercise, to breathe, to associate with family and friends, and to communicate.

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Born in Mesa, Arizona, Harold K. Moon has lived in varied circumstances and far-flung places. He spent several years pursuing university credentials, earning a BA and MA at BYU and a PhD at Syracuse University, and serving his church as a missionary. He then spent the bulk of his life teaching Spanish (occasionally French) at BYU. The happy husband of Mayva Magleby and the doting father of nine noble and productive children, he now enjoys the fictitious leisure of retirement in Orem, Utah.

“During my professional career,” he writes, “I often felt that I lived in a house divided. I loved, believed in, and practiced scholarship, publishing numerous articles (I don’t remember the number, which is unimportant anyway), books (three, as I recall) pertinent to my fields of study, and textbooks (at least two). But I was inexorably drawn by the tug of creativity, publishing a volume of short stories, four novels, and several poems and stories that appeared in various magazines. At least one more novel is still in gestation, and unpublished poems are strewn about my none-too-tidy office. Some of these promise to be collected in a single volume to be published (it is hoped—and expected) before I draw my last breath. I wrote a few plays (unpublished), directed and presented many plays by Spanish authors and one of my own. I read numerous papers, and generally enjoyed the dialogue of professional commitment.”

Posted August 2010

I believe in true religion and true science, and I am grateful that the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints allows me to be intellectually honest in my profession of both. More specifically, I am thankful that our religion professes no doctrine that requires me to ignore scientific facts that I know to be true, and that my understanding of science requires me to accept no observations that would controvert my religious beliefs. In fact, when I scrutinize the fundamental tenets of both sources of truth, I continue to see areas that testify of each other.

I am sitting at my desk at my home in Lafayette, Indiana, a rather ordinary college town in a rather ordinary part of the western hemisphere of a beautiful blue planet we call earth. This earth is located ~93 million miles from a rather ordinary star that we have named the sun, and this ordinary star is located ~2/3 of the way toward the outer edge of an ordinary galaxy comprised of roughly 100 billion stars that we call the Milky Way. And as I understand astronomy, our Milky Way galaxy is thought to be just one of ~100 billion galaxies that comprise our universe, which according to some astrophysicists is just one of many universes. The Lord has said, “And worlds without number have I created” (Moses 1:33), …“And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning of thy creations” (Moses 7:30). In these important basic descriptions of our universe, there is surprising congruence between science and religion, and in fact, they testify of each other. And this agreement is especially comforting, given the meager understanding of our universe that existed at the time that this modern scripture was revealed to Joseph Smith.

How was this universe created? Religious scripture does not pretend to be a scientific document and consequently does not comment on physical mechanisms. Science, in contrast, does not inform us who formed the universe, but it does describe its sudden beginning from a “singularity” of infinite density and temperature with a “big bang” ~13.6 billion years ago. At that point, the universe began to expand and cool rapidly, generating the elements and ultimately the celestial bodies that comprise our universe today. Not only does this sudden beginning testify of the involvement of a supreme being, but the rate of expansion of the universe also adds remarkably to this affirmation. Thus, as stated by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, and as quoted by Francis Collins in his book The Language of God, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it reached its present size.” “On the other hand, if the rate of expansion had been greater by even one part in a million, stars and planets could not have been able to form.” Since the resulting probability that our universe does exist is actually the product of the above two probabilities, “the existence of the universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability.” Thus, I feel very comfortable in professing a belief that God created this universe. I am also satisfied that a God who would pay as much attention to detail during creation of the universe as the above calculations require, would not allow formation of man to occur by accident, nor would he permit the subsequent happenings in his universe, including events in our personal lives, to escape his attention.

One need not be a scientist to appreciate the miracle of the birth, growth, and death of all life forms, and the remarkable ability of man to think, plan, create, love, serve, and follow spiritual promptings. However, as a biochemist, I see even greater evidence for divine involvement in our creation in the workings of a living cell. Thus, I find it scientifically difficult to imagine how unguided lightning, heat, and light in a primordial atmosphere could have generated the necessary concentrations of the required amino acids, nucleotide bases, and sugars, etc. from free ammonia, carbon dioxide, oxygen and other gases, to form life, and that these basic building blocks could have in turn reacted spontaneously in the unique proportions and sequences required to form the hundreds of complex proteins, enzymes, and nucleic acids that would have eventually assembled into the highly organized supramolecular complexes required for even the simplest of life forms—and all this in the face of entropic forces that would have relentlessly acted to force disintegration of the same materials. However, once an intact self-replicating cell equipped with the proper molecules, supramolecular complexes, and organelles was assembled and placed in a proper environment, I have no problem envisioning a divinely guided evolutionary process by which this living cell could have led to all life forms found now and formerly on this earth. Indeed, I consider the process of evolution to be an ingenious strategy for creating the diversity, complexity, and balance in life that fits so well into the multitude of niches and environments on this beautiful planet.

I also find death easier to comprehend when viewed with the aid of religion than I do from a purely scientific perspective. At the instant of death, a person’s biochemistry can be as functional as it was before death. Biomolecules, organelles, cells, tissues, and even organs are generally as biochemically capable of sustaining life seconds after a person’s passing as they were immediately prior to his/her passing and can often be used by a living recipient in need of a functional component. However, something departs an organism at the instant of death that leaves it lifeless, even when death is caused by “old age.” Were death totally biochemical, I would have expected a gradual aging process to lead to a gradual dimming of consciousness, rather than an instantaneous loss of vitality as we know it to be. However, like the removal of a hand from a glove, true religion tells us that departure of the spirit from the body lies at the root of its sudden lifelessness.

While I could continue to describe many observations that allow me to believe firmly in the gospel of Jesus Christ while remaining honest as a scientist, I would prefer to comment briefly on why I believe we will never find a verifiable proof of religious beliefs. We learn in the scriptures that faith is a major power that can motivate people to do good (see Hebrews 11). Faith can heal the sick, it can move mountains, it can encourage great achievement, and it constitutes a major component of priesthood power. Indeed, our Savior has repeatedly commanded us to exercise faith and, therefore, we must assume that to emulate Him, we must develop this divine attribute. Because faith cannot arise where proof is present, it seems obvious that we will never find verifiable evidence of the divinity of Jesus Christ or of His resurrection. We will also never discover a stone with the inscription, “Welcome to the City of Zarahemla,” nor will life after death ever be scientifically verifiable. In brief, God will never rob us of the opportunity to develop faith, but instead will provide us with trials and uncertainties that, if acted upon with minimal faith, will lead to growth of our faith. Thus, I believe that any quest for a scientific proof of religion will be futile. Instead, God may provide us with sufficient evidence to enable us to believe, if we desire to do so, but will never provide the scientific proof that would eliminate our need to develop faith.

Finally, I wish to state my firm conviction that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is true and that it is designed to bring us happiness both in this earth life and in the life to come. The principles that Christ and his apostles taught, including that we should love and serve our fellowmen, avoid judging others, be honest in our dealings, forgive those who transgress against us, do unto others as we would have others do unto us, be faithful and kind to our spouse and family, and provide for the poor and less fortunate, etc. constitute the soundest principles for happiness on this earth, even in the absence of any hope for a life to come. However, it is also my firm testimony that our lives are eternal and that this wondrous blue planet, ~2/3 of the way toward the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy, was created so that we might prepare ourselves to enjoy an eternity with our Father in Heaven.

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Dr. Philip S. Low (www.chem.purdue.edu/low/) received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1975 and joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he is currently the Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, in 1976.

Dr. Low has published nearly three hundred refereed articles on various topics, including 1) the structure and function of the human erythrocyte membrane, 2) signal transduction across plant plasma membranes, and 3) design and development of receptor-targeted imaging and therapeutic agents for cancer and inflammatory diseases.

Dr. Low currently serves on four editorial boards and several external advisory boards for major institutions. He has received both of Purdue University’s awards for outstanding research, an NIH Merit Award, and several national and international research awards. He has organized multiple international/national conferences and chaired two Gordon Conferences. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998.

Dr. Low’s research into receptor-targeted therapeutic and imaging agents has led to more than thirty US patents/patents pending, and development of these patents has yielded five targeted drugs that are currently undergoing human clinical trials for kidney, ovarian, breast, lung, brain, and endometrial cancers. He has founded a company called Endocyte Inc. based on this latter technology.

Posted August 2010

As a fifth-generation Latter-day Saint, I am Mormon through and through. Yet others, with similar ancestry, have broken their chains of believers and chosen to reject the faith of their fathers. Why not me? The answer begins with the respect I had for my parents. Their faith was expressed and taught to their children by their way of life, not by persistent pedagogy. The basic pattern of Mormon life, which they wholly exemplified, was all-encompassing, invigorating, and sustaining. It was also sometimes challenging as I became more widely exposed to competing life styles. The “Mormon way,” however, never failed me through those questioning years and has since proved its worth as a satisfying and rewarding way of life.

But I am not just a cultural Mormon. Mormonism has offered me more than a mode of living or a specific value system. Within its theology are intellectual and spiritual perplexities that beckon the inquiring mind and spirit. Intellectually it offers the seeker a new system of religious truths, many of which challenge conventional Christian dogma and thus create endless paths of inquiry and study. For the religious purist who brooks no human lapses in those who lead the faith, Mormon history also offers challenges. It is at this point, as I learned early on, that for understanding and commitment, the serious inquirer must heed Pope’s injunction: “A little learning is a dangerous thing;/ Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:/ There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/ And drinking largely sobers us again.” My professional study of LDS history and the development of Mormonism as a religion has proven that the more one studies in these religious realms, the more intellectually consistent and spiritually energizing they become. What often appear as human frailties or misjudgments have understandable explanations when viewed in a broad historical context. And the Mormon focus on the importance of eternal marriage, well ordered families, moral living, continuing revelation, and priesthood authority, as well as world-wide proselytizing, has eternal consequences often ridiculed and clearly not understood within the liberal and generally skeptical milieu in which these are taught and lived by practicing Mormons. Agency is the watchword of mortality and faith is a liberating choice. Through my faith in the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ I have found meaning and purpose in this life and hope and anticipation for the next. Instead of demanding answers now, I look forward to experiencing the complete unfolding of God’s plan for His children. A random, purposeless universe is anathema to me.

When I was fourteen, my grandfather, a patriarch, gave me a patriarchal blessing. I was told that I would never doubt Joseph Smith’s first vision, given to him also at the age of fourteen, in which he learned the nature of the Godhead, the reality of Satan, and the imminence of a new gospel dispensation, which he in time was designated to inaugurate. The reality of that vision is the foundation of Mormonism, and despite both inconsequential and serious questionings over my lifetime, I have never doubted that reality. It is the substance of my faith. God works through his human creatures to effect his purposes, and, despite our weaknesses, we are the stewards of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Because of the strength of its truth and the enduring faith of its followers, of which I am one, it will persist, despite its adversaries. “By seeing the blessings of the temple rolling on, and the kingdom increasing and spreading from sea to sea,” Joseph Smith told the women of the Church in 1842, who had suffered much at the hands of their adversaries, “we will rejoice that we were not overcome by these foolish things.” This I believe, and I can testify that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored and that prophets once again stand at the head of His church. How grateful I am that my progenitors were “in the right place at the right time,” as one early convert wrote, to hear the message of the gospel by the missionaries. How grateful I am for my own”conversion” to the Church that came from years of “drinking deep” into the Pierian spring of Mormonism.

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Carol Cornwall Madsen (Ph.D., University of Utah, 1986) is Professor Emeritus of History at Brigham Young University and retired Senior Research Historian in BYU’s Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for LDS History. Her primary areas of teaching, research, and writing are U.S., Utah, and Mormon women’s history. She is also the former associate director of the Women’s Research Institute at BYU.

She is the author of more than fifty articles on Utah and LDS women’s history (six of them award-winning), the co-editor of two compilations of talks from the BYU Women’s Conferences (As Women of Faith and A Heritage of Faith) and of New Scholarship on Latter-day Saint Women in the Twentieth Century, and the author of In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo; Journey to Zion: Voices from the Mormon Trail; Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896; Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary; and An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870-1920 (which won three best book awards). She was a historical consultant and participant on seven historical productions for PBS and KJZZ-TV (e.g., Trail of Hope, An American Prophet, Women Vote in the West, and The Joseph Smith Papers). For her lifetime achievement, Professor Madsen was inducted as a Fellow by the Utah State Historical Society, and she served as the president of the Mormon History Association from 1989-1990. She is currently working on a second biography of Emmeline B. Wells (the fifth general president of the Relief Society), focusing this time on President Wells’s private and church life. She is also co-editing a documentary history of the Relief Society, covering the years 1842 through 1892.

Professor Madsen is married to the Salt Lake City attorney Gordon A. Madsen, who is also Senior Editor of the Legal Papers portion of the Joseph Smith Papers Project sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are the parents of six children and the grandparents of twelve grandchildren. She has worked in all the auxiliaries of the Church—but mainly in the Relief Society, as stake leader, ward president, and teacher. She has directed several ward choirs, is a former member of the Church’s hosting committee (assigned to visitors from the Middle East), and currently teaches eight-year-olds in the Primary. With her husband, she guides Church history tours in the United States, Great Britain, and Israel.

Posted August 2010

MY TESTIMONY IN RELATION TO MY SCHOLARSHIP

INTRODUCTION

Regarding my testimony and its interaction with my professional life, I will present three major segments. First, I will give my personal testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ—essentially why I believe what I believe. The second segment details how my experiences as a teacher are related to my testimony. Finally, the last segment is an argument against those who believe that science can disprove religious beliefs.

MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST

My testimony is simple. I know that there is a supreme being, a God, or our Heavenly Father. I know that his son, Jesus Christ, is the Savior of the world. I know that his Atonement happened and is vital for each of us. The Atonement is a comprehensive word for his suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross and his subsequent resurrection. This Atonement is the key to our overcoming physical death and overcoming the spiritual death or our own separation from God due to our choices, attitudes, and actions. These two barriers that keep us from God are impenetrable for each of us without the Savior. I know that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I know that, as in ages past, He has spoken and speaks to men in our days. One such man was the Prophet Joseph Smith. Another such man is a current prophet, a man named Thomas S. Monson. I know that both of these men are prophets of God. I also know that both the Bible and the Book of Mormon are true scriptures written by other prophets of God throughout the ages. Knowing that Joseph Smith and Thomas S. Monson are prophets also lets me know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is indeed God’s church on earth. Two very natural questions arising from these statements are “How do you know these things?” and “How can you be sure?”

HOW I KNOW

The answer here is also simple, but many, I fear, will look beyond the mark or think that it’s just too simple. However, just as in mathematics, the more simple the solution, often the more elegant and profound it really is. In religious matters too, the more simple the answers, the more profound they often really are. I took only a few simple steps which have led me to this knowledge. These steps are (1) faith, (2) prayer, (3) listening, (4) living it, and finally (5) observing.

Several years ago, I realized I had a desire to find out more about God and religion. At that point I had (1) faith in a supreme being. This belief was almost a decision, but also it was a feeling. Looking back now, I know it was based on faith. I felt that there was a God. I had learned that if one prayed to God (see James 1:5 or, in the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:3-5) that he would answer your prayers. So when I decided to find out if Jesus Christ was the Son of God and our Savior, I (2) prayed and, when doing so, I felt calm, peace, happy, assured,… feelings that I have come to recognize as coming from the Holy Ghost (or the Spirit, see Galatians 3:5). I have had similar experiences praying about whether the Book of Mormon and the Bible were the words of God and whether Joseph Smith and Thomas S. Monson are indeed prophets of God.

I (3) listened to these feelings and believed that they were an answer from God. But more than this, I (4) started living the Christian principles taught in the scriptures and by the prophets. As I have tried to live these principles (with varying degrees of success—I am by no means perfect), I (5) observed what happened (see John 7:17). The results of my living these principles solidified my belief, and it grew to knowledge (see, in the Book of Mormon, Alma chapter 32). As I have lived the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ taught in the Book of Mormon, in the Bible, and by modern prophets such as Thomas S. Monson and Joseph Smith, I have come to know that this gospel is the doctrine of God.

MY EXPERIENCES AS A TEACHER AND MY TESTIMONY

How have my years of teaching experience and my higher learning about education interacted with my testimony? (1) Faith is closely related to hope. Both provide a focus or an end in sight. Successful teachers know that they often need to give their students a reason for why they are learning a particular topic. When I give my students good reasons (or if they have already acquired these good reasons from other sources), they usually succeed. They (3) listen to their brain’s reasoning, saying “(4) Engage in the material,” and pretty soon they start to engage in the material. That is, they (4) start to live the principles of the discipline that the teacher is teaching. Once they engage in these principles of this discipline, they (5) begin to observe what has happened and they see the power of the discipline. These realizations strengthen their initial faith in the discipline.

For example, I teach math to future elementary teachers (some of whom struggle at math). One principle about learning mathematics is engaging in the material. If you engage in the material enough, you might fail at times but, overall, you will learn. Many students who struggle at math just give up way too soon.

I have seen students who “struggle at math” suddenly start succeeding. Why? Well, these pre-service elementary teachers already have a reason to try. They know they need to understand math to teach it effectively later. But, many doubt their ability to learn math. So their faith is shaken. Yet, time and time again I have seen these students suddenly start having success in my classes.

The key to my method is that I attack their belief that they can’t succeed. When they start having (1) hope and faith that they can succeed, good things happen. Based on this hope and faith, (3) they begin to believe in themselves just enough to (4) actually start studying differently. Now, with this new attitude, when they miss a part here and there, they (4) start sticking to it, they persevere rather than give up. The eventual result is . . . learning mathematics. As my students start having success, they (5) observe what is happening and are shocked. Their whole mindset of how they think of themselves and mathematics has been fundamentally shifted. Now they realize that they can learn mathematics. Their faith and hope has been made sure and solidified. Faith and hope have morphed into knowledge and confidence. Of course, what often happens in these situations is that these students also start to like mathematics. That is, they begin to see the power that mathematics has in changing their power of reasoning (the essence of mathematics’ power).

A quick side note about education and the gospel.

Another aspect about gospel of Jesus Christ that I have learned over the years, which has been influenced by my educational training, is the importance of the simplicity of the gospel. In education, and in mathematics too, the simpler solutions are the most powerful and when you get down to it, they are the most elegant. Consider these quotes from famous mathematicians.

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. S. Gudder

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until
I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length. Carl Friedrich Gauss

As an educator, I am constantly revamping my lessons to try to deliver the content in a more compact, efficient manner. I am continuously seeking for better ways to teach the concepts. Of course, many of the concepts are complicated, but only until they are understood. Then the simplicity stares out at you and you wonder, “Why didn’t I see that before?” Many times the simplest concepts, once understood, are immensely powerful. They are applicable to many different situations and problems.

Similarly, as I’ve studied the gospel and understood it more and more, I see that it is based on simple principles and standards. They are easy to understand but powerful. In religious aspects, many adults look beyond the mark. We see the simplicity of the gospel and think that we want to see the mysteries of the gospel. We hear a “do this” or “don’t do that” and think “that’s too easy”. We act like Naaman (see 2nd Kings chapter 5). But our Heavenly Father’s gospel is not one of complexity; it is one of simplicity and one of power. “God would indeed be unjust if the gospel were only accessible to an intellectual elite. In His goodness, He has ensured that the truths regarding God are understandable to all His children, whatever their level of education or intellectual faculty.” (Gérald Caussé, “Even a Child Can Understand,” Ensign, Nov 2008, 32–34). Remember, who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven? (See Matthew 18:1, 2-4). For example, consider the power of the very simple concept called faith. It’s a simple concept once understood, but the power of it is huge. Faith can and has moved mountains. I know that it has moved me closer to God and helped make me a better person.

MATHEMATICS AND SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD

Many claim that truths or well-established theories from science, such as evolution or the increasing understanding of the universe, can disprove that God exists or other issues of religion. As a mathematician, I reject this notion wholeheartedly. On the contrary, I can use what I know of mathematics, one of the necessary bases of all science itself, to prove that this approach is a fallacy. So let me back up this bold claim.

All of mathematics is based on assumptions. This may be a surprise to those who have only common understandings of mathematics, but it is nonetheless true. Ask a mathematician if you don’t believe me. Geometry is a typical part of mathematics where one comes face to face with such assumptions. Postulates are mathematical words for assumptions. The five postulates of Euclid (and the subsequent work by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century geometers to fix them) are a fascinating part of the history of mathematics related to the interplay between assumptions and mathematics. For example, one of Euclid’s base assumptions is logically equivalent to making this statement: “Parallel lines exist.” This seems like a pretty safe statement to make. After all, we all believe this is true. “They must exist. Don’t they?” This is an understandable reaction.

Euclid wanted to make Geometry to be based on as few postulates as possible. He generally succeeded in only using five assumptions. His fifth postulate was one that dealt with parallel lines. While this seems like a nice assumption to make (that parallel lines exist), Euclid was quite disturbed by it and tried unsuccessfully to avoid using it. For hundreds of years after Euclid, mathematicians tried and failed to prove that the fifth postulate was a result of the first four postulates and sheer logic. Finally it was proven that it was impossible to avoid using this fifth postulate.

The average person would still say, “What is the big deal? After all, I can see parallel lines. I understand the concept. I know they exist.” But, unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately, since it leads to my big result), this unwavering faith in the existence of parallel lines is questionable. What is the definition of a parallel line? One definition states that parallel lines are two lines that never intersect. However, can you really draw two such lines? How would you know they won’t ever intersect? Consider two such lines, drawn on the ground outside your house. They are drawn so that they look parallel:

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Yet, if these lines continue on the earth, they will eventually meet! How? Well, if they were longitude lines, they would meet at the North Pole, for instance! Other lines would similarly meet at some point on the earth. Perhaps space is curved too (after all Einstein believed it was). Perhaps even space is really nothing but a huge sphere. In other words, perhaps our universe is nothing but a giant sphere and a pair of lines drawn on its surface might meet at its North Pole equivalent. Other lines drawn inside might even hit the boundary and bend and then meet at the “North Pole”. All lines would meet somewhere!

Why does this matter? When mathematicians realized that that the fifth postulate might indeed be false they started looking at “What if Euclid was wrong” situations. They decided to investigate

(a) Are all the postulates there? Do more exist?

and

(b) What would happen if they assumed any of these postulates were false?

During part (b), for example, they assumed parallel lines didn’t exist and then used sheer logic to investigate what sort of theorems and Geometry emerged. They did this with all five Euclidean postulates and all the combinations of the five postulates (in yes-and-no form). This ends up being 5! or (5x4x3x2x1) or 120 different possible Geometries, only one of which is the Geometry taught and understood as true in high school. What happened? Well, several of the Geometries were complete nonsense, not fitting what we could observe in the real world. Some however, weren’t. In fact, some of the non-Euclidean geometries were internally consistent (coming from careful logic based on the assumptions) and at the same time fit many of our regular world observations. That is, some non-Euclidean Geometries actually seemed to fit the world and might be not only logically valid, but better than what we’ve assumed is the best approach for over three thousand years.

These investigations led mathematicians to a dilemma. These Geometries are logically opposites of each other in the sense that one Geometry might say that Euclid’s third postulate is true, whereas another Geometry may say it is false. Yet other than that one contradiction, the rest of each Geometry could have identical assumptions. These Geometries might end up with different theorems, but because the postulates are assumptions one could never know which Geometry is “true.” That is, belief in a particular Geometry—like, say, the one we usually teach and understand—is based on (1) faith.

Mathematicians cannot tell which of the one hundred and twenty Geometries is true. In a very real sense, all of them are valid. They are all just logical results of the initial assumptions. The famous mathematician Henri Poincare put it this way, “Geometry is not true… it’s advantageous.” So we use the Euclidean Geometry that we use today, not because it will lead us to true conclusions necessarily, but because it seems to work pretty well. We’ve (3) listened to its claims, and (4) lived using it and (5) observed what happened. Since this Geometry has worked out well, we’ve stuck with it.

The moral of this is that mathematicians have to operate on faith to a much greater extent than most people realize. That is, the very foundation of the Geometry accepted by most people is mathematics based on faith. And it is a somewhat shaky faith at that (since it’s possible that one of the other one hundred and twenty Geometries is really the best one or the true one for our world).

This scenario is even more startling in arithmetic. After their successful attempts to uncover all of the Geometry postulates (there were actually more than five postulates eventually found, and thus even more than one hundred and twenty possible Geometries), several other mathematicians tried to uncover the postulates of Arithmetic. This proved to be an extremely challenging task. Several mathematicians and logicians attempted and failed to come up with a good set of postulates. When one group would announce they had finally done it, within a few years, a huge hole in logic would be found and the hunt would begin again.

Then in the 1930s the mathematics world was shocked by the results of one Dr. Gödel. He found the following stunning result: Any set of postulates complex enough to give birth to Arithmetic would either be infinite, or it would have a contradiction built into the postulate system. This was an amazing result! Not only would mathematicians have to trust some statements, they would have to trust an infinite number of statements on sheer faith in order to logically set up the basic Arithmetic that we teach in grade school. It is possible that our understanding of Arithmetic is like Geometry, in the sense that some of these postulates that we intuitively think are true (like the parallel one) might indeed be false. That is, it is possible that an entirely different way of understanding even basic Arithmetic at a very core level is true and what we are doing is actually just false.

The results of all this, to my mind, can be summed up in a few statements. (1) All of science is based to some extent on mathematics—imagine doing science without ever using Arithmetic or Geometry. (2) Our understanding of mathematics is itself based on faith (postulates) and there is substantial reason to at least question whether the postulates we have accepted are even correct, so (3) people who base their disbelief on God on the conclusions of science are basing their disbelief of faith on . . . faith.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, as I have studied educational theory and mathematics, I have learned how to take ideas apart and look for contradictions in logic. As one does this, one either finds a flaw in the reasoning (a flaw in logic) or eventually gets down to the base assumptions. These base assumptions are undeniably true or not. One must either accept them based on faith, or reject them, also based on faith. In studying the religious ideas of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have similarly taken the ideas apart as I have learned them. While doing so I have never found any contradictions in logic. On the contrary, I have found the simple teachings to be valid and consistent. The crux of my belief is whether I believe the base assumptions: That God and His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost live, that they speak to prophets today as in times past, that the Bible and Book of Mormon are the word of God. When I have put to the test the promises (see James 1:5 or, in the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:3-5) found in the Bible and Book of Mormon and started with (1) some faith, (2) prayed for more answers and guidance, (3) listened to the answers that I recognized as coming from God, (4) lived the principles taught to me in these answers and the scriptures, and then (5) observed the results, my faith has become knowledge. I know that God lives. I know his Son is our Savior. I know that the Church has been restored. It is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is led by a living prophet, Thomas S. Monson. I know the Book of Mormon and the Bible are the words of God. For the skeptics who are reading, don’t think that this method to spiritual knowledge is too easy. When you get down to it, it is very similar to the method which has been used by teachers and mathematicians for centuries to discover truth. If you do doubt, put your doubts aside for a bit and try. Be like Naaman; give up a bit. Have faith, pray, listen, live, and observe.

Sincerely,

Your brother in Christ,

Michael Matthews

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I am Dr. Michael Matthews, a mathematician/mathematics educator at a large, urban, Midwestern university. After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a teaching certificate, I taught mathematics at a treatment facility for adjudicated youth from 1997-2003. During this time, I acquired a Master of Science in Secondary Education at the University of Nevada. After this, I pursued a Ph.D. full time at the University of Iowa. I received a second Master’s degree in Mathematics while there, and my Ph.D. in Mathematics Education in 2006, after which I acquired my current position at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I have published some theoretical research articles in teaching and learning mathematics and also some practitioner articles (written for a current-teacher audience instead of fellow researchers). My research focuses are improving content knowledge of pre-service elementary teachers, using Lesson Study in teaching, and appropriate integration of technology in mathematics teaching and learning.

Posted August 2010

Preparing for my oral and written exams for my PhD, I put myself on a rigorous schedule of reading five days a week, spending up to twelve hours daily flying through novels, poetry, and criticism, and taking notes furiously, all in an effort to fill my head with as much information as I could digest. I was amazed at how hard it was, but I was equally impressed that the brain was like a muscle and, with practice, I got stronger, more focused, and more capable of processing what I was reading in a sustained way.

I was married and had one child at the time, and I was serving in the bishopric of a singles ward. I remember that it occurred to me that the time I devoted to reading secular literature in comparison to what I was giving the sacred literature of my religion was embarrassingly disproportionate. While I had devoted at least an hour a day of study to the scriptures during my mission, I was now down to maybe a few minutes a week, and when I did read the scriptures, it was when I was exhausted, in bed, without a pencil, paper, or any other method for allowing it to make an imprint on my mind. It was then that I decided to start taking notes when I read the scriptures, a habit I have kept over the years. More importantly, I realized that I had to take my spiritual growth as seriously as I did my intellectual growth, for it is more important to be good than to be right.

As hard as it was to serve actively in the church during my graduate years and to be starting a young family, those responsibilities kept me mindful of the importance of developing my character and of creating opportunities to practice selflessness. The intellectual life can easily become an end in and of itself. The appeal of writing, indeed the very appeal of playing at ideas itself, is the temporary suspension of the self and the illusion of radical autonomy. After a good writing session in the depths of the library, I am often disappointed, although not as surprised as I used to be, how much more difficult it is to return to the work of self-reformation. If only it were as easy to reform our character as it is to correct poor grammar or edit a poorly expressed idea!

But this temporary suspension of the self is only a problem if it becomes a permanent state of mind. The playful freedom of thought and expression can provide us needed practice in formulating our selves. As we learn, we become committed to a pattern of reading and listening because we know that one good book, or a good conversation with a thoughtful friend, might be enough to find ourselves on an entirely new path of consideration that would have otherwise passed us by. This means that what we think we know is perpetually contingent, and accepting this contingency with humility is essential to any intellectually fruitful life, since it encourages us to cultivate and sustain the discipline and hard work of overturning the soils of accepted ideas. But if we are not equally serious about reforming ourselves, of pushing the limits of the contingencies of our character, and developing the discipline and hard work of overturning the soils of habit and sin, then we allow our intellectual pursuits to stand in for character. Because we have responsibilities to our own bodies and to the bodies of others, the life of the mind is not as radically free as intellectual endeavors might make it seem. When my life is grounded by committed moral action, my intellectual freedoms feel more like intimations of potentiality rather than the grounds for my radical autonomy. This means that as my discipleship has deepened, I have become more committed to obeying with exactness even though I have also become less, not more, orthodox. This is because I have better reasons to be increasingly patient with the work (and play) of thinking.

We are frequently warned against being beings of mere thought. To believe in the gospel but not to work on developing the right character, James warns, may leave us without an idea of our potential, only able to see our image in the mirror. Usually this involves either perpetual self-hatred in our disappointment of seeing our many blemishes or, in an attempt to protect our vanity, striving to see all our faults as virtues. But as James warns, if we are merely hearers of God’s word and not doers, we may end up deceived about who we are. As thoughtful, creative people, it can become far too easy to mistake the freedom of thought as the essence of who we are.

This might be a cause of some disappointment to those devoted to the intellectual life, since so much of our energies is consumed in learning how to master the art of thinking. But it is perhaps precisely because thinking about the ultimate reality of things is an art and not a science that we need not assume that the content of our thinking is more important than the content of our character. We are at play with ideas. It is serious play, to be sure, but it is the nature of conscious, deliberate, and critical thought to be amenable to new questions and new information, for our perception of the truth to be dependent on the quality of our imagination and expression, and to seek dialogue and engagement with others. Scholarly inquiry, in other words, is not the work of declaration but of exploration, a willingness to test ideas against the backdrop of what we, in our feeble and limited ways, might imagine to be the totality of all that can be known.

Of course, it is difficult to contextualize scholarly inquiry in this way without some trust in something that approximates the idea of God, which is one reason why being a believing scholar has never seemed to me to be a contradiction. To be a scholar without any capacity to trust or believe in such totality means that our certainty of the nature of things only extends as far as our latest idea. This can be a formula for the worst kind of secular dogmatism. Belief in God, for me, however, has never meant license to believe one is already in possession of that ultimacy, a license for religious dogmatism. Instead it is cause for a constant reconsideration of the contingencies of my own understandings.

I mean to suggest that belief, or what we might rightly call faith, does not give us license to oversponsor what we know, to triumphantly announce a hypertrophic testimony of the nature of all things. Secular and sacred knowledge alike give us reason to be humble in our declarations of what we have witnessed. I do not mean that we shouldn’t declare what we know, only that what we know should be honestly and humbly offered.

Curiously, when it comes to things of which I am most confident, I have little or no scholarly wisdom to offer. I only have experience. Which is why I believe that experience teaches more powerfully than any amount of reading and writing, any amount of scholarly exchange, because it does far more than transmit information. Instead it transforms our being, penetrates us into the very recesses of our consciousness, and presses the limits of our capacity to describe and convey to others. This is true of all experience, which is why we struggle to find adequate words to give proper account of a life, a week or a day in the life of one human existence. But it is especially true of those experiences that penetrate us most deeply, that shake us to our roots, and cause us almost to step outside of experience altogether and gain that rare and precious opportunity to see ourselves as we truly are or as we can truly become. All spiritual experiences, I believe, have this as their end: true repentance. And repentance cannot be meaningful or lasting if it isn’t instigated by a clear vision of what we can become and by a belief that such potential is within our reach.

For this kind of understanding, we are dependent on God. It cannot be generated by anything other than His spirit. These experiences can begin with a book, with a conversation with a friend, but they can also come from experiences in the wilderness atop a mountain or in the quiet of our own bedroom. The point is that they are experiences, not doses of information about the truth. Because of such experiences, I have come to trust some things to be true, and over the years that trust has yielded a confidence so strong, I would call it knowledge. These, then, are the things that I know to be true:

1) When I humble myself in sincere pleadings with God, I find my best self. In so doing I find the power to keep up the hard work of unfolding this true self to the world. Life is a competition between this unfolding and the concealment of light and goodness in our souls that comes from selfishness, sin, and pride. Sincere prayer is real conversation with God that yields real power.

2) I know that when I read the scriptures with a similarly earnest desire to improve myself, to hear the Lord speaking to me, I have an experience with the text that is uniquely self-transforming, as if the words become a part of my soul, as if I had heard them before. This I believe is the workings of the spirit, the annealing power of Christ’s atonement, the price by which every word of the Lord was paid. While I have found God’s truth in many books, only his revealed word has that power to change me.

3) I know that when I serve others, I move beyond the limitations of a tired habitual sense of self and purpose and begin to feel potentiality in me, a movement toward a new kind of being that is also a return to what I have always been. We seek to be most genuinely ourselves and yet we only discover that authenticity in service and worship because that is where we find the power to be transformed. A spiritual life depends on our willingness to believe we are on God’s errand, surrounded by, living with, and serving those who need us.

4) I have had the singular benefit in my life of experiencing repentance many times and in many ways. I have never found obedience to be entirely easy, nor have I arrived yet at that moment where even the very thought of sin causes me to shake in fear. I have thought at times, when the spirit of forgiveness has fallen upon me like a hard rain, that perhaps I had arrived at that blessed state, but alas, the habits of thought, of the heart, and of body return, and I am back again on the quest for a more perfect and permanent transformation into a new creature in Christ. At times this perpetual need for repentance has been discouraging, as if I keep circling around the same problems with little or no progress, but I have come to understand that sins are manifold in their nature just as are strengths, and sometimes changing circumstances require another examination in the mirror, another attempt to chisel away at the old self, and an even stronger commitment to do what is right in God’s eyes. If it weren’t for my weaknesses, I would have never learned such dependence on God.

There are two organizing principles to these things I have stated that I know. First, and most important, is that all of this knowledge points to Jesus Christ as my Redeemer and Savior. It is his saving grace that heals me when I am in sin and am weak, that provides me with the power to love and serve more fully and more purely, and that helps me to see and believe in my potential. Second, this knowledge has come to me within the context of the LDS faith and the experience of committed LDS service and living, guided specifically by the teachings of those who lead the LDS Church whom I regard as Christ’s special witnesses. I don’t know any other religious life, obviously, but I do know what it is to live without religious faith of any kind, and I have decided I need and like the strength and transformation that comes from earnest and committed devotion to living the gospel. That strength is so tangible, so undeniably real, that I have stopped doubting in the goodness and effectiveness of the church to serve as the instrument and its leaders as His mouthpieces—uniquely commissioned in these latter days— of bringing souls to Christ. Trust eventually gave way to unforgettable, anchoring experiences with the spirit that have witnessed to me that this is true. As exciting as intellectual growth can be, it pales in comparison to what I feel I am becoming and to the mysteries that I can sense my spiritual understanding encompasses when I give myself to Christ. Skepticism, cynicism, and criticism are useful in discovering hypocrisies and in fine-tuning arguments, but they are not sufficient for self-transformation, self-knowledge, and the kind of peace that surpasses understanding.

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George Handley was born in Utah, grew up in Connecticut, and received his BA at Stanford and his MA and PhD at UC Berkeley, all in Comparative Literature. He served a mission in Venezuela, which convinced him of the value of learning foreign languages and of the wonder of the Caribbean and of Latin America. After teaching for three years at Northern Arizona University, since 1998 he has taught at Brigham Young University, where he is currently Professor of Humanities. He is the author Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River (University of Utah 2010), a book of creative non-fiction that explores Mormon theology, environmental history, and personal and ancestral family stories along the Provo River. His work in literary criticism includes New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (University of Georgia Press 2007) and Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (University of Virginia Press, 2000). He has also co-edited four books and authored various articles on literary criticism and on the relationship between Mormonism and the environment. He is active in various environmental causes, has served as a bishop of a BYU married student ward, and is the father of three daughters and one son. He and his wife, Amy, live in Provo.

Posted August 2010

“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32).

One of my goals is to study things carefully and find the truth. Many times what is perceived as true is influenced more by popular opinion rather than by factual information. To illustrate, many years ago people believed that the earth was flat. Their belief did not alter the truth about the shape of the earth but hindered progress. Another example is when I was growing up in North Dakota. Smoking cigarettes was common and many believed that smoking was not harmful. Their lack of knowledge did not alter the deadly consequences faced by those who smoked.

It takes much effort, observation, time, and study to learn the truth. Ignorance limits our ability to make good decisions and to be truly free, whether studying criminology, marriage, or spiritual principles. However ugly or painful the truth may be, we will only be free as we learn and apply the truth.

I am a sociologist who studies crime, drug use, and family relationships. My goal is to understand human behavior as it actually exists—why people become involved in drug use and crime, how it impacts their lives, and how some people desist from crime while others do not. Throughout the years I have spent much time thinking about and studying human behavior. I have interviewed many prisoners to understand better their perspectives and situations. It has been sobering to see the consequences of crime and drug abuse for individuals and families. I have also studied behavioral change—how some people learn to desist from criminal behavior and drug use while others do not. Recent research indicates the importance of support from others and of hope and spirituality in learning to desist from drug use and crime.

I ache as I think of the difficult and wretched situations some people experience such as theft, hunger, assault, rape, and the death of a loved one. In spite of the pain and suffering in the world, I know there is hope. I think of a story I heard about a boy who was walking along the seashore and saw hundreds of starfish that had been left on the beach as the tide receded. Any starfish that was not able to get back into the ocean would dry up and die. The boy was walking along the beach picking up starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. A man came walking along the beach and watched the boy throwing the starfish back into the ocean. Seeing the vast number of starfish and the small number that the boy would be able to save, he told the boy that the task was hopeless and that he might as well give up. The boy picked up another starfish, threw it into the ocean, and said, “It is not hopeless for that one.”

Because of agency, many face difficult situations and some are the victims of horrible crimes. Someday all who commit crimes against others will stand accountable before God, while God and Christ will comfort and heal the innocent victims.

There are things we all can do to help alleviate the suffering around us. I think of a poem I read long ago:

I am only one
but I am one.
I can’t do everything
but I can do something.

Through my own experience, I have discovered that the principles of Jesus Christ are true and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ’s church. It was organized to support us, to help us learn correct principles, and to enable us to become free, competent, and happy. Much hurt, pain, and evil exists because people do not live the principles given by Jesus Christ.

I know that achieving peace and happiness in this world will require people to live the principles espoused by Jesus Christ. As we live His principles, we can learn how to face and learn much from our trials. His commandments do not limit us but help us become free. God has given us a living prophet to provide guidance, advice, hope, and inspiration. We have our agency to accept or reject His counsel but we must accept the consequences of our choices.

I have had a personal witness from God that these principles are true. My spiritual experiences are as real as anything I have experienced in my life. My studies of sociology have confirmed my belief in our Savior, Jesus Christ. As I have learned to live these principles, I have gained increased freedom.

I believe that God loves every person on this earth and that He will answer the prayers of every person who sincerely seeks Him. It may take years, the answers may come in ways that are unexpected, and the answers may not be what one expects or desires, but I testify that God does answer prayers.

When Christ visited the Americas, he said: “How oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens and ye would not” (3 Nephi 10:5). Christ gives us our agency and will force no one to come to Him. However, His arms are open and, if we truly seek Him, He will help us.

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Stephen J. Bahr is Professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. from Washington State University. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin and was a professional fellow at the Bush Institute for Child and Family Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology at BYU and as an associate dean in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences. Recent research and teaching have focused on prisoner reentry, adolescent drinking and drug use, and the evaluation of programs to help juvenile and adult offenders desist from drug use and crime.

Posted August 2010

My first acquaintance with the inside of the Book of Mormon came when, at age thirteen, I contracted polio and was confined to bed for six months. My father supplied me with the Book of Mormon and a number of other volumes he knew would appeal to my youthful mind. The Book of Mormon was tough sledding compared to Treasure Island, Johnny Tremain or Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. Dad suggested I read three chapters from the Book of Mormon each day before switching to my preferred fare. That worked, and after I got past the Isaiah chapters, the pace picked up and when the experiences of Ammon and his brethren appeared, I was locked in and the three chapter ration was gone.

When Ammon was brought before King Lamoni after having defended the king’s flocks alone by lopping off the arms of the attacking thieves to explain by what power he did that remarkable deed, the record says, ‘Now Ammon being wise, yet harmless, he said unto Lamoni: Wilt thou hearken unto my words, if I tell thee by what power I do these things? . . . And the king answered Yea, I will believe all thy words. And thus he was caught with guile.” (Alma 18:22-23). I had to ask Dad what “caught with guile” meant, but the yet harmless part of the verse caused me to laugh out loud then, and makes me still chuckle fifty-eight years later. How does one call someone harmless who has just lopped off “not a few” arms of assailants? (Alma 17:38) My father explained the difference between courage in battle and gentleness in personal conduct. It dawned on me then that I was reading real history, not fiction. That conviction has only deepened in the ensuing years, until I now know that the Book of Mormon is just what it claims to be: scripture, and that the precepts and doctrines contained therein are true. Moreover, Joseph Smith was its faithful translator.

The first time the Spirit bore witness to my soul that what I was hearing was true happened at a stake conference while a returned missionary was testifying that Joseph Smith was a prophet. I was eighteen at the time. There have been infrequent recurrences of such contacts with the Spirit at diverse and sometimes unexpected times in the following years, on occasion while giving or receiving a blessing, while praying, meditating, or hearing someone preach, but most often (in my experience) in quiet moments in the temple. All those have only reconfirmed the conviction that God lives and that His Son Jesus Christ is our Savior.

My training and occupation has been the law. About forty years ago, I became curious about all the legal encounters, arrests, trials, harassment, and persecution in legal guise to which Joseph Smith was exposed in his comparatively short life. That led to some writing and ultimately an invitation to join the team of the Joseph Smith Papers project, as senior editor of the Legal Series. He was involved in over 220 lawsuits as plaintiff, defendant, or witness. While Mayor of Nauvoo (which included the office of Justice of the Peace) and as Presiding Judge of the Municipal Court of Nauvoo, he presided over scores of other cases. In collecting his legal and business records, and learning what they demonstrate, I have come to what is for me an inescapable conclusion: Joseph Smith, quite apart and in addition to his prophetic calling (about which many others have written), was in his business and legal dealings with his fellow men an honorable and reasonable man. He paid his debts; he successfully defended himself and his church from claimed criminal charges; he built communities; he shared the material goods that came into his hands with followers and strangers; he faithfully performed the legal responsibilities as both judge and court-appointed guardian; he petitioned legislatures and the U.S. Congress for redress on behalf of his dispossessed people; he dispensed justice in his official capacity and rendered mercy and forgiveness personally. In short he was an honorable MAN, whether one regards him a prophet or not. For me he was both. Like Ammon he was “wise and harmless” while serving as God’s mouthpiece on this earth.

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Gordon A. Madsen earned B.S. and J.D. degrees from the University of Utah, and, early in his career, served as a deputy district attorney and then, from 1959 to 1964, as assistant Utah attorney general. After 1964, he worked as a lawyer in private practice, also serving from 1969 to 1971 in the Utah House of Representatives. Thereafter, at various times, he has been a member of the Utah State Constitutional Revision Commission, the Utah Judicial Qualifications Commission, and the Judicial Nominating Commission (Third District).

Now retired, he is a co-editor of the business and legal papers in the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Among his important Mormon-related works are “Joseph Smith’s 1826 Trial: The Legal Setting,” BYU Studies 30/2 (1990), “Joseph Smith and the Missouri Court of Inquiry: Austin A. King’s Quest for Hostages,” BYU Studies 43/4 (2004), and a 1996 presentation to the Mormon History Association in which he argued that William Law’s accusations of fraud against Joseph Smith, Jr., were demonstrably false.

He is married to the historian Carol Cornwall Madsen, and they are the parents of six children.

Posted August 2010