What I know [Ryan]

I’m not sure about the purpose of this particular blog entry. I think it’s coming from a number of needs — to prove my own faith to myself, to respond in kind to Elder Holland’s last talk in general conference, or to answer the challenge from various General Authorities to share the gospel over this newfangled thing called the Internet.

I don’t know where this blog is coming from, but I do feel the need to write it.

I encounter a lot of anti-Mormon stuff when I’m at work. It seems someone is always trying to bring the Church down. Sometimes they have understandable concerns, like people who despise the Church because its stance on same-sex marriage, and sometimes they’re just nutjobs, like the guy who wrote in last week saying the Ensign was part of carefully calculated plot by the LDS Church to manipulate the world’s thinking and take over various secular governments.

Sometimes, honestly, it makes me think. Is the Church off-base on gay marriage? What exactly is the deal with blacks and the priesthood? Does unfavorable DNA evidence disprove the Book of Mormon?

I’m slowly coming to an understanding of those and other troubling issues, but my purpose today is not to tackle the things I don’t completely understand. If you want to hear the arguments batted back and forth ad nauseum, go Google them.

But running down every argument will only get so far. There’s always compelling evidence for both sides. An argument based solely on logic can go on forever; logic is based on facts, which are subject to change as new facts are discovered and tested.

Truth, however, comes from somewhere else, and it never changes.

And it’s truth that is important here: It’s not what I don’t know, but what I do know that makes the difference.

Here’s what I know:

Jesus Christ’s sacrifice made it possible for us to fulfil our eternal potential.

In 1820, Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using divine power granted as a part of his calling as a prophet.

Joseph Smith’s successor continues to exercise that role as prophet.

There are some who would call my reasoning flawed — how could I know these things? How can I so callously dismiss logic and hold everything to the standard of knowledge that can’t possibly be proven?

Call it a leap of faith.

How do we truly know anything? Even the most godless, stoic atheist must accept that what he takes as absolute fact must still be taken with a degree of faith — what is reality? How do we know our conscious interpretations of the world are right? An ancient philosopher once asked, “I had a dream I was butterfly — or was I a butterfly awakening from a dream that I was a man?”

We all have to take the world on faith sometime. Every man has to be backed against that wall and make his stand. Sooner or later, we will have to accept that we cannot truly know anything without the assumption of faith.

This my faith. This is what I know because of it. What I don’t know shrinks in the face of what I do know with the promise that all will be made clear someday.

I’m nothing special, but somehow I got lucky and have been able to develop this knowledge. My words lack thundering rhetoric delivered over a pulpit, but you can be assured that they are not less heartfelt that the speaker of such words.

That's what I know.

Why science and religion can coexist [Ryan]

I recently saw the movie Angels and Demons. One of the main themes in the movie was the conflict between science and religion. It’s not the only medium where such a theme exists — “Science and Religion” has its Wikipedia entry.

As I walked from the theater after watching the movie, I reflected that I was glad I belonged to a religion where we can be assured that science and faith can coexist.

A few weeks later, I overheard someone here arguing that we wouldn’t need science anymore once we were exalted. The next week, I learned of a person who left the Church because he couldn’t reconcile obvious evidences that pointed to evolution and his religious beliefs.

I think we may need to step back and look at what both science and religion are, and I think that we Latter-Day Saints might find the two a little more friendly than we might think.

Science is based upon theories, upon things we can see. It’s our quest to understand the world around and inside us through trial and error. Truth in science is established through finding proof.

Religion is based on a belief on a higher power, a sense of purpose. Like science, it’s our quest to understand the world around and inside us, and it’s also a little more: it’s our struggle to overcome the mundane and become more than we already are, also through a little bit of trial and error. Truth is established through faith.

They have their differences and their similarities, but can these estranged stepbrothers coexist?

Of course.

For example, we know for a fact that the earth (or the parts thereof, at least) is at least billions of years old. Tradition, including a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants (see D&C 77:6), tells us the earth has a temporal existence of only seven thousand years. It would seem that two dates contradict one another.

However, I firmly believe that because God works through science as well — but a higher form a science, one we don’t quite understand yet — that both statements may easily be and probably are true. Firstly, we might not even understand the basic statements as well as we think we do — who knows what exactly “a temporal existence” means? — so who are we to say they don’t match up?

Maybe the parts of the earth are billions of years old, but the formation of those parts as we now know it has only been around for a few thousand years or so. I don’t know. That’s just one explanation, and by no means the most authoritative one. Men a lot smarter and more educated than me could probably come up with better ones if they applied their knowledge of both science and theology, using both methods in their respective places to fill in aspects of the final truth.

Both science and faith have their places. The Book of Mormon isn’t going to help us much with the formation of limestone, and science won’t tell us whether abortion is right.

But when you put them together, you have a nearly complete picture, and even those places where they seem to overlap with a little discrepancy can be accepted as testaments to God’s use of natural laws to which we simply don’t have access.

It’s completely possible to live in harmony with both science and religion, as long as we recognize that they both have their place and together they give us different pieces of that great eternal puzzle that is ultimate truth.

Finding faith with other faiths

When I was little, I viewed people who weren’t members of the Church like they were in some way irreconcilably different from the people like me. I viewed them way I would lepers, aliens in disguise, or Democrats.

They were different from the others in my predominantly LDS community. Some people had tattoos; others had earrings in odd places. Some people just smelled different — a clear indication that they weren’t on the straight and narrow.

I remember when the first family of non-members moved into our subdivision. I rode my bike past them with furtive glances over my shoulder, as if their dark influence might cause my tires to explode, leaving me at their mercy.

My parents were and are great examples of tolerance, but I still couldn’t get over the way non-Mormons were simply different — and that made nonmembers scary.

A mission was an eye-opening experience. Most of the people I met weren’t LDS, and many of them could totally have passed for such. In my two years of service, I encountered hundreds of amazing, wonderful people who either hadn’t had a chance to find the gospel or simply weren’t interested.

Still, these people loved their families, went to work every day, watched Star Wars, called themselves Americans, used deodorant and ate regular food. They went shopping at the mall, drove cars, spoke English, celebrated holidays and got irritated when people played hip-hop at full volume in the middle of the night.

They did not, however, sacrifice goats to their demons gods, plot the hostile takeover of peaceful neighborhoods, eat babies or soak their tentacles in specialized alien fluid every night to keep their skins moist in Earth’s atmosphere.

In other words, these people really were normal human beings.

I went to General Conference recently, where the protestors against the Church were engaged in their semiannual quest to save our souls. Four years ago, when I attended conference before my mission, I saw the protestors as minions of Satan out to destroy the peace that existed on Temple Square.

Now, I see them as possibly God-fearing, good people who might just see their holy crusade against Mormonism as nothing more than their own version of missionary work.

Then, just as I was coming to appreciate a heterogeneous environment and accept that a world where everyone was a clone of me might not be the ideal situation, I came to BYU–Idaho.

I wouldn’t say that diversity is dead here, but I wouldn’t say it’s alive and thriving, either.

I simply wish we had a little more diversity to even things out and prepare us for the real world, where not everyone is a Primary graduate.

A few weeks ago, I went on a date. It went great, and afterward, I called up the girl’s roommate, with whom I am good friends, to get the scoop. “Oh, she had a great time,” said the roommate, who then filled me on more details.

Certain that I knew all I needed to know, I swooped in and asked the girl out again.

This time, as we were making cinnamon rolls, she blithely informed me that she couldn’t eat sweets because she was on Lent.

Yeah, she was Catholic. Here at BYU–Idaho. I stuffed my cinnamon roll into my mouth, uncertain of what to say.

It seems my spiritual journey had reached an apex — She wasn’t LDS, and yet she shared our morals and values. There really can’t be anything too bad about that.

I love my religion, and I know it’s true. But I can accept that others might have their own beliefs, creeds and faiths.

Here’s to BYU–Idaho, where you can be assured that the person sitting next to you probably shares your values.

And here’s to the real world, where there are still a lot of good people, and where we can all join together and do some good.