The Crucible of Doubt: Granting Permission to Believe

Modern science has taught us a lot about how our bodies work. To say it all boils down to chemistry may be an oversimplification, but there is a lot of truth in that statement. What does it mean then, when we feel love and affection for one another? Are our emotions and desires the work of chemicals that manipulate our subjective experience, and therefore not really real? These kinds of questions are sometimes posed by budding rationalists, who wonder what role such chemical reactions should play in their life. A common answer goes something like this: 'We are humans and we have no choice but to experience life as humans. Our emotions and feelings are real to us. Understand where they come from so that you don't make bad decisions based on them, but don't over-think them either. It is not a betrayal of reason and logic to be human. Enjoy life!'

Sometimes we need permission to just be ourselves. One of the messages I took away from The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, is that we should give ourselves permission to believe.

Coming into the first chapter, The Use and Abuse of Reason, I was a little skeptical that I would agree with what the authors would say. It is easy to say that there are ways of 'knowing' other than science and reason. Such statements usually strike me as a kind of epistemic jealousy. Artists and writers may have dreamed up things as strange as relativity and quantum mechanics, but they could never deliver the empirical reality. I was pleasantly surprised that the Givens did not seem to be trying to put science 'in its place' as much as put it in a human context.

The problem is not that science cannot give us direction with life’s most urgent questions. It is because, in actual practice, logical reasoning does not give us much guidance. We don’t really live our lives, in any meaningful way, according to the dictates of logic. And we certainly don’t embrace our most cherished beliefs, values, or opinions on the basis of reason alone—however much we may protest we do....

[A]s moral agents, immersed in a world of human relationships and human values, we most appropriately choose and judge and act as human beings whose desires and motivations and bases for action are deeper than and prior to logic.

I can get on board with that, since even certainty is a feeling.

The discussion in the first chapter connects to the last chapter, where the Givens take up the inevitability of belief and how we channel it. After describing three views of the cosmos (both theistic and atheistic), they write:

...we assemble the scattered pieces of evidence from science, from life experience, from intuition, and from reason into a tentative whole, trusting some sources of meaning and distrusting others. We cannot escape the burden of faith, within or outside the parameters of religious conviction.

So we can't help but believe in something, but what if that something turns out to be wrong? The Givens, in turn, ask if that is really such a horrible thing, and quote William James as follows:

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. . . . This fear he slavishly obeys. . . . For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

This is all well and good, but there are elements of Church doctrine where we might suspect that we are indeed being duped. What then? The Givens answer:

Perhaps...one might focus on the message rather than the messenger. One might consider that the contingencies of history and culture and the human element will always constitute the garment in which God’s word and will are clothed. And one might refuse to allow our desire for the perfect to be the enemy of the present good. Finally, we might ask ourselves, with the early disciples, “to whom [else] shall we go?”

The worst risk such a life of faith entails is not that such a life might be wrong—but that it might be incomprehensible to those unprepared to take such a risk.

Perhaps you find yourself unable to abandon belief in certain core doctrines of Mormonism in spite of science and reason. As I read them, the message of these two chapters of The Crucible of Doubt is this: 'You are a human and will unavoidably believe things that go beyond science, and often make choices ignoring it. It is not a betrayal of rationality to believe. Embrace what you find beautiful, good, and compelling in Mormonism. Enjoy life!'

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Voting Your Conscience: Old LDS Edition

This week's U.S. election gives me an excuse to share some material from Church history I recently found.

In the April General Conference of 1907, with the Reed Smoot hearings finally over, a declaration written by the First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith was read to the congregation titled, "An Address: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the World." The purpose of the declaration was to correct misunderstandings about the Church and assure people that even though Mormons believed in revelation to a prophet, they were simultaneously loyal citizens of their countries, and the United States in particular.

Following its reading, President Francis M. Lyman, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated that the address was endorsed by the Council of the Twelve Apostles and moved that the address be adopted "as an expression of the principles and policy of the Church that we will advocate and sustain." After the motion was seconded by Elder John Henry Smith, the congregation was asked to signify approval by standing. Then those objecting were asked to do the same, of which the Conference report stated there were none. The declaration was included in the Conference report and printed in the May issue of the Church's magazine, Improvement Era.

The document makes for an interesting read because it reveals the public pressures felt by Church leaders at that time. One of the points addressed was the charge of 'arbitrary power' in the Church. After reciting well-known passages from D&C 121 about the righteous exercise of priesthood authority, the First Presidency wrote:

Nominations to Church office may be made by revelation; and the right of nomination is usually exercised by those holding high authority, but it is a law that no person is to be ordained to any office in the Church, where there is a regularly organized branch of the same, without the vote of its members. This law is operative as to all the officers of the Church, from the president down to the deacon. The ecclesiastical government itself exists by the will of the people; elections are frequent, and the members are at liberty to vote as they choose. True, the elective principle here operates by popular acceptance, rather than through popular selection, but it is none the less real. Where the foregoing facts exist as to any system, it is not and cannot be arbitrary.

The notion that the Saints could freely express their will with respect to ecclesiastical government was encouraged in a number of General Conferences in that first decade. For example, in the April conference of 1905 President Joseph F. Smith prefaced the sustaining vote with these words:

As this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, we will present the general authorities of the Church for your vote this afternoon, and I would like to say that it is expected that all the Latter-day Saints will exercise their right to vote for or against those whose names are submitted. We would like you to exercise perfect liberty and freedom in the expression of your own thought and faith and fidelity in the lifting of your hands.

Well, times change and as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism put it,

The principle of common consent has functioned in the Church since its inception, though the actual practices incorporating this principle have evolved significantly.

Most recently we were instructed that there are no elections in the Church and that we do not vote on Church leadership at any level, but rather sustain them. In practice there is probably little difference from over a century ago. I would guess that the sustaining vote of 1905 was about as routine as that of 2014 [1]. It seems clear, however, that Joseph F. Smith's portrayal of the sustaining vote as a non-arbitrary 'elective principle' is long gone.

Notes:

1. Almost. The April report states: "All the voting was unanimous with, two exceptions; and President Smith invited those who had so voted to state their grievances to the proper authorities, and they would be considered."

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