Let's Talk about Faith and Intellect

by Terryl L. Givens

In the days that follow, this man’s thinking undergoes a . . . quick and brutal reorientation. . . . Things that once filled him with awe seem strangely trivial, and things which a few days before did not even exist for him now fill his consciousness. For the first time he discovers the . . . beauty of the world of nature. . . . The perfection of children comes to him like a sudden revelation. . . . Everywhere he looks he gets the feeling that all is passing away. . . . He sees all life and stuff about him involved in a huge ceaseless combustion, a literal and apparent process of oxidation which is turning some things slowly, some rapidly, but all things surely to ashes. . . . ‘What has happened to our solid citizen?’ his friends ask perplexed. He has chosen to keep his disease a secret, . . . [but] he cannot conceal his change of heart. As far as his old associates can see, the poor man has left the world of reality. . . . Now the question arises, has this man been jerked out of reality or into it?16

The great humanitarian Lowell Bennion wrote that “love of knowing, without the love of learning, leads to dissipation of the mind.”19 In other words, it is not the satisfaction or complacency of knowing as much as the passion and drive of wanting to know that is elevating and ennobling; the first may simply gratify pride or ambition; the second is the motive force behind growth, discovery, and life in its abundance and variety.

earthlings have the unique advantage of living on a planet from which a large moon has the virtually identical apparent diameter as the sun—an extraordinarily rare scenario in planetary systems. During a total eclipse, the moon completely and exactly occludes the disc of the sun, while allowing us to observe its full corona. Observations on these carefully timed occasions have been instrumental in the development of spectroscopy, a field that not only allows us to understand the composition of and processes occurring in the sun but has also led to the development of stellar astrophysics. In sum, perfect solar eclipses “have helped reveal the nature of stars, provided a natural experiment for testing Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and allowed us to measure the slowdown of Earth’s rotation.”27

A second example is the set of conditions that makes distant cosmic observations possible: an unusually transparent atmosphere, a stable planetary rotation, our precise position within the galaxy (beneath the plane of a galactic arm, with clear lines of sight), and the relative isolation of the Milky Way itself. These conditions all optimize our opportunities to observe, measure, and understand the diverse structures and composition of the universe. As one astronomer writes, “We occupy the best overall place for observation in the Milky Way galaxy which is itself the best type of galaxy to learn about stars, galactic structure, and the distant universe simultaneously.”28

“Our intellect can feed our spirit, and our spirit can feed our intellect,” as the Apostle Joseph B. Wirthlin recognized.32 And in Elder Neal A. Maxwell’s words, “How intellectually amazing the gospel of Jesus Christ is!”33

The danger, and one that has widely come to pass, is the reduction of religion to emotion, to feeling alone. Influential Christians like Origen knew better. And so should Latter-day Saints.

As C.S. Lewis sums it up, “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.”

On August 2, twelve elders, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, ceremoniously placed the first log for the first building in Zion. It was not for the temple—it was a foundation for a building that would serve as a schoolhouse.2 Only the next day did Joseph dedicate the temple site. Secular learning, the implicit message held, was a natural and even an essential preparation for spiritual knowledge. In fact, Joseph considered such learning one of the motives of the gathering itself. “One of the principal objects . . . of our coming together,” he wrote, “is to obtain the advantages of education; and in order to do this, compact society is absolutely necessary.”3

there is no learning that is not, ultimately, tied to our eternal progress now and in the eternities.

Wilford Woodruff, who after finishing common school attended an academy for four years, where he studied classical languages along with chemistry, mathematics, and other advanced subjects. Converted to the Church in 1833, he left on a mission a year later. In the midst of preaching throughout the Tennessee Valley he still found time, his journal records, to study Hebrew, English grammar, and a book on philosophy. Returning to Kirtland after his mission, he resumed his study of Greek and Latin in 1836.16

Even more advanced in his training was Lorenzo Snow, who joined the Church in that same year. His sister Eliza remembered him as “ever a student, at home as well as in school, (most of his schooling after his twelfth year was during the winter terms,) his book was his constant companion when disengaged from filial duties; and when sought by his associates, ‘hid up with his book’ became proverbial. With the exception of one term in a High School in Ravenna, Ohio, also a special term of tuition under a Hebrew professor, he completed his scholastic training in Oberlin College.”17

By the turn of the century, more female American medical students hailed from Utah than from any other state in the union.31

In 1870, Utah children attended school at a higher rate than in New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts, the birthplace of public education. Even so, Brigham Young in that year ratcheted up the level of institutional support by establishing a series of academies (tuition-supported high schools) throughout the settlements. Three years after Young’s death, there were some two dozen of these academies from Canada to Mexico. In 1880, according to the census, Utah’s literacy rate (for ages ten and above) was 95 percent, whereas in the country as a whole, it was 87 percent.

Brigham Young made the unceasing pursuit of knowledge not just an ingredient in salvation, but the essence of the only joy humankind will find fulfilling: All men should study to learn the nature of mankind, and to discern that divinity inherent in them. A spirit and power of research is planted within, yet they remain undeveloped. . . . What will satisfy us? If we understood all principles and powers that are, that have been, and that are to come, and had wisdom sufficient to control powers and elements with which we are associated, perhaps we would then be satisfied. If this will not satisfy the human mind, there is nothing that will. . . . If we could so understand true philosophy as to understand our own creation, and what it is for . . . and could understand that matter can be organized and brought forth into intelligence, and to possess more intelligence, and to continue to increase in that intelligence; and could learn those principles that organized matter into animals, vegetables, and into intelligent beings; and could discern the Divinity acting, operating, and diffusing principles into matter to produce intelligent beings, and to exalt them—to what? Happiness. Will nothing short of that fully satisfy the spirits implanted within us? No.34

Elder Ballard continued, “Gone are the days when a student asked an honest question and a teacher responded, ‘Don’t worry about it!’ Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue.” Then, directly countering the anti-intellectual attacks and controversy avoidance of the 1980s, he recast honest scholars as assets rather than challengers of the faith. “If necessary, we should ask those with appropriate academic training, experience, and expertise for help.” “If you have questions” about historical issues, he continued, “ask someone who has studied them.”35 Elder Neil L. Andersen affirmed this approach: “Addressing honest questions is an important part of building faith, and we use both our intellect and our feelings.”36 President Russell M. Nelson summed up the case concisely: we should have a “sacred regard for intellect.”

C. S. Lewis put it with economical and irrefutable logic, “either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it?”

“Hence,” writes Nicolai Berdyaev, “our attitude to evil must be twofold: we must be tolerant of it as the Creator is tolerant, and we must mercilessly struggle against it.

David L. Paulsen, one of our tradition’s premier philosophers, responds that he trusts God “because He’s told us that we can. My faith in God is grounded in His self-disclosures, not in logical inferences from philosophically constructed premises.”

What distinguishes us from quarks and asteroids and lichen is that we can choose to be taught, to align ourselves with the teachings of a superior Intelligence, and to optimize all of the forces acting upon us from within and without to grow in the way we choose to grow. We can aspire to goodness, wisdom, holiness, and change in those directions.

It is debatable to what extent language is a uniquely human capacity, since apes, like the accomplished chimpanzee Kanzi, have mastered limited but impressive vocabularies. Yet, as Ian Leslie notes, “What Kanzi never did, and never does, is ask why. He never furrows his brow, leans over the keyboard, and bashes out a sentence like, ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ or ‘What exactly are you trying to discover?’ He doesn’t ask what lies beyond the confines of his home at the research center.”

Only humans are impelled by the desire to expand their world experientially, intellectually.

No finer evidence could be found that we are here to learn, to experiment, to venture forth, and yes, to err. That word may be more apropos “when you remember,” Gould adds, “that [error] came from an old root meaning to wander about, looking for something.”

“what we are saved for.”33

Nikolai Berdyaev spoke with unknowing echoes of the beauty of Restoration doctrine when he wrote that the truly “‘good’ do not condemn the ‘wicked’ to hell and enjoy their own triumph, but descend with Christ into hell in order to free them.”

We crave a larger narrative that gives meaning to our scattered intimations of beauty and peace and to the form and purpose of one’s life. Spirituality without religious commitment reminds one of the character in a novel by V. S. Naipaul: she had several opinions, but in the collective they did not “add up to a point of view.”10

There are truths, in another formulation, that are simply not provable—even mathematical ones that we know to be true.1

We can enjoy Beethoven without knowing how to read music; we can love the stars in complete ignorance of astrophysics; and we can be a good neighbor without knowledge of either God or our own origins. But she who reads music will see patterns and hear motifs of which others are blind and deaf; he who knows a red giant from a hot blue sees variety and history where others see no more than a featureless variation of light; and those who perceive the reality of heavenly parents, or an eternal past, and of an educative purpose in our mortality just may find the catalyst they need to persevere in affliction, find genuine connection with the divine, and cooperate more joyfully in the project of building communities of ever-larger scope and longer duration.

The earth-centered cosmos died in the seventeenth-century, witch burning in the eighteenth, and bloodletting by leeches and belief in spontaneous generation in the nineteenth, while ice-pick lobotomists won Nobel Prizes in the twentieth. Each age is confident it has reached the end of historical development, but each generation’s ignorance is pitied condescendingly scant decades later. Which of our age’s paradigms about human nature, educational psychology, economic systems, medical practice, and political theory will embarrass our grandchildren?

Agency, as distinct from mere behavior, is marked by practical rationality. . . . Becoming someone is something someone does, and not merely something that happens.”14

Bertrand Russell had the seeds of this insight but did not apprehend the fruit: “There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good; to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. . . . The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has.”

Einstein may be particularly apt. “It is not that I am so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”

Faith, in my conception, is not a silencing of the intellect. It is the only path by which the fullest appetites of the intellect find satisfaction.