Faith and rationality

Hey Elder Wilson,

I had a discussion recently with a cousin who is disaffected with the Church, and it occurred to me that it might be worth sharing part of my response. I don't know if you've thought very hard about proof and faith and knowledge, but at your age I was very uncomfortable even talking about "what if" scenarios involving impossible counterfactuals because I didn't have a framework for thinking about it, and I wasn't comfortable making predictions anyway. (E.g. at your age I wouldn't have felt comfortable saying that Jesus not returning to Earth by 2618 A.D. is a zero probability event which cannot happen unless the Church isn't true. It would have felt presumptuous, even overconfident. But I'm not your age any more.)

Anyway, one reason faith is so important is that even though a given exercise of faith is not guaranteed to always work out the way you hope (even if everything I believe is completely true!), if you don't act on faith at all you'll never gather the necessary data to even know. So you act, then observe, then evaluate, then update your beliefs and act again, then iterate from there.

In other words, having faith is rational! There is no conflict between reason and faith (acting before gaining a sure knowledge of a thing) if you keep an open mind, as long as what you have faith in is actually true. And faith in the Son of Man's teachings, and His continuing leadership, is a true faith.

See examples below.

Max

A cousin wrote:

<<The real question I'm trying to bring up is this: If the Word of Wisdom was not correct, how could you figure this out? If scientific studies about the benefits of green tea are meaningless because the Word of Wisdom is correct no matter what, then scientific studies about the dangers of alcohol are also totally meaningless. >>

Max wrote:

If the Word of Wisdom were bogus, there are a number of ways one could know it. For example, that would imply that Jesus Christ will not be returning to Earth at any time (I am here discounting other Christian religions because frankly I don't find them credible; I've long said that if I were not a Latter-day Saint I could only be an atheist, although atheism has huge problems of its own--anyway, the point is that the only hypothesis I'm comparing to the truth of the Church is atheism). If humanity is still ticking along as usual 600 years from now, I will cheerfully acknowledge that this is a 0% probability event under the doctrine of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and that since it has (hypothetically) happened anyway, this totally disproves the Church. There are other hypothetical events of low-but-not-0% probability which would constitute strong evidence against the Church but not a total disproof, just something that you'd have to weight against other evidence for and against. For example, while my experience with tithing is that the Lord is very proactive about blessing those who show trust in him by paying it, it is also the case that sometimes the Lord gives us trials (see Job), so let's call it a 10% chance that you could pay tithing faithfully for a year and still be in some sense worse off than if you didn't pay tithing. In the Bayesian sense, that would be strong evidence against the Church (even if the Church is completely true!), and so if the Church is indeed true you'd expect to see a lot of evidence conflicting with that evidence against it (lots of things that are very improbable if the Church is false, such as having more peace and a happier home life from devoting time and attention to scripture study). If instead all of the indicators come up negative--if everything you'd expect to be true if the Church is true turns out to be false--then you can treat the Church as untrue. I mean, don't expect _me_ to treat it as untrue in that case, because the results of my experiments are obviously different than your hypothetical results, but you could reasonably just conclude in that case that the doctrines of the Church just don't work for you. (You may or may not turn out to be correct, but you're not being unreasonable.)