Faith Is Not Blind — Book Review & Quotes
Review
In almost any religion, there is an expectation of ambiguity. We will likely not know the answers to everything we would like to know. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the offer is to have answers to more of those questions than most. That being said, you’ll never have all the answers you’d like to have, at least not in this life.
Bruce Hafen and his wife Marie talk about a three-tiered way to think about dealing with questions of your faith. First, is the simplicity before complexity where children and most converts to the faith find themselves, feeling like they get the big picture of everything they’re learning and have no reason to question most of what they’re being taught. Second, comes the complexity where you learn something about Church history or doctrine that seems out of line with what you felt you understood. The hope of this book is to help get you to the third tier, the simplicity after complexity where you can find foundational first principles that you do believe (e.g. the Book of Mormon comes from God, Joseph Smith is a prophet, etc.) and then be strong enough to continue asking questions to learn more.
“Growing deep roots requires that we learn to work through uncomfortable realities.”
That willingness to ask questions in a sincere search rather than an accusative hunt is something that not very many people are good at. At the same time, being supportive of those who are asking questions is something that many in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints struggle with.
“Too often, young people and other members ask sincere but too-skeptical questions — while their parents and leaders give them sincere but too-rigid answers.”
As a religious person, I have tried to look for some key things. First, and foremost, I have tried to find a place that I feel like offers me the answers to life’s great questions: where did we come from, why are we here, what are we meant to do in this life, where are we going after this life, etc. I see a world revolving around the narrative that either we need to believe in God and stop asking questions, or that to believe in God is foolish and unnecessary.
“G.K. Chesterton once distinguished among ‘optimists,’ ‘pessimists,’ and ‘improvers,’ a comparison that roughly corresponds to Holmes’s progression from early simplicity through complexity into mature simplicity. He concluded that both the optimists and the pessimists look too much at only one side of things. So neither the extreme optimist nor the extreme pessimist is of much help in improving the human condition, because people can’t solve problems unless they are willing to acknowledge the problems exist while remaining loyal enough to do something about them.”
Hafen talks a few times about where the ‘burden of proof’ lies and how some seem to think that by pointing out inconsistencies in a religion, things that don’t seem like there are answers, they have somehow invalidated the entire organization. What I have come to again and again is the idea that while I will never be able to definitively prove my religion to be true, no one can definitively prove it to be false.
“Science writer Christie Aschwanden says science can increase or decrease our confidence in some propositions, but it can’t produce ‘absolute certainty.’ Instead, ‘it’s a process of uncertainty reduction.’”
Finally, there is a common criticism of religion. That, for some reason, a big swath of people have decided to sing constant praises to some magic man in the sky. Hafen includes a quote that I felt effectively summed up one of the most important things about the way I view a relationship with God:
“‘To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow you master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.” (Michael Polanyi)
We submit to God, not because He is an egomaniac, but because we’re learning from Him and we believe that He represents the perfect example of what we ought to try and become.
Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“Bushman has since spent a lifetime learning to communicate about religion ‘in a way that can be understood’ by a secular audience rather than forcing them ‘to learn our language in order to understand us.’”
“Too often, young people and other members ask sincere but too-skeptical questions — while their parents and leaders give them sincere but too-rigid answers.”
“Our hearts go out to those whose faith becomes unsettled by information or people or experiences that seem to cast doubt on their previous beliefs. Encountering surprises and uncertainties is actually part of faith’s natural growth process.”
“God has given us correct principles by which we may govern ourselves, but these very principles may at times seem to be in conflict. Choosing between two principled alternatives (two ‘goods’) is more difficult than choosing when we see an obvious contrast between good and evil. But learning to make such choices is essential to our spiritual maturity.”
“Growing deep roots requires that we learn to work through uncomfortable realities.”
“A little learning, as valuable as that is, can be dangerous when left to think too highly of itself. The ability to acknowledge ambiguity, an important step in our spiritual development, is not a final form of enlightenment — it is only the beginning.”
“G.K. Chesterton once distinguished among ‘optimists,’ ‘pessimists,’ and ‘improvers,’ a comparison that roughly corresponds to Holmes’s progression from early simplicity through complexity into mature simplicity. He concluded that both the optimists and the pessimists look too much at only one side of things. So neither the extreme optimist nor the extreme pessimist is of much help in improving the human condition, because people can’t solve problems unless they are willing to acknowledge the problems exist while remaining loyal enough to do something about them.”
“The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin…are almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head…Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” (G.K. Chesterton)
“In this day of both the internet and the international Church, we need to do a better job of introducing our children, young people, new converts, and others to the process of learning how to deal productively with complexity.”
“We are open-minded believers who know that history and life are not always clear-cut and tidy, but we desire to keep learning and to improve the status quo, not just to criticize it.”
“Faithful questions are valuable. Having a curious mind is a pathway to understanding and growth. However, there may be some who mistakenly assume that LDS culture disapproves of people who wonder. So when we have honest questions, some of us may feel unfaithful or even guilty. Is it wrong to wonder, or even to wander? We don’t think so. The Church does not self-destruct under questioning or scrutiny. Rather, seeking answers and deeper understanding really can help us grow.”
“As J.R.R. Tolkien said, ‘not all those who wander are lost.’”
“A myopic preoccupation with complexity can easily become a rigid pessimism that also blocks the search for truth.”
The request of one father when his son left home for college while still unsettled about his testimony — “As you continue your search for faith,’ he said, ‘please keep the commandments. Otherwise you will bias your search. If the affections of your heart are attached to the vices of this world, your head won’t make you — perhaps won’t even let you — believe in the virtues of God’s world.”
“Too many get stuck in the complexity. And because complexity is more nuanced and realistic than innocent simplicity, some bright people may think that mere complexity is better informed, more honest and authentic. Others may think that complexity is all there is, or that they can’t get out.”
“In the words of T.S. Eliot, ‘We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.’”
“Yet today, somehow, as we found with Peter and Emma, running across any criticism or a complicated different of historical opinion can seem to shift the burden of proof to the traditional source — as if merely raising an apparently legitimate question is enough to win a guilty conviction in the court of public opinion.”
“Historian Leonard Arrington once quipped about the stories of hardship in settling the Western American deserts, ‘The remembered desolation of the Great Basin before the arrival of the Mormons became more formidable with each subsequent telling.’”
“Yet even after the mythbusters do their research, the bottom line of both the myth and its criticism typically remains. The criticism may clarify some detail, or prove that the folklore version is exaggerated, or show that some part of the evidence could use more credible sources. But the essential core of a well-established founding story that’s been around and celebrated (and attacked) for a long time is usually still true.”
“Their problem is not that they know too much about Church history, but that they don’t know nearly enough. And they have been conditioned by the oversimplifications of social media to expect a short answer to any question. They often aren’t interested in a long answer to anything — even if the true, complete story is very complex.”
“The current problem that bothers U.S. columnist David Ignatius most is that ‘people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore’ about everything from climate change and ‘allegations about people we like [or] don’t like’ to the ‘political polarization’ now infecting ‘every area of our common life — including sports….We’re learning that social media can be tools of deception as well as truth.”
“Science writer Christie Aschwanden says science can increase or decrease our confidence in some propositions, but it can’t produce ‘absolute certainty.’ Instead, ‘it’s a process of uncertainty reduction.’”
“These ‘merchants of doubt’ weren’t really pushing for better knowledge. Instead, they worked to ‘amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.’ For years that strategy worked so well for the tobacco industry that the same basic approach has since ‘served as a sort of playbook for [other] industry interests ever since.”
“Both common sense and our legal system tell us that someone accused of wrongdoing is presumed innocent until proven guilty. And whoever makes the accusation carries the burden of proof to confirm the guilt. Raising questions or doubts alone would never, legally or logically, carry that burden. One unresolved question can’t offset a mountain of answers that are resolved. Perhaps we can’t explain with certainty where one sheep is located, but that alone by inference doesn’t mean the other ninety-and-nine are lost.”
“In summary, I said, almost nothing is more important than motherhood and fatherhood. At the same time, the Church encourages women to gain all the education they can, including, if they so choose, law school. And we all need prayerfully to apply these sometimes-competing principles to our own circumstances. The Brethren have confidence in our ability to do that.”
“By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” (Joseph Smith)
“Dillon, Marie, and I and our classmates were experience what Catholic sociologist Thomas O’Dea had called ‘Mormonism’s most significant problem.’ In his 1957 book, The Mormons, he said the Church’s ‘great emphasis on [higher] education’ created a serious and unavoidable conflict for LDS college students, because the Church’s literalistic and authoritarian approach to religion collided with the skepticism and independence fostered by university-level studies — just like the ‘ideal’ confronting the ‘real.’ For O’Dea, that issue was a big one: ‘The encounter of Mormonism and modern secular learning is still taking place. Upon [the outcome of this source of strain and conflict] will depend the future of Mormonism.”
“Fifty years later, reliable research showed that — unlike with most other religious groups — the more education a Mormon has, the more likely he or she is to have a strong religious commitment. For example, some 84 percent of Mormon college graduates have high religious commitments, compared with 50 percent among Mormons who have only a high school education.”
“Both the restored gospel and American culture contain strands that draw upon both a Hebrew and a Greek heritage. That helped me see why I had felt the conflicts I did in my student days. For example, most U.S. coins carry two familiar phrases: ‘Liberty’ and ‘In God We Trust.’ The personal ‘liberty’ of the individual was a key element in Greek values. To the Greeks, man was the measure of all things. For Socrates, nothing was more important than to ‘know thyself,’ and his ultimate goal was to ennoble man through reason.”
“But the coin’s other phrase, ‘In God We Trust,’ would have perplexed an ancient Greek — even though it spoke directly to the Hebrew soul, who put his whole trust in God. The Hebrew pattern sought to glorify God, not man, and one reached this goal through faith and obedience, not through human reasoning. This tiny comparison contains the seeds of countless arguments contrasting reason with faith.”
“So we can fall off the edge at either the right or left extreme — both potential responses to the complexity created by the tension between faith and reason.”
“[Elder Neal A. Maxwell] urged [BYU professors] to take both scholarship and discipleship seriously, because faithful scholarship brings together both the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. At the same time, he believed that every dimension of the gospel was relevant to modern social problems and that, whenever possible, LDS scholars should take their research premises from gospel teachings.”
“I sensed that a balanced quest for knowledge, as valuable as that is, perhaps can’t be our ultimate end. Simply knowing something will not sanctify us; it won’t make us capable of being in God’s presence. And our sanctifying circumstances won’t always be rational. By its very nature, faith ultimately takes us beyond the boundaries of reason. So if we condition our faith on rationality, we might shrink back from a sanctifying experience — and thus not discover what the experience could teach.”
“Biologist Francis Collins led the international project in the year 2000 that put together the first complete map of the entire human DNA code. Seeing that complex code as ‘the language in which God created life,’ Collins writes that ‘belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and…the principles of faith are…complementary with the principles of science.’ In fact, the earth contains in exactly the right proportions all of the fifteen scientific ‘physical constants’ that are each crucial to sustaining the planet’s complex life forms. The likelihood that this unique combination could come together by sheer chance ‘is almost infinitesimal. [Without God] our universe is [so] wildly improbable [that] faith in God [is] more rational than disbelief.”
“There are two very different kinds of knowledge. One involves such rational processes as gathering information and memorizing. The other kind of knowledge we might call skill development — like learning how to play the piano or swim or take a computer apart, learning to sing or dance or think. The process of becoming Christlike is more about acquiring skills than it is about learning facts and figures. And the only way to develop those divine skills is by living His teachings. Even God can’t teach us those skills unless we participate fully in the process, with all the trials and all the errors that are inherent in learning a skill by practice.”
“‘To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow you master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.” (Michael Polanyi)
“With the unspeakable tragedies and misery we see throughout history and now all around us, some say there couldn’t be a God. Others say that the order in nature could never have been accidental. Neither side can persuade the other on the basis of external evidence alone. Could lit be that the Lord planned it that way — so that we are not forced by circumstances to believe?”
“We value what we discover more than we value what we are told. And unless we discover God’s influence for ourselves, perhaps we won’t know it’s there.”
“The Lord really can’t save us without our freely chosen initiative, energy, desires, and wholehearted participation. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink it. You can lead a child to a book, but you can’t make her read it. The Savior offers the grace of His saving and exalting blessings only as we willingly participate in our own deliverance by choosing to believe Him, then by exerting all our strength to follow Him. This voluntary, active participation is essential to the growth process that results in our personal and spiritual development.”
“Zachary handled his questions honestly, but without compromising his values or slackening his standards of behavior. Neither did he allow his questions to become a crisis. He used what he already knew to help him work through what he didn’t yet know. In his words, he ‘chose conviction over fearful uncertainty.’”
“Visualize a sketch on a blackboard showing a small square inside a larger square. The large macro square is ‘life’ and the smaller micro square is ‘my life.’ The idea here is that, for centuries, large historical forces defined the outer square, thus defining for people what ‘life’ in general meant. That overarching meaning of life often controlled the meaning of each individual’s life — ‘my life.’”
“Throughout the European Middle Ages, the Christian church and later the kings in various countries defined life’s purpose as they understood it. They exerted such a dominant influence that for most people, the church and the kings also defined the micro ‘my life’ of individuals within the larger framework, usually depending on their class or status. Most people accepted their place within the larger whole, usually because they believed that the church’s explanation (or, later, the king’s explanation was God’s will.)”
“The Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe (the Age of Reason) began to change this pattern because science and reason gradually replaced the church and the kings as the sources that explained the meaning of ‘life’ in the big outer box. These explanations were typically more secular, competing with religion for social and cultural influence. Over time, science and reason came to replace or at least to dominate the religious explanations for ‘life,’ but people generally still looked to the given larger box as a frame of reference for their own lives.”
“Then came the twentieth century, when the big ‘life’ box began to tremble and, for many people, it began to fall apart. Several major ideas that anticipated this century appeared in the late 1800s in the writings of people like Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx. And the events that followed shook the foundations of traditional explanations: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, the Bomb, and Communism.”
“Within the next several decades, shattered by two World Wars and the economic collapse of the Great Depression, Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl could write from his crushing years in a Nazi concentration camp, ‘The traditions which buttressed [man’s] behavior are now rapidly diminshing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do.’ Soon he will not know ‘what he wishes to do.’ More and more, he will be governed by ‘what other people wish him to do.’”
“The twentieth century thus ushered in the age of relativism — not only moral relativism but scientific, philosophical, and artistic relativism.”
“For instance, in Samuel Beckett’s celebrated 1955 play Waiting for Godot, two men carry on what usually sounds like meaningless conversation as they keep waiting, expecting someone named Godot to arrive as promised — but he never comes. Because Beckett believed that life has only the meaning the individual gives it, waiting for what or who never comes was for him a fair representation of mortality. In 1990, a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre found Godot the most significant Englishe language play of the twentieth century, partly because of how Beckett captured and reflected our shattered age: ‘Godot has the pressure of our nightmarish history behind it. [It presents] man, naked, helpless, waiting…intensely alone, talking and talking to avoid feeling the…hellish silence — how can we not think of those killing prisons called concentration camps? The [800 people] who found Godot the most significant play of our century [realized] that it hauntingly reveals the darkest shadows of our frightening age…of man’s pitiful vulnerability and unexplained cruelty.”
“Constructive modern writers like Frankl tried to show that the modern vacuum of meaning was an opportunity for each individual to define his or her life in a meaningful way. But it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to infer general cosmic meaning from purely personal preferences. One person’s individual choice won’t necessarily lead to the universal absolutes that might — or do — exist. That’s partly because everything depends on each individual’s experience.”
“Unlike the church of the Middle Ages, the restored gospel places enormous value on the concepts of personal freedom, agency, and growth.”
“The gospel’s universal truths thus teach us how to engage a personal quest for freedom and meaning. That quest really can’t be fulfilled without our active, wholehearted striving: participating, enduring, searching, and overcoming all forms of opposition, uncertainty, and affliction.”
“When people abandon the Restoration’s ‘big box’ about life’s meaning but have nothing better to go to, their small ‘my life’ box can be left with no frame of reference, no fixed stars, no complete orientation to the cosmos. It’s hard to define one’s cosmic structure only in terms of what it isn’t. Perhaps that is why their disillusionment can beget the cosmic loneliness that leads to agnosticism or atheism.”
“We are changed by what we love more than [by] what we think.” (Peter Wehner)
“When President Wilford Woodruff announced the Manifesto in 1890, he said, ‘The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of the Church to lead you astray.’ Yet President Russell M. Nelson has also asked us to ‘Give your leaders a little leeway to make mistakes,’ because, as President Dallin H. Oaks put it, ‘We don’t believe in the infallibility of our leaders.’ Whatever else ‘won’t lead you astray’ means, it does not mean the Lord’s prophet will always tell us exactly what to do. Sometimes he asks us to seek our own direction, part of helping us learn how to develop our trust in God.”
“Would the Lord give His prophet instructions without also giving reasons for the instruction? He might, partly because we may not yet be able to understand His reasons.”
“I know the arguments against the [Book of Mormon’s] historicity, but I can’t help feeling that the words are true and the events happened. I believe it in the face of many questions…Unanswerable as some questions are, we need not lament the questions they bring. The strain of believing in unbelieving times is not a handicap or a burden. It is a stimulus and a prod…And…we are in this together.” (Richard Bushman)
“Tolstoy’s theory of history was that we ‘must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the…small elements by which the masses are moved.’”
“Those who criticize the Latter-Day Saints for blindly following their leaders don’t really understand the origin and meaning of this spirit. They seem unable to grasp that those shining eyes are not ‘the outcome of cunning calculations’ but are the fruits of intensely personal convictions developed through thousands of private stories and struggles.”
“Today, when our backs are against the wall of a degraded, secular society whose acid eats at the roots of our children’s faith, or our own, do we just look to our prophet-leader to fix it, or do we also look into our own souls? When we speak of giving the Lord and His Church the benefit of the doubt, what or who is ‘His Church?’ We are giving our trust not only to the Lord and His prohpet. We give it also to the gospel and its power — the combined personal assurances from all the Latter-Day Saints that the Lord keeps His promises. In all their paradoxes and uncertainties, they reflect those assurances in the shining eyes of a million personal discoveries.”
“As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, ‘If we are serious about our discipleship, Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are most difficult for us to do.’”
