Eugene England: On Finding Truth and God: From Hope to Knowledge to Skepticism to Faith

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith. The essay has been edited lightly for space considerations.]

A student once came to me for counsel. I had taught him at the Institute of Religion and had served as a member of his bishopric while I was doing graduate work at Stanford. He told me that he had tried on his mission—and with particular intensity during the year since he had returned—to get a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon. He had read and reread the promise of Moroni and had tried to fulfill the conditions—reading the book, pondering, praying, yearning. But, he told me in tears, he simply had not experienced any response—any knowledge or even spiritual comfort. How, he begged, could I explain this “failure”—or better, how could I help him find success?

I don’t think I was very helpful. I didn’t know then—and don’t now—how to “explain” and thus control the gift of grace or the meanderings of the Spirit, which “bloweth where it listeth.” The operative word in Moroni 10:5 is “may”: “And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” And that is the word used by Alma in his great chapter (Alma 32) on epistemology, on the process of finding (creating) truth in this lone and dreary world: “Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed…, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold it will begin to swell within your breasts” (Alma 32:28). The processes of knowing and the role of our individual agency are so subtle and intertwined yet so important that neither pride nor despair behooves any of us engaged in this pilgrimage. And I can only be thankful that I did not further burden my young friend with allegations that he had not really fulfilled Moroni’s conditions—or that he must be sinful or at least delinquent in obedience to the gospel if the promise wasn’t being fulfilled. But the years since then have brought experience and perhaps a little wisdom.

My essay’s title contains both my subject and my conclusions: I am convinced, both in theory and from experience, that it is possible to find a truth that matters and a God who is personal, ravishing, and an accessible guide and model. I believe the quest must start in hope—an active desire that this universe is a meaningful and potent one. Such hope includes a yearning for meaningful, individual life after death—and also some willingness to accept the responsibilities that such potential life implies, such as eternal marriage, continual repentance, and preparation to meet God. I’ve learned that knowledge comes in abundance from such questing. However, if the quest is honest, skepticism also comes. All the faith that is possible in this vale of tears lies on the other side of skepticism and is made possible in part by our being energetic and persistent in that skepticism. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man reminds us that “[a] little learning is a dangerous thing”—but so also is a little skepticism. Finally, I believe that there is precious little faith possible for many “intellectuals”—that is, for those who are blessed (and cursed) with the “gift of knowledge.” But faith is precious—above all that is sweet and precious—and it is sufficient for our needs.

It may seem strange that an essay on faith and hope should depend so much on such seemingly weak reeds as skepticism and what I later on shall call“the null hypothesis.” But we shall see that such weak things of human experience can be more reliable and important in certain ways and instances than objectivity and reason—the mighty and strong in the world’s eyes.

Indeed, the increase in skepticism since the Enlightenment and the Renaissance has become dramatic since the Restoration and seems to have undermined religious faith irreversibly, which some see as evidence of Satan’s battle against the Restoration. But, on balance, I believe that this skepticism has been positive. There are of course a great many things toward which we should remain skeptical. Skepticism has undermined false religion and bad faith—all to the good. In fact, it can be read as a necessary part of the Restoration and preparation for the Eschaton, the final great drama. Though skepticism has sometimes destroyed true religion and good faith, when properly understood and used it reinforces the need for both religion and faith. It has, in the hands of faithful thinkers like Pascal, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Karl Popper, and F. A. Hayek, undermined the excessive faith of many modern thinkers in such previously intimidating giants as Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, and Marx. It also has countered the modern tendency toward naïve faith in science as our savior. Skepticism has successfully refuted reductionism—the pervasive modern idea that all reality is matter and all theory of matter is reducible to physics. Skepticism has helped us rediscover the law of unanticipated consequences—that social experiments often fail, even when launched by moral truth and good intentions, because human nature is more complex than we have assumed. It is therefore dangerous to give great power to anyone on the basis of their claim to special truth or ways of knowing truth. In the perspective I am seeking here, skepticism leads directly back toward the balance of humility and fearlessness of true faith—that very thing that Latter-day Saints understand is among our chief purposes in life to develop.

Let me first establish my perspective from two basic Mormon texts, both from the Book of Mormon. The first gives the most challenging and yet satisfying basis I have been able to find for ontology: a concept of what the universe basically is. The second gives what I have found to be the most convincing and workable epistemology: a concept of how we know anything. In 2 Nephi, chapter 2, Lehi teaches his son that “it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11) and goes on to explain that this is not merely a descriptive statement about the divisions and conflicts of human personality and social interaction in history, but a proscriptive assertion about what the universe must be like, not only in order for righteousness and good to be brought to pass but in order for life, sense and sensibility, the earth, God, and even the universe itself to exist. The crucial thing this opposition at the heart of things makes possible is the creative activity and freedom of intelligences, initiated (at least in our sphere of present understanding) by God: “For if [opposition is] not there is no God. And if there is no God, we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away” (2 Nephi 2:13).

This crucial ontological point is reinforced in a revelation that was given to Joseph Smith three years after the Book of Mormon was published: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30). This scripture bridges ontology and epistemology because it not only suggests that the very existence of the universe depends on the dynamism of opposition and the perplexing, joy-bringing—but also pain- and sin-bringing—creative play of intelligences, including God. The passage also states that “truth,” which we have been tempted to regard as static and permanently fixed, however elusive, is also inseparably connected to the creative activity of intelligences and relative to the sphere of existence where it is pursued. As the Lord told Joseph Smith in that same revelation, “Truth is knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come.” And knowledge, as we have learned so well since the Romantic revolution, changes as the knower changes. I believe that the second text I will use, Alma 32, gives us the best help both in understanding how the knower knows and what the process of change is. It also helps move us to engage in the process. Alma puts his finger on the essential dilemma of any epistemology. He points out that in his time, just as in ours, many start with a self-defeating condition before they will risk the search for truth and God: they say, “[i]f thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe” (Alma 32:17). Human beings claim they are perfectly willing to believe, if only someone will provide perfect knowledge—clear, rational argument and evidence—in advance. But Alma knows from experience that such a condition, such prior “knowledge,” is a snare and a delusion, because “if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe”—that is, he will be satisfied with those static, unprogressive, essentially trivial aspects of existence which are available for perfect knowledge, and he will not be moved to change his life to conform to the active knowledge of self and God that comes only through faith. As Alma warns, “How much more cursed is he that knoweth the will of God and doeth it not” (Alma 32:19).

Alma is interested in something much more important than the knowledge available empirically and rationally. He is interested in faith, which he says is “not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen which are true.” In other words, we live in a universe (not of our making, nor ultimately of God’s, but just irrevocably there) in which the most important spiritual realities and meanings are not empirically available to mortals. Some of those realities in fact seem to be merely potentials, yet to be built by beings willing to hope and to proceed without perfect knowledge. Truth is to be found in the process of creating the true realities possible in our universe. God is to be discovered as the being who guides and nurtures that process, but only as we create the beings we may become in that process.

How then are we to proceed in such a strange universe, so unresponsive to our desire for a sign, for perfect clarity and assurance? Alma is extremely fair; he asks the bare minimum required for the process to begin: “Awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith” (Alma 32:27). This is hope being described, a motivating wish that certain things could be true, because he goes on to ask of us, “Even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.”

At this point alarm bells go off for skeptics, especially those aware of “cognitive dissonance” and the numerous ways mortals delude themselves. Such are convinced that any tilt in the experiment, any emotional hang-up, any desire for social approval, even any desire to believe, destroys complete, disinterested neutrality—and thus the reliability of the experiment. They are right about the destruction of neutrality—but not about the value of the experiment: because all experiments unavoidably have at least those limitations, even the ones upon which apparent evidence is based. No human endeavor at all, including science, would be possible without some desire, some chance-taking, some hope and vision, some assumptions—if no more than faith in the reliability of our senses as they perceive and measure things. And there are some good safeguards against these minimal tilts, ones well-proven in science and ones that Alma not only accepts but firmly insists upon. He is perfectly aware that the process he is describing, central to the life of the universe, is a fragile one, much like the growth of a plant—the very metaphor he chooses. The process can be aborted by tilts in either direction: On the one hand the seed, even a “true seed,” a “good seed,” can be cast out by unbelief, by resisting the Spirit of the Lord. On the other hand the seed can be bad, and “if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away” (Alma 32:32). That is, it should be cast away. But clearly Alma understands that some of us, because of cognitive dissonance, or pride, or fear, or some other weakness, may go on harboring bad seeds (whether false doctrine, Mormon mythology, or simply incomplete notions that need to be improved before they are planted and nurtured). And by sometimes not being skeptical enough at this point, we delude ourselves that these bad seeds are growing. Thus we invalidate the experiment and do real damage to ourselves and others.

But Alma realistically views even a successful experiment as only a beginning, though a crucial and rewarding step:

Ye know that the word hath swelled your souls, and ye also know that it hath sprouted up, that your understanding doth begin to be enlightened, and your mind doth begin to expand. O then, is not this real? I say unto you, Yea, because it is light; and whatsoever is light, is good, because it is discernible, therefore ye must know that it is good; and now behold, after ye have tasted this light is your knowledge perfect? Behold I say unto you, Nay; neither must ye lay aside your faith, for ye have only exercised your faith to plant the seed that ye might try the experiment to know if the seed was good… And now behold, if you nourish it with much care it will get root, and grow up, and bring forth fruit. (Alma 32:34-37)

This all strikes me as eminently reasonable and fair and modest, yet it does not shrink from suggesting how difficult and risky the business of learning to know through faith really is.

Though we may be blind and gullible pilgrims in a strange and deadly universe, assaulted on all sides by claims and counter-claims, there is an orderly way to begin to sort things out. We need only have the courage to hope, to desire a living and responsive universe no matter how responsible that makes us—and whatever increasing demands that places on us. If we refuse to begin or to continue the process, the judgment lies not on the universe—despite Albert Camus’ pained and painful arguments—but upon ourselves:

If ye neglect the tree, and take no thought for its nourishment, behold it will not get any root; and when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it, because it hath no root it withers away, and ye pluck it up and cast it out. Now, this is not because the seed was not good, neither is it because the fruit thereof would not be desirable; but it is because your ground is barren, …and thus, if ye will not nourish the word, looking forward with an eye of faith to the fruit thereof, ye can never pluck of the fruit of the tree of life. (Alma 32:39-40)

On the other hand, Alma’s promise, which I have tested many times and found as true as anything I know about, is that

because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst. (Alma 32:42)

No wonder that fruit was so desirable to Adam and Eve. I mean that seriously, because I believe that was precisely the fruit they learned to partake of in the Garden, through great effort and moral anguish and courage. Their brave choice to partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil began for us all the opportunity to engage in a similar process of growth through faith. It is a process not available in any other way and one that therefore our heavenly Father and Mother, in great sorrow but in great hope, had to send us forth to do—on our own, though with Christ’s necessary and sufficient help.

I know I have not pinned down precisely the only true way for finding God and truth. But it is one way that I, your fellow pilgrim in this lone and dreary world, can bear fervent witness about. It may help to relate some contemporary ideas and experiences to encourage understanding and a willingness to try this approach to the fruit of knowledge. For instance, many modern scientists and philosophers have carefully removed any basis for undue pride or overconfidence in the once touted powers of critical intelligence and the certainties of science. In his essay “On the Uncertainty of Science,” Lewis Thomas argues powerfully for humble attention to our still mysterious but essential human gifts for ambiguity and for language: “The culmination of a liberal-arts education ought to include, among other matters, the news that we do not understand a flea, much less the making of a thought.” Another example is Alston Chase, who presents a striking description of what we have lost since the Renaissance by exalting knowledge over virtue and faith, not only in public and private evil committed by perfectly intelligent beings like the Nazis (who increased through science their power to do evil but not their will to avoid it), but also in educational disarray and general anxiety:

The academic community, by putting scholarly ideals above spiritual and moral ones, has forgotten how to make value judgments, and therefore does not know how to say what ought to be taught… Nuclear bombs, genetic experimentation, industrial pollution, carcinogens in processed foods are all products of our own ingenuity and unlimited desire. In the end our fears remain because we have chosen neither to limit knowledge nor to rein in the human will.... Only in my lifetime have educators abandoned all pretense to limit reason by faith.

But, you may be saying, didn’t you earlier praise desire and knowledge as parts of the process of finding truth? Yes, certainly, but only in the context of Alma’s thorough and balanced treatment of the process of gaining faith. The process begins in a “hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” But where do we get any idea about what Paul called “the substance of things hoped for” so that we can go on to develop (through Alma’s process) some evidence for “things not seen”? Joseph Smith, in his Lectures on Faith, taught that three things are necessary for viable faith—that is, faith unto salvation: the idea that God exists, a correct knowledge of His attributes, and confidence that we are living in harmony with those attributes of integrity, charity, etc. The first two conditions are provided in history and revelation: God has assured us that He will not “leave us comfortless,” and throughout the scriptures He both gives us the evidence and reminds us how important that evidence is to assure us of what Moroni calls, in the preface to the Book of Mormon, “what great things God has done for our fathers.” But though God, through His loving watchfulness over human history, makes available to us all the essential knowledge on which hope and proper desire can be based, we must finally reach out to Christ for the power to repent and put our lives sufficiently in harmony with the divine nature that our hope can be properly directed and our knowledge sufficiently humble. Then, if our skepticism is adequately persistent, we can begin to develop a growing and saving faith.

I remember with continuing pain a conversation I once had with a fine young poet and thoughtful, sensitive husband and father. He and his wife had decided to no longer be involved with the restored gospel, not because it wasn’t true but because they were afraid it was. He had considered the prevailing Mormon rhetoric about the celestial kingdom—apparently a place of organizational charts, high-powered administration, constant progress measured by graphs, assignments, and evaluations and constant cheer of the kind best imagined as a perennial missionary zone conference or an Amway sales force meeting. He had accepted the image as accurate and decided that he wanted no part of such a heaven, because there would obviously be no place for poets. Like Huckleberry Finn, he said, “All right, I’ll go to hell,” because his sound heart would not accept racist values—though he uncritically accepted them as true—of the imperfect society that had conditioned him. But my friend, right as he was to resist a false image of heaven, was wrong; his desire was not Christ-centered enough and his skepticism not persistent enough to help him beyond a community-taught “knowledge” that was flawed and limited, to help him move on to a growing and life-giving faith in the living God of the scriptures and of his own best imaginings—a God who, I believe, is a poet.

Besides the skepticism my friend needed in order to find faith, I mentioned another “weak reed.” The first is “the null hypothesis,” which refers to a process, familiar from algebra and used effectively by Hugh Nibley, by which the corrosive power of skeptical logic can be turned to the service of affirming propositions rather than constantly attacking them. For example, rather than merely pointing to logical and evidential weaknesses or problems in the claim that the Book of Mormon is of divine origin (a very easy thing to do) or trying to prove the claim directly (an impossible thing to do), we can make the “null” or negative hypothesis that the book is not divine, was written by Joseph Smith or some other early nineteenth-century person, and then apply all our skeptical, logical tools scrupulously to that proposition. The result, I believe, is a powerful argument that the null hypothesis is not true and by logical implication the opposite is true—the Book of Mormon is divine. In general, if we would be as rigorously honest and thorough in questioning our negative conclusions as we are our positive ones, we would find God and truth more easily. Skepticism should keep us from accepting inadequate answers and merely wishful hope—but also from accepting inadequate refutations and self-indulgent or cowardly despair. As Pascal taught, the possibility that God exists, the mere chance that he guarantees human immortality and joyful eternal purposes, is so stupendous a possibility that we ought to risk all for it, gamble everything, certainly time and intellectual persistence and “working out our salvation in fear and trembling,” rather than getting lost in some absurdly fair or “objective” game of letting all the negative evidence overbalance the little, but sufficient, positive evidence. If I am marooned on a desert island, absolutely dependent on finding another human being to comfort and perhaps save me, the one little swale where I find a single footprint is more important, more true, than the other hundreds of square miles where I find nothing.

I believe that the struggle to find truth is only really successful when united with the struggle to find God—and that the struggle is worth the pain and setbacks, worth enduring to the end. I believe the evidences God has provided in history and in the scriptures are adequate to show what great things he has done for our ancestors and can do for us if we will persist in the hope that such evidence provides. I believe His grace is sufficient, that He will visit us with assurance and spiritual confirmation from time to time—not as we demand it but as He knows we need it. And I believe the Church of Jesus Christ is the best context on earth in which to carry on the struggle—because it provides ways to know and serve Christ that can direct and discipline our desires and thus help us to hope genuinely in things that are real but not seen. And through the sacrificial service it requires and unconditional love it thus helps us learn, the Church can teach us to persist in humility—not to be consumers of truth but rather servants of truth and to affirm the struggle, becoming as little children; willing, as Joseph Smith the boy was, to ask and let it be given, to knock and let the door open.

Sterling McMurrin, one of the brightest people I’ve known and truly a post-Enlightenment rationalist, once bore his testimony as follows: “I came to the conclusion at a very early age, earlier than I can remember, that you don’t get books from angels and translate them by miracles.” I find that a remarkably unskeptical assertion, one that manifests much greater faith than I am capable of—a faith, that is, in a dogmatic and quite limited view of the world. I am inclined to believe what Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds us—that there are stranger things than are dreamed of in any of our philosophies. Joseph Smith was in one sense more skeptical than Sterling McMurrin, more willing to question the most basic assumptions and thus to make contact with the most basic, divine realities and learn basic truths about the universe. As we learn more about young Joseph as a practitioner of folk magic, one still in tune with forces and perceptions that had not yet been destroyed by Enlightenment rationalism and thus able later to look back to what he called “the ancient pattern of things,” I hope we will not let our own rationalist limitations shock and disappoint us too much. We may even open up a bit ourselves. After all, it seems to me that the living God of the scriptures (the one whom I desire to love and serve and know) could make Himself known to a boy still capable of seeking treasures in the earth more easily than to someone who is certain you “just don’t get books from angels.”

Finally, let me say something about the role of the Church in our quest for truth. Not too long after that conversation with my young friend at Stanford who was struggling to get some divine confirmation, I heard President David O. McKay give one of his last addresses, one that was a little disturbing to those who thought the process of getting divine manifestations an easy one, especially for potential prophets. He told how he struggled in vain all through his teenage years to get God “to declare to me the truth of his revelation to Joseph Smith.” He prayed, “fervently and sincerely,” in the hills and at home but had to admit constantly, “No spiritual manifestation has come to me.” But he continued to seek truth and to serve others including going on a mission to Britain, mainly because of trust in his parents and the goodness of his own experience in the Church. And finally, during that mission in England, while witnessing some remarkable spiritual outpourings at a conference, including the presence of angels, he realized that “the spiritual manifestation for which I had prayed as a boy in my teens came as a natural sequence to the performance of duty.” I have had many personal confirmations of that prophetic witness. Most of my profound spiritual manifestations that have confirmed and strengthened me in the struggle to discover and create truth and to find God—as well as my most soul-stretching moral challenges and my most precious though painful opportunities to learn how to love—have come “as a natural sequence to the performance of duty” in the Church.

I believe that, together with the scriptures which it plays a major role in preserving and teaching, the Church is one of the major gifts of grace God provides in His promise not to leave us comfortless in a difficult world. It is the most tangible, day-to-day reminder of “what great things the Lord hath done for [our] fathers,” the chief way we “may know the covenants of the Lord, that [we] are not cast off forever.” And according to Moroni, this is precisely the evidence of “how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men” and what we must “ponder” in our hearts in order to be prepared to know the truth of all things through the power of the Holy Ghost (see Moroni 10:3-5).

I know from experience that there are many ways to improve our receptivity to divine confirmation of truth. Pride and despair, seemingly opposite, are similar in their preoccupation with self, their inclination to put immediate success or failure in the quest for truth ahead of sacrificial love or even patience: “He that would save his life shall lose it.” And a persistent inclination to extreme skepticism—or cynicism, whether intrinsic or adopted as a modern fad—can be a problem: “If ye do not cast [the seed] out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord” is one of Alma’s conditions for tasting the fruit of faith. But the essence of my wisdom is simply that one must keep trying, patiently and humbly, and that by far the best place to do that is within the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood created by a covenant community; for all of us who have it available to them, the Church of Jesus Christ is that community. I just don’t buy the objection that church participation is too stressful, too boring or painful or degrading or whatever. I have encountered most of those stresses quite directly and I’m not persuaded the price is too high, especially as I have found that the very problems and stresses that a demanding, authoritarian, but lay church places on us are a good part of its blessing to us in teaching us to love so that we can more ably create truth and find God.

Finally, I just can’t accept the claim of some people (though I certainly feel the pain they reveal) that we must get on with our lives—that if there is no sure answer, fairly soon, to the question of Joseph’s divine calling or the truth of the Book of Mormon claims, then we can’t wait around but must try something quite different. This takes us back to Alma’s condition of desire: What do we want to be true? The claims of the restored gospel, beginning with Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, are simply on the face of it the most intellectually and morally and spiritually exciting available on the earth. If it is true that we are eternal intelligences, gods in embryo who can fulfill our infinite potential only in an ever-ongoing process of perfecting the very best of what we know and find joy in—love, marriage, friendship, service, integrity, learning, pursuing beauty, creating—then it is worth every effort, every sacrifice, to engage in the process sufficiently to find out. Certainly, short of convincing evidence that such a possibility does not exist, we would be foolish to turn our energies to lesser options, especially those, however brave-sounding, that are content to limit our vision and responsibilities to this mortal—that is to say, material and doomed—life. So I encourage us to keep trying, however long and difficult the way.

It seems that all of us must go through some kind of Gethsemane, some version of Abraham’s test when he was asked to give up his beloved son and his most cherished moral beliefs in order to know God. This may be the only way in the universe to be prepared to understand and accept for ourselves what Christ learned in the Atonement—and thus learn to forgive ourselves and others and develop faith unto repentance so we can be redeemed. For some of us that test may come in our challenge to keep trying, to keep planting seeds and nurturing them, without feeling any clearly recognizable swelling motions or spiritual confirmation, but simply enduring in desire and hope until, after long and patient service in love, the joyful taste of the fruit comes “as a natural sequence to the performance of duty.” If my young friend from Stanford were here, this is what I would bear my own witness to—and hope for him.