Brothers and Sisters, it’s a privilege to be with you this evening to discuss that most wonderful of all topics, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I would like to take as my theme, “Can Religion Be Objective?” I suppose there’s no other question that moves larger in the university atmosphere about religion than its objectivity. I think it bears some very careful discussion. So let’s talk a little about this and see if religion can be objective.
Let’s first of all begin as every intelligent discussion should begin, it’s going to get down to details with a definition. There are different ways we can define objectivity. The common sense definition that we sort of offhandedly take when we talk about it, is that objectivity is according to our thoughts and our ideas with that which is absolutely so, with the truth. Now that’s fine if we have a means of knowing the truth. But so far as most people are concerned, they discover that what they think is true is only relatively so. And therefore, this definition does not serve in any precise use, simply because there are very few things we can be sure about in this life. There are many things we might believe, and believe on good evidence, but to be sure, to know that we are objective in the sense that we can somehow compare our ideas with the absolute truth and know that we are right, is a thing we seldom come by.
At the other end of the spectrum, another definition is to believe that objectivity is simply that upon which some group people agree. Now as a matter of fact, this is the way the word is frequently used. You are objective when you agree with your judges. They say you are being objective when you, as it were, mirror their image. Now this of course is a rather cynical definition, but unfortunately it’s one that pertains far and wide in academic circles. When you become an objective scientist in such and such a field, it’s because you have come to the standard of those who say they are objective scientists in that field. Unfortunately it’s a personal thing, and this changes from generation to generation. There are fads in various areas. But I think we would have to reject this one.
I’d like to then substitute or suggest a third definition of what it means to be objective. And this would be that to be objective means to do the very best thinking that you can on the basis of the evidence you have as an individual. So far as I can see, so help us, that is all we really can do. We must make decisions about many items. And if we always do the very best that we know, with the evidence that we have, I think we can live with ourselves, and we can then face our God.
Let’s go into the history of objectivity. Originally, objectivity was simply to believe what you were told by those who were supposed to know the truth. The traditional religions of mankind have functioned on this kind of basis. Originally the true religion was upon the earth but then mankind apostatized from this, and false teachers destroyed the truth. And then we had a time when men were supposed to believe these false and adulterated notions. And the false teachers insisted that everyone should believe the weight of their authority. Now plainly this had serious limitations, because the authorities themselves didn’t always agree with each other.
Now any thinking man could say you couldn’t be objective if you believed two different things that were contradictory. In the midst of all this, this religious confusion, we have the beginning of what is called philosophy. In history, philosophy was born as an attempt to do better than the false priests and teachers of the peoples’ religions were doing in ancient Greece. It was an attempt to find that objectivity that was better than simply believing the priest. And men invented the use of reason. They thought that, since reason shows us that these men are not consistent with themselves or with each other, if we can just find a system of ideas that is thoroughly and completely consistent, then we will have the truth. Now this gave rise to what we call rationalism, which is a very strong and important trend in the history of thought. Rationalism was the bases of ancient Greek science. Science was born as a child of philosophy, in the attempt of people to discover the truth about the world. Philosophy has as its main objective, knowing how to live and to be happy. In other words, to find the course of wisdom. But to know how to live and be happy, you have to react to the universe. And to react to the universe properly, you have to know what it is. And so science was born as that specialized discipline wherein men sought to know the world and to understand it so that they could react properly to it. The standard objectivity, then, was to be reasonable. If you were consistently yourself, then, indeed, you would be found to be in accord with the truth.
Now it was soon discovered that this was not enough. Just to be reasonable was not a sufficient canon. And so there developed in the history of philosophy, (I’m going to condense the whole history, in the earliest beginnings down to now, in a few short statements here) and simply go to the canons of philosophy that have been developed with the canons of science, which have provided for science the most sure, the most firm basis for thinking that men have been able to devise. Science is taken in the world today to be the objective standard. And it is the thing which the world looks to for answers. Since they can’t find sure answers anywhere else, they look to science. So let’s look to the standards or canons which science has invented and developed, and see just what they are, and we’ll compare the possibility of having objectivity in religion on a similar basis.
First: First of all the idea of reason; that’s the first canon. We discover by hard experience that when we are consistent with ourselves that we do better than when we aren’t.
Second: Going on to the second canon. We discover that if we are going to do any real, consistent thinking about the nature of this world, we must have some kind of uniformity. The only way that the mind of man can cope with the universe is if there are some regularities about the universe. If everything in your world were different from minute to minute, could you do any thinking? You might react, but you could never react intelligently. The only way that we could act intelligently relative to the universe, is if there are certain things that happen over and over again and we can learn what to do next time when that same thing comes along again. And there are some similarities in our world, thank goodness. And so we learn to react to these. The sun comes up every morning, and we learn to react to this. It goes down every evening, and we learn to react to this: to the seasons, to the way people act, to the plants and animals around us, to the opportunities for happiness and for unhappiness around us. And so it is that we have to defend our uniformity, because if there were no uniformity we could not think as successfully about this world as we do. And so a second canon of scientific objectivity is to depend on this idea of uniformity. We say, as it were, that the universe at other times and places must be like it is here and now. We insist on this so that we can think about it. So when we see a certain process going on here, say we were measuring the sediments in a lake bed, we observe that in a period of so many years so many sediments build up resulting in such and such a thickness: so many different bars of layers or something like that. Then we extrapolate backwards and we say on the basis of uniformity, if it took this long for this many layers to accumulate, and we find out how many layers were in the lake, then we say the lake is so and so old. Now we have to do this thinking about just about everything in our physical environment. If we do not use the principle of uniformity, we are not being, strictly speaking, scientific. And so we are not being objective by that standard.
Third: To think scientifically, we must relate things in the world. We must see that there are chains of cause and effect. We might pose the principle of causality or sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason. There has to be a reason for something happening. Things don’t just happen individually. They don’t happen for no reason at all out of the blue. Again you see this is simply an application of the principle of uniformity as it were. If we want to know how to turn lights on, we’ve got to figure out something other than just supposing that it happens. If we can come to see that there is a sufficient reason mainly that when we have flipped the certain switch the lights would go on, we begin to get an understanding of what makes what work in the world. And as we have this understanding, then we can know how to accomplish certain things. Until we can begin to build up an understanding of what makes what work in the world, we don’t think we’re being very objective in our thinking. And so, the standard of causality has become a very important bulwark of scientific objectivity.
Fourth: There is a postulate of naturalism, and when science began, especially coming out of medieval times, science was afflicted with all kinds of false notions about spirits, angels, and devils that were doing this and that sort of thing. Not that it is necessarily false that the spirits and angels and devils do things, but the kind of things that they were said to do just didn’t make very good understanding in the universe. Like the idea op the ancient Greek idea that Apollos used to get in his chariot every day and drive the sun across the sky. Well, this as interesting Greek mythology, but it didn’t do very much for your understanding of astronomy. And especially in medieval times before science could escape and become objective, it had to rid itself of every such notion of an animistic sort. And therefore today, we have what is called the postulate of naturalism in science. If you are going to think of things scientifically and be objective in modern science, you cannot evoke any reference to any kind of supernatural being. No gods, no spirits, no intelligences, no devils, no gremlins, gnomes, fairies, or any sort of things like that. These things had to be strictly cast aside, in favor of what is called scientific objectivity. Now this gave a tremendous power to science. In enabled scientists to think in ways that they could get an understanding of the universe that gave them actual power. If they thought of their chemistry, or their physics in terms of spirituality they found this didn’t lead them to much predictive power. It didn’t lead them to be able to control their experiments, but when they began to see that certain chemicals reacted with certain other chemicals in a certain quantitative and qualitative way, and they began to develop understanding and theories as to why things happened. And using these theories they were able to control other experiments, and so forth. This became a very powerful tool, and thus became part of the standard of objectivity.
Fifth: Finally, we have the canon of publicity. This is to say that if you are going to be scientific, the evidence that you adduce, the evidence that you propose to be the basis for your understanding in the world has to be something that’s public. Now by public, we mean that it has to be something that you can see and also any other qualified observer can see and report on, and you can agree on the report. Now there is no insistence in science that you need to agree on the interpretation, but at least you must agree on the report. If this particular object is one yard long, you have to be able to come to some kind of an agreement on it. Now it’s notorious that the finer your measurements get, the less agreement you will get. But within the limitations of our ordinary measuring devices, we are able to get some standard agreements as to what the nature of the data of the world is. And on the basis of this physical data, which we can agree upon, the whole edifice of science is built. Well there now we have as it were a profile of what makes scientific objectivity.
Supposing you have a theory that you want to test and see if it is scientifically objective. Supposing you’ve got some kind of notion as to what makes UFO’s, flying saucers, and you want to say clearly people from other planets that are coming. Well, so far as we are aware, there’s nothing unreasonable that we know about the fact that there could be people from other planets. That would fit in quite well. About uniformity…Well it doesn’t fare too well here; we have no knowledge of any persons from any other planets, and so until we can build up a rather great body of experience where we can test the thing again and again to develop a uniformity within the data itself, this one would tend to say, “Maybe this isn’t a very good scientific explanation of these things.”
About the law of cause and effect. In the law of cause and effect we insist that there should be some kind of reasonable and regular cause for these things. We would have to study many cases of the supposed cause and the effect to see if there was some kind of definite correlation. Just because somebody has the idea that this is somebody from another planet doesn’t mean that it is. Just because somebody sees a flying object, doesn’t mean there’s really anything there. There has to be more tangible evidence as it were, more people have to see it. We have to invoke this idea of publicity. Many people have to see this and agree upon the report before we can even have the effect. That is to what the cause of this is or what we might correlate it with, this is something else.
Well, the idea of naturalism comes in the attempt to make of this being from another planet any kind of supernatural creature of course would be limited. This could not be scientific if we applied the canon at this point. We could conceive of these creatures scientifically as being beings like ourselves, human beings or something like ourselves, which another world might produce, this would be within the pale of scientific thinking. But to suppose that this is some kind of supernatural being would be strictly impossible according to the scientific canon.
And finally we’ve mentioned the publicity. To make a long story short, such an idea would have a very difficult time getting established. But the fact that it’s difficult is the safeguard of scientific objectivity. It was not intended that ideas should be easily accepted. but that idea has been pretty passe for a long time among people who really understand how to think. It’s unfortunate, however, to know how many people in the world still believe in this as their methodology. There are strongholds of rationalism all over the world. But be unto people who are getting out and accomplishing things. These are the people in the ivory tower who sit back and theorize on the world. Mathematicians, of course, make great rationalists because they don’t need to deal with anything in the real world. There are very few other people who can be rationalists and get away with it. But we can agree that it’s good to be rational. We ought to use the very best thinking we can possibly muster. We ought to search through our ideas and see if they are self-consistent. Just because they are self-consistent doesn’t mean a thing as far as the truth goes; but if they are inconsistent, then you know you are wrong.
So this test of rationalism becomes a very important test of falsehood. It’s not a test of truth but it’s a test of falsehood. You can tell when your ideas are wrong at some other time by this test. Now if you could tell when they were wrong all of the time by this test, then it would also be a test of truth. But since you can’t, it’s only a test of certain kinds of falsehoods. So, I think in religion we must insist on being reasonable, on being consistent. And we must search through our understanding of the Gospel, of our theology, whatever we are considering in a religious way and see that it is consistent. Now this thing is an end product. In the beginning we may not see that it’s consistent. But whatever we do know and understand must be consistent. Sometimes the Lord might tell us to do something particularly we don’t particularly see the consistency of at the moment. The Lord told Abraham to take Isaac out and kill him; he didn’t see the consistency at the moment. But he knew that the Lord was consistent, and therefore he trusted in the Lord and the consistency was plain to him when the experience was over, it was perfectly consistent. But that’s afterward. As I say, when we have the knowledge, it must be consistent. Until afterward he didn’t have knowledge or in other words understanding of the situation.
Well secondly, as in science when we think religiously, we too must depend upon uniformity. If there isn’t some regularity in this universe, our case is hopeless. In fact, this is one of the things He testifies to us about Himself is that he is uniform. He says it this way: my course is one eternal round; I am without variableness or shadow of turning. Now what does that mean in a practical sense to you and me? It means this: When you trust the Lord, you can depend on Him. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night or country you’re in, what problem you’re facing, what your situation is, the Lord is uniform. He is there. He’s there to support you, to instruct you, to guide you, to chastise you if you need to be. Whatever you need to be blessed, to become a more righteous person, the Lord is uniform. The Lord is without variableness or shadow of turning. He will be there for you just like He was for Abraham. Now that’s a great thing to know. If we can’t use this part of uniformity, if there isn’t uniformity in the universe, we’re just as hopeless as science is. To be living, intellectual, productive human beings, there has to be a uniformity in the world. Now it’s wonderful as we note that the uniformity in the spiritual universe is far greater than the uniformity in the physical universe. One of the reasons we have to be quite cautious about science is that we know not how far and how long this uniformity is going to go on. We can’t always predict with accuracy that certain experiments will take place. And so we always have to be tentative and cautious. And if we are truly moved with the true spirit of science, we’ll never be caught being dogmatic or authoritarian in making any scientific statements. We’ll say, on the basis of the evidence, it appears to be such and such. And some mighty good thinking can be done in a tentative way.
But you see, when it comes to religion, we must of necessity begin to be quite sure of ourselves. And if all we can say is that this is a tentative thing like we must in science, that’s not very good. It’s pretty hard to put your faith in something that will let you down one out of ten times. Now this it the remarkable and wonderful thing about the Lord, if you have tried the Lord, and it’s actually Him you have been trying, He will not have let you down. When you get uniformity that’s there 100% of the time, that increases the likelihood of your being on the right track, doesn’t it? You will find almost nothing in the physical world you can depend on that way. But if you try the spiritual experiment, it’s there.
Thirdly, there are laws of cause and effect that pervade the spiritual universe, and we must think in these terms to be religiously objective just as we must in the scientific realm. If we suppose that righteousness just comes, or happiness just comes by accident, that evil is just a matter of what happens, that wickedness and unhappiness don’t necessarily go together, then we’re not being very objective. We haven’t got our minds straightened out as to what really goes on in the universe. There are laws, definite laws of cause and effect that pervade. And if we’re going to think carefully and objectively in religion, we’ve got to straighten out what causes what. We have to become very astute observers. Now the observation field for this is within our own souls, within our own breast, our own mind, or whatever figure you want to use; it’s within us anyway. That’s where we have to look to observe these regularities. Now if you want to know what makes a certain chemical solution turn blue in your laboratory, you’ve got to watch what you’ve done to it. And if you just go around mixing things without paying any attention, or keeping any records of it, are you ever going to know what happens? Of course not. But by the same token, we can never straighten out the spiritual laws of cause and effect until we pay attention to what we do and what the result is. The Lord wants us to keep records. That’s what our scriptures are essentially, they are records of spiritual experiments that have been made by individuals, some turning out disastrously, some turning out very happily. We can to back to the record of those experiments and read the account of every one of them for ourselves. There’s not one that isn’t reproducible. We can try it, we can see if we get the same result. If we don’t, we can say that either I didn’t understand the report or the report was wrong. But at least that brings us to an understanding of the relationships of cause and effect. This brings us to a knowledge for us about what works and what doesn’t work in the world. So we try doing what we know is wrong. If we are honest, we’ll know whether we are happy or not with the result. If we aren’t honest of course, there’s not much that we can do. But we can begin to find the relationships of cause and effect that do pertain in our personal realms, which is to say in the spiritual universe, the two being essentially the same.
Fourthly, now we must part company with the scientific canons and there are two different ones we must have to think objectively and religiously. Rather than having fostered of naturalism now, religion, I think we must have the postulate of honesty. To be honest means that when something happens, we’re willing to admit what happens. The people who are honest in heart in this world are the ones who are willing to admit that they are not fully happy, that they are not satisfied: Well, let’s not say it that way, that when they have done that which they have known to be wrong they have not reaped happiness from it. Now the place a person has to go and do his religious thinking and experiment is within himself. And if he can’t be honest, there’s no hope. Now you don’t worry about the honesty of a scientist; that’s not too much of a problem—why not? Because in science, because all the evidence must be public, another scientist is going to come along behind him and check his work. And if he hasn’t been honest, what happens to him as a scientist? Well, he’s out of the scientific community. And people are not careful, or if they are dishonest, somebody is going to find them out and trip them up. And so this isn’t a problem to the scientist. But you see, the phenomena that you have to deal with, the area of religious experimentation is within us, and there is nobody who can tell us whether we are right or wrong. We have to be able to admit and recognize and state the truth of what goes on within us without any help of anyone else. And if we can’t do that, if we’re not honest, there is no point in even talking about the experiments. There must be this principle of honesty within our own breast. That’s why the missionaries go out to find the honest in heart.
Then fifthly, to be religiously objective we must add to honesty, courage. Why courage? Because other people are going to be putting pressure on us. Other people are going to be wanting us to agree with them. They are going to be wanting us to take the fruit of their experiments and take their word for it, and apply in our own lives what they think is best. But one of the fundamentals of the Gospel is the fact that every man must stand by his own light. Every man has to make up his own mind and stand on his own two feet, spiritually speaking. But unless we have the courage of our own convictions, we could never do this. A person who doesn’t have the courage to stand up to every other human being in this world can never live the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Because he will never be able to be true to that which we know and have experienced, what can we be true to? To nothing. This is the only thing that we really have in us. Our own experiences are all we know. And if we can’t profit from it, there’s no hope for us. There’s no possibility of our being an individual person. To be an individual, to be an agent means to both be honest in what happens to us, and then to have the courage to stand up for it, and to speak the very best we know, to bear our testimonies, and not to let other people influence us into simply taking their ideas on the subject.
You know that in Section 1 of the Doctrine and Covenants, this is what the Lord says about why He restored the Gospel. He restored the Gospel so that no man would counsel his fellow man, that every man might speak in the name of the Lord. It was never intended in this Church that we should be authoritarian, that we should do what any other human being says. To accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to live it, means to become independent of flesh. It means to rely upon the arm of the Lord as we receive it through the Spirit. But unless we can follow canons like these, how will we ever know when we are being religiously objective?
Okay now, let’s try religious problems. Supposing that you’ve got a problem—you’ve been influenced, you’ve had a feeling and you wonder if this is the voice of the Lord that’s speaking to you. How can you use these canons? Well, try the canon of reason. The Lord is consistent. He will not tell you to do something that’s inconsistent with something He has told you to do as a general principle. Well, He may say go here today and there tomorrow, but that’s not inconsistency. Why not? Because this was for yesterday and this is for tomorrow. Time makes a difference: what is right now is not always right later. If you try to live by the Spirit of the Lord, this is one of the very hard facts that you will soon learn. Thinking over what the Lord says for a week or two and then doing it is disastrous. When the Lord gives us a commandment, it’s for then. It’s not for some time later. And very frequently when we put it over and wait until we are sure it is absolutely right and then do it, it doesn’t work because it isn’t right for that new time.
Well, the thing will be reasonable; it will be consistent. Consistent with what? Well, it will be consistent with what the scriptures tell us. And if we wonder if this is the voice of the Lord, we can go see if there is anything like it written in the scriptures. It will be consistent with what the presiding authorities over us say. And our of this consistency, we can find whether we are on the right track or not. There is the rational criteria. Or we can see if there is a uniformity here. Is this now the kind of thing? Well, until we have experienced the Lord many times, we don’t have that uniformity. Again, it’s like these people from outer space. Knowing, having heard the voice of the Lord once, we don’t really know whether that’s the voice of the Lord, we just have to kind of guess. There’s no possibility of being objective with something we’ve experienced just once. But if we’ve experienced this same voice many times, and it’s the same voice that has led us to good results in the past, then by applying the principle of uniformity, we can know and be assured as a matter of faith then that this is the voice of the Lord.
About the principles of sufficient reason—We can look into our lives, and we can begin to see now, as we act on this thing the Lord tells us to do, it leads to happiness. What Satan tells them to do may lead to pleasure. People have to have very clear in their minds the difference between happiness and pleasure. Then if we can be honest, if this is in all honesty the fear of my experience, this thing that I am saying, and if I can have the courage to stand up in the face of all kinds of social pressure, then I can be objective in my religious thinking.
I suggest to you that religious thinking is every bit as difficult and demanding, nay more so than scientific thinking. Every person who hopes to be exalted has to become at least as good a thinker as the greatest scientist in the world. Why? Because the problems of knowing what is true in the Gospel are like that. Some people get the idea that revelation is just a matter of receiving it, and doing what it says and that’s all there is to it. And that’s the mistake that Oliver Cowdery made. He thought he could just ask the Lord for the translation and how it would come and that was all there was to it. But the Lord assured him that isn’t the way it works. You have to work for it. You have to bring to bear all the power of your intelligence on the problem when you’ve got to bear all you have the Lord will make up the difference. And that’s why we have to have some system of thinking these things our in our minds. Whether you realize or not, you already have some kind of canons or standards of religious thinking. The question is, are they good enough? Are they precise enough? If it was demanded of you to perform a scientific experiment and come out with a certain result, you’d soon find out whether your scientific canons were good enough or not. But by the same token, if you’re performing religious experiments and getting good results, you know that you must have a pretty good system. You must have pretty good canons in operation. So it’s important to think these things through and become conscious about them, self-conscious so that we do not allow ourselves to be misled. It’s one thing to have revelation, but all of Satan’s servants have revelation too. He directs them and he guides them. The important thing is to be able to find the revelation from the Lord. That which is true, that which is good, that which brings happiness. And to do this we have to employ the very best thinking we can possibly muster.
Well, let’s get back to the original question now. The question was, can religion be objective? Now let me answer the question, perhaps a little differently than you might think that I have been heading. Let me say, no; frankly religion can’t be objective. But by the same token, science cannot be objective. And the reason for that’s very simple. And that’s simply because neither science nor religion exists. There’s no such thing as science in this world. If you think there is, show it to me, where is it? What is it? This is a mythological entity that we have created in our minds as a short-end way of referring to something that does exist. Now what does exist is human beings who are acting scientifically at certain times. Now that’s a reality. But there’s an awful temptation to generalize and talk about science as if it were something individually existing and talk about science as if it were something individually existing apart from people acting scientifically at various times. Do you see what I’m driving at? Philosophically speaking, this is what we call the difference between realism and nominalism. Maybe I could illustrate this by another example: Supposing that every human being in the United States all of a sudden decided not to believe that the United States government existed. So you and I and everybody else just said, Okay, the government doesn’t exist. Would the government exist then? No, it wouldn’t exist because it is only a figment of our imaginations. The government, as a separate institution, is just a myth. Now what exists actually is people who exercise power over other people, and the other people let them do it. And that’s government. That’s the reality of the situation. But there’s no such thing as “the government.” There’s only this individual who exercises this power over these people. That’s the specific reality that exists. So, when we talk about religion, well, religion isn’t a thing—it doesn’t exist. What exists is human beings who act religiously. Now my point is this: Can I as an individual think objectively in science? Certainly, if I follow the standards. Objectivity is like having a measuring stick out here. If it measures up, it’s objective. But the measure for objectivity has changed radically in the last 1500 years in science. It’s much better frankly than it was. If you were to use the canons of scientific objectivity that Galileo used, you’d be laughed out of court today. We’ve progressed a great length from Galileo. Now Galileo was a very good scientist. He happened to guess right, fortunately for him, or he would be one of those bad examples we use. He didn’t know he was right, he just guessed right in a lot of what he did. But because he guessed right, we honor him today. Now, that’s not quite good enough. And we recognize that today, so we have better canons or scientific objectivity. But the question comes down to it now, how about religion? Are you being objective in your religious thinking? Are you doing the very best thinking you can? Are you honestly evaluating and searching for the evidence that’s available? To make a long story short, a person can be just as objective in his religious thinking as he can in his scientific thinking. But all that thinking goes on within himself. He’s got to be at least as astute in his religion as he is in his science if he’s going to produce the kind of results that bring salvation to him.
So in conclusion let me say, the great need you and I have is to do the very best thinking we can do. If we will apply ourselves to religion, we will find that there is such a thing as a reality of the spiritual existence. We know of some spiritual existence, we know our own spirit exists. We experience it. And if we come to be able to differentiate, to understand to experience other spirits, to get these things all straightened out in our minds on the basis of cause and effect, and uniformity and reason, in accordance to what the scriptures say and the prophets say, we can come to a sure knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I bear you my testimony that I know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is true. And I know that my evidence for that is every bit as good as for anything that I know in this world. If anybody wishes to examine the evidence, I can tell them what it is. They can’t see the evidence themselves. But then for that matter, you know nobody can see the evidence for anybody else in science either. This canon of publicity is really kind of a mythological thing, because all evidence is private. Physical or spiritual evidence, it’s all within our heads. There’s no such thing as public evidence. What we call public evidence is simply that about which we make the same noises. In other words, if I say that that wall is blue and you say it’s blue, we think that we’re being public because we both make the same noises with our vocal chords. But the blueness of that wall isn’t a thing that I can check out in your mind. All I can ever check is what you say about it. Well, the point is, it all drives back to you and to me. We are the ones that have to have the courage and the honesty to take the stand to know that we might be objective. It’s my hope and prayer that every one of us can rise to this wonderful opportunity that we have to know the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to be objective and constructive, and powerful in our thinking. The point of the Gospel is to do great and might works of righteousness in this world for the salvation of souls and for the building of the Kingdom of God after we have found out that it’s true.
But many are stumbling at the gate. They do not know where to find the Lord God. They are afraid they might not be objective if they start thinking religiously. But the only reason they think that is because of the finger of scorn that has been pointed at them by people of the world who don’t want to think that religion is objective. I’m simply trying to demonstrate tonight that those who say that religious thinking is not objective are not being very objective; they don’t have much of a case to stand on. I offer this hope, and I say it in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
ANSWERS TO TWO QUESTIONS:
One. The first time you see something, you don’t know what it is. You have experienced it, but that doesn’t mean you know it. Until you begin to recognize the voice of the Lord, you don’t know that it is the voice of the Lord. What I’m saying is this: The purpose of the Gospel is to bring people to the point not where they have had a revelation, but where they live by revelation from hour to hour and minute to minute, day to day. Now a person who has had ten thousand revelations from the Lord and has tried Him and tested Him, he doesn’t wonder if that’s the voice of the Lord on the ten thousand and first revelation—he knows. But for the first few hundred he might have been very confused about which was which. This is the same with anything. Supposing you’re talking with somebody on the telephone who you’ve never met; you do business with him. The first few times you talk to him you might not be sure whether it’s the right person or not until you get certain facts established, make certain tests. But after you’ve talked to him a thousand times, you can just tell from the vocabulary he uses, the inflection he has, and the tone of voice; it’s very difficult to be fooled. So I say no, I don’t see a conflict here, because it’s only after long experience that we come to knowledge, until we can get enough experience to establish that uniformity that I was talking about. What I am saying is what you are testing is probably the Spirit. There isn’t just one Spirit that speaks to man; there are many lying spirits that speak to all men. And the question is, how do you tell the Holy one, the true one, the one that never tells you a falsehood? Now the word holy is a derivative of the word whole. The Holy Ghost is completely accurate in what He tells you, and the thing we’ve got to do in our mind is straighten our which one of the voices that speaks to us is always right. Now that’s a pretty big task. Frankly, not many people have done it.
Or, your point’s well taken. One of the great diseases in the Church is rationalism which is to set ourselves up as a judge of God and pre-judge the thing by saying, “If I can’t understand it, it must not be right.” Now we must search until we find and know and identify the voice of the Lord. Then when the Lord says, “Take your son out and kill him,” we don’t deny the rationality of it; we don’t deny this to be consistent necessarily with everything the Lord has told us hitherto, and He explained Himself before he would do it. But now I agree with that point 100%. But the fact is we will by then have established the fact as to who the Lord is. You see, Abraham had talked face to face with the Lord before that happened. He knew the Lord as you and I stand face to face to each other and talk to each other, and therefore, this wasn’t a thing where he was just going out on his belief that the voice had spoken to him which he took to be the voice of God. He knows this was the voice of God and he knew in whom he trusted, therefore he was willing to do it. This list of the scientific canons is a thing you will find various lists when you read different books on the philosophy of science. This happens to be my own collection as it were, and I don’t know anybody that would agree with me on all these points; but on the other hand you will find everybody would agree with me on some of the points.
The point is that, well, like Einstein said, “Don’t pay attention to what scientists say, watch what they do,” because frequently good scientists are not self-conscious about their own method and thought, and therefore as you read their works and see what they’re doing, sometimes you can get a better insight into what they’re doing than from what they tell you as to what they’re doing. So, this again, one of the points that I think is very important is to not be authoritarian. If you want to know what the canons of science are, go look at science and figure it our for yourself. That’s what I have tried to do, and that’s what I commend to you. Don’t take my list…If you want to be objective about religion, the hallmark of your objectivity is are you successful in accomplishing your religious objectives. And if you are, I’ll buy your canons, at least for you. Let me point out first of all that the very point I was making in all of this is that everything is subjective, there is no such thing as public objectivity either in science or in religion. It all comes back to what you as an individual has to decide for yourself. Now if you take somebody else’s word for it you’re not being scientific—that’s authoritarianism. So I would say, why worry about subjectivity? Everybody is subjective in everything that they do. This is what’s called in philosophy, the ego-centric predicament. If you know what that means, it means simply that we are trapped as individuals; there is no way that we can get outside to see what the world really is. We have to depend on our ideas of the world. So when you say this really a form of subjectivity, I’d be guilty. But on the other hand, I think you can be objective in your subjectivity if you have a measuring stick and if you faithfully use the measuring stick. Now I think this is a new definition of objectivity, but I don’t pretend that’s bad, I say this is good! Let us advance beyond the old shibboleths and not be frightened of this word subjectivity. We have to admit that we stand alone for what is true and right in the religious sense, but if we could just get everybody to admit that they do that in science goo, it would clear the air considerably because it is also true in science, isn’t it? No one can know what goes on in anybody else’s head to date, and therefore everything we think is private.
Now, let’s come to the second point of your question: “How do you know you aren’t just kidding yourself?” Well, if you’re going to talk that way, you see, then we have to ask the question, “How do you know that you’re not kidding yourself that you’re here?” Maybe you’ve just psychologised yourself into thinking that you’re at Berkeley; and until you are that sure of your religion, you’d better doubt it. Now that’s my point. If you think you’re psychologising yourself, then you’d better watch out; you might just be. The reason you know you’re here is because you can check it and re-check it by all kinds of evidences, like these canons I’ve been talking about. And until you have your religion in that same shape, you’d better watch out, because you may be wrong. It’s very easy to be misled. Most of the people in this world are misled religiously. Most of them are “insane,” spiritually speaking. Now it isn’t very difficult to tell when a person’s insane physically, you might try to go through the window over here and pretend that it’s a door or something. And if you kept insisting on that, refuse to be amenable to the fact that the door is over here, we’d probably lock him up for his own safety. Now you see, people do this spiritually all the time. They say, “This is the way to happiness,” when it’s actually over there. But until a person has found happiness, and found it again and again and again, and he knows he’s doing the right thing, he’d better wonder if he’s just psychologising himself. Yes indeed, the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to come to know that God lives; that is eternal life, and any person who doesn’t get some eternal life in this life hasn’t been living the Gospel very much. So I would say, “Amen to your point.” But you see, I’m carrying it far beyond what you would usually anticipate. Because the point is, you have to be just as sure. The only reason we’re sure we are here is because we have had this kind of an experience over and over and over again. It’s a well tested, well substantiated hypothesis. And until your knowledge of the Lord becomes that same well substantiated, well tested hypothesis, you may just be whistling in the dark. So, that’s what the prophets commend to us. They commend to us to seize upon that iron rod, and if we don’t believe the iron rod to test it, and to try it and to test it and to try it, getting the fruits, getting more and more happiness. It gets pretty wonderful after a while. You have to ask yourself the same question whenever you eat: “Am I really nourished?” Am I really full? Is it just gas that’s distending my stomach and making me think I’m full?” Well, if you haven’t lived long enough to tell the difference, you’re not very mature, and similarly, the purpose of the Gospel is to bring us to religious maturity our of thousands of experiences so that question will never have to be asked.
There are people in the Church who are converted to the Church. They depend upon those in authority; their method of operation is essentially authoritarianism. But they are not servants of the Lord Jesus Christ until they become converted to Him—that is to say, until they get beyond the point where they rely upon the arm of flesh, they are not servants of Jesus Christ. It’s only when through their own prayers, fasting, meditation; through their own personal spirituality having tested the Lord and tried Him and found Him and knowing Him, only then are they true servants of Christ. The role of the Church then is what? It’s to bring people to have that personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. The Church doesn’t save anybody, anytime, anywhere. It merely provides a gateway to a path and encourages them and instructs them when they come to the day of judgment, and the bar of judgment, it’s Him that they will find at the gate of the Celestial Kingdom. There won’t be any church there, there won’t be multitudes there, there will be just one person, Jesus Christ. And if they have been His servant, and they know Him, and if they have qualified to be one of His sheep, then He will open the door to them. But it doesn’t matter how faithful you might say we have been as an organization man in the Church, that doesn’t save anybody. This is the part of the seventh chapter of Matthew I take it; so the Church is here as an indispensable means for the salvation of mankind. But that indispensable means is to introduce people to the Lord so that they no longer are authoritarian, in that worldly sense. Does that answer your question?
Two. The essence of religion is not just what is the truth of the universe, but what is my relationship to the universe which includes the reality of me as well as the reality of everything else. And so I have to be, that’s why I try to push these two points of honesty and courage. You have to want something to do anything. Desire is the motive power for all action. If persons are not anxious to find righteousness, they will never find it. The Lord has so constructed the world so that they can blithely go off in all kinds of directions and not find it; and that’s the agency of man. If it were not so, we’d all be forced into His Church. But He doesn’t want it that way. This earth is designed so that only those who genuinely and truly love righteousness will ever discover it. And then it will be plain that it’s no accident that they discover it. And then it will be sure that when they are given exaltation, they really deserved it and nobody else did. So I agree, the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t just truth, it is a way of happiness.
One of the tremendous concerns I have about the intellectual community in the world in which I find myself a part of, whether you were talking about me just a minute ago or not. I must confess, if this sounds hard right about what I’ve been talking to you about tonight, all I’m saying is that, if you have a testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and you love to do the works of righteousness, both, more power to you because you’re on the right track. Pay no attention to the rest of us if that bothers you, because all the rest of that is just the trappings by which you might say this to somebody who was over-impressed by the language of the world. But, a man said to me this morning, “You know, the intellectuals in the Church have made a great sacrifice to train themselves, and they bring themselves to the Church ready to do anything the Church would want them to do. But the Church almost turns it’s back on them, and doesn’t want them, is suspicious of them.” And I think there’s something to that. A great many of them get that feeling; I think that’s a good thing to analyze. Why is it that they get that feeling? I think that there are two fundamental reasons: In the first place, if they are intellectual, and they have conquered some field and have become masters, there are almost none of them who can avoid the temptation to start monkeying with things and trying to correct them. And that’s why they are destressive. But secondly, there’s a much greater point, and I think it’s this: Who is the greatest intellect around anyway? Who is the person who knows the most physics and chemistry, and music and architecture, philosophy, and anything else you’d care to mention? Well, it’s the Lord Jesus Christ. But he doesn’t brag about this. The thing that’s great about Him, the thing that’s His claim to fame is not just that. The thing that made Him our Savior and God is the fact that knowing this, He then went and did that which was right.
Now I submit to you the important thing about the Gospel is not knowing it; it’s living it, it’s doing. Now the disease of the intellectual community is to suppose with Plato that knowledge is virtue. If you have the truth, that’s sufficient; everything else follows. But that just isn’t so. The thing that’s important in the Gospel and in the Church of Jesus Christ is to be a doer of the word. Now if the intellectuals were interested in promoting the work of the Kingdom, they wouldn’t be sitting around wanting to intellectualize about it. They’d want to be out there using their intellect to get the job done, to be a better Elder’s Quorum President, to be a better manager of a welfare farm if that’s their assignment. They wouldn’t be available for intellectual consultation. That’s what they would expect, apparently. They would be available for hard-core work in solving the problems of the Kingdom. And if that’s what their intent was, they’d find they’d be snapped up in a minute. They would never feel left out in the cold forlorn, because the Church has great need of anybody who will serve with a willing heart and capable mind. The Church needs people of intellectual power greatly, but it needs their intellectual power to solve the particular problems of day to day application of the Gospel, not to correct the doctrine, not to straighten out Church organization which is where they usually want to apply their labors.
Well, the only unfortunate thing about such an opportunity as this is that I didn’t get to hear enough of from you. I know some of you probably recognize that I’m no authority on some of these things. If I have said anything good, don’t believe it because I say it; if it has been good, the Lord will testify to it, to you, and then you can accept His word for it. I believe that we ought to sit at the feet of those who are authorities in the Church. So far as you’re concerned, I’m not. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not; we don’t preside over each other. We can explain our ideas to one another; we can be edified as brothers and sisters in the Gospel. We have such a wonderful work to do; we live in great times. They’re troubled times, but they’re great and wonderful times. It’s my hope and prayer that each of us can be true to ourselves. I like that scripture in Shakespeare, or I like to paraphrase it: This above all, to thine own self be true, he said. I like to say it this way: This above all, to thine own God be true. And then it follows to the night and day thou canst not be false to any man. If you and I can make it the study of our lives to find our God, and knowingly unite with Him in the purposes of righteousness, think how much good we can do in this world. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and anything else you need will be added. I bear you my testimony that that is true, and I say it in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
