Outside the Blog -- by Jon Young

This is a book by President Henry B Eyring's dad who was an accomplished chemist. The out of print book was given to me by a church institute instructor who was cleaning out the institute's library. I was intrigued by it at the time because my introductory classes in biology and physics were opening up new ways of thinking that were in conflict with my previous notions about the nature of God, man, and how we know things. According to Dr. Eyring, "God is so gentle, so dedicated to the principle that men should be taught correct principles and then govern themselves, that they should take responsibility for their own mistakes, that His children can actually question whether He exists" and that "our opportunity to grow would cease if freedom of choice were withheld." Whether one believes God has designed this situation or not, it's hard for anyone to claim the search for Truth does not exist and is not a matter of personal responsibility.

As might be expected, his approach toward truth is that science and religion are completely compatible. Well, most people claiming to be religious will claim that. What's unique is how he bridges the gap. He presents the idea that scientific and religious knowledge can be arrived at in very similar and pragmatic ways: "Try it. Does it work?" Similar to Physicist Richard Feynman, he divides religious and scientific knowledge into the types of questions that they can answer. Science takes on questions of how things work and religion takes on the questions of the value of things. Both types of questions are searched and answered best by individuals in a non-superstitions and methodical manner.

Unlike some, he is also very comfortable with the fact that human knowledge is fractured and incomplete. He'd agree that life is a wonderful experience of learning and growth and could not be if we were just handed perfect knowledge. To demonstrate his comfort with mystery, he muses about the paradoxes of our "principled" knowledge. For example, he compares the "competing" notions that light is both a particle and a wave and that God is both an exalted being and yet has influence that fills the entire universe. These ideas seem to conflict and many people are uncomfortable not having a wonderfully complete and unified description of truth. These conflicts are limitations to human understanding that he invites readers to reconcile.

In the search for Truth, Dr. Eyring briefly touches on the fallacies we run into when citing authoritative figures and the sometimes false statements we attribute to them. Many will find this uncomfortable, especially concerning church leaders, but unavoidable as we learn new things that appear to conflict with what we thought our leaders taught. Dr. Eyring gives a simple and obvious example: "If in his speculations the Prophet [Joseph Smith] thought there were people on the moon, this has no effect on my belief that on other occasions, when the Lord willed it, he spoke the ideas that the Lord inspired him to say. It is for these moments of penetrating insight that I honor and follow him...The Gospel is not the people of the church. The Gospel is not even the people who direct it. The Gospel is the Truth."

Truth is not given to us by any other person as a free handout. Rather, we have the freedom and responsibility to discover Truth for ourselves.