There’s truth, and then there’s Truth.
An old joke among mathematicians goes like this: “One plus one equals three. (Pause.) …for very large values of one.” Anyone who survived (and still remembers) calculus will find this hilarious. Well, at least slightly funny.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States essentially gives us the right to say that 1 + 1 = 3. But saying that doesn’t make it true. In fact, a mathematical framework built on that fundamental premise will not safely land a lunar module on the Moon. A famous Abraham Lincoln quote says it even more clearly: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
For different but related reasons, worshiping a golden calf (or making a personal god of Darwinian natural selection, or financial derivatives, or the Large Hadron Collider, or political power) will not make everything work for you.
Believe what you want, but if your belief is not based on fundamental truth, it will get you nowhere. It certainly won’t buy you happiness – that $20 million yacht derived from your dishonestly earned bonuses and compensation notwithstanding. We are reminded of a Gary Larson cartoon. At the end of a funeral reception, a grand piano, a refrigerator, a television, and a set of golf clubs all fly out the front door of the deceased man’s house, and zoom up into the clouds, while his wife wails “Aaaugh! It’s George – he’s taking it with him!”
Arthur R. Bassett (Bassett, 1977) wrote in the Ensign, “One of the facets of the Lord’s way of teaching that has continued to fascinate me is his ability to interlace simplicity and profundity. His gospel offers a mental challenge to the most profound scholar and yet has attraction even to a small child. Its doctrines range as wide as the entire human experience, yet all truth can be circumscribed within the bounds of a few simple, central principles” (emphasis added).
Don Lind, the Church of Jesus Christ astronaut, earned a PhD in high-energy physics from the University of California, Berkeley (also our alma mater). After retirement from NASA, he also served as a member of the Portland, Oregon, Temple presidency from 1995 to 1998. Don once gave a lecture which we attended at the University of Arizona. During his talk he made several statements that have stuck with us ever since, including the following:
“This is the only religion that I can adhere to and not have to believe one thing on Sunday and another thing the other six days of the week.”
His point here was this: there is no incompatibility between my faith and my science. They are not mutually exclusive. Implicit in this is also his clear understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 9th Article of Faith:
“We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”
Our point here is this: science and religion are different means for reaching the same end – the Truth with a capital “T” that does not change over time – and science and religion are definitely converging.