If I felt the spirit telling me that there was a Loch Ness Monster, I probably still wouldn’t believe, simply because I’d a priori expect some hard evidence to have shown up by now if a plesiosaur was surviving in the Scottish Highlands. Reason and science provide epistemological boundary markers for religious claims, and I’m skeptical of any religious premise that expects us to throw out all reason, or treats belief in the face of reason as a virtue. (Real reason, not the “Reason!” that is used as a conversation stopper by militant atheist types). 

Of course, I can hear the eager anti-Mo disciples in the back of the class itching to raise their hand and point out that, say, Book of Mormon civilizations are basically the Loch Ness monster. Game, set, match. Like the “Jesus is Santa Claus for adults” trope making flippant comparisons between religious beliefs and fantastical creatures is an easy rhetorical dig, but once you actually do your due diligence and dig into exactly what claims are made by the religious text or tradition and what the confidence intervals are for the respective scientific method, the analogies become quite superficial. In rare cases where a very specific religious claim very clearly contradicts a very established religious belief, say, the earth is 6,000 years old, that the white race was created 6,000 years ago by a Meccan scientist, or that the primary ancestors of Native Americans are Middle Eastern immigrants about two millennia ago, then the faith either needs to modify their position or go on the attack against the scientific method, and the latter typically doesn’t end well. 

A large part of the role of apologetics is to wrestle with these seeming conflicts.* There’s defensive apologetics that try to make a space for belief by not showing how a truth claim still fits within the reasonable boundaries staked out by science and reason. This is what Elder Holland referred to when he said there should be no uncontested slam dunks against the Church’s claims, or what Elder Maxwell referred to when he quoted Farrer:

What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

There are also positive apologetics that look for evidence supporting a truth claim, while this is very useful and interesting there’s a limit to which this can go since, simply put, if God wanted to empirically and intellectually demonstrate His existence He could just come down. 

In addition to its separation-of-powers, boundary-marking function, Rodney Stark, for example, traces the Christian theologies of a reasonable God to the Scientific Revolution and all its positive downstream implications, so there are benefits to combining reason with religion in terms of providing a motivating engine. While it would be inaccurate to say that scientists are a religious bunch nowadays (although perhaps more religious than we sometimes think), nearly all the greats during the Golden Age of universe-shaking discoveries, (Leibniz, Newton, Pascal) saw their scientific investigations of a piece with their religious devotions as they sought to describe the handiwork of God. 

And yet. 

More big picture I’m skeptical that from first logical principles alone we can comprehend something like God or develop a testimony of a particular religious worldview (although I believe that with fine tuning and the combinatorial origin of life math, pure reason divested of any religious emotion can reasonably lead one to believing in some sort of creator God). Reason has its limits. Among other problems it raises all sorts of ethical issues: if God can be approached through intellect, why is God making Himself more available to higher IQ people than good-hearted low-IQ people? Even Aquinas famously declared at the end of his life that his life’s work of reasoning towards God “was all straw.”

As Latter-day Saints we emphasize the epistemology of the spiritual experience. We know because we feel. Other faiths vary in where they fall on the reason/emotion continuum, with perhaps the extreme example on the reason end being the medieval scholastic types that gave us the different logical “proofs” of the existence of God. Even within the same tradition of Catholicism we have the St. Theresa of Avila emphasizing the spiritually charismatic experience versus the St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizing the logic of God. 

But if religion has its unsavory episodes, so too does reason, both in the case of Reason used as a lazy placeholder for whatever happens to be socially fashionable among a certain intelligentsia class as well as the more carefully defined use of reason as an intellectual tool. Despite the ambitions of early 20th-century thinkers like Bertrand Russell, since Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem we now know that we have to take some principles, even bare bones arithmetic, on faith in certain axioms; we know that no internally coherent system can justify itself based on its own premises. So if we go all the way to the “reason” side and demand some airtight rigorous proof for any belief, we’ve known for almost a hundred years now that that’s an impossible bar, so even the most cynical logician has to take some things on something that could be described as “faith.” And that’s for 2+2=4, to say nothing of the belief in morality or other metaphysical verities that everybody builds their life around that has an exponentially fuzzier connection to pure logical reason. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything is permitted, even if we take some of the foundations on axiomatic faith. This isn’t a call for a nihilistic, believe-whatever-crazy-religious-thing-you-want, but rather simply pointing out that those demanding some demonstrably airtight logical or scientific threshold for any belief are being hypocritical. 

So, while my faith is largely one of emotion and the spirit, it is leavened with a dash of reason and intellect, knowing that the latter (at least in its human manifestations) can’t get me to the throne of God on its own, while the former largely can.   

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*(For that reason, when intellectual, science embracing members poo poo traditional apologetics in principle and think that reading Adam Miller should be enough I assume they’re basically non-believers who are taking some metaphorical approach to their faith, since their anti-apologetics position doesn’t make much sense otherwise).