Part 58: CES Letter Science Questions
by Sarah Allen
In this life, there are a lot of questions for which we don’t have answers, or only have partial answers. There is much still yet to be revealed, and one of the big lessons we need to learn in this life is that of having patience and trusting in the Lord to reveal things according to His timeline, not ours.
When I’m praying over some of these questions, two scriptures often come to mind as my answer. The most common one is D&C 58:3, which says, in part:
Ye cannot behold with your natural eyes, for the present time, the design of your God concerning those things…
The scripture verse that occasionally follows it up if I’m not satisfied by that answer and I get a little salty or frustrated over it is D&C 25:4, which reads:
Murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the world, which is wisdom in me in a time to come.
Sometimes, we’re just not ready for the answers yet, and we need to learn how to be okay with that. It’s not an easy lesson to learn, but it’s a pretty important one.
In this particular section of questions in the CES Letter, we’ll be discussing things that don’t have full, definitive answers yet. A lot of it is speculative, and a lot of Jeremy’s questions and comments are based on assumptions, not revealed doctrine. We’re mostly going to be talking about theories today.
I’m okay with not having explicit answers to these questions yet. Some of you won’t be, and that’s okay, too. Everyone has unanswered questions, and some of those questions can really bother us until we come to an answer that satisfies us. There’s nothing “wrong” or shameful about that. This church was restored because of Joseph Smith trying to get answers to his unanswered questions.
There are two things in particular that I think President Nelson excels at, and I think we’re very blessed to have a leader who does excel at those things. First, he is very good at separating the necessary from the extraneous, both in doctrine and practice. Under his leadership, the Church has streamlined various programs and taken steps to make things more simple and clear for us. He has shown that he’s open-minded and willing to change certain things to make our lives easier. He’s also told us that other things will not change, because they’re necessary for our salvation.
The second thing he’s really great at is closely related to the first, and that’s his ability to adapt to new information. When he’s informed that something isn’t working for many people, he seeks out ways to change it. When he learns new historical information, he adjusts his assumptions accordingly.
Sarah Allen is brand new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. A voracious reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises and began sharing what she learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.
Tarik D. LaCour is a Ph.D student in philosophy and MA student in neuroscience at Texas A&M. Primary research interests are in philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of mind, moral psychology and epistemology. He is a traditional Latter-day Saint and author of the blog Mad Dog Naturalist. He has interest in developing rigorous apologetic arguments rooted in an empirical philosophical approach and plans on continuing his contributions to Latter-day Saint apologetics.
