Beach Haven

I know there is a posted headline version of this story on the BHP page, but I wanted to make some additional comment here.

After attending Mom's funeral, we returned to Utah a few weeks later. This time there were two reasons for our visit. The first and most important was to attend the wedding of our oldest son, Nathan, to Vicky Summerville. They were sealed in the Ogden, Utah temple. The weekend included all sorts of family activities. After the wedding, the happy couple took advantage of the week of Nate’s college spring break for their honeymoon to Portland, Oregon. We are so pleased to see them both happy, and to see them start their life together under the strength of eternal covenants.
 
The other reason for the trip was to help finalize the closing of my mother’s home after her passing. There were some larger items that needed to come back to Virginia with us. My wife, Michelle, took a friend from our church with her, and the two of them drove to Utah pulling a near-empty trailer. I flew out for the wedding. After all the wedding festivities, Michelle and I drove the car and full trailer back to Virginia. There are still a few items awaiting us in Utah to haul back, but they will wait where they are until summer time when we will go back out due to the impending birth of our ninth grandchild, John Coates.
 
In clearing out all my mother’s things there was one in particular that had some real monetary value. It was one of those high-end motorized wheelchairs. When we looked online it seemed to be worth several thousand dollars. We posted it online for sale and waited to see what would happen.

What actually happened? In a word, nothing. Despite the need and the value it was clear the two were not matching up. It became obvious that those who could afford to buy one likely already had, and were not in the market for another. Those who needed but could not afford it, continued to make do with whatever arrangement they already had. Basically, we had nobody interested in buying it.

So my sister, Lisa, asked around. The last few years of her life, my mother lived in a neighborhood where many other older folks lived. After asking around, Lisa was able to get a referral of a Vietnam veteran in the neighborhood, Leon Snow, that could really use the chair, but had no way to pay for it. We decided to donate the chair to him. Mom would have liked that. As it turns out, the fellow is a member of my other sister Crystal's church, and is good friends with Jerry, my brother-in-law.
 
It makes me think about how although life can be unfair at times, and it’s not intended to be, that there are little things here and there we can do to help in very specific positive ways. Although Christ taught to the multitudes, his miracles were almost always in service of the one.

As we see all the need around us, or have needs in our own lives, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and discouraged. I see it every day on the street as I walk from Union Station in Washington DC, to my office only a few blocks away. Good news! We don’t have to help everyone we see with everything they need. We do what we can and have faith that God can have others help where we can’t. We also need faith enough to know that some won’t be helped in this life to the level that we (or they) believe they ‘ought to be’. We act in the present, as ineffective as our efforts may seem. We make a difference where we can. We do our best to try to keep an eternal view that this life is not meant to be fair. It’s meant to give us opportunity to learn and to help.
 
I know these ideas can sometimes sound like platitudes. I have seen firsthand when people have used the idea that they can’t do enough so they won’t do anything. They don’t even know what they are giving up when they focus on themselves, or only on the here-and-now. So with that here are a few phrases that have come to be my personal guiding thoughts:
 
“Wisdom through knowledge, integrity and service.”
A family motto we developed with our children when they were still young.
 
“I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded”
1 Ne. 3:7
 
“My Father worketh hitherto, and I work”
John 5:17
 
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity”
1 Cor. 13:13

​Like many others these days, I listen to a selection of podcasts. One of my regulars by NPR is titled Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam. Recently he had an episode titled Creating God and featured an evolutionary scientist named Azim Shariff. In essence, the ideas the guest shared pointed to an evolutionary need in early human development for creating community. The result, says Shariff, was the invention of religion, the invention of God. Creating a belief system, goes the argument, helped small groups form a common ethos and a method of bonding. Toward the end of the episode Shariff affirmed he is an atheist. Here is the description of the episode on the Hidden Brain website:

If you've taken part in a religious service, have you ever stopped to think about how it all came to be? How did people become believers? Where did the rituals come from? And most of all, what purpose does it all serve? This week, we explore these questions with psychologist Azim Shariff, who argues that we can think of religion from a Darwinian perspective, as an innovation that helped human societies to survive and flourish.

https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain

I have made an argument many times about science and faith, but after listening to the podcast I feel a need to make it again. I firmly believe that human intellect has limits, and the amount of data available to human kind is limited as well. A limited reasoning ability coupled with a limited amount of information often leads to only a partial, or sometimes completely inaccurate, understanding of truth.

A few days after listening to the podcast I listened to a Ted Radio Hour that was focused on this issue of what science knows about truth. The episode is titled The Spirit of Inquiry. In particular, a recurring theme in the episode was about the trap of arrogance scientists often fall into by believing the conclusions science draws. Multiple presenters, scientists not religionists, spoke about how science really doesn’t prove anything, but gives us a reasonable framework to try to understand the world around us, and the worlds in the cosmos. Here is the description of the episode on the TED Radio Hour website:

The force behind scientific progress is the simple act of asking questions. This episode, TED speakers explore how a deeper and more humble style of inquiry may help achieve the next big breakthrough.

https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/archive

There is a danger in this approach as well. A follower of this line of thought can come to the conclusion that truth is not really knowable. In his epistle to Timothy, the apostle Paul describes people in the last days. One way he describes them (us?) is in 2 Timothy 3

7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

When atheistic scientists remove the possibility of the existence of God, and accept completely the ideas of evolution, I can understand how they, like Azim Shariff, come to the conclusions they do. That said, if you assume one possibility should be completely ruled out (the actual existence of God for example), and you assume another possibility as the only description of reality, then how can someone really put stock in such a one-sided perspective? Isn’t that the same argument such scientists use to discredit those who claim a belief in God?

Personally I put little hope in any version of truth that relies only on the logic arguments of human kind, be they scientific or religious. By my own experience through prayer, and seeing results in the lives of those who choose to live the gospel of Jesus Christ, I find reason to view any idea through the lens of how it does or does not align with truth revealed through ancient and modern prophets. Coming to know truth requires more than thought. The Savior puts it this way in John 7

17 If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.

For me, faith is stronger than belief. Believing in something does not make it true, nor does belief imply action. Faith is doing His will (taking action). Doing His will increases faith. As faith increases, so does understanding. As understanding increases, a person comes closer to truth. As the scripture notes, doing His will discloses truth. Stated in the negative, if the doctrine is not from God, is not true, then doing the act will reveal to the doer it’s untruth, and faith does not increase.

I’m just fine that many do not accept my perspective. I’m also aware that when considering religion there is a great deal of variation and contradiction among belief systems. I wonder, though, how that is any different than the variation and contradiction among various scientific camps. Scientific evidence is just that, evidence. Scientific theory is just that, theory. So much of what gets represented as "fact" later proves not factual. Religions have come and gone throughout human history. So too have scientific theories.