It took me a very long time to write this devotional address. Sometimes when I have the opportunity to give a talk or teach a lesson, I know immediately what I want to talk about. This happened a few months ago in my ward. The bishop came to my door and asked if I would be willing to speak the following Sunday, and I instantly knew what I wanted to talk about. When I sat down to write that talk, it felt as if the talk wrote itself.<\/p>\n
This devotional was very different. I was plagued with uncertainty about what to say from the moment I was asked to speak. Two months later, I had written and discarded pages and pages of drafts and half-formed thoughts. I did not know what the Lord wanted me to say to you today. I did not know what I wanted to say to you today.<\/p>\n
And so finally, one week before I was required to submit the text of my address, I accepted that perhaps what I needed to talk about today was not knowing.<\/i><\/p>\n
Perhaps this will be strange to say, since I have grown up in a church that encourages members from a very young age to say the words \u201cI know,\u201d but the thing I am most certain of in this life is that we do not know all things. In fact, on the grand scale of all truth, it is quite possible that, statistically speaking, we don\u2019t know anything. And by that I mean that because God and truth are so vast and so big, the things we know are so small in comparison as to render that knowledge essentially nonexistent. So today I want to talk about this idea of not knowing and about finding God in our uncertainty.<\/p>\n
I want to add this caveat: I am speaking from my own perception and experience. Paul, in his epistle to the Corinthians, talked about spiritual gifts\u2014the gifts of wisdom, of knowledge, of faith, and of healing.1<\/sup> I will openly confess that I was probably not given the gift of knowledge. At times in my life I have had faith and I have had hope, but, in general, my knowledge has often felt a little tenuous. However, I have come to believe that uncertainty can be a gift every bit as much as knowledge is, so I will approach you today in this spirit of uncertainty.<\/p>\n I would like to discuss several aspects of not knowing. My hope is that in at least one of them you find something helpful for or of value to living your life, attending school, developing your testimony, building relationships, and going out into the world to do whatever it is you will do on this earth.<\/p>\n First, I think it is helpful to talk a little bit about knowledge itself. We use the phrase \u201cI know\u201d in many ways, but they are not all the same. Consider the following statements:<\/p>\n 1. I know that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065.<\/p>\n 2. I know that on a clear day, the sky is blue.<\/p>\n 3. I know that I love my parents.<\/p>\n All of these statements use the phrase \u201cI know,\u201d but the way I know each of these things is not the same. Take the first statement. This one is easy for me as a math teacher. If I take two distinct objects, say M&M\u2019s, and combine them with three more M&M\u2019s, I will have five M&M\u2019s. Although I have come to recognize that truth in mathematics is far more complex than we usually imagine, it is nevertheless very difficult to dispute the statement that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065.<\/p>\n But now consider the second statement: the sky is blue. On the surface it seems equally indisputable. I believe that all of you will agree with me that on a clear day, the sky is blue. But I do not know if when we look at the sky that we all see the same thing. And if a person is unable to see the sky at all, what does it mean that the sky is blue? Scientifically we can speak about light and wavelengths, but this does not reflect my experience<\/i> of seeing blue. In fact, I recently learned that ancient languages did not have a word for blue and that in lacking a word to describe the color, people who spoke these languages may have been incapable of even seeing the color blue. To explore this possibility, researcher Guy Deutscher decided to do what countless researchers have done: he experimented on his own child. When his daughter was very young, he was careful to never describe the color of the sky to her. Finally, one day he asked her to look up and describe the color, but she had no idea how to describe it. The sky at first did not fit any ideas of color to her.2<\/sup><\/p>\n This complicates the truth of my statement that the sky is blue.<\/p>\n When I consider the third statement, that I know I love my parents, I have to concede that there is no objective way to measure this. In fact, I have failed embarrassingly on a few simple measures of love. Last year, when my dad called me on his birthday, I didn\u2019t even say happy birthday to him! Still, I can say that I know with 100 percent certainty that I love my parents, and I truly believe they know the same. It is just a different kind of knowledge than the knowledge that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065.<\/p>\n When it comes to matters of the Spirit, we \u00adfrequently hear the words \u201cI know\u201d:<\/p>\n I think we sometimes assume that any \u201cI know\u201d needs to mean \u201cI know\u201d in the same way that I know that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065. But we can\u2019t know these things in the same way, because they are different types of truth and they are accessible to us in different ways. What I think we usually mean is that we are equally confident<\/i> in those things. Even then, some of us are and some of us are not. Not all of us have been given the gift of knowledge.<\/p>\n I believe it is important to understand the kind of knowledge we should be seeking. Knowledge that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065 is fairly set, but knowledge about the color of the sky is born of our experience with the sky. Not only is the color of the sky ever changing, but, as we gain experience, our ability to describe what we are seeing and even our very ability to see can change and grow\u2014just as our ability to know God can change and grow throughout our lives. If I assume that knowing God is like knowing that 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065 and then I experience something that conflicts with my understanding, I have to go back to the drawing board with all of arithmetic. But if knowing God is more like knowing the color of the sky, apparent conflicts with my current understanding have the potential to expand rather than shatter my view.<\/p>\n Knowledge of spiritual things is also manifested in how this knowledge drives our actions. It is far less important that I know I love my parents than it is that I show this love to them and continue to try even when my expressions are imperfect. Knowledge that the Church is true or that God lives or that Jesus loves us is less important than what our faith and hope compel us to do. Knowledge of God\u2019s love is important, but how I take that love and allow it to change myself and the world around me, even when my efforts are imperfect, is far more important.<\/p>\n Knowledge that is complete and certain can also be limiting and, quite honestly, not all that interesting. A living knowledge that changes, grows, adapts, and motivates us to action is a knowledge that embraces states of uncertainty and not knowing. These states lead us toward change and growth. In fact, as humans, we tend to move on quickly from simple facts like 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065 to complex questions of what we can do with these facts and then to questions that stretch our understanding past its apparent limits. Math is much bigger and much more open than 2\u2006+\u20063\u2006=\u20065, just as God is much bigger than we imagine.<\/p>\n I want to turn in another direction now and address another side of not knowing. I would like to begin with a story.<\/p>\n One day while I was working on this devotional address at home, my four-year-old daughter was playing on the couch next to me. Our dog Jin barked at the back door, wanting to be let into the house.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you let Jin inside?\u201d I asked my daughter. Because what are children for except to do the small tasks you don\u2019t feel like doing yourself?<\/p>\n But instead of jumping up happily to help, my daughter informed me, \u201cJin did not bark.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I just heard him,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n \u201cJin is not outside,\u201d she responded.<\/p>\n \u201cWell,\u201d I said, \u201cI am actually looking at the door, and I see him standing outside.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe is not<\/i> outside,\u201d she insisted.<\/p>\n Because I was working on a devotional address about knowledge, I decided to do that \u201cexperiment on your own children\u201d thing and asked, \u201cDo you know<\/i> that Jin is not outside?\u201d<\/p>\n With great confidence she looked at me and said, \u201cI know<\/i> that Jin is not outside.\u201d<\/p>\n At this point I got up myself and let our dog inside, and my daughter exclaimed, \u201cOh, Mommy, Jin was<\/i> outside!\u201d<\/p>\n Her apparent genuine surprise convinced me that she had not been lying when, in the face of visual and aural evidence, she had informed me that our dog was not actually outside barking to be let in. I believe she really knew that the dog was not outside because she wanted him to not be outside. It would have been inconvenient for her if he were outside because she would have had to stop playing and go let him in.<\/p>\n It makes for a funny little anecdote when it is about my determined, headstrong little daughter, but we do this all the time. When we know something, we are likely to hold on to that knowledge as tightly as we can, even when we are mistaken. We usually don\u2019t realize we are doing this. Of course we don\u2019t, because we know<\/i>!<\/p>\n Our human minds are built to make sense of the world around us, to categorize, to evaluate, and to put our experiences and observations into simple boxes. The ability to create order and organization out of the chaos that surrounds us is incredibly important to our survival and well-being. But a consequence of this well-developed human ability is that we all think we know and understand far more than we actually do.<\/p>\n One of my favorite stories from the history of mathematics is the story of the parallel postulate. Around 300 BC, Euclid of Alexandria wrote a book called Elements<\/i> in which he essentially built geometry on the foundation of five postulates or statements that are accepted as truth without needing additional reasoning or argument. Four of his five postulates are pretty straightforward. One, for example, was that with two given points, we can draw a straight line connecting those two points. But the fifth postulate has given mathematicians grief for the last two millennia. This postulate reads:<\/p>\n If a straight line intersecting two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles.<\/i>3<\/sup><\/p>\n It is a mouthful, but essentially this postulate allows us to believe some things about parallel lines, or lines that never intersect, that intuitively seem like they must be true about parallel lines.<\/p>\n The problem is that mathematicians weren\u2019t convinced that this concept was conclusive. The fifth postulate seemed like an idea about geometric space that needed to be argued, rather than a conclusion that could be put forth without argument. For centuries, mathematicians attempted to find a way to make this argument using just the first four postulates and perhaps a new, more self-evident postulate.<\/p>\n One person who worked on this problem in the early eighteenth century was Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri. He attacked the problem using quadrilaterals and thought he had succeeded. In his Proposition XXXIII he stated that a particular counter result would be \u201crepugnant to the nature of the straight line.\u201d4<\/sup> Basically, Saccheri knew what a straight line should do and knew what parallel lines should do. Ultimately his argument for the truth of the parallel postulate hinged on the fact that without it, straight lines ended up behaving in ways that were \u201crepugnant\u201d to their nature.<\/p>\n But a century later and more than two thousand years after Euclid wrote his book Elements,<\/i> a handful of mathematicians finally asked, \u201cWhat if we are wrong about the nature of straight lines? What if in some spaces lines behave one way, but in other spaces they behave in a completely different way?\u201d<\/p>\n By letting go of their knowledge, they discovered something fascinating: if they reconsidered the way parallel lines work, geometry did not fall apart. In fact, by tweaking this one condition, they managed to create or perhaps discover a strange, new, wonderful geometry that we now call hyperbolic geometry, which is every bit as mathematically valid as the Euclidean geometry you learned in high school, although it is much harder for humans to wrap their heads around.<\/p>\n Mathematics, when you spend time with it, has a particular kind of beauty that is not always conveyed well in our school experiences. Hyperbolic geometry has its own beauty, both mathematically and visually. But opening the door to this beauty required humans to admit that what they thought they knew could actually be wrong.<\/p>\n I think it is important for us to question what we think we know and to open ourselves to the idea that it might be wrong, even (and perhaps especially) when being wrong would be inconvenient or uncomfortable for us. I might ask myself some of the following questions:<\/p>\nThere Are Different Ways of Knowing<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Sometimes We Are Wrong About What We Know<\/b><\/h2>\n