While historians generally agree that Lew Wallace was unfairly scapegoated for the high casualty count among Union troops at Shiloh, we need not suppose that Grant was conniving and coldhearted. In the fog of war, plans go awry, communications get garbled, and honest mistakes occur repeatedly. Grant, like Wallace, was a good though flawed man trying his best. When the public demanded an explanation for the high body count, he vented his frustration towards a subordinate officer who had not, in his mind, obeyed orders. It was a simplistic rendering of a complex situation, but such is consistent with the way people like to digest new information. One person wears a white hat, the other black. Things get too dizzying if we are asked to believe that we are all wearing gray hats.

Complexity implies uncertainty, and uncertainty calls for mercy. We live in an intrinsically uncertain world. “The real trouble with this world of ours,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality, yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”[1]

Science and mathematics, once hailed as bulwarks against uncertainty, have in the past century opened new frontiers of uncertainty and incomplete understanding.[2] The prevailing interpretation of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (the Copenhagen interpretation) portrays uncertainty as an intrinsic, ineradicable feature of the world. So what? some say, quantum uncertainty is a microworld phenomenon having no bearing on everyday (macroworld) reality. This response is a bit naïve because quantum effects may be exploited to impact human life at the macrolevel. Quantum computing, for example, relies on quantum entanglement.[3] In another blow to the belief that human reason could throw a net over the whole of reality, Kurt Gödel showed that logical genius cannot fully rein in truth: there will always be truth beyond our capacity to prove what’s true and what isn’t.[4]

For some thinkers these developments bespeak God, or at least wider metaphysical possibilities than what nineteenth-century science allowed. My interest concerns the common ground that science now shares with Christianity: as Paul wrote, we “see through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).[5] The world we know, particularly as we deal with other people, re-veils itself as it reveals itself, just as dark glass does. Light and dark, Lehi taught, are a “compound in one” (2 Nephi 2:11). They interpenetrate. This is our twilight reality, one in which we never see things as clearly as we might suppose. But this reality accommodates our growth because it places us squarely in the middle of light-dark ambiguity and then offers us a rope or ladder let down from heaven: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an early pioneer of probability theory, insisted that the light-dark reality we know invites but does not compel belief in God. He proposed that there is enough evidence of God—enough light—in the world to constitute an invitation from God.[6] Latter-day Saints might recall the younger Alma’s declaration that “all things denote that there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44). Pascal regarded such displays of nature as part of God’s glory or light, and being such, they invite and encourage faith on our part. Other invitations exist as well—the Christian discipleship and kindness of others, for example. Many people accept these invitations and live their lives accordingly.

But not all. Some refuse God’s invitations, or at least hold them at arm’s length, and they too can cite evidence to justify their disinclination. There is, along with light, darkness in the world. Hurt, hunger, misery, evil. It is to these skeptics that Pascal, a probability theorist of the first order, pitched his now-famous wager. He proposed that it is more rational to bet on God (the possibility of his existence) and the prospect of eternal happiness than to bet against him. Not because it is obvious that God exists but because the reward for winning the bet infinitely outstrips the penalty for losing it. If people bet on God by living his commandments, they win an infinite jackpot (eternal happiness) if in fact he exists. Should, however, they bet against God and lose the bet, they forfeit that jackpot and are consigned to unending hell. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, bettors have nothing to win either way. Should they bet against him, they may “enjoy” a few decades of self-centered pleasure, which Pascal regarded as counterfeit happiness. But there is no jackpot at the end of the tunnel. They simply blink out at death, as do those who wager that God does exist.

Pascal’s view of life after death does not line up very well with Latter-day Saint understanding. We do not embrace the heaven-hell dichotomy that he did and that many modern Christians do. Our vision of the afterlife is marked by a three-tiered hierarchy of kingdoms, each of which is fitted to optimize its residents’ capacity for happiness. Moreover, we do not subscribe to the traditional Christian doctrine of unending damnation: our emphasis on eternal progression and the matching metaphor of a ladder of kingdoms (rather than an unbridgeable chasm between heaven and hell) suggests, though does not necessarily entail, ongoing ascent for those willing to repent, grow, and advance toward God.[7] Given these differences, Pascal’s wager should hit Latter-day Saints less forcefully than most other Christians.

What I find compelling in his argument, however, is the implicit suggestion that God has a backup plan for those who decline his invitation to approach him. If skeptics are not moved by the starry heavens and other revelations of his grandeur and goodness (revelations coinciding with what Pascal called the “order of the heart”[8]), they can fall back on logical reason—another form of light—to break the light-darkness stalemate. In any event, everyone must make a choice. Indifference or indecision is not an option. If we decide not to decide (agnosticism), we still decide because at some point we die, which, by Pascal’s reckoning, means we die without God and go to hell.

As Peter Kreeft makes clear, Pascal’s wager is really a wager on Christ and his centrality to God’s plan of salvation. That plan assures us that God is on our side—he has a plan to lift us out of the shadowy world we presently inhabit. It also lets us know that God honors our agency by not overpowering us with too much light. Christ himself veiled and revealed himself as he dwelt among us, according to Pascal. Speaking of the Savior’s mortal ministry, he wrote: “It was not . . . right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who sincerely seek Him. . . . There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”[9]

Regarding God in the world, then, nothing is so blindingly obvious as to deprive us of our freedom to choose; nor is anything so obscure that we cannot, if we wish, catch a glimpse of the divine. It is not as if those who deny God are carefully and in a singularly meritorious way drawing their conclusions from the evidence at hand, for the inconclusive evidence at hand can tip one’s thinking either way according to one’s inclination to believe or disbelieve. There is always some evidence from which to build one’s conviction, but never enough to categorically settle the issue of God’s existence for everyone involved. As a result, evidence must be constellated by interested parties in the same way star constellations are imaginatively constructed and seen by observers. To invoke a familiar formula from philosophy, facts are theory laden. That is, there is no immaculate (theory-free) perception of nature; we see nature, we gather up facts about the world by the courtesy of faith, imagination, and theoretical predisposition.

Jesus instructed us not to (unrighteously) judge others, partly because we all need the corrective lens of Christlike love, the acquisition of which presupposes true discipleship.[10] An obviously imperfect world, filled with imperfect individuals operating from insufficient evidence, does not qualify as a place from which absolute judgments can be truthfully rendered. Similarly, by reason of its uncertain character, the world simply does not lend itself to unambiguously explicit, exclusionary truth claims. It “plays the devil,” remarked Alfred North Whitehead, when we try to treat half-truths as whole truths, when we try, in effect, to canonize one-sided theses without carefully and open-mindedly considering antitheses.[11] It plays the devil, I suggest, because it breeds contention in a world where neither thesis nor antithesis can be permanently eliminated or put out of play. If it were possible, such elimination would collapse the ambiguity—the oppositional tension, as Lehi described it—that lies at the heart of reality.

In such a world, faith in Jesus Christ is always a saving principle because it lives from the honest realization of mortal weakness and limitation. To know that we see through a glass darkly is to acknowledge the possibility of error. We could be wrong, Jesus said, because while finding fault with others we tend to see past our own faults, which may be far more serious. “And why beholdest thou the mote [speck] that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam [log] that is in thine own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). When things are close at hand, or close to home, they are often hard to see clearly. It is easy to see that the moon is round but hard to see that the earth is. Hence, thousands of years passed before Parmenides, living about 500 BC, reasoned that the earth is round like the moon.[12] We may go all our lives without making a similar discovery about ourselves—we too are sinners like those we criticize.

“The devil flatters us that we are very righteous,” wrote Joseph Smith, “when we are feeding on the faults of others.”[13] We often do more than just see past our sins; we see through them to let their discoloration jaundice our view of others so that we can pat ourselves on the back. In other words, we salvage a sense of righteousness by projecting our unrighteousness onto others. The last thing we want to do, however, is cultivate a false sense of righteousness by comparing ourselves with others whom we deem unrighteous. This, I believe, is the fundamental reason Christ cautions us against judging others. Unable to see them clearly, we may judge them unkindly and then feel ourselves more righteous by comparison. But this is exactly how the devil flatters us. He gets us feeding on the faults of others and puffs us up with unkind thoughts about them. This is Satan’s hate-filled perversion of true religion. He, after all, was the one who accused others “before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10).

Why Charity?

Given the high risk for error in this world, and the certainty that we err if we condemn and unkindly criticize others, the brave and smart thing to do is to cultivate the gospel virtues of humility and charity. These virtues are natural fruits of faith in Jesus Christ because they are character traits fitted to the ambiguous, half-lit world that calls forth our faith utterances. In such a world many people mistake half-truths for whole truths and consequently play the fool if not the devil as they try to drive home their truth claims.

When my family lived in Hawaii, a blue state on the political map, I often heard people say that Democratic party values best align with gospel principles. Upon moving to Utah, however, I heard the opposite refrain: to fully live the gospel one must vote Republican. How could both viewpoints, expressed sincerely by equally faithful members of the Church, be right? Well, neither outlook can be completely right, I came to believe, so long as it comes packaged as complete truth. To grasp the political orientation of Hawaiians or Utahns, one must see more than a blue or red marker on a political map. One must follow the scriptural admonition to “study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (Doctrine and Covenants 90:15). Understanding a people’s history and culture engenders the “drop of pity” Johan Huizinga spoke of, and pity or charity is a kind of buoyancy that lifts us above half-truths and bitterly contested ideological differences. As the apostle Paul said of charity, it is “a more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).

By elevating charity or the pure love of Christ above (uncertain) knowledge, the gospel of Jesus Christ directs us along a different path, one lowly and mindful of our weak, fallible nature in a shadowy, intrinsically uncertain world shared with other weak, fallible beings (see 1 Corinthians 12–14).[14]

Paul taught these truths to the saints of Corinth.[15] There are many gifts of the spirit, he explained, and all faithful followers of Christ are entitled to at least one gift. But the possession of spiritual gifts gets us nowhere, and in fact may lead to error, if we lack the greatest of all gifts—charity. Some Corinthian saints were able to speak in unknown tongues and evidently did so whenever they felt moved by the spirit, an inclination that led to needless interruption and confusion during congregational worship. Members should subordinate the expression of their gifts to the needs of the congregation, Paul taught, and that is why all should seek the gift of charity. Because “it seeketh not its own” (1 Corinthians 13:5), it flows against the natural tendency to call attention to one’s gift and vaunt oneself above others. While other gifts put us on the path to heaven, charity is the gift that takes us into God's presence, for it reeacts his saving love.

“Charity never faileth,” wrote Paul while extolling this greatest of all gifts (1 Corinthians 13:8). By contrast, he added, prophecies, tongues, and knowledge do fail or vanish away. Patterned after the ambiguous, probationary world we live in, a world meant to test and call forth our character, these gifts are similarly ambiguous and tentative. They can cut toward good but also toward evil—witness Paul’s concern with unruly speakers of unknown tongues, the harm caused by self-deluded individuals who claim to speak or prophesy for God, and the similar harm that piles up when, without considering counterevidence or trying to see things from another point of view, people arrogantly insist that they know best. Charity succeeds where these gifts fail because its very essence is loving concern for others rather than egotistical self-promotion.

The Sureness of God’s Love

Perhaps it is not surprising that Parmenides, the person who first proposed that the earth is round, is best remembered for his claim that appearance is one thing and reality quite another. The two do not always line up, and so truth seekers, he said, must not let themselves be misled by appearances. To some degree, we all know this firsthand. Sometimes we feel ourselves misrepresented by the way we appear to others, and sometimes we misrepresent or misjudge others because of their appearance. This is just part of the territory of mortality, says Bruce C. Hafen: “My suggestion is that some uncertainty is characteristic of mortal experience. The mists of darkness in Lehi’s dream are, for that very reason, a symbolic representation of life as we face it on this planet.”[16] Said differently, we see through a glass darkly.

Appearances can mean everything, at least initially. When we see through them, we are, as often as not, surprised. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans’s penname) wrote Middlemarch, sometimes praised as the greatest novel of the English language. Her appearance tended to put people off, but her sparkling conversation drew them in so that they ended up “falling in love with her,” wrote fellow novelist Henry James.[17]

Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Dominican friar whose vast scholarly work reshaped Catholic theology and helped set the stage for modernity as it developed in the West, was labeled a “dumb ox” by his classmates. He was unusually large and spoke slowly, in addition to being shy and socially inept. His appearance was unpromising, but one of his professors, Albertus Magnus, saw what lay beneath the surface. Rebuking Aquinas’s critics, he prophesied, “You call him a Dumb Ox; I tell you this Dumb Ox shall bellow so loud that his bellowings will fill the world.”[18]

And so they have. Among medieval thinkers who wrestled with the old question of how to harmonize human reason and divine revelation, or whether a harmonization should even be attempted, Aquinas struck a daring balance that validated science as the handmaid or servant of religion. Without this validation, Christianity may have rejected science in its premodern infancy. Aquinas’s “bellowings” have indeed impacted world history.

Sometimes we are misjudged not by our appearance but by our behavior and demeanor. One of Albert Einstein’s professors, Hermann Minkowski, called him a “lazy dog” because he didn’t always follow course requirements and tended to do things his own way. But Einstein wasn’t lazy; he followed his own inner compass as he thought about fundamental problems in physics. A few years later, after the so-called lazy dog published his special theory of relativity, Minkowski saw Einstein in a new light. Minkowski was among the first to embrace the theory, and he promoted it by transcribing it to a widely familiar geometric basis.[19]

In the Church there are similar instances of initial misjudgments and misunderstandings getting worked out as the parties involved adjust their thinking. People make mistakes, but mistakes are ot necessarily sins. Seeing through a glass darkly, we learn through trial and error, line upon line. For a while Brigham Young spoke favorably of building the Salt Lake Temple out of adobe.[20] Adobe bricks could be quickly made by compacting clay, water, and straw, and then letting the bricks dry in the sun. They were easy to work with and served as the building material for many of the first pioneer structures in the Salt Lake Valley. Soon, however, Brigham realized that adobe would not support the weight of the towering temple walls and opted for granite instead.

He made an early miscalculation and then corrected himself, no doubt after talking with others and thinking through the issue. Throughout this learning process, Wilford Woodruff waited patiently. He knew the temple would be built of granite—he had seen it in a dream. In 1880 he stated: “When in the western country, many years ago, before we came to the Rocky Mountains, I had a dream. I dreamed of being in these mountains, and of seeing a large fine looking temple erected in one of these valleys which was built of cut granite stone, I saw that temple dedicated, and I attended the dedicatory services, and I saw a good many men that are living today in the midst of this people.”[21]

Remarkably, Wilford Woodruff did not impose his dream on others. It was his dream, his blessing from the Lord, and not a Church-wide mandate. He continued: “When the foundation of that temple was laid I thought of my dream and a great many times since. And whenever President Young held a council of the brethren of the Twelve and talked of building the temple of adobe or brick, which was done I would say to myself, ‘No, you will never do it;’ because I had seen it in my dream built of some other material.”[22] He did not use the dream to hurry things along artificially, to override the natural trial-and-error process that Brigham Young and others had to go through to accomplish God’s purpose.

Amid the good and the bad of everyday circumstance, the dream was a grace-filled blessing from heaven. After receiving it, Wilford Woodruff knew something probably no one else in the Church knew, but he did not let that knowledge puff him up. As a manifestation of the heavenly, the dream was first and foremost an expression of God’s love, not simply a transfer of information. That love carried over into the way Wilford patiently kept the dream to himself while Brigham and others gained their understanding incrementally.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.”[23] In the everyday medium of mortality, trial-and-error learning is the norm. Accordingly, knowledge itself is felt to involve ongoing correction and revision. Look at academia. Not only is every discipline unfinished and in flux at its frontiers, but it is populated by scholars and scientists restless to make their mark with some new insight. The resulting message is that for all our learning, knowledge is a kind of game that never ends. I myself, according to my wife, am an incorrigible victim of the game. She says I like questions more than answers. Certainly there is danger in getting too caught up in the game. In the latter days, Paul wrote, there will be those who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).

Learning can become addictive because facts, like potato chips, excite the brain and make it cry out for more of the same. As Paul taught, however, knowledge goes nowhere unless it blossoms into love of God and others.[24] We often talk of what Joseph Smith learned from the First Vision, but the knowledge he drew from that vision was packaged in the sublime experience of God’s love. “My soul was filled with love,” he wrote, “and for many days [thereafter] I could rejoice with great joy.”[25] The medium was the message. The First Vision was, first and foremost, an outpouring of divine love, the outpouring itself being the fundamental message. The Father and the Son did not have to tell Joseph Smith they loved him, because that message was packed into every atom of the revelatory medium. It was coincidental with the flood of light and glory that suffused the grove and filled Joseph’s soul.

The sureness of God’s love, as opposed to the uncertainty that drives trial-and-error learning, arises from its coincidence with what is most real about us. Wilford Woodruff stated, “Man possesses a spirit that must endure forever—a spirit that comes from God; and inasmuch as he is not fed from that same source or power that created him, he is and cannot be satisfied.”[26] Put simply, human happiness tracks back to God’s love for his creation. That love is the water of life, which quenches our thirst for all those lesser things that excite our minds and make us cry out for more of the same, whether time, money, youth, affection, recognition, or knowledge. When we drink that water, we remember who we really are. We realize we have been waiting our whole lives to drink it.

What do we want most of all? Lehi stated that the fruit of the tree that he saw in vision was “desirable to make one happy.” After partaking of it, he added that it “was most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted . . . [and] desirable above all other fruit” (1 Nephi 8:11–12). Upon seeing the same fruit in his own vision, Nephi identified it as “the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.” Upon hearing this, Nephi’s angel guide replied, “Yea, and the most joyous to the soul” (1 Nephi 11:22–23). This is what we most want: to taste the joyous love of God. The blessing of tasting God’s love is our very reason for being here. No doubt thinking back to his vision of the tree, Lehi wrote that “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:25).

Though not a believer in a loving God, Aristotle was an astute student of human psychology, and he observed something about ourselves that lines up with Lehi’s claim that joy or happiness, or the capacity for such, is wound into our being in a way other experiences aren’t.

He noted that while pursuing happiness, many people seek proximate goods that do not, in and of themselves, bring happiness. They want wealth, pleasure, and social approbation, seeking wealth in order to use their money to engage in pleasurable activities and win the respect and admiration of their peers. But this sort of striving for one thing in order to achieve another will not inevitably bring happiness; even after achieving all the means to the end, we may not achieve the end. This is because happiness, according to Aristotle, stands apart from what some may regard as the conditions necessary to the realization of happiness. Unlike wealth, pleasure, and social status, happiness is its own thing: it is “without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.”[27] Put differently, happiness is its own reward, and while it may partly depend on the satisfaction of physical needs, it cannot be fully reduced thereto. It obeys a different logic than those physical needs, that of existing for its own sake rather than for the sake of something else.

While we may choose a career to advance toward happiness, we always choose happiness for itself. It is the good whose self-luminosity tells its own story without outside help, and when we experience happiness, we do not seek a greater end, for there is none: true happiness is our homecoming. More than any other experience, happiness has something to do with who we are and how we are put together. Our beginning and end.

Aristotle knew enough about happiness to realize that it is irreducibly real and deeply informative of human nature. Seven centuries after Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo proposed that our search for happiness—and here he was thinking of happiness that is synonymous with joy or that segues into it—draws us to God. We have a God-shaped hole in our souls that, when filled, makes us euphorically happy. He stated that “without exception we all long for happiness” and observed that “unless we had some sure knowledge of it we would not desire it with such certainty.”[28] Our yearning for perfect happiness is whetted by the happy moments we experience now and again.

These moments are like the burnings of the Holy Ghost that Paul talked about, which he characterized as deposits or promissory notes, “guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Corinthians 1:22 New International Version). They teach us that joyful union with God is our deepest thirst and the very reason for our being. People approach happiness or joy differently, writes Augustine, but they all agree that that is what they want most all, and no one “can say that he has no experience of joy” because the seed of joy is planted in our hearts. It is planted by God and activated by love of God: “For there is a joy that is not given to those who do not love you [God], but only to those who love you for your own sake. You yourself are their joy. . . . This is true happiness and there is no other.”[29]

There are many metaphors here. God’s love loops us back to who we really are. It repairs the broken circuitry of our being. By that love we relive our deep, forgotten identity with divinity. That love is sympathetic vibration with God’s creation. “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”[30]

This is the sureness of human happiness celebrating God’s redeeming love. Immersion in that love is complete and entire of itself, wanting nothing and not reducible to the uncertainties and ambiguities that govern human knowledge. Such immersion is not seeing through the glass darkly—it is not seeing through the glass at all. It allows us to look past the imperfect lens through which we know reality in order to see Reality itself.

Notes

[1] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Co., 1908), 148, https://books.google.com/books/.

[2] For a good summary of the major developments, see Noson S. Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

[3] The hypothetical—and some would say, arbitrary or imaginary—line that separates micro- from macro-reality seems to be fluid and perhaps more an aspect of our understanding of nature than of nature itself. One view is that the world we know is quantum mechanical “all the way down” (perhaps better said, “all the way up”), but current technology registers quantum effects only at the molecular level or lower. Plus, there is the thought that even if we can’t detect quantum effects at the macrolevel, an understanding of quantum ontology sheds light on macrolevel conundrums and paradoxes. For more on this, see David Grandy, Everyday Quantum Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). For a discussion of how quantum mechanics may illuminate social science, see Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[4] This is an extrapolation of Gödel’s proof, which, technically speaking, pertains only to formal axiomatic systems, like Euclidean geometry. Gödel showed that any consistent logical system (that is, any system without contradictory axioms) can be made to generate statements that are not provable from within. We must, therefore, step outside the system to furnish proof. This implies that there will always be unproven truth outside the system. One reviewer of this book argued that this proof has no bearing on everyday life, but to me that seems to misrepresent much of the literature engendered by the proof. See, for example, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[5] Cosmologist John D. Barrow wrote, “If a ‘religion’ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.” The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of Human Creativity (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), 211. Mathematics, singularly constituted to prove conjectures or theorems, has proved that not all that flows into its practice is provable.

[6] In his discussion of Pascal’s commitment to Christianity and using language peculiar to Catholicism, Peter Kreeft writes that “Christianity is not a hypothesis, it is a proposal of marriage.” Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined and Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 31; original emphasis.

[7] As to the question of progression between kingdoms, the Church takes no official position. For various statements by Church authorities, see “Question: Do Mormons Believe There Is Progression between the Three Degrees of Glory?,” https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org.

[8] “The heart has its own order; the reason has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in [logical] order the causes of love. That would be ridiculous.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958), Pensée 283, p. 68.

[9] Pascal, Pensée 430, p. 101.

[10] “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).

[11] Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Mentor, 1954), 19.

[12] Not everyone agrees that Parmenides was the first to propose that the earth is sphere. I follow Daniel W. Graham. See his Science before Socrates: Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85–108.

[13] Joseph Smith History, 1838–1856, vol. C-1, addenda, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/.

[14] See also 1 Corinthians 8:1–3, which contains Paul’s declaration that “knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”

[15] The exposition that follows relies on The Abingdon Bible Commentary, eds. F. C. Eiselen, Edwin Lewis, and David G. Downey (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929), 1186–90.

[16] Bruce C. Hafen, “Love Is Not Blind: Some Thoughts for College Students on Faith and Ambiguity,” (Brigham Young University devotional, January 9, 1979), speeches.byu.edu.

[17] Quoted in “George Eliot,” New World Encyclopedia, newworldencyclopedia.org.

[18] Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 195.

[19] John Gribbin, “Pay Attention, Albert Einstein!” New Scientist, January 2, 1993, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13718543-900.

[20] Aubrey Eyre, “Surprising Stories, Fun Facts and Other Things You Might Not Know about the Salt Lake Temple,” Church News, May 3, 2019, https://www.thechurchnews.com.

[21] Wilford Woodruff, in Journal of Discourses (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855–86), 21:299.

[22] Woodruff, in Journal of Discourses, 21:300.

[23] Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf.

[24] Charity is “the more excellent way” Paul speaks of after listing other spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:31). It is the greatest of all gifts, for without it, Paul explains in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, we are “nothing,” though we possess all the other gifts.

[25] Joseph Smith History, circa summer 1832, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles.

[26] Wilford Woodruff, in Journal of Discourses, 8:268–69.

[27] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 941.

[28] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 228.

[29] Augustine, Confessions, 228.

[30] This is a common translation of Augustine’s most famous saying from the first paragraph of Book I of his Confessions. See, for example, “Lord, Teach Me to Praise Thee,” https://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20020821_agostino_en.html.