Clayton M. Christensen in his book “The Power of Everyday Missionaries wrote:
“One of the most intolerant climates for discussion about religion is among scientists and academics. Although they fashion themselves as the most fair and open-minded of all people, in my experience many in academia can actually be very biased and closed minded against truth. Many people are cowed into believing that because some of the most erudite among us disparage religion, academia and religion are not compatible—that they actually cannot be employed in the same conversation. Many treat religion as a second tier stepchild when juxtaposed with scientific and academic inquiry, and many of us therefore conclude that bringing religion up in politically correct conversations will cause others to thing less of us.
I have decided that rather than framing such colleagues as intellectual opponents, I should instead view them as having been deceived by Satan, just like the rest of us often are. With this in my mindset, I can frame my interactions with colleagues as if we are always on the same side of any divide.
Here is my logic. God did not say to us in the premortal existence, “Children, shortly you each are going down to earth, and I want you to be very careful. When you get there you are going to confront bodies of beliefs that they call science and academia. You will find these riddled with inconsistencies when compared to the truth about me, and the more you study, the more it will destroy your faith in me. So be very careful with science and academia: learn as little of those things as you can.”
God did not say this.
The great scientist Henry Eyring taught this principle over and over: Truth, from whatever source makes it known, helps us to become more like God. The evening before young Henry was going to leave home to study engineering at the University of Arizona, his father, Ed Eyring, asked Henry to take a walk with him around the family’s cattle ranch. He did not counsel Henry to learn selectively. Rather, he said, ” In this church you don’t have to believe anything that isn’t true. You go over to the University of Arizona and learn everything that you can, and whatever is true is part of the gospel.”*
The Restoration of the gospel allows us to categorize things by “truth vs. falsehood” instead of science vs. religion.” This has made me unafraid. It helps me to instinctively draw upon concepts from religion to solve problems in business and in academia, as readily as I draw upon academic concepts to solve these problems. Ed Eyring helped me to see that there isn’t a hierarchy of types of truth. Scientific and academic pursuits are not superior in any way to truth that we learn from religion, and vice versa. Correctly defined, there is inherently not a contradiction. If we observe that academia and science on the one side and religion on the other are inconsistent, then one or the other is incomplete or wrong. But truth cannot be inconsistent with truth. We are on solid ground as long as we are humbly searching for truth. ~Clayton M. Christensen, The Power of Everyday Missionaries (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book 2012), 66-67
* Henry J. Eyring, Mormon Scientist (2007), 4
