A Latter-day Saint, Phillip Barlow writes:
My grateful mental state lets in a different view of reality than is otherwise possible. . . . And when I am thus conscious of my life and the world as a gift, I am less preoccupied with self. My attention focuses elsewhere. I am more alert to other people’s needs and virtues. I find my wonder awakened by just about everything: the engineering behind the physique of a cricket or a fly, for instance, or the beauty of even a pebble. In other words, when I am grateful, I tend toward a higher mental (and spiritual) state. I take things—people, order, air, roundness, everything—less for granted. Hence I notice things otherwise invisible to me. It is as if I have a sixth sense, taking in more context, more reality. If my temporary taste of gratitude becomes a disciplined habit, an ongoing habit of state and mind, I am “smarter,” more aware than if this were not so. To the extent that I become a habitually grateful person, I engage a different and richer reality than “the me” who is less grateful.11
Science can tell us a great deal about the world. It can tell us what the stars are made of, explain how a lightening bug flashes in the night sky, and describe the process of cell division that leads a zygote to become a baby girl. But it does not tell us why we should care about the nature of the stars, why the staccato flash of insects in the night delights us, or how a child should live. The error of believing that science represents the highest, or purest, or only reliable truth is the error of scientism. Philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty have pointed out that the problem is not science itself, one of the greatest and most fruitful of all human enterprises. The healthy stance is not “to question the validity of physical laws or the veracity of mathematical equations, but rather to break the dictatorship and absolutism of scientific thought over all other forms of human thinking.”12 This is perhaps why many of science’s most brilliant figures, past and present, are critics of the supposed conflict between science and religion and are themselves perfectly comfortable espousing religious belief. As Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most esteemed theoretical physicists, explains, “Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe.”13 Contrary to prevalent myth, a recent, large study revealed that, in the U.S. at least, “scientists are only a bit less religious than the average American.”14
Terryl Givens, Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014). 18-19
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
