Dr. Chauncey C. Riddle
February 25, 1966
We are addressing ourselves to the problem, “Can Religion be Objective?” The problem was raised, of course, by the fact that a great many people in our age think it cannot and so we’ll attempt an answer to this. But first of all we will lay some groundwork for the answer. It’s not enough to have an answer. Perhaps even more important is to know why the answer is so, which makes the answer important. To begin with, any time you have discussions on anything important, the obvious thing to do is to define your terms. Let’s first of all define objectivity. There are three definitions which are important relative to objectivity. The first, which is, you might say, the one that people probably think of the most in their minds when they think of being objective is to think that that which is objective is the absolute truth—that which is really so. The problem of this definition is that we human beings don’t have the ability to know very much absolute truth. We see through a glass darkly. We don’t really know the world around us. We don’t really know our surrounding. True, we are discovering more and more about these things, but still we see through that glass darkly, and so for a really good, practical definition we will have to reject this one. Not because it isn’t a fine thing to have, but we just don’t have very much of it.
We might define objectivity in the sense that that which is objective is that upon which people agree. Now this happens to be a very functional definition. This is actually what passes for objectivity in our society, but on the other hand, it’s a somewhat cynical definition. I don’t think it’s the best definition, simply because we all know that a hundred million Frenchmen can be wrong. We all know that people, as a group, can err. All the progress of science comes from individuals who dared to defy the rest and to prove that it’s so.
So let’s try a third definition of objectivity. Objectivity, could be construed to be doing the very best you can, using all the evidence available to you and the very best thinking that it’s possible for you to muster in your situation. Now this is the one I choose to use in our discussion today. This is the one that a man must use if he’s going to be an Einstein, and dare to let everybody think he’s crazy. Einstein was willing to run that risk because he had something that was extremely valuable, and he knew it was valuable because he had performed all the tests that he could perform on his ideas and found them to be good, and then he opened them to the criticism of others to let them test also. Time has vindicated him, and so today he is honored as a great scientist. Not so when he first brought forth his ideas. He was considered to be quite a crackpot then. But, you see, it’s awfully easy to say that Einstein is objective 50 years after he has come to acceptance. The problem is to see that Einstein is objective when he first formulates his ideas, and the problem is that the individual has to go back over the same ground and make the same examination of the evidence and the conclusions which Einstein himself made to avoid just going along with the herd. Well, science is the paradigm for objectivity in our world, not that it should be this way necessarily, but it happens to be that way. So, let’s discuss science a little bit and see wherein this good thinking, this objectivity, has come to science.
Science began as an offshoot of philosophy in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago and until just a hundred years ago or so, all science was called natural philosophy. Many discovered that as they sought to be wise, which is to love wisdom, to be philosophical, that one of the first things they had to know was, “What is the nature of the problem?” “What’s the situation in the world in which I live?” As men sought to know the nature of the problem, they found that it did not pay to take other people’s word for it. They had to find a way to discover for themselves the reality of the world, and this is where science was born. As men began to make this search, the first tool they used to try and discern reality was their own reasoning power, and so the simple cannon for objectivity in Ancient Greece was, “Is it rationally consistent?” Almost all of ancient Greek science was, what you might call, a pure rationalism. If a thing was deductively valid, it had to be true. The paradigm science for them was Euclid’s geometry—this tremendous intellectual feat where you could have taken a few fundamental axioms and tied together all the laws of geometry that had been observed and forming a beautiful, wonderful deductive system. It was thought that all sciences would eventually be formed after this same pattern. But ancient Greek science laid some very important groundwork that didn’t get very far off the ground. There were a few men such as Archimedes, who did go beyond rationalism. The monuments of their work were the beginning points of modern science, but nevertheless, the tenor in ancient Greek science, the hallmark of objectivity was simply to be rationally consistent.
Now this has remained to this day to be a hallmark of objectivity. It is not the hallmark, however, as it was then. The type of approach made in the middle ages when theology was the queen of the sciences was essentially no different from that of the Greek temper. Rationalism again was the key to objectivity, and the pursuit of theology was done almost strictly by means of a rationalistic approach, taking premises from the scripture and tradition then working out the rational involvements of these things.
Modern science, as we know it, was not really born until the 16th century. We had the work of the early modern thinkers such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, going down to the time of Newton who pretty well set the stage, you might say. The scheme of modern science sort of climaxed in Newton, with his tremendous triumph, not only in actual scientific ideas, but in methodology. That’s the thing we’re interested in here, is the methodology of thought. Even since Newton’s time the methodology of science has continued to grow and to increase.
Let’s review some of the further postulates or guidelines which have been introduced into modern science as a help to keep these people from making grievous errors of thought, to help them evaluate evidence and come out with propositions that are highly defensible. The next proposition modern science uses is the idea of uniformity. Uniformity is basically the notion that it is reasonable to consider that the universe at other times and places is like it is here and now. Now the closest tie we have to the universe is sensory observation, but our senses are quite limited. We can’t see very far, and we’re limited, of course, to time and the moment of the present. We cannot perceive tomorrow or yesterday. We can perceive right now. We can’t perceive far away, but we can build yesterday and tomorrow and far away in our minds. We can build imaginative pictures of these things. And we do this on the basis of the principle of uniformity. It just so happens this is the only way we can think. If nature doesn’t happen to be uniform, we can never know it. And so the areas where we have progressed most, in our science, for instance, are the areas of greatest uniformity. Where the number of factors influencing something are the fewest or where we can get down to get experimental control, we thus very quickly achieving uniformity. When we have this uniformity we can project, we can predict, and our hypotheses come to be verified in this kind of a situation. Uniformity is one of the very life bloods of science. We couldn’t have thought very much without this principle of uniformity because we couldn’t have it without the necessity of being rationally consistent.
Thirdly, science postulates the need for a cause for every effect. This principle is called various names, but it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s the same thing under any title: causality, determinism, sufficient reason—these are all names for the same idea. This is the notion that events do not happen fortuitously in the universe. Everything that happens happens for some reason. There is a sufficient reason behind every event.
Now science, from the days of Aristotle down to now, has had as one of its significant points that it’s not enough to observe the world; we must understand what we observe. Understanding comes from our way of thinking, through knowing causes. Causes are relations of things, and understanding is a matter of relating things. The more relationships we see for something, the better we understand it. In our modern terminology we tend to think of causes as the efficient cause; something pushes something. But the word cause has a much broader heritage than that. Perhaps the word because is a little closer to the historic usage. The word because suggests a reason for something and cause simply means a reason. It’s the rational cause, the intellectual explanation, that gives understanding to our observations of the physical world. And so science has said this, “You don’t really know anything until you can explain it.” Just to see the moon eclipse doesn’t give you science, but when you understand why the moon is eclipsed and you see that there is a sufficient reason for it—you see that the earth is interposed between the sun and the moon, the shadow of the earth therefore blots out the light that would otherwise be reflected from the surface of the moon, then, having the sufficient reason or the cause of the phenomenon, we can appreciate what the phenomenon is and we then have scientific knowledge of it. And so, as we pursue science in the world, we try to get this kind of understanding for everything.
A fourth postulate is the idea of naturalism. This has come since Newton. Newton believed that God was a very important part of the universe and he introduced the notion of God into his theories to account for things that he could not otherwise account for. It so happened, in the last few hundred years, that men have been able to account for all these functions that God was supposed to perform and so God is no longer necessary. No longer is God necessary in the theories of physics. In modern science, if you were to go to a convention and read a paper including the idea of God or such notions as spirits or devils or such beings of any kind, you would be laughed out. This is just not scientific objectivity anymore. Scientific objectivity now includes the idea that we must limit ourselves to what is called the natural universe. We limit ourselves because this is the only way we can be sure to avoid certain kinds of errors. The errors of ancient scientists are many and as our methodology increases and refines, we are able to eliminate more and more of these errors. By limiting ourselves to the natural universe we have been able to make greater progress in describing and accounting for the phenomena of the material world.
The fifth one of these things we have mentioned is the postulate of publicity which is simply to say that we can have sciences only about things that are publicly observable. The meaning of “publicly observable”: where two people can see the thing in question and agree on its description. Science has had to introduce this postulate to get rid of certain vagaries of opinion that caused it much embarrassment over the years. What it specifically excluded in this is anything that is private or personal. My thoughts, for instance, would never be a subject matter for science because no two of you can observe them and agree with them. This includes feelings that I have; the values that I have. You could take what I say, you can ask me questions. You can take the response I give and use that as a basis for science. This is called behaviorism in psychology, and by limiting yourself to a behavioristic approach, you can get fairly reliable generalizations about things. But you can never have a science about my personal thoughts because you cannot observe them. So, anything that is not publicly observable is simply a sufficiently dangerous ground for even theorization or hypotheses. Scientists, in protecting themselves from making gross errors, delimit themselves from this area.
Now the strength of science is to take these five principles and apply them, and apply them only where they can be well applied so that what science comes out with is a defensible generalization. As a matter of fact, these principles and others that apply are applied more or less thoroughly by different individuals, but the thoroughness to which an individual applies these things, in the long run, becomes the hallmark of his worth as a scientist. I was talking with an eminent sociologist the other day, a man who is deeply engaged in research in the field and has published, I guess, a hundred articles in the journals. He stuck his neck our quite a bit, and he was telling me that one of the reasons he feels so confident about his work in sociology is because he and the men he respects in sociology have the good sense not to try to make statements about at least 95% of the questions they would like to know about. There’s only a very small area where they have tools and they can apply the methods of scrutiny with sufficient care to be sure of their results. So on the other 95% they don’t even pretend to have answers, and this is the way they obtain objectivity. This is very commendable. It’s not very commendable to make wild statements about something where one has no basis for statements, but if one can limit themselves to the area where they can be objective and then make statements in that area, this indeed is doing very good thinking and it’s the kind of thing I think we would all want to commend. I mentioned the fact that a certain study was done trying to vindicate certain of Freud’s ideas. One hundred fifty tests were made on a certain population. Only about twelve of the tests turned out to be significant. Half of them tended to vindicate Freud and half of them tended to disqualify Freud’s ideas. Probably in this particular study that he mentioned the people picked the half dozen that vindicated Freud’s ideas and published them and, thereby, completely ruined their reputation because other people went out on the same experiment, got different results, not only once but several times. This was brought to the attention of the community of sociologists and now these people aren’t listened to anymore. Why? Because they weren’t careful enough. They did not accept the data and the evidence with sufficient care to be awarded with the kindness, you might say, of being listened to. Maybe they can redeem themselves, but that is awfully hard after making that kind an error. There are a lot of lessons in that for us too. The point of all this is that scientific objectivity is obtained by highly limiting what will be studied. Don’t study and don’t make assertions on anything you can’t be reasonably sure about. That’s the net point of this great approach of objectivity on the side of science.
Now let’s turn to religion and consider objectivity on the side of religion. Religion also, I think, must come under this third definition. In religion, to be objective, we must do the very best kind of thinking that we can possibly do with the evidence available to us. So, there are postulates in religious thinking that are just as important as there are in scientific thinking. They’re not the same postulates. But let’s go through and see where they are the same and where they differ. The first postulate, the idea of being reasonable, is necessary. In science reasonableness is the thing which, shall we say, is kind of an end product. You don’t start out by being reasonable. You end up by being reasonable. Today we know that light is probably neither a particle nor a wave, because neither of these hypotheses is reasonable. In other words, it’s not consistent with all the evidence, but nevertheless, we continue to use these until we can get something better. So, as we go on, the thing we are saying is that, until this thing works out to be completely consistent, we will openly admit that this is not any kind of final hypothesis. Even if it were reasonable, science has learned enough that you have to experiment. You have to test, and you have to go on. Even then, it might be wrong. Just because it’s reasonable does not mean it’s right or true; but if it is unreasonable, you know there is something wrong; you need to gather more evidence. You need to do something more. That’s the real problem that’s involved. The same thing happens in religion. If a thing is inconsistent, you need to go on gathering evidence and not make any final pronouncements. Science and religion happen to coincide in this particular postulate.
Secondly, there is the postulate of uniformity. We need a uniformity just as much in religion as we do in science. Again, if it so happens that the spiritual universe is not uniform, we can never know it. That is because our human minds or brains are so equipped to deal with something where the same sort of thing happens again and again. Supposing that no two days were ever of the same length. How could you ever plan a day? If the days were not only not of the same length, but you could not ever know of what length they would be, you could never plan a day, could you? Similarly, if there were no spiritual uniform realities, you could never have knowledge of anything spiritual. It’s interesting as we look into the scriptures you see the statement that God makes about himself. One thing he wants to inform us of, as a hypothesis which we might personally test and find for ourselves to be true, is simply the notion that He is uniform. He tells us, “I am without variableness or shadow of turning. My course is one eternal round. I am the same yesterday and forever.” Why is that important? It’s important simply for this reason: If God is that uniform in His dealings with His children, then if we perform an experiment now and get a certain result, it is very highly likely that if we perform that experiment again we will get the same result. If it were not so, what could a person ever do to live a good life? He wouldn’t know what to do. This is the same as in science. If the sun didn’t come up every morning we couldn’t plan a thing. There has to be a uniformity in the universe for us to “know” it. So far as I can observe the uniformity in the gospel, the spiritual uniformity is at least as great as that of the physical uniformity enjoyed by the physical world. Therefore, we have at least as good a basis. How do you tell there is a uniformity in the physical universe? Only by experimenting, only by trying it to see if there is one. How would you know there is a uniformity in the spiritual universe? With exactly the same test, by trying it and seeing if it works. Only then can you say that you know what you are talking about.
Let’s go on to the third postulate, the postulate of causality. Again, this is absolutely essential to religion. In religious thinking, there is a cause for everything: there are reasons behind things; there are laws—this universe is run on the basis of law and order. This, of course raises the problem of agency. If everything is determined in the universe, and here’s a causality which is valuable both in science and religion. How does the problem of agency get solved? We don’t have time to solve that one today, but suffice it to say there is a very simple, beautiful explanation. There is such a thing as agency. At the same time there is a determinism. But we don’t have time to follow that one through.
The next postulate, which is necessary to religion and which differs from science now, is the postulate of honesty. Now, this is the one that corresponds, you might say, to the postulate of publicity in science. The way you keep a scientist honest is by forcing him to be public. As long as he is forced to publish his results in order that people can compare, you don’t have to worry about whether he is going to be honest or not because someone else will come along and check it. So you don’t have a postulate of honesty in science, although it is a fine thing to have. But you don’t need to enforce it by any rule. The social system that we are in in the scientific world enforces honesty; in other words, objectivity, if you will.
But you see the thing that we deal with in religion is a different universe; we are not even talking about the same sort of thing, at least in large measure. The universe and the area we are talking about in religion is what is going on inside my mind. The important thing to know in religion is: What things do I do that make me happier and what things do I do that make me less happy? This can’t ever be possibly studied by science until we can someday learn to interpret brain waves or something like that. At the present time this can’t be done. But this is the area that is central to religion. It is what makes up my relationship to the rest of the universe—not physically speaking, but within my own mind, my thoughts, my feelings, my values, my hopes, my desires, my fears. Before I can do some kind of good, clear thinking in this area, I can never be a stable person; I can never grow and develop as I ought to; I can never become a religiously mature person; I can never have the blessings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ until my thinking is objective. So the first thing I’ve got to do is to be sure that I’m honest. Specifically, if I perform an experiment and I discover that a certain thing leads me to be happier and then I perform the contrary experiment and find that this leads to unhappiness, I’ve got to be honest enough to admit that the one thing led to happiness and the other didn’t. If I can’t be that honest, you see, since there’s no one that can check—there’s nobody outside that can know my thoughts and my experiences and my happiness—the only salvation I have is to be absolutely and rigorously honest. And as soon as I start kidding myself and telling myself that maybe I enjoy this little bit of sin and I’ll pretend that it leads to happiness, we destroy ourselves religiously right there. There’s no hope for us. It’s no wonder that when the missionaries go out, they look for whom? The honest in heart. They’re the only ones they can possibly help religiously. Unless people have that they just can’t get off the ground, religiously speaking.
The next postulate in religion is the postulate of courage. This isn’t really a postulate, I guess; this is a way of acting. But it figures very importantly in being objective religiously. Why is courage important? Simply for this reason: When you study psychology you know that social pressure has a tremendous effect on people’s thoughts, beliefs and values. Maybe you’ve seen the experiment where the teacher draws a straight line on a board and asks everybody how long it is. They go around the room saying how long it is. Just guessing, from a distance. What they do is they have everybody except two or three in the back who have been planted to tell them all to say 45 inches long. Well, by the time you get around to the people who don’t know what’s going on, they tend to make a judgment somewhere between what they really think and what the group has said. Almost nobody is strong enough to call a spade a spade the way he sees it. Now, there’s some good in this because we frequently find that we are wrong and other people are able to help us temper our judgment. But you see, in the area of religion you can’t afford to do that. Why not? Simply for this reason. The data you are dealing with in the area of religion is your own personal consciousness. You are not the same as another individual. You never have the same experiences and experiments as another individual, so you can’t afford to depend on what other people say. You’ve got to perform the experiment for yourself and then have the courage to stand by it when you have made the evaluation of the data within your own mind. Religion is thought out in the inside of the individual. It is not a public thing. Every individual has come to his own testimony, to his own light. Don’t mistake me—this is not saying you pay no attention to anybody else. You do. But what you receive from other people is hypotheses, not conclusions. You receive structures of experiments to perform yourself, to be evaluated and to form conclusions on your own. You can’t get a testimony from any other human being. You can’t know right from wrong or what makes you happy or unhappy from any other human being. Now you can go along with other people but that will never make you an individual. That just makes them your master, as it were, and makes you their slave. But the purpose of God is to free all men from every other man. Read Section 1 of Doctrine and Covenants where the Lord tells why He restored His Gospel. Why? So that man would not have to counsel his fellow man, so that every man might speak in the name of the Lord God from his own personal knowledge. Now, that’s freedom, that’s the freedom from tyranny that every human being needs. But he’s got to have the courage to perform his own experiments, he’s got to have the honesty to call a spade a spade and then he’s got to stand forth before the world and bear his testimony to what he thinks is true.
In religion we don’t have the same kind of thing that we have in science. Science is a community project and the thing that really counts is the consensus of the community in science. And that’s good, that safeguards science. But it also limits science to those things which can be publicly observed.
Religion, too, by delimiting itself to the consciousness of our own conscience, our own personal feelings, thoughts and desires, it gets strength and we avoid certain kinds of errors that come from letting other people influence us too much. But at the same time, all that we can then assert is that I believe this—on the basis of my experiments, this is what it seems to be. And that’s why the missionaries from this church don’t go forth in the world saying, “I’m right and you’re all wrong.” The missionaries from this church go forth and the only righteous thing they can say is, “I know for myself that this thing that I’m telling you is true. Won’t you please perform an experiment for yourself and see if you find this is true for you.” Personal testimony is the hallmark of our religion. It has to be.
Well, let’s make a few concluding remarks about objectivity. The important thing about objectivity is not to be concerned with the subject matter. I hope it is clear from what I said that objectivity is not a function of subject matter or discipline. Objectivity is a function of people. It’s meaningless to say that science is objective because science doesn’t even exist. That is a generalization or a platonic idea in our minds which doesn’t have any real existence; it’s just a generalization. The thing that exists is people who act as scientists. Those people who act as scientists have a great need to be objective but because they are pretending to be scientists doesn’t mean they are objective; they must meet the canons and if they meet the canons, they are objective. If they don’t, they aren’t. By the same token, in religion the important thing is to be an objective thinker; to do the very best we can in analyzing, thinking, experimenting so that when we come out with some notions that for our own experience, for our own area of life, we are justified in making the statements that we make.
So—let’s answer the question, “Can religion be objective?” Well, religion is a thing again that doesn’t exist. The question is, “Are you objective in the religious matters of your life?” That’s the real question, isn’t it? It has nothing to do with whether or not you are thinking about religion. If you are a scientist, you need explanations. As a matter of fact, every human being has a pattern by which he makes his decisions in his life. That is his religion. The question is, “Are you objective about your religion? Do you do the very best kind of thinking you can do?” One of the wonderful and delightful things to know about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the fact that this kind of thinking is encouraged in this church and in this gospel. The Lord wants every one of us to have our own light and stand upon our own light. He doesn’t want people to follow blindly. He has His prophets tell them, “Don’t listen to just the president of the church. Get down on your knees and pray to find out for yourself.” That’s the only way you can seize upon the truth. That’s the only way you can be objective. And only if you are doing the best you can, can you oppose the adversary.
The adversary would love to have us fall into all kinds of error and the best defense that we have against him is to know whereof we speak, for our own selves, for our own lives. It’s to know that Jesus is the Christ. It’s to know for ourselves on the basis of our own experiments that God can be trusted. We need to know for ourselves that if we rely on the Holy Spirit it is a sure and unerring guide, a rod of iron that leads in the path of righteousness that leads us to the good things of this life, that it leads us to love, it leads us to kindness, it leads us to peace, to comfort, to all the things that we so desperately need in this world. But that comes only if you’ve tried it. That comes only if you know what you’re talking about, only if you are doing some very fine objective thinking in the area of your own religion.
So, can religion be objective? The answer is plain. Religion is an abstraction, a figment of our imagination, like unto “science,” another abstraction. But scientists can be objective if they follow the rules for objectivity. And persons can also be objective about their own religion if they follow the rules of careful thinking. Let us think carefully and we will do well. The results show how carefully we have thought, both in science and religion. We can be objective about our religion.
I bear you my testimony the Gospel of Jesus Christ is true. It works in my life. I am acutely conscious that my unhappiness comes only when I defy the principles of the gospel and that all the good things that I have ever received in my life have come as I have done what is right in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I bear you that testimony in His name. Amen.