Heresy at BYU

This reminds me of a story related by one of my very old professors while studying engineering at BYU. He was telling us of how grateful we should be so many subjects are freely taught today in school, as his BYU professor had to keep certain teachings secret and urge interested students to keep certain principles in the strictest discretion in order to teach them. What could possibly be so controversial in the school of engineering? Certain physics principles were being treated as heresy and scandalized certain puritan students.

One of the great heresies was Newton’s third law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In order to teach the application of this principle, professors use examples with inanimate objects and humans. I believe the professor would explain the students that when a man pushed against a wall, the wall would in return produce an equal and opposite force against the man. Some students found this to be sacrilegious and complained to the BYU president (George H. Brimhall). Allegedly, Brimhall told professors that they could not teach such a thing. Since then, the principle had to be taught cautiously, allegedly even decades after Brimhall had left BYU.

The other day a friend of mine and I were talking about this very subject. How ironic it is that somehow, the Church often seems to take some “ownership” or credit of scientific advances by claiming these are revealed of God, yet the men that are the most immersed in religion are the ones who resist these “revelations” the most.

It is for the most part the men who are pointed as “heretics” or even “atheists” who come up with brilliant advances in science, with religious people following far… FAR behind. We often hear about how many advances have been made “since the restoration of the Gospel,” as if one was the direct causation of the other, yet, religion seems to sit the longest at the culprit of ignorance struggling to embrace new ideas and struggling even harder to let go of the false traditions of their ancestors creating all sorts of taboos, idiosyncrasies, and obstacles for the true progression of man. Religious people seem to always drag behind, they only give up their false traditions after there is so much evidence to the contrary that to stand in their view is ridiculous (unless if you are from the south, where creationism is taught in schools and evolution denied, lol).

This is why Einstein uttered two of my favorite quotes of all time. He sure encountered religious opposition to his ideas, and when his ideas turned to be brilliant, then nations, organizations and groups would claim him as their own (lol... oh yeah, he is one of us for sure, hehehehehe):

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

Both quotes by Albert Einstein

I agree with Bill Kilpatrick. (Bill, contact me, old friend.)

I was a philosophy major at BYU and then picked up a law degree across the street at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. I found that every topic in courses I took and TA-ed were freely explored, much more so than might have been possible in public universities in some respects, because we were able to explore the religious history and dimensions of a topic without fear of interference from the state's Thought Police. I also found the tolerance for devotionalizing serious subject matters to be quite low in my Science and Philosophy classes.

I think Latter-day Saints who believe the gospel is at odds with any truth are missing the boat. Joseph Smith reportedly taught that “Mormonism is truth; and every man who embraces it feels himself at liberty to embrace every truth: consequently the shackles of superstition, bigotry, ignorance, and priestcraft, fall at once from his neck; and his eyes are opened to see the truth, and truth greatly prevails over priestcraft." He also taught that “Mormonism is truth, in other words the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth . . . . The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.” Letter from Joseph Smith to Isaac Galland, Mar. 22, 1839, Liberty Jail, Liberty, Missouri, published in Times and Seasons, Feb. 1840, pp. 53–54; spelling and grammar modernized, as it appears in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Chapter 22 (in other words, this is from last week's lesson in Priesthood and Relief Society!)

SIMPLE PLAN:

1. Embrace all truth as you find it regardless of its source or origins.
2. Reject all falsehoods.
3. Distinguish carefully between fact and theory (doctrine being the religious analogue to theory).
4. Regard fact as sacred and primal and the latter as useful, but secondary. Or, in other words, adjust theory to fit facts, not the other way around. (Many of the more silly, contentious errors of religion happen when we get this the wrong way around.)
5. Always be on the look out for facts not accounted for in the theory (some of the most remarkable advances in religion and science have come from questions asked about things that did not fit or seem to fit the then current theory).
6. Our religion arises not from a theory or doctrine, but from facts - those of our relationships to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and to each other.
7. If you tend to these facts -- these relationships -- as sacred and primal, you will be less inclined to want to demean others engaged in the enterprise of seeking out truth, regardless of whether you currently agree with them; you will also expect to be surprised sometimes and to have your theories and doctrines disrupted, because we believe God will yet reveal many great and wonderful things and we know from experience how that has shaken things up for some of our doctrines in the past; for this reason, we are humble in the expression of our doctrine and do well to keep it simple and pure -- i.e., close to the facts: Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the avoidance of contention of points of theory or doctrine. 3 Nephi 11.

The truth enterprise is the enterprise of our religion. It is in no respect in conflict with the enterprise of science. Even in methodology both our religion and science must be humble and bend always to the facts. Both are, however, human enterprises and are distorted by full litany of human folly -- from hubris, ambition, and envy to even more base follies.

Sorry not to be more concise.

My $.02.

Oh, and you have to love the audacity of the students who wrote that great prose in 1911 in defense of their faculty.

Ha!

That's awesome, Mark D.

Manuel, I think you're right -- mostly. But wouldn't on e like Joseph Smith also fit nicely into that category of "great spirits [who] always encounter[] violent opposition from mediocre minds"?