I. Spiritual Experience as the Basis of Knowledge?
Perhaps the most basic of challenges lobbed at theists by atheists is, “You cannot know God exists.” Of course, not all believers say they know God exists, preferring instead the word “believe” —but many do claim knowledge, and emphatically, at that. It is a claim worth investigating seriously. Is it an excess of zeal that drives some people to say they “know” God exists, or are they justified in using the word?
A reasonable approach to this question would be to find people who say they know God exists, find out what they claim is the source of their knowledge, and see whether the claimed source holds up under scrutiny. The first step is accomplished easily enough; walk into any fast and testimony meeting at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and you will hear the phrase “I know” in reference to spiritual matters, including the existence of God, dozens of times. The second step is also straightforward, since Latter-day Saints bearing testimony almost invariably cite experiences with God as the foundation of their knowledge: a feeling of His love, a sense of His guiding hand, the witnessing of miracles, the voice of the Holy Spirit, and so on.
The third step is the purpose of this essay. If knowledge of God rests upon spiritual experience, as testimony bearers say it does, then to understand whether one can know God exists, one must understand the nature of spiritual experience. Do we know God exists, as the term “know” is widely used? Or are Latter-day Saints (and other believers) appropriating the word “know,” using it to refer to a subjective experience that cannot, in the regular sense, accurately be called knowledge? I aim to show here that this is not a case of linguistic overstepping. For most people who say it sincerely, the word “know” in the declaration “I know God exists” has the same meaning as it does in everyday conversation.
II. Spiritual Feelings
Here are two descriptions of the effects of the Holy Spirit from scripture:
- “But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.”1
- “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”2
Here are two from modern prophets:
- “The Holy Ghost will be the wind beneath your wings, placing in your hearts the firm conviction of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ and His place in the eternal plan of God, your Eternal Father.”3
- “Regardless of what others may say or do, no one can ever take away a witness borne to your heart and mind about what is true.”4
These teachings are familiar to any Latter-day Saint. There are many other things the Spirit does, but these are some of the most common: He gives peace and comfort, inspires to do good, testifies that Jesus is the Christ, and produces feelings of warmth.
But these are rather vague impressions, aren’t they? Those who don’t believe in God easily look at such descriptions and say, “None of this is proof! In fact, I would barely even call it evidence. You’re saying you know God is real because you felt warmth in your chest? Because you felt joy and peace? Because you felt convinced of it? I can feel all the same things about my own worldview. Feelings aren’t proof!” Even someone who does believe in God may wonder, at times, if this line of thinking is valid.
I side emphatically with the skeptic here: Feelings are not proof. Feeling peace and happiness while at church or while reading the Book of Mormon does not mean God is real, nor does it mean all the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are true. Many people professing other faiths, or no faith, also feel peace and happiness while practicing their beliefs, yet some of these beliefs are contradictory; they cannot all be entirely true.
But this is no reason to give up on your belief in God and in His Church. The fact that feelings aren’t proof doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of anyone’s testimony, because when we reduce spiritual experiences to feelings, we significantly misrepresent their nature.
III. A System of the Nature of Physical and Spiritual Experiences
We misunderstand the nature of spiritual experience when we focus only on what it feels like, instead of what it is. In fact, this distinction—between how a thing feels and what the thing is—is required to accurately understand any experience, spiritual or physical.
Spiritual and physical experiences are comprised of three parts. I’ll call them the thing, the sensation, and the emotion. I’ll discuss physical experiences first, and then I’ll return to spiritual experiences.
Consider a static shock. The experience of receiving a static shock contains three distinct elements: the static electricity, the sensation of being shocked, and the consequent emotions. The electricity itself is the thing; it is objectively real and exists apart from the person having the experience. The shock you feel, mildly painful, is the sensation; it is the immediate result of your coming into contact with the thing. The annoyance you feel upon being shocked is the emotion; it is your internal reaction to the sensation.
The same parts exist in the experience of seeing. Say you see a dog running toward you. The thing is the dog, which exists independent of you; the sensation is the immediate act of seeing the dog, when light enters your eyes and your brain recognizes it as a dog; and the emotion is how you feel about seeing the dog—joy if it’s your own dog, fear if it’s a feral stray.
One more example. When you hear a sound, the thing is the sound waves and whatever is producing them; these are real independent of you. The sensation is the immediate experience of hearing and comprehending the sound. The emotion is how you feel about the sensation—perhaps anticipation if the sound is a phone call you’ve been awaiting, or calm if it’s a peaceful song.
The structure of any spiritual experience is the same. The thing is the Holy Spirit and His spiritual communication, which are objective realities; the sensation is your immediate experience of coming into contact with them; the emotion is how you feel about the experience. For example, if the Holy Ghost suggests you give money to a homeless man by the side of the road, but you do not want to do so, then the Spirit Himself and His whispered suggestion are the thing, the appearance of a thought in your mind and the sense that it is a divine communication make up the sensation, and your distaste and rationalization are the emotion.
Confusion arises because often the sensation and the emotion are both referred to as “feelings.” But the feeling of the Holy Ghost speaking to you is not the same as the feelings consequently generated within you, just like the feeling of a bug crawling down your leg is not the same as the subsequent feeling of panic.
This distinction matters because to have justified confidence that God is real—to honestly say we know it—we need to be sure we have correctly identified the cause of our spiritual experiences. To be precise, we need to know the emotions we associate with spirituality are indeed responses to sensations, not willed in isolation, and we need to know the sensations are indeed caused by God, not some other thing.
The human mind can generate emotions at will which are not grounded in reality. We do this for many reasons, such as confirmation bias, groupthink, trauma, or grudges. Sensations, on the other hand, always correspond to an external reality; there must be something to sense. If I see a light, there is certainly something other than my will causing it. It may be a lamp, a star, a flashlight, or fluids inside my eyeballs, but there is always a physical cause. But my emotional response to the light is a matter of will (at least in part); I can see beauty in it, be annoyed by it, ignore it.
Likewise, when I have a true spiritual experience, there is the feeling of the divine pressing upon my spirit from the outside—not a matter of will—and there is the inner, willed response—submissive, afraid, grateful, skeptical.
If I do not distinguish between the sensations and the emotions of spiritual experience, I may develop the belief that positive emotion is the entire essence of spiritual experience. There are many people who live like this for years, having the appearance of a spiritual life but none of the substance. Then, seemingly without warning, their faith disintegrates, either because something (like a personal disagreement, a doctrinal doubt) leads them to start feeling negative about their faith or because they realize they can feel happiness, peace, and enjoyment without it. If positive emotion is the substance of spiritual experience, then there is no spiritual experience at all. So to affirm that we “know” God exists (that is, our spiritual experiences are legitimate), the first step must be to establish that our spiritual experiences involve sensations, too.
This, I think, is the easier problem. Emotions can be generated at will, but anyone who has had spiritual experiences will recognize, with a bit of self-reflection, that they cannot be. If you choose to look for and dwell on evidence your wife is selfish, you can make yourself feel anger toward her; if you choose to look at a colleague in a positive light, you can make yourself feel warmth toward him. But no matter how you try, you cannot replicate the feeling of holding your newborn child for the first time; you cannot recreate the moment light flooded into you in your darkest moment. Genuine spiritual experiences are a sensation of something beyond you, out of your control, to which emotions are a natural response, within your control to some degree; they are not emotions alone.
However, this alone doesn’t prove spiritual knowledge is legitimate, because even though sensations must be caused by an external thing, it is not always apparent to us what the thing is in the moment. I feel a bug crawling down my leg (sensation) and respond with panic (emotion)—but is the thing really a bug, or is it a coin that slid out of a hole in my pocket, or is it merely that my pants brushed against my leg and my brain, hyper-attentive to threats, interpreted it as a bug? If it turns out to have been a coin or my pant leg, then although I may have said “I know there is a bug on my leg” and felt certain there was, I would have been wrong.
Analogously, as I listen to someone share a testimony that aligns with my beliefs, I feel a connection to God (sensation; it feels like its source is outside of me, and I cannot produce it myself) and respond with gratitude (emotion; I can choose it)—but is the thing causing that sensation really God, or is it kinship with the speaker, or is it merely that I am surrounded by like-minded people and my brain, hyper-attentive to social relationships, interpreted it as God?
This is the more difficult problem. To have justified confidence that God is real—to honestly say we know it—we need to be sure we have correctly identified the cause of our spiritual experiences. How do we know the sensations we call spiritual experience are caused by God, not by some trick of our minds in response to the world around us?
To answer this question, I propose a parallel one: how do we know the sensations we call physical experience are caused by an existing physical world, and not by some trick of our minds? The answers are one and the same. Physical and spiritual experiences, I have shown, are made up of the same three parts, and now I will show that physical and spiritual realities become known to us via the same process. I will look at this process through the physical lens first and then return to the spiritual.
IV. Properties of Sensory Knowledge
Most people innately accept that the physical world, which they directly experience through their physical senses, is objectively real. You have perfect confidence, when you see a dog running toward you, that it is in fact a dog and it is in fact running toward you. You have perfect confidence, when you hear a piano, that someone nearby is playing a piano (or a recording of one). You have perfect confidence, when you taste a sweet piece of candy placed in your mouth, that it is full of sugar or some other sweetener. You have perfect confidence, when you catch a whiff of livestock, that there is livestock upwind of you. You have perfect confidence, when you grasp a piece of ice, that it is cold. Let’s call knowledge gained this way sensory knowledge. Here are some of its properties:
- It is apprehended immediately by the mind through the senses. The acquisition of sensory knowledge corresponds with the definition of sensation from earlier. When you experience a sensation, you gain sensory knowledge.
- It is usually hard to doubt, as shown in the examples above.
- It can’t be transferred to another person; you can’t, via explanation or any other way, make someone else see something just because you can see it, or make him hear something just because you can hear it, or make him feel something just because you can feel it. He has to look at, listen to, or touch it himself.
- Each sense has a corresponding type of knowledge which cannot be gained via any other sense. A man blind from birth cannot know what an apple looks like, though might know an apple is in front of him and know its exact shape and texture and taste. Knowledge of what things look like is gained only via the eyes. Knowledge of what things sound like is gained only via the ears. Knowledge of what things taste like is gained only via the taste buds.
We can describe another type of knowledge, which I’ll call intellectual knowledge, to further clarify the nature of sensory knowledge. Intellectual knowledge contrasts with sensory knowledge in a few ways:
- It is not apprehended immediately by the mind through the senses, but rather through study or reason. Some examples are knowledge of mathematical laws, knowledge of history, knowledge of baking techniques, and knowledge of computer programming.
- It is usually easier to doubt than sensory knowledge, since we know we aren’t perfectly intelligent, don’t have perfect memories, and could have been deceived by the people who taught us.
- It can be transferred to another person through explanation or teaching.
- It doesn’t correspond to any particular sense or way of learning; the exact same intellectual knowledge can be gained by anyone, even if they are missing a sense. For example, you can learn history through sight (reading), sound (listening), or touch (braille).
We can have varying degrees of confidence in both types of knowledge, but in general we consider sensory knowledge the most certain type available to us. There are people who doubt the earth is round, having only intellectual knowledge that it is, but there are no astronauts who have seen the globe with their own eyes and continue to suspect it is flat, since their knowledge is sensory.
V. Why We Have Confidence in Sensory Knowledge
We trust sensory knowledge almost perfectly, but we rarely, if ever, consider why we have such confidence in it. Where did this confidence come from? It might feel innate and inevitable, having no origin, but it is not. We learned it from experience.
This is clear because newborn babies have no such confidence; they haven’t developed the capacity to interpret the physical stimuli they receive. Babies can see, but it takes experience to learn to recognize faces, differentiate them, and distinguish between a person and a video of one. Babies can hear, but it takes experience to learn to recognize voices, differentiate them, and trust some more than others.
If a baby is deprived of experiences with one type of physical stimulus, the brain never learns to interpret stimuli of that type. This is discussed in a 2014 New Yorker article titled “What People Cured of Blindness See.” It describes the experiences of people born with cataracts obscuring their entire field of vision who had them surgically removed later in life—they had the capacity to see, but they could never use it because their entire field of vision was covered by the cataracts.
Opening their eyes for the first time after surgery was not the wondrous moment we might imagine it to be. The author relates a conversation with the vision researcher Dr. Pawan Sinha:
Sinha showed me a video in which a teen-age boy, blind since birth because of opaque cataracts, sees for the first time. The boy sits still and blinks silently, the room around him reflecting in his eyes as a kind of proof of their new transparency. Sinha believes these first moments for the newly sighted are blurry, incoherent, and saturated by brightness—like walking into daylight with dilated pupils—and swirls of colors that do not make sense as shapes or faces or any kind of object.
The sensations of light this teenage boy receives make no sense to him. Why would they? He has no more experience with the world of sight than has a newborn baby. His brain has no visual pattern recognition skills, no expectations for what any given arrangement of colors should mean. The author elaborates further by quoting scientist Stephen Kosslyn:
“When you develop expectations, you can use the fruits of previous experience to help you process what’s coming in now,” Kosslyn said. “But you need to have had that experience.” An example is depth perception: to the sighted, with a lifetime of practice, rules about occlusion (if A occludes B, object A is closer) and foreshortening (objects farther away appear smaller) are continually used to combine incoming light into a rich, three-dimensional world. The absence of these rules can frustrate the newly sighted, whose visual world can be both blurry and two-dimensional—paintings and people are often described as “flat, with dark patches”; a far-away house is “nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps”; streetlights seen through glass are “luminous stains stuck to the window”; sunbeams through tree branches collapse into a single “tree with all the lights in it.”5
In short, our ability to see is innate, but our ability to use sight to make sense of the world requires practice—years of consistent experience during which we recognize patterns, which allows us to develop confident expectations for what the visual input we receive means about the objective world around us. We gain the ability to recognize, interpret, and have confidence in all our other physical senses in the same way. Only through consistent experience do babies learn language, learn to recognize and avoid sources of pain, learn to recognize smells, and so on, until eventually (in early childhood), their confidence in the reality and predictability of the world with which they are interacting becomes virtually unshakable. By adulthood, most people have so much experience receiving sensory input from the world, and the input has been so consistent, that any suggestion that the world around them is a fabrication of their mind seems ridiculous.
Philosophers such as George Berkeley have argued that this is not proof the world objectively exists as we perceive it to. I agree; the purpose of this paper is not to prove anything exists. It is to defend the use of the word “know” in the sentence “I know God exists.” So, to the caricature of an atheist with whom we began this conversation, here I say, take note: if you are comfortable saying “I know the world around me exists,” it is only because you have a lifetime of experience perceiving it, and those perceptions have been consistent. You cannot prove your senses are providing you with reliable information, since you cannot exist apart from them; you cannot step outside your physical senses and assess their accuracy neutrally. But only the most stalwart disciple of Berkeley would begrudge you the use of the word “know” in the sentence “I know the world exists.” When most people say we know a thing exists, that is exactly what we mean: we perceive it, and we entirely trust the sense(s) by which we perceive it because they have presented us with a consistent picture of the world for as long as we can remember.
VI. The Communicability of Sensory Knowledge
Most physical experiences are easy enough to describe to other people. “The clouds are white and wispy.” “The dog is shaggy, smells wet, and is covered in fleas.” “My stomach feels bloated, heavy, and has a dull ache.” You can see the clouds in your mind’s eye. You can not only see the dog; you know what it would feel like if it approached and jumped on you. You can imagine the ache in my gut. None of your mental representations is a perfect recreation of what I’m describing, but you have a fairly clear idea of what all those words mean, of what sensations they correspond to.
This ability to accurately describe sensory knowledge feels innate to us. However, like our ability to interpret and our confidence in sensory knowledge, the ability to describe it is only learned through experience. We learn the meanings of words by recognizing the patterns in how people use them; a baby hears his mother say “hot!” next to a stove, a candle, and a fireplace, and eventually he understands that “hot” refers to the sensation he experiences when he is near those things. Without time spent learning which words correspond to which sensations, we would never be able describe our sensory experiences to anyone else.
What’s more, since communication is a two-way street, both people need to have had the same sensory experiences for any meaningful communication to pass between them. Reread the descriptions in the first paragraph of this section from the point of view of someone who has been blind since birth: “white and wispy” becomes meaningless. Reread them from the point of view of someone born without a sense of smell: “smells wet” becomes meaningless. Try as you might to explain colors or smells to someone who has never seen or smelled, there is no way to make them understand you, because the person has never experienced it.
H. G. Wells’s short story “Country of the Blind” tells of a man, Núñez, who stumbles upon an isolated community in which everyone is blind and has been for generations. The community has long since adapted to blindness and has no knowledge of sight, and Núñez discovers what we have just acknowledged: it is impossible to explain sight to people with no firsthand experience of it. His descriptions of shape and color are dismissed as delusions, and his success in tasks requiring sight is dismissed as luck or coincidence. Eventually, considering him a disturber of the peace, the people tell Núñez he must have his eyes removed if he wants to remain with them.
Wells’s story illustrates this truth: any given type of sensory knowledge, though taken for granted in communities where it is commonplace, would be incommunicable and likely viewed as strange and suspicious in a community bereft of it.
VIII. Confidence in Spiritual Knowledge
At the end of Part III, we were left with the question, “How do we know the sensations we call spiritual experience are caused by God, not by some trick of our minds in response to the world around us?” Now we are prepared to answer.
The first step was introduced earlier: recognize the difference between emotions and spiritual sensations. The mind can produce emotions on its own (by choosing certain thoughts or reactions), but it cannot produce sensations on its own. You could feel peace by replaying a classical symphony in your mind, with no external prompting, because peace is an emotion. But you could never hear the symphony unless it were actually being played, because hearing is a sensation. Likewise, you could feel happiness simply by thinking positively and optimistically, because happiness is an emotion. But you could never feel the Holy Ghost unless He were communicating with you, because feeling the Holy Ghost is a sensation.
If God is not real, there are two possibilities for the nature of spiritual experiences. The first is that what you call spiritual experiences are emotions only, not sensations. When you pray, meditate, attend church, or serve others, you are merely thinking and acting in ways that make you feel good, and the belief that those emotions have a source beyond your own choices is delusion. The other possibility is that prayer, meditation, church, and service do involve genuine sensations; they bring you into contact with some external thing, but you are mistaken about the thing’s nature. You are not spiritually communing with God, or God as you understand Him; rather, your brain is subconsciously reacting to other people, nature, circumstances, or the energy of the universe, and you are misinterpreting it.
But if God is real, then all three pieces are aligned: God exists independently and condescends to you, you spiritually perceive Him, and you have feelings in response.
Many people at this point may grow frustrated: “Well, I can’t tell for sure. Was that feeling really contact with the Holy Ghost, or was it the joy of being safe and accepted, or was it just me feeling something I wanted to feel, or was it something else?”
The answer is to apply the process by which we came to know the physical world, elaborated in Part V, to the spiritual world. We must learn to recognize, interpret, and have confidence in spiritual perceptions through experience.
When in your development did you gain object permanence? When did you become confident that objects nearer to you look larger? When did you learn tinnitus is not an external noise, but the high-pitched whine of an old TV is? When did you learn to distinguish between a hunger headache and a sleep deprivation headache? When did you become confident that sometimes vibrations in your pocket are just “phantom vibrations” and you’re not crazy for feeling them? When did you learn that as you spend time in an area with a specific odor, your nose adapts so you smell it less over time? When did you become confident that higher floors are warmer than lower floors?
You probably don’t remember. Even if you had a perfect memory, you probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint one moment of conscious realization. And yet you have total confidence that these patterns exist in reality and are explained by some underlying physical mechanism, even if you don’t know what the mechanism is. Why does a hunger headache feel different than a sleep deprivation headache? You don’t know, but you’re sure you’re not making it up.
Sometimes, although you don’t know firsthand the mechanism underlying some physical phenomenon, intellectual knowledge of the phenomenon’s cause supplements your sensory knowledge of the phenomenon and leaves you no real reason to doubt. You know from your own physical perceptions that upper floors are warmer than lower floors, but without being taught you probably never would have understood that hot air rises because it is less dense than cool air. However, now that you’ve been taught the basics of convection, there’s little reason to doubt that the reason upper floors are warm is that hot air rises; the explanation squares with your experience.
None of this understanding was gained in a single moment. Gradually, imperceptibly, through years of experience, your mind has noticed patterns and from them formulated an understanding of the way the physical world is, and now you have total confidence in this mental construction of the physical world.
That is how we learn about the spiritual world, too.
When in my development did I learn God was real? When did I become confident that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world? When did I learn Joseph Smith had the interactions with God he claimed to have? When did I learn that the current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet? When did I become confident the Book of Mormon is an ancient text and teaches the truth about Jesus Christ? When did I learn that Christ, because of His atoning sacrifice, can and does forgive our sins and remove our guilt?
There are some spiritual truths the spiritual mechanisms behind which I do not know, but I have no doubt they exist. Why is God real? I don’t know, but I am as sure that I am not making it up as I would be if His voice were audible. Hearing the voice of God, the Holy Spirit, is a sensation, not an emotion. I cannot produce the experience myself, and I have experienced it so many times, in such a consistent way, that by now my mental picture of that aspect of the physical world is vivid and would be ridiculous to doubt. Why does Christ’s suffering and death allow Him to forgive my sins? I don’t know, but I am sure I am not making it up; there is a discernible experience of being forgiven by God which I cannot fabricate in my own mind and which has consistently been linked to Jesus Christ for as long as I can remember. I have sensory knowledge of these things, firsthand knowledge, gained through my soul’s inborn spiritual sense.
There are other spiritual truths for which intellectual knowledge supplements my sensory knowledge. I perceive, spiritually, that the current president of the Church is a prophet. The doctrines of the Church provide an explanation of the origin, purposes, and function of priesthood authority, which I have studied and been taught. Without being taught those doctrines, I probably never would have understood that the president of the Twelve should become the next president of the Church because the Twelve Apostles collectively hold all the necessary priesthood keys. However, now that I’ve been taught how priesthood succession works, there’s little reason to doubt that the reason the current president of the Church is a prophet is that he is the rightful successor to that priesthood office; the intellectual knowledge I have been taught squares with the spiritual sensory knowledge I have gained firsthand, and together they form a solid picture of that aspect of the spiritual world.
None of this understanding was gained in a single moment. Gradually, imperceptibly, through years of experience, my mind has noticed patterns and from them formulated an understanding of the way the spiritual world is. At this point, I’ve had enough spiritual experiences to be totally confident in the essential aspects of my mental construction of it. It is not a finished construction, not by a long shot. Spiritually, I am still a child. There are plenty of holes and weak links. But some core principles, such as those listed as rhetorical questions above, have been so consistent, my perception of them so obviously originating outside myself, that I can no longer doubt them.
There’s no quick formula for recognizing whether your spiritual experiences, the spiritual sensations comprising them, are interactions with the Spirit, with something else, or happening solely inside your head. You can only give the question attention over time, and as you do, your brain will pick up on the patterns. Gradually, you’ll learn to recognize the differences between the Spirit’s voice and your internal dialogue, between spiritual impressions and natural inclinations, between divine direction and subconsciously selfish desires. You will build a mental picture of the spiritual world from experience, as you have built one of the physical world.
IX. Communicability of Spiritual Knowledge
As you engage in this process and start building out your spiritual knowledge, there is one more piece of the puzzle worth acknowledging: spiritual experiences are incommunicable to those who haven’t had spiritual experiences of their own.
People who don’t share your beliefs will challenge the validity of your spiritual experiences, as the people challenged Núñez’s vision in “Country of the Blind.” Their challenges hold no water; they simply cannot understand because they have not had spiritual experiences themselves. Try as you might, no matter your intelligence, empathy, or eloquence, your descriptions of spiritual experiences will sound fanciful to people who do not believe in God or who have not had substantial experience with spiritual things. But among those with spiritual knowledge, a shared vernacular can develop, whereby it is possible to describe your experiences and find others who are on the same page.
I’ll describe a few spiritual experiences I’ve had. If you believe in God, you may find these descriptions match how you would describe some of your own spiritual experiences. If you do not believe in God or have not interacted with Him much, you will not be able to understand them until you interact with Him yourself, and you may be skeptical. Nevertheless, it is obvious to me that these are sensations I received, not merely emotions I felt. They were interactions with an objectively existing spiritual world, with the objectively existing God, I AM.
My life has, in a matter of minutes or hours, been rerouted by God so thoroughly that I could not have undone it after the fact even if I had wanted to. The way I had been thinking and the direction I had been walking seemed impossibly far away, unrecoverable.
I have wrestled with questions on homework and tests until I had no ideas left, and then prayed and felt the Spirit guide my thoughts down new paths which ultimately led to the understanding I needed.
I have had love for others poured into my heart from outside. I have loved people more than I should have been capable of, loved them as if Jesus had taken me by the arm and was walking me through what it really means to love.
I have felt God, in a sense, arrive at my door and wait for me to open it. He let me know He had a message for me and then gave me time to gather my thoughts, get a notebook and pen, find a quiet place, and open the door once I was fully ready to receive Him.
I have had words enter my mind that I knew immediately were a divine message, even though I didn’t understand them. Only after giving them serious thought and prayer did their meaning and the reason they were sent to me became clear.
I have tapped into an absolute unity underlying and connecting all things. All things are one in Christ.6
As you accumulate spiritual knowledge through spiritual experiences, don’t start second guessing it just because you can’t articulate how you know it. All knowledge gained through the senses is likewise impossible to explain, and that doesn’t make it any less true.
X. Summary and Conclusion
We have physical senses, and we have a spiritual sense. There is no way to gain sensory knowledge of a given type except by using the corresponding sense. Thus, the only way to gain firsthand knowledge of God and of the spiritual world is by using our spiritual sense, that is, by having spiritual experiences.
Physical senses allow us to sense the physical world, and the spiritual sense allows us to sense the spiritual world. These sensations sometimes lead us to feel emotions, but it’s not a complete experience if the sensation is discounted. Spiritual experiences may include emotions, but they are more than just emotions.
Neither physical nor spiritual sensations can be generated independently by the mind; there must be an external thing with which we come into contact. When we have spiritual experiences, we come into contact with God.
It takes time and experience for us to learn to perceive, interpret, and have confidence in our perceptions and interpretations of the world around us. The same is true of the spiritual world. The only way to know spiritual realities is to come into contact with them many times, giving ourselves practice receiving and interpreting information through our spiritual sense. Gradually, as we recognize patterns in our perceptions, a consistent picture of the spiritual world develops in our mind, and the clearer the picture grows, the more confidence we have in what we know of spiritual things.
From the moment we are born, we are flooded with inputs to all our physical senses, so our picture of the physical world and our confidence in its reality develop fast, in early childhood. Inputs to our spiritual senses are rarer, typically requiring effort on our part to get into a position to receive them, so our picture of the spiritual world develops slower, as does our confidence in its reality. Spiritually, we are infants and toddlers—but we choose our own rate of development, because we grow up spiritually in proportion to our choice to seek out contact with the spiritual world. “God hath not revealed anything to Joseph but what he will make known unto the Twelve, and even the least Saint may know all things as fast as he is able to bear them.”7
Communication about any type of sensory knowledge can only be meaningful between people who both have access to and experience with the sense in question. Many people refuse to believe in any spiritual world; thus, they never put in the effort to come into contact with spiritual things; thus, they never have the opportunity to utilize and become familiar with the operations of their spiritual sense. Explaining spiritual experience to these people is impossible, like explaining color to a blind man. The only possible route to understanding spiritual things, then, begins with belief—that is, accepting the possibility that spiritual things are real and seeking out experiences with them.
I hope this has made it plain that spiritual knowledge is not a far-fetched thing whatsoever and is not even less reliable than knowledge gained through the physical senses; the two types of knowledge are structured and acquired in identical fashion. The only differences are which sense we’re using (the soul’s innate ability to receive spiritual communication, as opposed to sight, hearing, etc.) and how accessible the objects of perception are (encountering spiritual things is less common, and requires more effort, than encountering physical things).
If you think “I know the world exists” is an uncontroversial statement, then you should think “I know God exists” is also uncontroversial. The knowledge expressed in each is identical in kind. If you would like to dismiss both statements, throwing out sensory knowledge altogether, feel free. But I, for one, will continue to believe in the world, and I will continue to believe in God. I know both are real.
Notes
- D&C 9:8 ↩︎
- Galatians 5:22-23 ↩︎
- Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Wind Beneath Your Wings,” November 2003 BYU Speech ↩︎
- Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” April 2018 General Conference ↩︎
- Patrick House, “What People Cured of Blindness See,” The New Yorker, August 28, 2014. ↩︎
- Galatians 3:28 ↩︎
- Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1902–1912), 3:380. ↩︎