My testimony is unique. I absolutely believe that God is real, exists, and knows me personally. I am also a hard empiricist. To many, this seems to be conflicting, but it isn’t.
I had quit The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 17. In the time between my leaving and my coming back, I deconstructed my belief system and began studying other religions. I found truth in them all, but at some point, it always led to blind faith in something. This was unacceptable to me.
I studied out my own religion and found that it just made sense. There was no phenomenology, there was no blind faith in the words of men: it was all on me. I could accept science and the mysteries of God and not be contradictory. I could accept reason and empiricism and still have faith. I am loathe to say I know anything, because of the classic view of empiricism and my rejection of innate knowledge.
But I still struggled. There were many things that I could not reconcile with what we believe and what I understood about the temporal world. I became a student of philosophy and my eyes were opened. The one thing I found fascinating was how people in my program who had renounced the Gospel claimed it was because philosophy showed them God didn’t exist. That baffled me – it was through philosophy that my understanding of God improved, increased, and helped overcome the troubling conflicts I perceived. Philosophy increased my testimony!
One of the great downfalls of men, we believe, are truths that have been distorted by the introduction of the “philosophies of men.” We believe these truths have been used to lead mankind away from God by mingling these philosophies with scriptures that seem to support them, which turns those truths into falsehoods that sound valid.
“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” – Colossians 2:8
“…the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture” is a term used a lot in the church to describe Satan’s plan to lead mankind away from our Heavenly Father through deceitful beliefs. I decided that I would take back that practice and use his tool to conduct a counter attack: to use philosophical processes to explain the beauty of Christ’s teachings. I would use philosophical processes that worked for me to develop my unshakable testimony in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with the power of the Holy Spirit.
The ideas and concepts that I write about here are in no way teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: these are solely other ways of understanding things as I, Rick Jacobs, see and understand them. Feel free to disagree, but disagree with thought and counter arguments. This is my mission to help those that struggle with empiricist minds but choose to believe in God as I choose to believe. My beliefs are evidence based, but the evidence I have now is only gained by first choosing to believe and then seeking the truth.