Welcome to my first blog. If you’re reading this, then you’re probably interested in the truth, which means you and I already have at least one thing in common. Let me start by telling a little about myself.
About Me
I’ve always had a strong desire to find answers to many questions. But not just any answers; I wanted absolutely true, defensible answers. I’ve had plenty of time to think deeply about many different subjects, both secular and spiritual. I’ve kept most of this to myself because I didn’t think the rest of the world would value my ideas as much as I do. However, after seeing how confidently other people express terrible ideas on the internet, I decided that if they can do it, so can I. Hence, I created this blog.
One thing that makes me unique is that my life has been both deeply religious and highly scientific. I was raised in a culture of faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and even volunteered as a missionary for two years in South America. My education, on the other hand, was mostly math and science. I earned a PhD in Physics, and spent some time working for CERN, helping to gather data from the Large Hadron Collider and analyze it for publications. All the while I never lost my religious beliefs nor my trust in scientific principles.
Truth Reconciled
People often ask me how I manage to reconcile my religious beliefs with my scientific career. I usually tell them that I never ran into any contradiction that needed to be reconciled. I based my beliefs only on ideas that were the most rigorous and defensible, and I simply rejected everything that was probably false. For example, the idea that Adam was the first human on Earth about six thousand years ago was never important to me. My personal testimony was always anchored in a much more tangible and important fact: The Book of Mormon exists, and its existence can only be reasonably explained by acknowledging the involvement of the Judeo-Christian God.
Truth is always consistent with truth. There is no reason to expect that truth in one subject area should ever contradict truth in another. The truth is already reconciled by nature. Disagreements simply point out misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings can be resolved by abandoning false assumptions. We just need to clear away the mess of false beliefs and bad research to see the truth reconciled.
If you’re having difficulty making sense of something, then you probably have some false assumptions that you need to identify and get rid of. For example, when Einstein’s special theory of relativity was discovered, many people immediately began to point out supposed paradoxes of the theory. But in reality, there are no paradoxes in special relativity; it is a mathematically consistent theory. The paradoxes were in the minds of the detractors. Special relativity contradicted the detractors’ false intuition of how the universe works.
Goals for this Blog
This blog is for people who are curious and open-minded, who are willing to throw off false assumptions in order to discover truth. I will be writing about many different subjects that have caught my interest. In every case I will try to distinguish between what is absolutely or very likely true and what is based on weak assumptions. I don’t expect to be perfect at this, because nobody ever is, no matter how educated or experienced they are.
My goal is to help people think about things in a more correct way. I have seen people reject extremely well thought-out and well-tested theories in order to hold on to flimsy ideas that have become precious to them. I want to help people recognize the biases and dogmas that they are holding onto that prevent them from gaining a more complete understanding of things. I also plan to use this space as a place to explore ideas that I find interesting. I hope my blog can be helpful or interesting for some people. Thank you for reading.
Truth Reconciled 