When I was a teenager, I felt that I was beginning to learn about the vast realm of human knowledge and venturing into higher education. I was also a good Mormon girl, attending church and Young Women meetings in my rural Rocky Mountain town and had learned much and been influenced greatly by the good people in my church. This led to a rather black-and-white view of the world and an assurance that there were good guys and bad guys, truth and lies, and that it was my job merely to join the right army and toe the line. The developmental state of my adolescent frontal cortex made it clear-cut and simple. I was also exposed to a lot of speculative, and what I now like to call apocryphal, Christian belief, from spooky books about the Book of Revelation and the Gulf War to video series about how ridiculous evolution is. At the time I was easily swayed and frightened by what I saw as the great anti-religion secret combination at work in the world. And Carl Sagan was my arch-enemy.

I remember watching Cosmos in my Freshman Earth Science class and bubbling over with rage every time he mentioned the fact that we were made of “star stuff.” As far as I was concerned, Carl Sagan’s agenda was to disprove everything I believed with a smokescreen of scientific lies. Everything he said was carefully crafted to cut to the heart of the believer. When he said we were “star stuff” he was saying that we weren’t children of God, and I couldn’t trust someone who would say that.

The years between my high-school self and my current position have brought many more shades of possibility and nuance into my worldview. As a freshman in college I took a course for honors students whose purpose was to expose us to a variety of meaningful texts and discuss them in a seminar setting. In this course I read Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, Matt Ridley’s Genome, and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, among other works of classic and contemporary literature and academia. My experiences with these books led me to find others on my own that I greatly enjoyed – Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel foremost among them. I began to realize that good and true ideas in the world were not neatly gathered into corresponding “righteous” corrals with the wicked and false ideas circulating around outside. I learned that it was a lot harder to know who was right and who was wrong, that good ideas came from unlikely sources and that even brilliant people held mistaken ideas all the time. I learned that there were plenty of wise people doing good work in the world who weren’t (gasp!) Latter-day Saints, who “are only kept from the truth because they know not where to find it.” And also, that “we should waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness, wherein we know them; and they are truly manifest from heaven—These should then be attended to with great earnestness.” (Doctrine and Covenants 123, 12-14) We have a duty to seek out and explore the mysteries of the natural world at the borders of murky ignorance.

In addition, I realized how quickly our understanding of the world changes and how incomplete it is, even for good, inspired servants of God who are working under His guidance. I believe that Joseph Smith was a good man, a prophet of God, who learned and revealed much in his lifetime. Nevertheless, there was plenty that Joseph Smith didn’t understand about the world . If being a prophet meant having a direct download link to the wisdom and understanding of God, why did the young prophet have to lie helpless in the arms of his father while a frontier doctor performed a crude surgery to remove a diseased part of his leg? Why did so many of his own children die from what would today be preventable causes? Clearly, being a man of God does not automatically qualify one for thorough and comprehensive understanding of the mortal world.

And what about those who research and teach things from outside of a faith tradition? Was Carl Sagan an evil man set on destroying the truth of God? Had he been a militant atheist bent on warping my young mind? As much as his life and convictions may have differed from my own, he himself said “An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.” (As quoted by Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post.)

And one can hardly dispute the contributions that the Carl Sagans, the Stephen Hawkings, the Albert Einsteins of the world have made to our understanding of the natural world and our modern technological and medical understanding.

If finding truth, then, is so multi-faceted and difficult, if the clear-cut boundaries between truth and error of my imagination don’t exist, how do we go about learning what we need to know?

That’s part of the mortal experience.

Last weekend, my roommate and I, who are fond of documentaries we can find on Netflix, discovered the Discovery Channel’s rather recent series How the Universe Works, and started with the first episode all about the Big Bang. This weekend, the two of us sat watching the LDS General Conference in which Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles gave a speech that included the statement “some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes (of the human body) happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere.” It provided an interesting topic for conversation to say the least!

Truth be told, I expected the reaction in the LDS Blogosphere to be more pronounced. So far, all I can find are this thoughtful post in the Millennial Star, a bitter tirade by an ex-Mormon facebook friend who claims that the Mormons “have just aligned themselves with new earth creationists and science haters,” and a sad appeal from an LDS friend who wants to know what “science-minded Mormons” think about the statements.

Personally, I am not feeling the need to be worked up about it. Elder Nelson’s statements were worded in a way and included a metaphor often used by creationists and “Intelligent Design” promoters to dispute the entire concept of human life arising from nothing. This was probably what tripped my friend’s trigger and caused him to proclaim us “science haters.” I wouldn’t have used the metaphor myself, but in essence, what Elder Nelson was saying was the same sentiment that many science-minded religious people would proclaim: the complexity and order of the natural world bespeaks a creator.

I have a problem with the kind of religion that turns this sentiment into a fearful distrust of science. But I also have a problem with the kind of science-based philosophy that ridicules it into oblivion by a twisting of skepticism into negative proof. To me, the clearest conclusion in light of our most recent scientific knowledge combined with a variety of faith traditions is that none of us knows enough to be making any definitive statements on the mechanism by which creation of the universe occurred.

There is actual physical proof of the Big Bang. We have seen with telescopes the light and radiation that has been travelling toward us for so long that we know it originated a mere 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We saw a time when there were no stars and galaxies created yet. In light of this evidence we cannot support worldviews that call for the Big Bang being a fabrication or wishful thinking. The burden of proof lies on anyone who makes such a claim to explain what the visual and mathematical evidence of a Universe expanding outward from a single point 13.7 billion years ago could possibly mean in that situation.

But there are huge limitations on what our empirical and theoretical understanding of the birth of the universe means. We are all, even in the light of the great light and understanding we have, completely ignorant of the reason, the mechanism or the past and future of a Universe that expands outward from a single point. There are differing schools of thought on whether it will continue to expand outward until it meets an icy death or whether it will collapse back in on itself and possibly explode outward again in a second Big Bang. We don’t even know if it would be the second – it could be the 13,487th for all we know, or it could be one of a limitless number of Universes undergoing similar cycles of birth and death. It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, and not a single jot of it is enough to say there is no Almighty God.

I love science documentaries. I even love reading Carl Sagan. I also love being a member of a religion that is open to the idea that God “has yet to reveal many great and important things.” I think the photos from the Hubble Space Telescope are awesome. I trust the apostles and prophets who lead our church and look for the truth in their words, not relying on hermeneutic extrapolations of my own. (Thanks, Elder Christofferson!)

We need to stop the vitriol and ridicule on both sides of the issue because, quite frankly, none of us are smart enough to know the entire truth about the origins of the universe. And we’re going to learn a lot more working with each other than we ever will by making absolute claims and stubbornly standing our ground on the ever-shifting sands of human knowledge. I truly believe that when we approach mystery and ignorance with an open mind and a prayerful heart we can begin to find bits of truth scattered throughout the human world – glittering like diamonds among the sands of confusion.