A place of truth where you can’t speak the truth

In those examples it sounds like people are happy when they get something they’ve been wanting but once they obtain that something they find that those feelings of happiness are fleeting. Once we get something we train our thoughts on the next thing we want. There’s the quote (and many variants):

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.

I get the feeling that people created the conflict between science and religion when scientific beliefs started to challenge religious belief but it doesn’t always have to work that way. There are many quotes from church leaders that indicate that scientific advancement is just another way god reveals truth.

It is hard to get the people to believe that God is a scientific character, that He lives by science or strict law, that by this He is, and by law he was made what He is; and will remain to all eternity because of His faithful adherence to law. It is a most difficult thing to make the people believe that every art and science and all wisdom comes from Him, and that He is their Author.

The idea that the religion of Christ is one thing, and science is another, is a mistaken idea, for there is no true religion without true science, and consequently there is no true science without true religion.

But science, dominated by the spirit of religion is the key to progress and the hope of the future. For example, evolution’s beautiful theory of the creation of the world offers many perplexing problems to the inquiring mind. Inevitably, a teacher who denies divine agency in creation, who insists there is no intelligent purpose in it, will infest the student with the thought that all may be chance. I say, that no youth should be so led without a counter balancing though. Even the skeptic teacher should be fair enough to see that even Charles Darwin, when he faced this great question of annihilation, that the creation is dominated only by chance wrote: “It is an intolerable thought than man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long, continued slow progress.” And another good authority, Raymond West, said, “Why this vast [expenditure] of time and pain and blood?” Why should man come so far if he’s destined to go no farther? A creature that travels such distances and fought such battles and won such victories deserves what we are compelled to say, “To conquer death and rob the grave of its victory.”

It sounds like he preached a balance, or harmony between science and spirit.

There are many, many other quotes where church leaders (people with names that make others actually think there’s some merit to what they say ) talk about the important role of science in circumscribing all truth into a great whole.

There are many quotes from church leaders that indicate that scientific advancement is just another way god reveals truth.

But they’re likely talking about the hard sciences, not the social sciences. Soft sciences are where things get real fuzzy because we’re dealing with hypothetical constructs like “happiness” and we’re assuming that our measure of happiness is actually measuring true “happiness.” But then, how do we define happiness in the first place? Can humans even agree upon a definition? I read something recently explaining that the fact that Scandinavia looks like the happiest part of the world in research may be because they interpret the questions in the survey differently from other cultures, and because of their metacognition surrounding the social construct of happiness.

We also may want to take a more longitudinal perspective when it comes to having children. If you have children, maybe you’re less happy than someone who doesn’t at age 38 or 45, but what if they perform the same survey on people who are within 5-10 years of the end of life? These people have family who are comparatively young whom they may live after becoming a widow/widower, or family who comes to visit them. They have grandkids, thus potentially reaping that initial increase in happiness that parents of young kids experience, repeatedly with each additional grandkid. So possibly, on average, we recoup some of the lost happiness from middle adulthood in later adulthood and come out even? Also, possibly not. But either way, until someone does that research, we don’t know. I feel like Church-inspired “truth” and “truth” from science are about equal in terms of actual validity. Science makes truth claims, forgetting that the entire discipline is based on a set of underlying assumptions that cannot be verified (just like religion), only to have those claims smashed to smithereens by subsequent science.

It would be nice if the lesson instructor would say, “Oh, yeah, so I guess the lesson manual and the social science research are somewhat contradictory.” I might say that, but I’m guessing a lot of people wouldn’t. They wouldn’t know what to say and would feel obligated to defend the church because they’re at church. Rough, regardless. I’m with you, science that contradicts the manual should not be taboo. Science that compliments the CES material is fine, of course, haha.