Maxwell Institute Podcast #164: How Can We Develop Resilient Belief? Featuring Katie Paxman

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship. I'm Rosalynde Welch, Associate Director at the Institute. This season we're exploring the questions we should be asking. Thanks for joining us.

Life is a learning experience, they say. If so, what have you learned from life? Do you know it for sure? Absolutely sure? I’ll confess, this line of questioning leaves me feeling trapped in a skeptical corner. Is there a better question we should ask?

Today on the podcast I talk with Katie Paxman, Associate Professor of Philosophy at BYU. Dr. Paxman studies the work of David Hume, and she’s thought a lot about certainty, humility, and the ambition to form true beliefs. She helped me reframe my question to avoid getting trapped in skepticism. Instead, I might ask: “What kind of person do I want to be when I encounter uncertainty?”

Elder Richard G. Scott said, “I am convinced that there is no simple formula or technique that would immediately allow you to master the ability to decide questions with absolute certainty. Instead,” he goes on, “essential personal growth will come as you struggle to learn.” My conversation with Katie helped me approach that struggle with more humility, hope and faith. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Hi, Katie Paxman. Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Katie Paxman: Hi, I'm so excited to be here! Rosalynde, thank you so much for having me.

Welch: Today, we are talking about knowledge, about what we can know, about how we can know, good foundations for our knowledge, bad foundations for our knowledge. I know that I personally swim in a sea or a torrent of information every day, and it can be difficult to know what I can know, what I can't know. And I think it's worth reflecting on what it means to know something and how we can. So you are the perfect person to talk about this with me because you study the philosopher David Hume. Hume was a Scotsman who lived in the 18th century. And he's most famous for being a skeptic, right? He didn't want to take any knowledge for granted. He wanted to dive down to those foundations, and ask, how do we know this? Are we sure that our reasoning is sound? So you shared with me a section of his first book, which is titled A Treatise of Human Nature. I'd love you to tell me about this chapter. Set it up for us. Why is it important to you? Why do you love it, and which of its themes speak to you most strongly?

Paxman: Well, I'm really excited to talk about this. But I want to make sure there isn’t false advertising going on. I think rather than saying we're going to talk about knowledge- certainly, rather than saying, we're going to identify what we can know and can't know, that's a big project. I think what I really want to talk about is our relationship to knowledge, our relationship to the possibilities, or we're hopeful that we will have knowledge. Extension, our relationship to uncertainty, and our relationship to the experience of questioning whether or not we have knowledge, whether or not we can have knowledge. So this probably brings us to Hume. It might be surprising that someone who works at BYU specializes in a philosopher whose mostly known, he's often characterized as a sort of destructive skeptic, for the reason that he spends a good amount of time first book of the work you just mentioned, the Treatise of Human Nature, tearing down other systems of philosophy that make claims about how we reason and how we come to draw conclusions about the types of things we can know. Hume is often treated, primarily this section of Hume is treated. Now this is the first book of three that come in this work. And in books two and book three, he begins to present a positive system of philosophy, he begins to present his own views, his own takes, his argues for what is the case. But he sets it all up by first engaging in a pretty rigorous questioning of the standard philosophical foundations from multiple schools of thought that ground knowledge claims. For this reason, as I mentioned, Hume is often thought to be something of a skeptic, a skeptic, being someone who abstains from belief formation. They say, “I have good reasons to think we can't know with certainty. So I'm going to opt to not make knowledge claims. I'm going to try and abstain from forming beliefs because I can't be certain about my beliefs.” There's a good case to be made that Hume is not a skeptic in that straightforward way in that he thinks he has beliefs, he thinks we all have beliefs. He thinks nature requires us to form beliefs. We, we can put a ton of energy into trying to abstain from making judgments, but the sort of creatures, we are belief generating creatures. We are going to feel that some things are true and some things aren't true. So, the challenge becomes not whether or not one should believe but rather how one ought to believe, especially in the face of the possibility of deep uncertainty. About whether or not we have the resources in reason and rationality to be absolutely certain about a variety of claims, scientific empirical claims, as well as rationalistic claims. So, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, all these things Hume takes a close look at and he offers skeptical arguments that say, look, there are philosophers who've said, we can have certainty in this area, here are my reasons for thinking they're not right about that. Now, the section that I want to look at is the very last section of this book one that treats his skeptical arguments. He's kind of gone through all the topics he's hoping to discuss. And he's problematized, all these different schools of philosophical thought. And he pauses in the last section before he says, I'm going to carry on presenting my anatomy of human nature, which is his way of saying, I'm going to give a detailed account of human mind and human tendency and human motivation and human reasoning, etc. So he, he wants to continue in that project. But he's going to pause at this moment, because he finds himself in what’s sometimes characterized in the scholarship in the sort of skeptical crisis, Hume seems to pause for a second and actually get quite emotional about where he's arrived. This is a scary place to be. He begins this section by saying that his desire to go on and say something about the nature of humanity, at this point, feels an awful lot like someone who went out in a little boat into an inlet, just barely survived, staying close to the shore, almost sunk the boat, and now has said, “Great, now I'm going to take this boat out, and I'm going to try and circumnavigate the globe. I'm going to try and go farther from shore, and into deeper waters and into more dangerous places, in this leaky vessel.” And the leaky vessel he says, is human reason and rationality. As he stops to think about that ambition, which he thinks now, he says, this seems crazy, right, seems completely foolish to try and do this, he also starts to reflect on what position this puts him in, in connection with other people, he starts to feel despondent, he starts to feel disconnected. And this section basically functions to work him through these negative feelings. This uncomfortable place he's put himself in, by feeling like he has reasons to doubt all of his most certain beliefs. But the section actually has a result that actually has a process he goes through. And by extension, it seems to be a process he recommends, as a sort of therapy. For someone who engages in skeptical thinking.

Welch: Katie, let's get to that antidote in just a minute. I wanted to, first of all, thank you for reframing the question for me. Instead of asking myself, “How can I make sure that my reasoning processes are so sound that I never allow any error or any uncertainty into my mind?” A better question, it sounds like Hume is saying, is, “What kind of a person should I be in the face of uncertainty that's inevitable?” Is that a fair characterization of, of what Hume recommends here?

Paxman: Absolutely. And I think that the, what kind of person is not merely sort of a question of what would a good person do? I think Hume is also interested in what would a rational person do? Even though he's challenged the foundations, and any suggestions of certainty that come from various philosophical schools of thought. I don't think he wants to abandon the possibility that there are better and worse ways of engaging in belief formation. So, he wants to address: How do I respond for me? How do I respond so that I can have an internal peace? I think he also wants to say, and how can I respond in a way that means that I am taking responsibility for the beliefs that I'm forming? That I go into things with my eyes open, and even as I commit to a variety of beliefs, I can do so with epistemic humility, I can do so aware that I could be wrong about things somehow being able to hold actively having beliefs that I've worked on, and the possibility that over time, I'm going to need to revise those beliefs. I'm going to have to be responsive to new information and new thought and new experiences. 

Welch: Tell me a little bit about this term, epistemic humility. What does epistemic mean and what would it mean to be epistemically humble?

Paxman: Thank you. So epistemology is the study of knowledge. So philosophers, when they engage in “epistemological discourse,” are interested in the question: what is truth? What is knowledge? Can we have knowledge? What sort of standards should we apply to people making claims about knowledge and truth? Epistemic humility, by extension, when I use that term, what I mean is a certain kind of humility in the pursuit of knowledge. Having epistemic humility doesn't necessarily mean one thinks one can't have knowledge, one can't come across truth. Rather, it means that we're aware of how much there is to know. Socrates famously says, “I know only that I know nothing.” Right. He says, that's the height of human wisdom is to know only that, you know, nothing. I think there's good reason to think Socrates actually did think he knew some stuff. But his epistemic humility, I think, is what's on display with that quote. He's trying to demonstrate that he recognizes there are limitations to what he's seen to how far he's thought about things, really, to what he knows. And that the pursuit of knowledge should always be tempered with a recognition of those limitations. Not in a way that says, “Stop trying to know stuff, mere mortal,” right, but rather in a way that I think ultimately makes us available to learn. Available to build line upon line. Hume is characterized as a skeptic that I think what is a better understanding of what he's doing is he's anti-dogmatic, which is to say, he was worried about anyone who adopts a system of thought, whether it's a philosophical system of thought, ethical system of fraud, and ideology, political system of thought, any way of thinking that says here, before you even experience the world, I'm gonna give you the way to understand everything you see. This is your lens, if you see something that is contrary to what I've told you, you need to resist that, you need to put on your blinders, stick to your script, and stick with a particular way of seeing the world. Hume was highly critical of religion in his day. And I think that was derived from an anti-dogmatic impulse. This idea that he saw too much of people who were sort of outsourcing their own agency, their epistemic agency, their agency when it comes to their belief formation. And he thought that was a problem. He thought that we ought to be active participants in how we form our own beliefs.

Welch: And that…his attitude reminds me a lot of how I understand the youthful Joseph Smith, right? Joseph Smith was teachable. Before God, he was epistemically humble, he was open. And he refused to be trampled by the common sense of his culture. He wasn't willing to accept what was just given to him without questioning, he wanted to unbind himself from those “blinders” as you describe them. So there's something that I really respond to, in Hume’s skepticism that reminds me of the Restoration in the sense that God always wants to tell us more. He's always wanting to pour down his light and knowledge on us. But we have to be open to it. We have to be teachable.

Paxman: Yeah, I'll just say I've made that connection as well, at times. I really appreciate this sense of a young person who was good at coming up with questions! Sometimes I worry that we, we think we ought to grow out of that in some way, right? That it's a five year old who asks why over and over again, and at some point, we're supposed to back off of questioning. But the questioning is a kind of, well, let's call it epistemic vulnerability here, to match our epistemic humility, the questioning speaks to curiosity and a drive and that I'm evaluating this stuff, and therefore I want to know things. And any teacher knows it's much easier to teach the student who has questions than someone who's just kind of passively waiting for you to tell them something, right? So I imagine God when he's engaging with us, when the Spirit engages with us, our questions make such a difference to what kind of truth and light is going to be made available to us.

Welch: And yet, it can be a difficult road to get to that place of epistemic humility, maybe especially as adults, right? If we could keep that childlike demeanor throughout our lives, always remain flexible, open, and humble. That would be one thing. But most of us as we come into adulthood, we gain a set of beliefs about the world, a set of a structure of knowledge that kind of guides our, our everyday choices, and we can get very invested, even rigid in in those structures of knowledge that we've built up around us. And it can provoke a real crisis when we begin to feel those foundations crumbling. That was one of the things that was most striking to me about this section from Hume's treatise, is the personal experience that he shared. The experience of, of crisis, as you say. It was a skeptical crisis, but it was an emotional crisis. He wouldn't have called it a spiritual crisis, but it sounded like a spiritual crisis where he felt depressed. He felt… he felt lost. He felt wretched and he felt stuck in where he was. I've never had that exact act kind of a skeptical crisis. But I have had experiences in my life where something changed quickly and everything that I thought I knew, everything that all the structures I had built up to guide me into the future, suddenly no longer seemed to apply. I'm thinking here of, it was a happy moment. But a dumbfounding moment, the first time I found that I was pregnant, and I remember sitting on the couch, and I was filled with, with joy and excitement. But I was also just stopped in my tracks. And I sat on that couch. I remember the couch, it was a light yellow velvet couch that we had quite literally gotten from next to the dumpster, in my first apartment with my husband. And I sat on that couch for probably an hour and I couldn't think, I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything. It felt like my life had shifted so profoundly, that I had to rebuild everything I knew how to do, all the ways I imagined my future, suddenly those had to be rebuilt. And although that was a joyful experience, it was a shaking experience. Right? It was an experience that shook me off my foundations and put me in this place of bewilderment and bafflement that Hume finds himself in, with a darker cast for sure. So one thing to do, when you find yourself in that place would be kind of to retreat into your own private world and say, it's too dangerous to go out there where nothing is certain, I'm going to retreat into my own, my own fantasy and, and rebuild from scratch just within myself. But this would be profoundly isolating for me as a, as a person. And I also think it would be pretty disastrous for our communities, our families and our, our civic communities, our church communities. Hume, he does come through his skeptical crisis, as you had hinted earlier, he makes some pretty surprising suggestions for those who might find themselves in that place of paralysis for whatever reason it might be. So tell us a little bit about what he recommends as the kind of antidote to these crises of paralysis around belief and knowledge.

Paxman: Yeah, so one of the reasons I chose this selection is that Hume’s description of the kind of pain he goes through as he feels so ungrounded, particularly these foundational beliefs. He’s challenged them and now he's not sure where he stands, or what he believes. His characterization of that pain, actually, the first characterization is largely social. He says, he feels like he's an uncouth monster, that now when he's with other people, even if he's surrounded by people, he feels separate from them. He doesn't feel like he's fit for their company anymore. There's something deranged about him, something inappropriate about him. And he says that he tries to encourage people to see the world like he does. But no one wants that, no one wants to be suffering the way he is, no one wants to feel ungrounded the way he does. And so he ends up feeling profoundly isolated from his community. And I am so struck by this description, because I feel like this is something many people experience in faith communities, when they engage in questioning, when they engage in deep thought, that begins to leave them feeling unsettled. Or not even begins to, it might have been a long process and gets you in a place where suddenly you look around, and you feel like what's in my head and what I think when I hear a sermon or when I hear a talk, or when I read things, is so different from everyone else, because I have these questions. Everyone around me seems to be smiling at each other and nodding and saying “Amen,” right? And that's not where I am. And one of Hume's insights about human nature was that we're deeply fundamentally social creatures. He has an entire theory about what he calls sympathy, which really modern language, we'd call it empathy. And he gives a whole psychological account of how profoundly this is a part of all of our reasoning and thinking. So what the people around us are thinking and feeling matters deeply to us. And often we have a sense of security and attachment that comes from feeling like we're on the same page, whether we're emotionally on the same page, or the content of our beliefs are the same page, a lot of our sense of belonging, and our sense of knowing that you're safe in some space comes from believing that you're thinking and feeling the same as the people around you. So what's happened in this section is that Hume has just spent considerable intellectual energy, examining foundations for various beliefs and problematizing them, and now he's come to a place where at the moment, he kind of seems to be floating, unsure where to land. And as he looks at other people, he sees a profound disconnect between the way they're thinking and feeling and the way he's thinking and feeling, and he thinks they're not going to want me. I'm a monster to them, they're gonna see my suffering and want to avert their eyes. And I think that not only do people feel that way at church, I think sometimes whether we mean to or not, we do this to people. We see someone who's in a faith crisis, or some other kind of crisis, who's going through some kind of trauma in their life. And it's hard sometimes not to say, Ooh, that is private, I'm just going to avert my eyes, right, or to say, I don't know if I can handle that kind of uncertainty. So I think I need to just step away. So there are ways in which we socially unfortunately, I think, can reinforce that feeling of isolation, that it's going to be part of the experience of someone who's engaged in this kind of questioning anyway. So that's part of the reason I think this section is so interesting is that Hume so colorfully paints those feelings. And then he says, what you actually prompted me to answer, he says, How do we, how do we get away from this? How do I get out of this? And his answer is perhaps so every day that we think that can't possibly work, but what he says is, okay, I need to go play a game of backgammon. I need to go find my friends, have something to drink, have something to eat, engage in my body, engage in things that I enjoy, maybe have a little fun, maybe keep it light, Hume was known in his time for being incredibly cheerful. He had a lot of friends, and he enjoyed his friends. And basically, what he's recommending is look, when I feel that profound isolation, I need people again, and that doesn't mean I need to go and have deep conversations with them about all these deep, heavy thoughts. Actually his prescription is that we start by having a game night, right? We start by making ourselves socially available, kind of setting aside the philosophy in his case, for a moment, and just enjoying ourselves. And once we've done that, once we've reconnected with our community, we're going to regain some sense of self, we're going to regain a sense of safety and security and belonging. At that point, Hume says then maybe I will go take a nap, or all go take a long walk by the river. And I'll let my mind calm. And very likely, I'll get curious again. I'll return to these questions. Because as a matter of fact, it matters to me what's true, it matters to me how I think about what's true, it matters to me how I form my beliefs, definitely matters to me what's ethical, how I treat other people, how government ought to function. And as he says, he thinks about these things, he starts to feel ambition, he starts to feel like yes, I would like to have things to say about this stuff. I'd like to contribute to the human project of trying to know things. And now that he's socially connected, he's re-grounded in his body in his everyday activities, he feels safe and secure. He says, Now with all those potential doubts in the back of my mind, so I have a certain kind of epistemic humility, now, I'm going to try out doing philosophy. He calls this doing philosophy in this careless manner. It doesn't mean that we don't care or that we're not careful. He means that we've shifted where our sense of self and value come from. Back to our social situation, back to our life, our everyday activities, back to things that make us happy, things that make us feel peace, things that make us feel connected. And from that place of security, we now can engage in knowing only that we know nothing, we can now engage in asking hard questions. And one of the interesting things about Hume I think I mentioned before is, he doesn't think we can sustain a resistance to belief formation, we're going to believe something. So the question is, do I kind of passively believe whatever comes my way? Or do I engage thoughtfully and carefully, and even though I can't have certainty, do I say, I'm going to use my agency, I'm going to take an active part in belief formation, while still holding on to that epistemic humility, knowing that we don't want my agency to turn into arrogance. We don't want my agency to turn into dogmatism, right. But we do have to make choices. And Hume does think we can have well-formed beliefs. Even if we can't have absolute certainty.

Welch: I so resonated with Hume's journey, his own journey, and it rang so true to me. When I was in graduate school, I was fortunate to have everything, just about the ideal situation. I had a wonderful program, I had a good cohort, I had supportive professors and teachers. Still, though, there were moments that were very, very hard. And I doubted myself, I doubted my abilities. And I would see my cohort and my friends, my fellow students themselves experience these profound crises of self doubt, right? Can I do this? I'm not good enough. I'm nothing. I'm wretched. For me, I was resilient to those crises. And I think it's precisely for the reasons that Hume goes into here, is that I was connected to my family. I was connected to my ward community, just as an inevitable fruit of my daily obligations: taking care of my little children, ministering in the church, fulfilling my calling at church attending ward functions. Not because I was so wise, or I was so good, just as a result of these practices, I found that my value, my sense of self was rooted in those places. And in a way, that freed me up to return to my intellectual studies, with a kind of carelessness, as you say, not… not clumsiness, but a kind of playful quality and a sense that, that I could be flexible in this space, right? That I could be exploratory in this space. And it really seemed to lift the pressure and anxieties that I had felt before. So everything that Hume says rang true, rang true to me.

Paxman: Yeah, one of my favorite books is Charles Inouye’s Zion Earth Zen Sky. And I think like, I don't know, maybe he’d disagree, but I feel like Charles has been a little Hume-ian in some parts of this, because he details moments of sort of faith crisis and, and feeling ungrounded and uncertain about what he can and can't know. And over and over again, he finds that it's the practice of what he relates to raking, right, this idea of, of some sort of everyday practice that needs to be done over and over again. Your mention of childcare definitely feels like you did the same thing. And it never is a completed task. It's just over and over again, in some respect, but but this idea that it's in… in practices, particularly those that involve serving others, and connecting with other people, that we reconnect to what feels fundamentally meaningful. And then what about philosophy? And then what about thinking about knowledge? One of the interesting things that Hume says in this section is he's not making the case that everyone needs to be a philosopher. And I think in a similar way, I'd make the case that not everyone needs to be a theologian, that the content of the gospel doesn't need to be a fixation with details and with justifications for making particular claims. However, Hume says, I find very naturally though, I want to be a philosopher, I want to think about these things, I want to talk about these things. I also feel this way very deeply. I feel this way, as I engage in scripture study, and in Sunday school. I like thinking about stuff, and reasoning about stuff, and systematizing my knowledge and trying to figure out how to make it make sense and put it all together. And Hume’s point is that he ought to go ahead and do that even post-skeptical crisis, because he says, “I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure. And this is the origin of my philosophy.” So what you said before about the carelessness being more about a kind of playfulness, a kind of joy. I feel like that's where Hume goes with this. He says, look, the things I've been talking about and thinking about spiraled me into a skeptical crisis, where maybe he's saying, may have spiraled you, the reader into the skeptical crisis. These are the things you might be feeling: this profound disconnect, this profound, unsettled doubt. And then he says, so, so what is it to reconnect to what is meaningful? To what practices in your life, help you see what you really value, what makes, you gives you a sense of self gives you a sense of community? And once you've been there, if your propensity, if you get a joy, in thinking harder and asking questions and trying to systematize your answers, go for it. Why in the world, would you deny yourself the ability to engage this way? And hopefully, this process, this kind of therapeutic process of a response to skeptical crisis, has put us in a position where I can now take joy in that even though a lot of that process is going to be going, wow, there's a question I don't have an answer to yet. Right? When I think of who I was, as a young child, I had what I actually think is a real privilege of growing up somewhere where the church was very small. So the majority of my friends, well, almost all of my friends were not members, there were only a couple of people at church and most of them weren't at my schools. I remember my close friends, when I was in junior high, there was me, who was LDS, we had a Catholic friend, a Jewish friend, Sikh friend, a couple people who didn't have a religious tradition. Meanwhile, in my home life, my mom was a convert. So her side of the family were not only non-members, but they were actually pretty actively critical of the church. But my experience as a child was that none of that stood in the way of our ability to have friendships and relationships. I was incredibly close to my mom's parents. And so from a really early age, I was very comfortable with knowing that there's a lot of different ways to understand the world. And that didn't mean there wasn't truth, that didn't sink me into some kind of relativism. Instead, it got me excited. There's a puzzle, there's possibility. There's this idea that I have little bits of light and revelation that I've been blessed with because of my life position. Other people probably have that too. We're all God's children. And so why not ask more questions? Why not try and and see if I can get as, as much vicarious light as I can from other people? And I remember being so excited as I went to university, I thought I was going to learn everything, I was going to be a “light and knowledge collector”. I think that probably my epistemic humility has gone up a bit since that time. But that energy, I think that's the point of pleasure that Hume’s was talking about. When we're driven to know, I really hope it's from a place of desire to learn and grow and become more and connect not just with other people, but connect with God. Because I think that's been my experience of having knowledge is in those moments, I'm able to connect with deity, and have that kind of profound clarity and light.

Welch: Knowledge that is perfected by faith, hope and love is the kind of knowledge that brings us back to those places of light, to those places of clarity, to those places of optimism and ambition that Hume expresses.

Paxman: Absolutely.

Welch: I hope you've been enjoying this conversation with Katie Paxman, Professor of Philosophy at BYU. I was so struck by her observation that, if I want to become the kind of person who responds to uncertainty with grace and humility, that I have to get my body, my emotions, and my relationships involved. Each of those elements is as essential as my mind. I have to cultivate my disposition as much as my reason. Then, when we're securely oriented to our bodies, our families, and our communities, we can approach the quest for resilient knowledge, with pleasure and with joy, with humility, and ambitious exploration. In the second part of the interview, Dr. Paxman shows us how to apply these insights to our life in the church, in particular, how I can do my part, to create the secure belonging that will allow other people to pursue spiritual knowledge with faith and ambition.

Hume was no friend of religion, as you pointed out, and yet, ironically, there's so much application from his ideas to the life of faith for a religious person who is seeking to better understand and cope with the uncertainties that go hand in hand with the faith that leads us to Christ. So, I would love for you to reflect a little bit more about how Hume’s ideas have influenced the way that you think about faith and spiritual knowledge?

Paxman: I think for some people, reading skeptical philosophy is disturbing and profoundly unsettling. I think for me, it has always been kind of freeing. And I'm still trying to work out why exactly, that's my experience. But I think it has a lot to do with having that relationship with God. So I've been, I think, really blessed from a pretty early age, that I've had a strong sense of God. That, that when I prayed, or when I opened myself up, and sought after deity, He was usually there. And to varying degrees. I think, as we all find, there are times in our life where it's really, really present. And there's times in our life, it feels more distant. Early in my 20s. I remember coming across the scripture in Alma 5, where we’re asked, “If ye had felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I asked you can you feel so now?” And I think in my 20s, which you know, is often a time when we're getting exposed, especially when you're doing graduate work and philosophy, it's a time when you're getting exposed to a lot of new ideas and a lot a lot that's going to challenge ways of thinking that we're comfortable, and we're just a part of the background of your life previously. And I took a lot of strength in knowing that there had been times in my life where yes, I had felt to sing the song of redeeming love. And I also took it that it was okay, if that ebbed and flowed. That sometimes part of the reason there's such an emphasis on remembering in the Book of Mormon, is that we're meant to trust our past selves. We're meant to think back to not just ourselves, but also the people who've been in our lives. Maybe this kind of relates to Hume’s sense of, kind of losing a sense of self and feeling isolated, and then trying to reconnect with who he was, and reconnect with the people around him. There's a way in which we ought to try and reconnect with past versions of ourselves who've had experiences that sometimes end up being the foundation for being able to have faith in the moment. And this brings me to Alma 32, which is a chapter I absolutely adore, and I've read over so many times before. But the process that's proposed in experimenting upon the word and planting that seed involves us moving in and out of certainty. It's really interesting, because the case is being made that faith is going to be a constant tool that we need in our lives. But that's not to say we can't, as a result of this process of planting a seed and investing in, in believing and having faith, that process of planting will have moments of light. We’ll say, is this not real? Yeah, it is real, because it is light! We will have moments where there is a kind of clarity, there is a kind of brightness and a connectedness, not just with other people, but with the Divine and with particular pieces of truth and light that come in virtue of that relationship with the divine. But then it says, so since you've had this, too, do put aside our faith now? No, you can't. Because it turns out those moments of clarity, we might think of them as something like moments of certainty, I prefer to think of them as moments where we experience truth, we experience light, and we have in that thing, in that moment, a full knowledge, a perfect knowledge. But that is going to ebb and flow. That's part of this learning process. It keeps us reinvesting in our questions and our thoughts. In the things, it keeps us learning more. It also keeps us seeking connectedness with the divine, in the same way that Hume found his everyday beliefs would be challenged if he failed to connect to the people around him in his community. I think that we find our theological beliefs, if we are not starting in a place of a relationship with God, and you can bring every uncertainty into that space, right? Having a relationship with God doesn't prove or require that you believe anything in particular. But it does allow us to be in a position to engage in this process of learning that Alma talks about in Alma 32. To kind of be in, come into these moments of light, and these pieces of truth, but then also have the faith and the relationship to sustain us as we then open ourselves up to more questions and realize there's more that we don't know. That's the other great thing about learning is my experience has been the more I learn, the more I realize, there's a ton of stuff I don't know. Haha.

Welch: I love that reading of Alma 32. And I so agree with you that we can have the ambition to aim for knowledge that is perfect. But what is perfect and sure knowledge? I think, when we read the parable in its entirety, perfect sure knowledge is knowledge that goes hand in hand with faith, right? Faith connects us to hope. It connects us to love. It connects us to that disposition of humility and modesty that we have to have even in the face of, of perfect knowledge. In the logic of the parable, when Alma urges us to pick back up our faith, can you lay aside your faith? No, don't lay aside your faith, pick it up again. And what do you do with it? Well, you go back and you cultivate the tree. You take care of that tree, it's not enough just to plant it. But over the course of its life, you're going to need to dig about it, weed about it, water it, take care of it, prune it. Taking us back to those bodily practices, those practices of care of ministry, that as Latter-day Saints, we are so blessed to have a structure given to us wherein we can do precisely this, we can pick back up our faith, we can go to work cultivating the tree, both our community relationships that are so crucial to right knowledge, and our relationship with God, which is the trunk through which that like knowledge flows. So I really love the way you've read Alma 32 for us here. What else Katie, would you want to share as insights from your professional life, your study of philosophy and of Hume that our listeners might be able to use in their own religious lives, in their own experience and journey of faith?

Paxman: Well, I think that one of the things I value most in Hume is the degree to which it encourages us to be less concerned about certainty, and more concerned about understanding people and the people around us, and then trying to figure out what it is to be virtuous, to have a good character. To both have a personal peace and joy, as we understand people generally, but also hopefully to be a sort of source for good. Now, I think that Hume is interesting because when you read the rest of his work, he kind of bounces between being a real pessimist about human natures and human potential for growth and change. And being what sounds like fairly optimistic about it. Often his pessimism, probably because it goes hand in hand for many people with the skepticism, is what's emphasized. And yet, as I mentioned, in practice, he was incredibly social. He had very close friendships, and his friendships were diverse as well. Most of his friends believed in God, were religious and disagreed with him on various points of philosophy. And that was all fine. There was still the, the option for community there. So, I think that when we go back to that experience at the beginning of the section of Hume feeling profoundly isolated because he perceives a difference in belief, I really appreciate the idea of, of connecting with people and seeking ways to connect with people that aren't preoccupied with particular belief content. This seems like something that just has to be the case, because God is working with every person on a different project, really. I mean, what we learn when, what light we have, and we sometimes talk in the church, as though, there's kind of like a single line, a single trajectory, of learning. But surely this isn't the case, all of our testimonies progress in different places at different speeds, we have different life experience, which gives us knowledge of different things. And so being comparative, or requiring some kind of homogenous… that we're all the same on that front, that just doesn't seem realistic. I think God intends for us to learn how to function as a community of knowers. And of faithful individuals who are each bringing a slightly different package, or maybe quite different package to the table. And, and the idea that as we engage in enjoying one another, playing, right, as we engage in walks together, as we engage in service…you've mentioned, the church provides various structures that encourage us to be socially engaged with one another. I think we all… I know that my Relief Society president has sometimes expressed frustration, that there's a disconnect experienced for the sisters between the things that were being required and the purpose of those things being required, right? And yet, if I step back and look at it, I go, gosh, these are really, really good structures put in place to get us to do things. And they're not the only way we can connect with one another. It just turns out, sometimes it's hard to get out of our comfort zone, sometimes it's hard to profoundly connect with other people. So, we're grateful for social structures that allow us the ability to find ways to have our lives intersect. So I…hopeful that I personally, can frame the challenges of things like ministry and service, in terms of a finding belonging. I am also aware that there are people that that's really, really hard, and that that sense of isolation that Hume talked about, is not just in his head, right? He points out that the people around him don't want him around, that he perceives that he's making others uncomfortable, and their lives are more comfortable when they don't have to engage him. And I think it's important to acknowledge that there are people in our faith community who are rightly perceiving that other people have a discomfort. That the isolation is we can't just say, hey, you need to work harder at serving and connecting. And in those cases, and really, in all our cases, this is where I come to something that the team doesn't come to, and that's that our sociality is not merely with the people immediately around us. In fact, the gospel has this amazing picture of our human sociality, such that we can and are encouraged to connect with ancestors, with people who have come before us. And ultimately, the primary relationship ought to be with God. We also require that relationship with Christ. One thing we haven't talked about today is…no, I've kind of suggested let's, let's not worry so much about certainty anymore. There are probably people listening who say, except I don't want to believe things that aren't true! I want to have good reasons for the things I believe. I want…I want certainty. I feel like maybe even I have a responsibility to seek certainty as I adopt beliefs, because the beliefs I have influenced the actions I take. The actions I take influence people, I want to be sure I'm taking good actions. And I think my answer to that is to say, absolutely, we want truth. How is it going to be okay, that we're likely to make mistakes? Because we are, we are, even if we work really hard at being as… whether if we study as hard as possible, read as much from those who we take to be wise as possible, reason as much as possible, we're still very, very likely to make mistakes. And I think that's where a relationship with Christ becomes so important, because I don't think the Atonement is only about helping us be able to compensate for some moral mistakes we make. I actually think it also has an epistemic role, that because of the Atonement, it was okay to grow into bought embodied beings who are likely to go into a world and bump into each other and to hurt one another and make bad choices. That's okay, because there's a Savior that's provided. And I like to think that applies to our search for knowledge as well. It's okay to go in there, ask the questions, bump around, try and develop views. Try and understand things. And sometimes, inevitably, maybe a lot of the time, get things wrong, or ultimately they’re only right in a limited way, let's say the way I like to think about line upon line, right, is that just because I've had clarity, in some limited area of knowledge, very likely, I then try and turn that into something that's a broader system, you know, something that's bigger, that explains more. And that's likely when I'm going to take the light that's been given me, and it's going to feed into my having a picture that isn’t completely right. But then I realized God was totally okay with that. There is a Savior provided, I think, for these practices as well. That the problem would be if I get dogmatic and a particular set of beliefs and get unrevisable, I stopped trusting that line upon line, means that I'm going to build my knowledge, and my understanding. And as someone who loves engaging in questioning and thinking, I can't imagine eternal progression being anything other than the ability to continue refining. Like, I want to have “aha!” moments for the rest of eternity. And those involve often correcting something that I previously believed, or realizing that I need to shift. I need to modify to accommodate more and more light. That's the process I want to be engaged in. And that process requires the Atonement, I think. It requires a relationship with Christ, it requires a relationship with God. And then yes, we are social beings, and we want to be connected to the people around us. And that's something that I truly hope for, for everyone. And again, recognizing how many people feel like there's barriers to that connectedness. It's important to me to try and create spaces in our church community in our faith community, where people can find that connectedness that Hume goes looking for, right? They want to play a game of backgammon, I will play the game of backgammon. That's specifically the game he mentions. If they want to play Catan or something, I'm probably actually more game for that.

Welch: Katie Paxman, I would play a game of Settlers of Catan or backgammon with you any day. Thank you so much. This is a beautiful place for us to end our conversation today. Thank you for being a guest today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Paxman: Thank you so much. It's been lovely.

Welch: Thanks for listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and give us a rating or review on the platform where you listened. For updates about the Maxwell Institute, follow us on our social media platforms @BYUMaxwell and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. Join us next time, and take care.