One of my favorite childhood games to play was Jenga. Jenga is a simple game where you start by setting up a tall stack of wooden blocks. Players take turns by first removing blocks from the stack and then placing that block on the top of the stack while trying to avoid knocking it over. I can be pretty competitive at this game. One of my favorite strategies is to take away the blocks around the bottom first making the stack structurally weak from the beginning forcing the other players to be especially careful from the beginning.
When the foundation of the stack of wooden blocks is weak the entire structure is weak. World-views and belief systems are the same way. A person's set of beliefs often begin with a few foundational assumptions or paradigms about the world by which they begin to stack other beliefs on top of those beliefs. The best way to cause another person to loose confidence in their beliefs is to remove or weaken those foundational assumptions or beliefs.
If we were to take all of the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and stack them on top of each other like the wooden blocks of jenga, what would be our foundational assumptions and beliefs? One of our foundational principles is our belief in agency, because if we have no agency, then the plan of salvation would be completely pointless. The stack would crumble if we did not have agency at the bottom. Another core principle is faith. Without faith there is no repentance, without repentance there is no baptism and no Holy Ghost and no eternal life and so on. According to Joseph Smith "faith is the first principle in revealed religion and the foundation of all righteousness".
It seems that one of Satan's best strategies against religion would be to attack or confuse the principle of faith.
What are some of the ways that Satan attacks this principle?
In the ancient world in the Book of Mormon, a man who was anti-christ named Korihor sought to destroy the beliefs of the followers of Christ. We learn from the record in Alma chapter 30 that he had much success. He led many believers away from Christ because he attacked their foundational beliefs concerning faith. He said, "Ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ."
In the modern world we hear similar attacks on faith. Bertrand Russell said, "We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." Another public intellectual Richard Dawkins has also said, "faith is merely belief without evidence; a process of active non-thinking which is not subject to peer review."
Attacks from the philosophies of men, from both the ancient and modern times try to redefine faith as something that believers cling to without any evidence. "Your faith is a crutch" they would say. If our faith was the way that they define it then they would be right. But our faith is not like they define it.
This is why it is important for those with faith to understand it clearly and define our faith to the world before enemies of religion define it for us. Understanding faith and defining it properly will help us build the foundation of our testimony and knowledge of the truths of the gospel that build upon this foundation.
So what is the accurate definition of faith?
The apostle Paul defined faith as "the substance(later clarified by Joseph Smith as assurance) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." and Alma declared that faith is not a perfect knowledge; rather, if we have faith, we “hope for things which are not seen [but] are true”
This definition of faith contrasts with the definition of faith given by those who are against religion. Their definition says that having faith is accepting something without evidence or assurance, however, the true definition is that faith “is the assurance we have of the existence of unseen things.
An example of faith is found in Alma 58:11 where the armies of Helaman are at war with the Lamanites. Helaman said, "Yea, and it came to pass that the Lord our God did visit us with assurances that he would deliver us; yea, insomuch that he did speak peace to our souls, and did grant unto us great faith, and did cause us that we should hope for our deliverance in him."
The faith of Helaman's army was based on evidence only it was the kind of evidence that they could not see. They could not see that they would be delivered from death in war, for those events had not happened yet. But they had assurances such as the peace that they felt which gave them hope and strengthened their faith.
We have assurances that if we repent, we will be forgiven. We have assurances that Christ lives and that he has atoned for our sins even though we cannot see these things. When we bear our testimonies we proclaim that through faith, we know that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that he was visited by God and Jesus Christ and restored the Gospel. We cannot see these things with our eyes but we can experience that they are true through faith.
In the church we believe in science and reason, and in faith. Whereas those who would attack religion limit themselves to only science and reason. Therefore, those with faith can see things that vindicate our faith that are practically invisible to those who deny faith.
In a 2000 BYU a devotional address, Richard N. Williams said something that was really profound to me, he said,
" The truth of the gospel rests on the occurrence of certain events. There was a Man, Jesus, or there was not; He overcame the whole of sin and darkness in the garden or He did not; the tomb was empty or it was not.
The truth of events is not confirmed by reason or science but by witnesses. Because of the restoration of the true gospel, we are blessed with an abundance of witnesses. This is why the apostolic authority of special witnesses and the restoration of the gifts of the Spirit are essential to the true church. Scriptures also witness of these things, and we Latter-day Saints have an embarrassment of riches where scripture is concerned. In this context, faith is not what we cling to when we do not know truth, faith is the knowledge of truth nourished by good acts. It is strengthened by witnesses capable of penetrating our very souls and culminates in the palpable fruits of sure and certain experience.
Faith is not a placeholder for knowledge or what we cling to in its absence. faith is substance, it is evidence--the evidence Alma talked about; the evidence God gives us by many witnesses; the evidence we give to each other; and what we evidence in our own lives. It is not the substitute for things hoped for but their very substance.
