Many believe that philosophy and religion contradict each other. However, during BYU Education Week 2025, three philosophy professors explained that the two disciplines actually bolster each other.
Every year, BYU hosts Education Week, inviting professors across campus to present about their disciplines—and often, to tie it in with the gospel. Three professors from the Philosophy Department led a lecture series titled “Faith and Philosophy,” where they used logic, questions, and epistemological principles to show how philosophy can promote faith.
Questions: The Key to Believing
Little kids question everything—the color of the sky and even the things you do—but when did adults stop? Associate Professor Katharina Paxman (Early Modern Philosophy) explained the power of good, meaningful questions in her lecture titled “More to Question, More to Believe.” Using the wisdom of both philosophers and apostles, she proposed that the key to a strong testimony isn’t suppressing big questions, it’s asking them.
Paxman introduced Greek philosopher Socrates as a “midwife of ideas,” a term used to describe his ability to question people’s knowledge, giving rise to deeper, more thought-out ideas. “He taught that the pursuit of truth is a labor of the soul and, in fact, that it was a labor of the soul that was worth doing,” Paxman said.
However, when it comes to the gospel, Paxman often hears members of the Church discourage others from asking questions. “The easy part is challenging everything,” she explained before warning the audience to be wary of cynicism when approaching questions. She continued, “I want to propose [that hope] is a really important part of what we ought to be feeling when we’re asking questions.”
Paxman concluded that using hope to guide questions will lead to opportunities to discover more full and joyful truths: “Questions will certainly lead to more questions, but they also lead to more light,” she said. “As we trust in our Savior, we will discover the joy of having more to question and, I truly believe, the joy of having more to believe.”
The Probability of Faith
Many people question the existence of God by citing evidences of evil: tragedies on the news, natural disasters threatening entire regions, and disappointments, both great and small. In his lecture “Joseph Smith and the Evidential Problem of Evil,” Assistant Professor Taylor-Grey Miller (Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion) used philosophy to break down how God can exist in a fallen world.
Skeptical theists, Miller explained, would argue that though we can’t understand it now, God has a good reason for allowing evil—and using the plan of salvation and an understanding of pre-earth life, members of the Church can find evidence of His reasons. Pulling from scriptures, Miller said, “Not only did we agree to live in this world, but it was a free and rational choice for us to live in this world.”
The rational nature of this choice comes primarily from the fact that, as the scriptures state, we were not coerced into accepting God’s plan, Miller explained. We also counseled about it, and we understood we’d benefit from coming to earth; in essence, we were de facto experts of the plan.
The fact that we’re on the earth shows proof of our past self’s confidence in God’s plan: “Given that your past self rationally consented to live in a world like this—and that they had comparatively better evidence on this matter than you,” Miller explained, “you can go on believing that God exists in the face of all evil with a little bit of faith in who you used to be.”
A Logic-Based Approach to Testimony
What does it mean for something to be true? According to philosopher Richard Swinburne, the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” can apply to the study of knowledge, a branch of philosophy known as epistemology. Using three principles of epistemological truth, Associate Professor Nathan Rockwood (Early Modern Philosophy, Religious Epistemology) broke down how to gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon during his lecture “‘Knowing’ the Book of Mormon Is True.”
According to Swinburne, for something to be true, it must meet three requirements: You must believe it’s true, you must know it’s true, and the belief must be justified. Rockwood used a selection of lesser-known testimonials of the gold plates to provide evidence for the first two requirements, specifically noting stories where the plates were seen or held while covered by fabric. “There’s a close connection there, I suggest, between the testimony of the plates and the truth of the Lord,” he added. “Every philosopher is going to take testimony as a kind of evidence. I don’t know anyone who disagrees with that: Testimony is evidence.”
While personal accounts of the Book of Mormon can fulfill the first two epistemological requirements—belief and knowledge—Rockwood explained that a justification of its truth comes only from the Spirit: “As years go by, I have studied the testimony of the plates,” he concluded, “it just adds further evidence to my testimony and supports the claim that the Book of Mormon is true—so I know the Book of Mormon is true.”