“You exercise faith by causing, or by making, your mind accept or believe as truth that which you cannot, by reason alone, prove for certainty.” Boyd K. Packer
Elder Packer is a teacher, all of the apostles are teachers, but he is the teacher of the 12 Apostles.
Our approach to life should be, I am LDS therefore – not “however.”
Reason, like any other human language is good for some things and not so good for others. We can have faith and reason, faith without reason, reason without faith or we can be faithless without reason.
Over time people have grown to view faith as lacking knowledge. In Spanish it is the verb saber versus the verb conocer. One is knowing facts (saber) and one is a knowledge such as knowing a person (conocer).
I might say “I know my wife” and no one would reasonably doubt. Faith in some ways leads us to a knowledge more sure than reason.
Faith is the substance or evidence (by witnesses) of things hoped for or not seen, it is not merely the replacement of things hoped for or not seen.
When the Lord tells us to “let go” so that He can work He means “let go” not “stop walking.” It means that we let go of what we know by reason and turn to the great truth that we should know by faith which is that He can guide us through the darkness and the mazes of the world.
Faith is a bridge, it is not to weed people out by being narrow but rather to provide a path across that which is otherwise uncrossable.
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