It Takes Faith To Gain Knowledge

While reading Elder Neil L. Andersen's talk, Faith Is Not by Chance, but by Choice, I came across an interesting quote: "Faith is a principle of power, important not only in this life but also in our progression beyond the veil."

You see, I had always assumed that once we pass through the veil again and get back the memories of our pre-mortal lives, we wouldn't really have faith any more, because our faith would have been replaced by certain knowledge. We wouldn't need to "have faith" any more; we would know.

However, the more I think about it, the more sense this quote makes. Just because we would remember our lives before birth and the lessons we learned then, that doesn't mean that we would know everything. We would still have things to learn from our Heavenly Father before we could fully become like Him. And perhaps, sometime along that learning, we would still have to have the faith to accept the truth of something we didn't fully understand.

In my algebra classes, I was taught formulas: equations that make it easier to find a missing number using what information you have. Formulas are useful because you can just plug in the numbers the formula needs and solve the formula, and the formula will give you the correct answer. You don't need to understand a formula in order to use one, but I always wanted to, so I would always ask the professor how each formula works, and he would usually show the class the "proof" of the formula, a set of equations that explain a formula using basic math. However, he wouldn't always give us the proof of each formula. For some formulas, he told us that the proof used math that was too complex for us to understand at our level, so we would just have to memorize the formula and trust that it would give us the right answer, even though we didn't know how the formula worked.

Perhaps, in our post-mortal education, there will be times like that. As we're learning basic physics from our Heavenly Father, He may tell us things about the properties of certain particles, and we'll just have to trust that that's the way it is, even if we don't understand yet why the particles are like that. At the very least, we'll have to have faith to trust that God knows what He's talking about and that all of the information He gives us is correct, even if it goes over our heads sometimes.

Even after our memories are restored, we still won't know everything. There will still be, and some theorize that there will always be, something more to learn, and as long as we're learning from a teacher, we will have to exercise some faith to trust that what the teacher is teaching is true. This is why faith will continue to be important, even "in our progression beyond the veil." It may be that we will always need to have faith in our Heavenly Father, which is part of why it's important that we build a strong faith in Him now.