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The Veto Power of Reason

The Veto Power of Reason

Last updated on: August 18, 2026 at 8:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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The Veto Power of Reason 2026-08-18T20:42:39-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Center on the campus of Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image) I doubt that there will be much snow tomorrow on either the roof or the grounds. But we shall see!

The thirtieth installment of our ongoing series of short documentary videos came out yesterday, and I think that I neglected to mention it. (If true, this will be my first mistake in at least a decade.) So here it is: The latest iteration of the series is “Educate Women? What Did Brigham Young Believe?” — Becoming Brigham, Episode 30.

Were you aware, by the way, that you can actually subscribe to Becoming Brigham? Just go to the online home of the series, locate the button there that’s marked “Subscribe on YouTube,” click on it, and you’re virtually there. This way, you’ll be notified (or reminded) of new episodes. There is no charge and it’s quite painless.

Canterbury Cathedral in the 1890s (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

In other me-related news, I gave the first of my four 2026 BYU Education Week lectures today: The overall title for my lecture series is “After and Before the Apostles: Highlights from British Christian History Between Dispensations,” and today’s presentation was “Christianity Comes to the British Isles.” I spoke in the Assembly Hall of the Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Center, which is billed as holding a lecture audience of five hundred people. It was full, practically speaking (that is, with a few empty chairs and a few people standing). We’ll see whether anybody comes tomorrow!

I had worried that I had too much material for one lecture but, as it happened, I finished a few minutes early. Bad planning. So I opened it up to questions. With such a large audience and high ceiling (and, possibly, with increasing deafness), it was sometimes a bit difficult to hear them. Still, if nobody else enjoyed himself or herself, I did. I’m an Anglophile, and I love English culture and English history. Tomorrow’s topic is “Figures from the History of British Monasticism.”

When I think of heaven, I confess that I think of Alpine mountain peaks and meadows. So I include here this image, from the region of Cusco, Peru: Among many other names, this peak is known as Verónica. At 19,334 feet (5,893 meters), it’s a genuinely serious peak.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

And, once again, Jonn Claybaugh has generously contributed a set of notes for students and teachers of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Come, Follow Me — Old Testament Study and Teaching Helps August 24-30, 2026: Psalms 49-51; 61-66; 69-72; 77-78; 85-86 — “I will declare what he hath done for my soul”

Sunset at Boston College, where Peter Kreeft and Father Ronald Tacelli were teaching in the Department of Philosophy when their Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics was first published (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’ve begun actually reading through Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), from its beginning. At the time that the Pocket Handbook was published (nearly a quarter of a century ago), Peter Kreeft was a professor of philosophy at Boston College, and Ronald Tacelli S.J. was an associate professor of philosophy at the same school.

I like a point that they make at the beginning of their little book, in which they’re defending the legitimacy of apologetics. It’s a point very much akin to that of a quotation from Austin Farrer that was, for a while, something of the unofficial motto of the old Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, back when the Maxwell Institute really was the successor to the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS. Elder Maxwell, for whom the Maxwell Institute was eventually named, was fond of Austin Farrer’s praise of the great C. S. Lewis: “Though argument does not create conviction,” Farrer wrote,

lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish. (See Austin Farrer, “Grete Clerk,” in Jocelyn Gibb, comp., Light on C. S. Lewis [New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965], 26.)

In a similar vein, Kreeft and Tacelli write that, while it probably can’t create actual faith on its own,

reason at least has veto power. We can’t believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can’t love what we believe to be unreal. Arguments may not bring you to faith, but they can certainly keep you away from faith. Therefore we must join the battle of arguments.

Arguments can bring you closer to faith in the same sense that a car can bring you to the sea. The car can’t swim; you have to jump in to do that. But you can’t jump in from a hundred miles inland. You need a car first to bring you to the point where you can make a leap of faith into the sea. Faith is a leap, but a leap in the light, not in the dark. (9-10)

In this passage from Kreeft and Tacelli, I think that you can recognize the two complementary kinds of apologetics that I’ve often distinguished as positive apologetics and negative apologetics. It occurs to me now that another way of characterizing them might be as, respectively, constructive and defensive. Sometimes, we’ve spoken of the role of an apologist as commending and defending the faith.

I was raised to love dogs. It came with my family. Here’s my father with a friend of his, somewhere (I think) on the continent of Europe sometime (I’m guessing) in mid-1945.

Another passage that resonated with me from the opening pages of the Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics is this one:

Without a living relationship to the living God, propositions are pointless, for their point is to point beyond themselves to God. (“A finger is good for pointing to the moon,” according to a wise Zen saying.) (13-14)

I myself have sometimes used a related metaphor or simile that is based on my observations of Prince, my very first pet dog when I was a young boy. I noticed that, when I tried to point his attention toward something with my finger, Prince would focus on my finger. I’ve thought of that often, when I’ve seen people, as I thought, confusing a symbol for the object or concept that the symbol was intended to represent. I suppose, though, that Prince’s concentration on my finger might just as well be used to illustrate the error that occurs when facts or propositions or arguments that are intended to move us toward God come, instead, to be the focus in and of themselves.

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