Science & Tech Quote by Thomas S. Monson

Monson isn’t arguing with evidence; he’s drawing a boundary line around belonging. “I wasn’t with Joseph, but I believe him” is a compact declaration of loyalty to Joseph Smith and, by extension, to the Latter-day Saint origin story. The sentence does two jobs at once: it admits the obvious (no eyewitness access) and then converts that weakness into a strength. Belief becomes a chosen posture, not a conclusion.

The second line is where the cultural friction snaps into focus. “My faith did not come to me through science” doesn’t just separate domains; it immunizes faith against a particular kind of challenge. Science is framed as an external force that didn’t build the house, so it has no right to condemn it. The phrase “so-called science” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it casts doubt on the motives and legitimacy of critics without having to litigate their claims. If the science is “so-called,” then the threat is not truth but arrogance, fashion, even hostility.

The context is late-20th-century modernity, when churches increasingly had to navigate DNA, archaeology, higher criticism, and a media environment eager for “gotcha” narratives about origins. Monson’s intent reads pastoral as much as polemical: reassure the faithful that they are not required to become amateur scientists or historians to remain spiritually whole. The subtext is protective: faith here is an inheritance and a community practice, and he’s warning that treating it like a lab result is a category error that can erode identity before it ever “enlightens” it.