Read the whole thing - but these excerpts give a flavour. I have added the bold emphasis:
Q: What should you conclude when your spiritual experience conflicts with logical and tangible evidence?
BO: This is a very good question. First I would
suggest this, there’s nothing more immediate than your own experience.
Only you know what your experience is. If it conflicts with logic? Trust
me, I’m very good at logic and I know there are a lot of ways to do
logic to make it conflict with just about anything I can come up with,
that’s what I do for a living {laughter}.
And tangible evidence? We
don’t know what evidence is until we have all of our basic premises and
axioms in place to begin with. You see, when I see through the lens of
faith what counts as evidence is different than when I don’t see through
the lens of faith.
In fact, I found something very interesting among people
who have lost testimonies. Almost invariably they will say, “I had a
testimony and then I decided, ‘I’m going to take a look at this without
relying on spiritual experiences or the way that I see things when I
trust the Spirit. I’m just going to see what logic or evidence
provides.'”
The fact is that evidence isn’t self-interpreting, and logic
is only a very useful tool for arriving – and I am very “Humean” about
logic. All logic is ex post facto to prove what we already feel is true; how’s that?
Q: How can one find the truth when two people
experience two opposite things while praying about the Book of Mormon?
One gets the feeling it’s true, the other gets the feeling it’s wrong?
BO: Well, I say trust your experience...
Trust your Heavenly Father. What I
said was that the experience that anybody else has is not evidence for
us. If somebody else has a different experience, I think I have good prima facia
reason for believing my own experience as opposed to theirs. What else
can I do?
And it comes down to faith. Am I going to trust my heart or
not? Am I going to have an open heart or am I going to close it? That’s
the bottom line.
