From The Candle of the Lord by Elder
Boyd K. Packer, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles:
I will tell you of an experience I had before I was a General Authority which affected me profoundly. I sat on a plane next to a professed
atheist who pressed his disbelief in God so urgently that I bore my testimony
to him. “You are wrong,” I said, “there is a God. I know He
lives!”
He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that!
You can’t know it!” When I would not yield, the atheist, who
was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of
testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you
know. Tell me how you know.”
When I attempted to answer, even though I held advanced academic
degrees, I was helpless to communicate.
When I used the words Spirit and witness, the
atheist responded, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” The words prayer, discernment,
and faith, were equally meaningless to him. “You see,” he said,
“you don’t really know. If you did, you would be able to tell me how
you know.”
I felt, perhaps, that I had borne my testimony to him unwisely
and was at a loss as to what to do. Then came the experience! Something came
into my mind. And I mention here a statement of the Prophet Joseph Smith: “A person may profit by
noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when
you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of
ideas … and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may
grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ
Jesus.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, comp. Joseph
Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1977, p. 151.)
Such an idea came into my mind and I said to the atheist, “Let
me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”
“Of course I do,” was his reply.
“When did you taste salt last?”
“I just had dinner on the plane.”
“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.
He insisted, “I know what salt tastes like as well as I know
anything.”
“If I gave you a cup of salt and a cup of sugar and let you
taste them both, could you tell the salt from the sugar?”
“Now you are getting juvenile,” was his reply. “Of course I
could tell the difference. I know what salt tastes like. It is an everyday
experience—I know it as well as I know anything.”
“Then,” I said, “assuming that I have never tasted salt, explain
to me just what it tastes like.”
After some thought, he ventured, “Well-I-uh, it is not sweet and
it is not sour.”
“You’ve told me what it isn’t, not what it is.”
After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could
not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore
testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed
that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to
tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I
have tasted salt. I am no more able to convey to you in words how this
knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to
you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t
try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!”