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Agency Lost?
Premise #1: God cannot allow the evidence for some religious truths to be too convincing or else it would interfere with agency and thus destroy the plan of salvation.
Premise #2: There are people who think that those religious truths have been more or less proven.
Conclusion: These zealous believers have lost their agency and purpose in the plan of salvation.
Discuss.
8 comments:
The idea that knowledge interferes with agency is pretty dubious. People rebel against greater "light and truth" all the time. One might say rather that true agency requires knowledge. cf. 2 Ne 2:16, James 4:17.
The idea that someone thinks they know something and the idea that someone actually knows something are not the same thing.
I suspect God is attempting to be as convincing as possible, and that to the extent we think God could be more convincing we probably need to adjust our understanding of God. How well do human embryos imagine the nature of adult humans?
Great post. Maybe God's wishes he could tell us more, but his immense knowledge prevents him from exercising his agency.
I think the claim about agency is more about the community than the individual.
I disagree with your conclusion. No matter how you feel about God or Joseph Smith there are enough holes to drive a truck through.
Like: No physical evidence of the BofM either geographically or any connection between new world and old world buildings, language, or genetics. On the other hand is it possible that an uninspired teenager or anyone in their early twenties with Joseph Smiths education could of written the Bof M and still had such rough writings elsewhere?
Plenty of room for agency and Faith.
Thanks for the comments. I've got a few more thoughts on this that I intend for future posts, so forgive my lack of commenting.
I'm actually writing a personal essay on this at the moment, so I have some relevant quotes handy. This is from Margaret Blair Young reflecting on the priesthood ban ("Essay for June 8, 1998"):
“I have pondered [a racist teacher’s] idea that after many righteous years, a man has earned freedom from temptation, and I’ve wondered if he ever grasped his self-deception, if he ever realized that the most dangerous, most tenuous place of all is an enclosed system where all things are set and known – or pretend to be so.”
“The inertia invited by a desire for absolute certitude and closure is either the setting for the second law of thermodynamics – the tendency towards chaos – or it is simply death.”
“I have often wondered if my seminary teacher ever understood that the gospel is not an enclosed system, but the opening of all systems through divinely prescribed keys, that the moment we box up anyone – including ourselves – is the moment we become slaves.”
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