The Crucible of Doubt: Granting Permission to Believe

Modern science has taught us a lot about how our bodies work. To say it all boils down to chemistry may be an oversimplification, but there is a lot of truth in that statement. What does it mean then, when we feel love and affection for one another? Are our emotions and desires the work of chemicals that manipulate our subjective experience, and therefore not really real? These kinds of questions are sometimes posed by budding rationalists, who wonder what role such chemical reactions should play in their life. A common answer goes something like this: 'We are humans and we have no choice but to experience life as humans. Our emotions and feelings are real to us. Understand where they come from so that you don't make bad decisions based on them, but don't over-think them either. It is not a betrayal of reason and logic to be human. Enjoy life!'

Sometimes we need permission to just be ourselves. One of the messages I took away from The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, is that we should give ourselves permission to believe.

Coming into the first chapter, The Use and Abuse of Reason, I was a little skeptical that I would agree with what the authors would say. It is easy to say that there are ways of 'knowing' other than science and reason. Such statements usually strike me as a kind of epistemic jealousy. Artists and writers may have dreamed up things as strange as relativity and quantum mechanics, but they could never deliver the empirical reality. I was pleasantly surprised that the Givens did not seem to be trying to put science 'in its place' as much as put it in a human context.

The problem is not that science cannot give us direction with life’s most urgent questions. It is because, in actual practice, logical reasoning does not give us much guidance. We don’t really live our lives, in any meaningful way, according to the dictates of logic. And we certainly don’t embrace our most cherished beliefs, values, or opinions on the basis of reason alone—however much we may protest we do....

[A]s moral agents, immersed in a world of human relationships and human values, we most appropriately choose and judge and act as human beings whose desires and motivations and bases for action are deeper than and prior to logic.

I can get on board with that, since even certainty is a feeling.

The discussion in the first chapter connects to the last chapter, where the Givens take up the inevitability of belief and how we channel it. After describing three views of the cosmos (both theistic and atheistic), they write:

...we assemble the scattered pieces of evidence from science, from life experience, from intuition, and from reason into a tentative whole, trusting some sources of meaning and distrusting others. We cannot escape the burden of faith, within or outside the parameters of religious conviction.

So we can't help but believe in something, but what if that something turns out to be wrong? The Givens, in turn, ask if that is really such a horrible thing, and quote William James as follows:

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. . . . This fear he slavishly obeys. . . . For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

This is all well and good, but there are elements of Church doctrine where we might suspect that we are indeed being duped. What then? The Givens answer:

Perhaps...one might focus on the message rather than the messenger. One might consider that the contingencies of history and culture and the human element will always constitute the garment in which God’s word and will are clothed. And one might refuse to allow our desire for the perfect to be the enemy of the present good. Finally, we might ask ourselves, with the early disciples, “to whom [else] shall we go?”

The worst risk such a life of faith entails is not that such a life might be wrong—but that it might be incomprehensible to those unprepared to take such a risk.

Perhaps you find yourself unable to abandon belief in certain core doctrines of Mormonism in spite of science and reason. As I read them, the message of these two chapters of The Crucible of Doubt is this: 'You are a human and will unavoidably believe things that go beyond science, and often make choices ignoring it. It is not a betrayal of rationality to believe. Embrace what you find beautiful, good, and compelling in Mormonism. Enjoy life!'

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Voting Your Conscience: Old LDS Edition

This week's U.S. election gives me an excuse to share some material from Church history I recently found.

In the April General Conference of 1907, with the Reed Smoot hearings finally over, a declaration written by the First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith was read to the congregation titled, "An Address: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the World." The purpose of the declaration was to correct misunderstandings about the Church and assure people that even though Mormons believed in revelation to a prophet, they were simultaneously loyal citizens of their countries, and the United States in particular.

Following its reading, President Francis M. Lyman, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated that the address was endorsed by the Council of the Twelve Apostles and moved that the address be adopted "as an expression of the principles and policy of the Church that we will advocate and sustain." After the motion was seconded by Elder John Henry Smith, the congregation was asked to signify approval by standing. Then those objecting were asked to do the same, of which the Conference report stated there were none. The declaration was included in the Conference report and printed in the May issue of the Church's magazine, Improvement Era.

The document makes for an interesting read because it reveals the public pressures felt by Church leaders at that time. One of the points addressed was the charge of 'arbitrary power' in the Church. After reciting well-known passages from D&C 121 about the righteous exercise of priesthood authority, the First Presidency wrote:

Nominations to Church office may be made by revelation; and the right of nomination is usually exercised by those holding high authority, but it is a law that no person is to be ordained to any office in the Church, where there is a regularly organized branch of the same, without the vote of its members. This law is operative as to all the officers of the Church, from the president down to the deacon. The ecclesiastical government itself exists by the will of the people; elections are frequent, and the members are at liberty to vote as they choose. True, the elective principle here operates by popular acceptance, rather than through popular selection, but it is none the less real. Where the foregoing facts exist as to any system, it is not and cannot be arbitrary.

The notion that the Saints could freely express their will with respect to ecclesiastical government was encouraged in a number of General Conferences in that first decade. For example, in the April conference of 1905 President Joseph F. Smith prefaced the sustaining vote with these words:

As this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, we will present the general authorities of the Church for your vote this afternoon, and I would like to say that it is expected that all the Latter-day Saints will exercise their right to vote for or against those whose names are submitted. We would like you to exercise perfect liberty and freedom in the expression of your own thought and faith and fidelity in the lifting of your hands.

Well, times change and as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism put it,

The principle of common consent has functioned in the Church since its inception, though the actual practices incorporating this principle have evolved significantly.

Most recently we were instructed that there are no elections in the Church and that we do not vote on Church leadership at any level, but rather sustain them. In practice there is probably little difference from over a century ago. I would guess that the sustaining vote of 1905 was about as routine as that of 2014 [1]. It seems clear, however, that Joseph F. Smith's portrayal of the sustaining vote as a non-arbitrary 'elective principle' is long gone.

Notes:

1. Almost. The April report states: "All the voting was unanimous with, two exceptions; and President Smith invited those who had so voted to state their grievances to the proper authorities, and they would be considered."

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Ebola: Fox News Preaches the Truth

Fox's Shep Smith put the smackdown on Ebola fear mongering in a brief but forceful statement.



Unfortunately, some of Shep's colleagues have been part of the problem. I don't do Facebook. But for those of you who do, may I suggest that this video is worth sharing? This is a video that ought to go viral (pun sort of intended, but also kind of hard to avoid).

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Priesthood Session Highlights: Dunning-Kruger and The Eyring Letter

Two items of relevance to this blog in last night's priesthood session of General Conference stood out to me. First, as President Uchtdorf described research showing that people with low skill tend to overrate their own performance, it became clear to me that he was describing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Pres. Uchtdorf didn't mention the corollary, that people with low skill also fail to recognize true competence in others. This bit of psychology is often invoked in online discussions when some ignoramus starts yammering on about things he clearly does not understand, and rejects correction. As Dunning and Kruger put it, in the abstract of one of their publications,

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

I thought it was great that Pres. Uchtdorf injected this nerdy bit of psychology into Church discourse, and I will be interested to see if/how it is footnoted in the printed text. The overall talk was very good, and I expect that it will be widely used for fourth-Sunday lessons. Maybe we can think of other ways Dunning-Kruger is manifest amongst the Saints.

The second item of interest to me was President Eyring's reference to a letter his father sent to Church leaders about science and religion, and which his father asked his opinion on. Pres. Eyring previously told that story during an interview for a program BYUtv did on his father several years ago. (Alas, it appears to have disappeared from the BYUtv site.) In that program, Pres. Eyring told the story in the context of reaction to Pres. Joseph Fielding Smith's book, Man, His Origin and Destiny. It is therefore likely that Pres. Eyring was referring to Henry Eyring's most famous letter. The full text of that letter and the story behind it can be read here. (It is also possible that Pres. Eyring was remembering one of the other letters Henry Eyring wrote.)

At a minimum, Pres. Eyring's talk is a useful reference if you ever have occasion to tell someone about the letter. However, Pres. Eyring's talk is also a likely candidate for a fourth-Sunday lesson. Maybe you can help liven the discussion by providing the background on the famous letter he was probably alluding to.

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How Climate Change Skeptics Made Me Feel Better About Ebola

The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.

1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.

See? Problem dismissed.

Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.

On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:




I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".

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Abraham's Myths

This is mostly a note for myself, but I thought I would post it for anyone interested. I've been re-reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Although written for an evangelical audience, it applies almost equally well to Mormons. (I've mentioned the book before, and it is routinely recommended by Ben Spackman.) In reading chapter 2 I was struck by Enns's explanation for why Genesis resembles the older myths of other ancient cultures. Before proceeding it is important to know what Enns means by 'myth.'

Myth is an ancient, premodern, pre-scientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Enns thinks it all starts with Abraham. (The italics are original.)

It is important to remember where Abraham came from and where he was headed....The Mesopotamian world from which Abraham came was one whose own stories of origins had been expressed in mythic categories for a considerable length of time. Moreover, the land Abraham was going to enter, the land of the Canaanites, was likewise rich in its own myths....

As God entered into a relationship with Abraham, he "met" him where he was--an ancient Mesopotamian man who breathed the air of the ancient Near East. We must surely assume that Abraham, as such a man, shared the worldview of those whose world he shared and not a modern, scientific one. The reason the opening chapters of Genesis look so much like the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is that the worldview categories of the ancient Near East were ubiquitous and normative at the time. Of course, different cultures had different myths, but the point is that they all had them....

What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them....

We might think that such a scenario is unsatisfying because it gives too much ground to pagan myths. But we must bear in mind how very radical this notion would have been in the ancient world. For a second-millennium Semitic people...to say that the gods of Babylon were not worth worshiping but that the true god was the god of a nomad like Abraham--this was risky, ridiculous, and counterintuitive....

To put it differently, God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.

[T]he question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins....The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship....Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed the only way.

Although the Egyptians aren't mentioned, they also had a rich mythology. That Enns builds his argument around Abraham is of special LDS interest given our Book of Abraham. However, the argument is equally applicable to Moses. God's covenant people were surrounded by powerful polytheistic cultures and empires for hundreds to thousands of years. It makes sense that they needed myths of their own, and that those myths looked somewhat similar to those of their neighbors.

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Let's Be Frank About the Book of Mormon Introduction

Daniel Peterson spoke at the annual FAIR conference last month, and the transcript of his talk has been posted online. Peterson's talk was titled, "Some Reflections On That Letter To a CES Director," a reference to a document that has been circulating for a year or two that compiles together a lot of criticisms of the Church. Not surprisingly, the issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon was raised. After dismissing the relevance of genetics under the theory that the Book of Mormon peoples were a very small group mixing with a large established population, Peterson turned to the introduction of the Book of Mormon.

[Letter to a CES Director] “Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page of the 2006 edition of the Book of Mormon shortly after the DNA results were released?” Quote: “The Lamanites were the principal ancestors of the American Indians” is changed to, “The Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”

Well, the implication is “because the DNA evidence undercut the Church’s position.” That’s not true. I happen to know the backstory, which has never been published. The backstory is, there were people who objected to that heading when it was done in the late 1970s/early 1980s. They were overruled by someone who was in a position of authority. But, they said the Book of Mormon never actually makes that claim. Don’t make the Book of Mormon claim things it doesn’t actually claim. We set ourselves up sometimes for problems when we claim things for the book, but that the book, when carefully read, does not claim for itself.

This is the kind of thing that drives believers-turned-critics crazy, and I can sympathize. I have a specific memory [1] of reading the introduction to the Book of Mormon as a missionary and coming across the passage in question. This was before DNA had become an issue, but it was still the case that virtually everyone outside the Church thought that American Indians came from Asia. I remember reading that line about the Lamanites being the "principal ancestors of the American Indians" and thinking that if the prophets and apostles were certain enough to put that in the introduction, then it must be the case.

I've obviously had to rethink that position and the assumptions behind it in subsequent years [2], but I have to admit that it irks me a little to see the wording simply attributed to someone in authority. It is hard to believe that the wording of the introduction was not read closely by the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles, and it is also hard to believe that the wording would have stood if any of them had reservations about it. I don't dispute Peterson's backstory, but it doesn't really solve the problem anyway. All it shows is that those who objected to the wording were not the ones in authority. That kind of makes the critique stronger.

It might be the case that former believers can be faulted for various failings, but taking seriously the Church's own introduction to the book that is the 'keystone of our religion' is not one of them. I think a better approach is simply to acknowledge that when the introduction was written (1981), Church leaders held the traditional LDS belief and assumption that the Lamanites were the main ancestors of the American Indians. However, it wasn't a crucial issue and so when strong evidence showed it to be in error, the wording was changed. What's the harm in a straightforward answer like that? (It's actually not that different from the Church's own explanation.)

Notes:

1. It is a memory I don't think I ever wrote down. As such, the standard disclaimers apply.

2. On a related note, I also remember one of my MTC teachers driving home the importance of using materials approved by the Church in teaching. Whether intended or not, one of the messages that came through to me was that you can have full confidence in materials published by the Church. Unfortunately, I have had to rethink that as well.

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Are We Too Stupid to NOT Believe in Free Will?

Over at his blog, Sic et Non, Daniel Peterson highlighted a Scientific American article from last June asking what happens if society stops believing in free will. The article is pay-walled but, according to Peterson's summary, experiments suggest that people become less judgmental and punitive. However, they are also more likely to act less like a Boy Scout.

Participants in scientific experiments who’ve just read a strongly anti-free-will passage seem to show a significantly greater tendency (50%!) than their fellow participants to cheat on academic tests. Other experiments showed a higher tendency to cruelty among readers of such passages, and decreased impulse control.

This gives me an excuse to think out loud: Maybe there are falsehoods that we need to generally believe because otherwise a significant number of morons would run us all off the rails. I'm reminded of an article at The Onion from a few years ago: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed [Federal Reserve chairman Ben] Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"

Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.

Yes, in a sense money is an illusion, but it's an illusion that works [1]. However, if enough people actually came to believe that dollars, for example, were worthless, life would suddenly be a lot harder. (Even for the gold hoarders, I think, but that's a topic for another day.)

So anyway, although I tend to think of humanity in a positive aspirational light, it is abundantly clear that there are a lot of menaces (and potential menaces) to society out there. And morons. (Let's face it, we're all morons in some way). I can imagine God considering what to tell humanity and thinking, "Well, I'm going to say X, Y, and Z, even though it's not strictly accurate, because if I give them more accurate information the humans will self-destruct [2]."

We are free to choose, the scriptures say. But maybe that's because if they said anything else, we'd all go to hell in a handbasket.


Notes:
1. For a neat example, check out this story about how fake money ended inflation in Brazil.

2. God does not lie. But in a way, anything less than the full accurate truth is misleading. However, the full accurate truth may be incomprehensible to mortals or dangerous to their well-being. And so we get accommodations (baby stories, as Brigham Young called one example) which begin to look like falsehoods in the light of better information. What is a truthful God to do? Also, see D&C 19:4-12.

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