coltakashi (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} coltakashi) wrote,@ 2008-05-14 17:45:00 |
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Why we fall for faith-promoting rumors.
The following item was a comment on a post at timesandseasons.org.
A big part of us human beings believing something is that we WANT to believe it. We would be happier and more satisfied with the world if that thing were true. It is the motivation that causes us to seek out the truth of the gospel (”Even if you can have no more than a desire to believe”), as well as the motivation for seeking truth in science, history, and other endeavors. There needs to be an adjective that describes things that not only we CAN believe (believable) but WANT to believe, separate from the alleged qualities that we think make it attractive (e.g. stimulating, comforting, original, insightful, etc.). Believattractive? Believlovely? The problem for a lot of us is that it can be a long, laborious and costly process to make a determination of truth after our heads are initially turned by something believattractive.
We LDS are taught to rely on the witness of the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, and Moroni goes on to say that it will confirm the truth of all things (presumably, the ones that are true). I think there is a tendency to forget that to get to the point where we ask the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, we have read most of a 500 page book, spending hours and hours with it. I suspect that a lot of propositions get put to the “just ask God” test without the prelude of intense and sincere investigation and “pondering” that are the conditions precedent forMoroni
The Book of Mormon comes with the testimony of 12 men–Joseph Smith+3+8–and the very explicit endorsement of the Church and its current and past leaders. Actually reading and pondering its message gives us the experience of whether it is good and fruitful or bad and barren, both intellectually and emotionally. If we believe the Bible narrative of Christ, the Book of Mormon affirms the same Son of God seen there, and is thus confirmed by the Bible narrative. It is a book that could be a product of the world that produced the Bible, a world where God rules over all, where he dispersesIsrael
A lot of the speculation that sounds so believattractive to many LDS and gets passed on through the chain of friends and family lacks any logical or rational evidentiary foundation. We need to be more careful about distinguishing what would be NICE to believe from what we have confirmed through study and THEN through revelation.
The example of Lorenzo Snow is also instructive. He received a statement from Joseph Smith Sr. about becoming like God, even before he was baptized. Later, he received inspiration that he formulated in his famous couplet. He wrote that, only after the doctrine was publicly preached in the King Follett funeral discourse by Joseph Smith, did he feel proper in sharing that insight with others.
Those of us who make our living through showing off our intellect have a hard time avoiding logorrhea. I have advised my coworkers that if they want a 10 page legal memo, I can do that in a day, but a one page memo takes twice as long. Showing off our brains with our words is something we are rewarded for in our paychecks and (hopefully) something we got praise for from parents, mentors and peers through our educational experiences, including awards, Phi Beta Kappa keys, scholarships and fellowships, and admission to prestigious institutions. It goes against our grain to be reticent about saying everything we know about anything. Yet we (should) have learned in our academic training and professional experience to avoid making assertions that we cannot back up with acceptable evidence and reasoning.
Yet one can grow up attending the usual schools and even colleges without learning how to rigorously weigh evidence, construct a defensible argument from verified information, or demolish a poorly constructed argument by someone else. That is the case, I fear, for most people, including those in the Church. My experiences dealing with juries have NOT raised my confidence in the analytical abilities of most Americans, including even the military officers who constitute most members of court-martial panel. (A related observation is that the general American judicial system is not constructed for the purpose of determining truth, but has a philosophical foundation that is derived from trial by combat, mixed with the unrealistic notion that the ideal jury should be uninformed ignoramuses. People walk into juries with their perceptions of the law formed by watching movies and CSI and Law & Order. We are being judged by people who are amateur lawyers. My personal nomination for judicial reform is to put the judge into the jury room to answer their legal questions, and not assume they can correctly understand the often arcane and self-contradictory legal instructions read to them.)
So we can expect that faith-promoting rumors will be with us for the indefinite future.
When I discuss something that I think is a logical deduction from the evidence with my Sunday School class, I try to lay out the sources for my information, and identify what is specifically speculation on my part. I try to give a serious hearing to speculations raised by class members, while explaining my reasons for thinking them less likely or not. Yesterday, presenting the same lesson about the reasons Nephi quoted so much of Isaiah, I was interrupted near the start by the visiting stake president asking me to talk about how Joseph did the translation of the Book of Mormon. I discussed the historical statements of his associates and the Critical Text Project and its conclusions. I then identified as my own speculation an hypothesis about the creation of the English language text that Joseph apparently read as he dictated to his scribes. I have discussed my idea with Terryl Givens, John Sorenson and Daniel Peterson, and they could not think of anything about it inconsistent with known facts. But even if I publish it in some forum, it will still be speculation, not something that is entitled to even be the subject of an inquiry to God about its truth or falsity, because it does not affect anyone’s salvation or exaltation in any way. It only squeaks into my lesson because it is part of what I see as I read the Book of Mormon, and as far as I can tell in my over a decade of teaching Gospel Doctrine lessons in California, Utah, Washington, and Idaho, nobody has gone off the deep end as a result of being in my classes. I am not even confident of how much they remember from one week to the next. But while we are in the class, I try to engage the text of the scriptures as much as possible.
What I hope my neighbors take away is a feeling for how truth-filled the scriptures are, not as a reservoir of Oprah-like homilies that appeal to our vanity, but as the challenging voice of God and those who dealt with him directly. I think if they appreciate the scriptures as that, they will find less of a need to make up things, or latch on to things that are shiny baubles compared to the real flinty truths in the scriptures.
Alma Chapter 32 was a critical part of my gaining a testimony. Unlike anything else I have read in the Bible, or just about any other scripture, it laid out a procedure for moving from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. Alma’s path to faith does not involve blind leaps, but careful consideration of the propositions to be tested, a commitment to complete the test, active effort in supplying the obedience and attention and reverence required for the seed to grow, and monitoring of the response of the seed as it grows and over time bears fruit. I loved the whole concept of an “experiment upon the word” and “your mind doth begin to expand.” It sounds like it was written to address those of us in the Boomer generation who lived through the era when drugs were touted as a path to satori (enlightenment).
One element in the criticism of the Intelligent Design critique of Darwinian evolution is that ID cuts off inquiry, rather than inviting the researcher to explore new ideas, and that the fruitfulness of a theory is considered to be one of the hallmarks of a true hypothesis. I disagree with the criticism of ID, but I find that criterion of fruitfulness to be in Henry Eyring’s statements about both science and Mormonism. He originally pursued his Absolute Rate Theory because it produced interesting and fruitful results, before it had been fully confirmed by experiment and had a theoretical framework explaining why it worked.
Mormonism is, in my experience, tremendously fruitful in responding to our investment of study, producing intriguing insights about all sorts of things, not just religious ones. The Book of Mormon by itself, seems to me to be generative of all sorts of studies and explorations. I think one of Hugh Nibley’s remarks, and one that I hear from folks at FARMS on occasion, is that the simple fact that there is so much that can be found in the book, that invites exploration in a wide field of knowledge, across many disciplines (not only ancient history, geography, and Egyptology, but also geology [supervolcanoes]), demonstrates that it is far more than a literary creation. You might be able to assemble something similar today with a team of scholars, but how in the world did a farmer in a frontier village do it at age 24 in 1829? One of my speculations is that the Book of Mormon came forward at a moment in time when it was simply impossible to produce such a work through extant scholarship. If it were published in the last century, the critics would be looking for ghost writers all over the world of scholarship, polymaths like Hugh Nibley. But the fact that it was published in 1830 closes that option completely. None of the ways that books are normally written explains it.
So we Mormons believe all sorts of extraordinary things, but our experience with criticism and even persecution should teach us, of all people, to be skeptical of assertions that lack proper provenance.
One final note: Mormons are not the only people who are drawn to “faith promoting rumors.” One of the most ubiquitous set pieces in environmentalist popular literature is the denunciation of the wasteful ways of the white man made by Chief Seattle. It is in elementary school textbooks and posters and gets dragged out every Earth Day. The fact that it was written by a white publicist as a well-intentioned fiction makes no headway in quelling the myth, even for people who are told to their face by the author that it is fictional. A little consideration of the language of the text makes the notion that it is inauthentic obvious. But it lives on because it is what people WANT to hear about modern civilization and the crimes ofAmerica
My personal take on the popularity of Global Warming is that it appeals to the same urge to indict mankind for profligacy, regardless of science for or against. This would not be the first time that Congress has acted against an alleged threat that was mostly mythical (e.g. the Edmunds-Tucker Act). Modern educated people laugh about the pious depiction of George Washington by Parson Weems, but the mythologizing about John F. Kennedy and other more recent figures has proceeded apace, with far more distorting effect on our political decisions.
The following item was a comment on a post at timesandseasons.org.
A big part of us human beings believing something is that we WANT to believe it. We would be happier and more satisfied with the world if that thing were true. It is the motivation that causes us to seek out the truth of the gospel (”Even if you can have no more than a desire to believe”), as well as the motivation for seeking truth in science, history, and other endeavors. There needs to be an adjective that describes things that not only we CAN believe (believable) but WANT to believe, separate from the alleged qualities that we think make it attractive (e.g. stimulating, comforting, original, insightful, etc.). Believattractive? Believlovely? The problem for a lot of us is that it can be a long, laborious and costly process to make a determination of truth after our heads are initially turned by something believattractive.
We LDS are taught to rely on the witness of the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, and Moroni goes on to say that it will confirm the truth of all things (presumably, the ones that are true). I think there is a tendency to forget that to get to the point where we ask the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, we have read most of a 500 page book, spending hours and hours with it. I suspect that a lot of propositions get put to the “just ask God” test without the prelude of intense and sincere investigation and “pondering” that are the conditions precedent for
The Book of Mormon comes with the testimony of 12 men–Joseph Smith+3+8–and the very explicit endorsement of the Church and its current and past leaders. Actually reading and pondering its message gives us the experience of whether it is good and fruitful or bad and barren, both intellectually and emotionally. If we believe the Bible narrative of Christ, the Book of Mormon affirms the same Son of God seen there, and is thus confirmed by the Bible narrative. It is a book that could be a product of the world that produced the Bible, a world where God rules over all, where he disperses
A lot of the speculation that sounds so believattractive to many LDS and gets passed on through the chain of friends and family lacks any logical or rational evidentiary foundation. We need to be more careful about distinguishing what would be NICE to believe from what we have confirmed through study and THEN through revelation.
The example of Lorenzo Snow is also instructive. He received a statement from Joseph Smith Sr. about becoming like God, even before he was baptized. Later, he received inspiration that he formulated in his famous couplet. He wrote that, only after the doctrine was publicly preached in the King Follett funeral discourse by Joseph Smith, did he feel proper in sharing that insight with others.
Those of us who make our living through showing off our intellect have a hard time avoiding logorrhea. I have advised my coworkers that if they want a 10 page legal memo, I can do that in a day, but a one page memo takes twice as long. Showing off our brains with our words is something we are rewarded for in our paychecks and (hopefully) something we got praise for from parents, mentors and peers through our educational experiences, including awards, Phi Beta Kappa keys, scholarships and fellowships, and admission to prestigious institutions. It goes against our grain to be reticent about saying everything we know about anything. Yet we (should) have learned in our academic training and professional experience to avoid making assertions that we cannot back up with acceptable evidence and reasoning.
Yet one can grow up attending the usual schools and even colleges without learning how to rigorously weigh evidence, construct a defensible argument from verified information, or demolish a poorly constructed argument by someone else. That is the case, I fear, for most people, including those in the Church. My experiences dealing with juries have NOT raised my confidence in the analytical abilities of most Americans, including even the military officers who constitute most members of court-martial panel. (A related observation is that the general American judicial system is not constructed for the purpose of determining truth, but has a philosophical foundation that is derived from trial by combat, mixed with the unrealistic notion that the ideal jury should be uninformed ignoramuses. People walk into juries with their perceptions of the law formed by watching movies and CSI and Law & Order. We are being judged by people who are amateur lawyers. My personal nomination for judicial reform is to put the judge into the jury room to answer their legal questions, and not assume they can correctly understand the often arcane and self-contradictory legal instructions read to them.)
So we can expect that faith-promoting rumors will be with us for the indefinite future.
When I discuss something that I think is a logical deduction from the evidence with my Sunday School class, I try to lay out the sources for my information, and identify what is specifically speculation on my part. I try to give a serious hearing to speculations raised by class members, while explaining my reasons for thinking them less likely or not. Yesterday, presenting the same lesson about the reasons Nephi quoted so much of Isaiah, I was interrupted near the start by the visiting stake president asking me to talk about how Joseph did the translation of the Book of Mormon. I discussed the historical statements of his associates and the Critical Text Project and its conclusions. I then identified as my own speculation an hypothesis about the creation of the English language text that Joseph apparently read as he dictated to his scribes. I have discussed my idea with Terryl Givens, John Sorenson and Daniel Peterson, and they could not think of anything about it inconsistent with known facts. But even if I publish it in some forum, it will still be speculation, not something that is entitled to even be the subject of an inquiry to God about its truth or falsity, because it does not affect anyone’s salvation or exaltation in any way. It only squeaks into my lesson because it is part of what I see as I read the Book of Mormon, and as far as I can tell in my over a decade of teaching Gospel Doctrine lessons in California, Utah, Washington, and Idaho, nobody has gone off the deep end as a result of being in my classes. I am not even confident of how much they remember from one week to the next. But while we are in the class, I try to engage the text of the scriptures as much as possible.
What I hope my neighbors take away is a feeling for how truth-filled the scriptures are, not as a reservoir of Oprah-like homilies that appeal to our vanity, but as the challenging voice of God and those who dealt with him directly. I think if they appreciate the scriptures as that, they will find less of a need to make up things, or latch on to things that are shiny baubles compared to the real flinty truths in the scriptures.
Alma Chapter 32 was a critical part of my gaining a testimony. Unlike anything else I have read in the Bible, or just about any other scripture, it laid out a procedure for moving from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. Alma’s path to faith does not involve blind leaps, but careful consideration of the propositions to be tested, a commitment to complete the test, active effort in supplying the obedience and attention and reverence required for the seed to grow, and monitoring of the response of the seed as it grows and over time bears fruit. I loved the whole concept of an “experiment upon the word” and “your mind doth begin to expand.” It sounds like it was written to address those of us in the Boomer generation who lived through the era when drugs were touted as a path to satori (enlightenment).
One element in the criticism of the Intelligent Design critique of Darwinian evolution is that ID cuts off inquiry, rather than inviting the researcher to explore new ideas, and that the fruitfulness of a theory is considered to be one of the hallmarks of a true hypothesis. I disagree with the criticism of ID, but I find that criterion of fruitfulness to be in Henry Eyring’s statements about both science and Mormonism. He originally pursued his Absolute Rate Theory because it produced interesting and fruitful results, before it had been fully confirmed by experiment and had a theoretical framework explaining why it worked.
Mormonism is, in my experience, tremendously fruitful in responding to our investment of study, producing intriguing insights about all sorts of things, not just religious ones. The Book of Mormon by itself, seems to me to be generative of all sorts of studies and explorations. I think one of Hugh Nibley’s remarks, and one that I hear from folks at FARMS on occasion, is that the simple fact that there is so much that can be found in the book, that invites exploration in a wide field of knowledge, across many disciplines (not only ancient history, geography, and Egyptology, but also geology [supervolcanoes]), demonstrates that it is far more than a literary creation. You might be able to assemble something similar today with a team of scholars, but how in the world did a farmer in a frontier village do it at age 24 in 1829? One of my speculations is that the Book of Mormon came forward at a moment in time when it was simply impossible to produce such a work through extant scholarship. If it were published in the last century, the critics would be looking for ghost writers all over the world of scholarship, polymaths like Hugh Nibley. But the fact that it was published in 1830 closes that option completely. None of the ways that books are normally written explains it.
So we Mormons believe all sorts of extraordinary things, but our experience with criticism and even persecution should teach us, of all people, to be skeptical of assertions that lack proper provenance.
One final note: Mormons are not the only people who are drawn to “faith promoting rumors.” One of the most ubiquitous set pieces in environmentalist popular literature is the denunciation of the wasteful ways of the white man made by Chief Seattle. It is in elementary school textbooks and posters and gets dragged out every Earth Day. The fact that it was written by a white publicist as a well-intentioned fiction makes no headway in quelling the myth, even for people who are told to their face by the author that it is fictional. A little consideration of the language of the text makes the notion that it is inauthentic obvious. But it lives on because it is what people WANT to hear about modern civilization and the crimes of
My personal take on the popularity of Global Warming is that it appeals to the same urge to indict mankind for profligacy, regardless of science for or against. This would not be the first time that Congress has acted against an alleged threat that was mostly mythical (e.g. the Edmunds-Tucker Act). Modern educated people laugh about the pious depiction of George Washington by Parson Weems, but the mythologizing about John F. Kennedy and other more recent figures has proceeded apace, with far more distorting effect on our political decisions.
