I’m surprised you frequent this site while still being Mormon because I had assumed the two were almost fundamentally mutually exclusive.
I am an ex-Mormon so yes I am biased etc etc. I do agree that ward communities have a lot of positive attributes, I wish it was possible to create and sustain something secular like that. (Perhaps it is and I just haven’t seen examples of it anywhere)
How do you justify believing in the religion on epistemic grounds? I left primarily because I could not tell myself I was intellectually honest while knowingly using a double standard for evidence for religion vs science & everything else. The way I see it, the entire belief system of the Church is premised upon emotional evidence (see: a personal witness from the spirit), which I personally cannot justify as sufficient basis to inform my entire worldview (especially in light of how incredibly easy and convincing it is for our brains to fabricate stimuli matching our expectations). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and anything unfalsifiable and impossible to replicate in a controlled setting does not count as extraordinary under any consistent standard I can think of.
I’m sorry if this seems like an attack on your beliefs as it wasn’t intended as so. I’m genuinely confused as to what sequence of events would result in someone passing through the inherent selection effects sufficient to end up here (and stay for any significant length of time) while being a believing Mormon. I do not have animosity to you personally.
Adequately answering this question would be at least its own blog post, but here’s a gesture at a response:
In the 1600s, there was a debate over whether natural philosophy should be structured like math (‘rationalists’) or whether it should be based on sense & memory (‘empiricists’). The empiricists won one of the most lopsided victories in the history of philosophy and empirical science was born.[1]
Joseph Smith & the Book of Mormon have a wildly more empirical approach than any of the religions at the time.[2] Alma 32′s ‘experiment on the word’. Moroni 10 is even framed in terms of falsifiability, a full century before Karl Popper introduced it to the philosophy of science.
Yes, observations can be theory-laden, but that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the empirical project—in theology any more than in other fields.
This is less relevant for you than for other people on this site, but I should maybe note that I don’t think that the evidence visible from outside the church is sufficient to ‘prove the existence of God’ or something like that. I do think that it is sufficient to justify a serious investigation, and that the empirical evidence builds up over time as you build a personal relationship with God.
See Shapin & Schafer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (book review) for more details. Despite being postmodernists, the authors have done substantial historical work.
Parts of Protestantism have since become more empirical, emphisizing personal experience with the Spirit over systematic theology. I think that this reflects Pentecostal influence, but am not familiar enough with the history to be sure.
I’m surprised you frequent this site while still being Mormon because I had assumed the two were almost fundamentally mutually exclusive.
I am an ex-Mormon so yes I am biased etc etc.
I do agree that ward communities have a lot of positive attributes, I wish it was possible to create and sustain something secular like that. (Perhaps it is and I just haven’t seen examples of it anywhere)
How do you justify believing in the religion on epistemic grounds?
I left primarily because I could not tell myself I was intellectually honest while knowingly using a double standard for evidence for religion vs science & everything else.
The way I see it, the entire belief system of the Church is premised upon emotional evidence (see: a personal witness from the spirit), which I personally cannot justify as sufficient basis to inform my entire worldview (especially in light of how incredibly easy and convincing it is for our brains to fabricate stimuli matching our expectations).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and anything unfalsifiable and impossible to replicate in a controlled setting does not count as extraordinary under any consistent standard I can think of.
I’m sorry if this seems like an attack on your beliefs as it wasn’t intended as so. I’m genuinely confused as to what sequence of events would result in someone passing through the inherent selection effects sufficient to end up here (and stay for any significant length of time) while being a believing Mormon. I do not have animosity to you personally.
Adequately answering this question would be at least its own blog post, but here’s a gesture at a response:
In the 1600s, there was a debate over whether natural philosophy should be structured like math (‘rationalists’) or whether it should be based on sense & memory (‘empiricists’). The empiricists won one of the most lopsided victories in the history of philosophy and empirical science was born.[1]
Joseph Smith & the Book of Mormon have a wildly more empirical approach than any of the religions at the time.[2] Alma 32′s ‘experiment on the word’. Moroni 10 is even framed in terms of falsifiability, a full century before Karl Popper introduced it to the philosophy of science.
Yes, observations can be theory-laden, but that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the empirical project—in theology any more than in other fields.
This is less relevant for you than for other people on this site, but I should maybe note that I don’t think that the evidence visible from outside the church is sufficient to ‘prove the existence of God’ or something like that. I do think that it is sufficient to justify a serious investigation, and that the empirical evidence builds up over time as you build a personal relationship with God.
See Shapin & Schafer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (book review) for more details. Despite being postmodernists, the authors have done substantial historical work.
Parts of Protestantism have since become more empirical, emphisizing personal experience with the Spirit over systematic theology. I think that this reflects Pentecostal influence, but am not familiar enough with the history to be sure.
Joseph Lawal on YouTube also has some good epistemology arguments, but I don’t remember which video they were in.