The Spinozist Mormon

The Spinozist Has Moved

2006-03-20T10:26:00.000-05:00

The Spinozist is now hosted here. Please update your links and bookmarks!

In the end, the allure of WordPress proved irresistible.

Aaron Eckhart on BYU and Mormonism

2006-03-16T14:42:00.000-05:00

Required to be in the car around midday, I had the good fortune to notice two Mormon connections on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. Audio available here.

(Image: Katie Holmes as a reporter, left, and Aaron Eckhart as super-lobbyist Nick Naylor in the upcoming Thank You for Smoking.)

The first half hour was an interview BYU alumnus Aaron Eckhart, who has been in a number of films, including four directed and/or written by fellow BYU alumnus Neil LaBute. LaBute was a graduate student in, what, I guess Theater and Film or whatever they would call it, and Eckhart was an undergrad in the same department. I’m a fan of Eckhart’s; his relatively brief performance in LaBute’s Nurse Betty was particularly riotous.

(I also like LaBute’s work, though I’m not sure how to read his In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, both of which he wrote as well as directed. The two films explore similar dark and twisted emotional territory, with the emotional sociopath ending up with the sweet girl in both cases. What I can’t tell is whether these are intended as tragedies/dark comedies, intended as cathartic depictions of unusual pathological cases; or as realistic depictions of the typical state of human relations. The title Your Friends and Neighbors seems to suggest the latter, but if so I have a bit of a hard time relating to it. But then, I often find depictions of human interactions in literature or movies unrealistic or unconvincing—“What is this? People aren’t that petty and mean in real life,” I often find myself thinking. Perhaps I have simply lived a sheltered existence.)

Anyway, in today’s interview (occasioned by his new film Thank You for Smoking), there is some discussion of how LaBute’s work didn’t fit in well at BYU, how they were locked out of the theater and had performances cancelled, how they did single unauthorized performances at like 8am, how he took a film ethics class from LaBute, how neither he nor LaBute—the department’s two most famous alumni, at least before Napoleon Dynamite came along—have ever been invited back. He did express warm feelings towards his Mormon upbringing, saying that it taught him certain values he appreciates, and something along the lines of ‘once a Mormon, always a Mormon, something that’s always a part of you that you can’t get away from’ and so on. Oh, and sisters, he said he’s 38 and childless, and joked about not getting too old to have children (whether or not he’s single did not come up).

The second half hour had an interview with journalist Elizabeth Weil, who recently wrote about the issue of ‘wrongful birth’ in The New York Times Magazine. Weil spoke of spontaneously answering her daughter’s question about where she was before birth with an answer like, ‘floating up in the sky,’ together with her sister—which seemed to be a great comfort to her daughter, but it was also an answer that distressed Weil in connection with her abortion of a fetus expected to have severe disabilities. Anyway, I found it interesting that the notion that a pre-mortal life may be as naturally imagined and desired as a post-mortal life, and I wondered why it doesn’t come up more often.

Do the prophets deny they lead by revelation, or encourage dissent?

2006-03-14T15:01:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: In response to RoastedTomatoes’ charge of unfairness, I changed the original title (The prophets speak: ‘We have no revelation, so we encourage dissent’), and made modifications marked with strikethroughs (old) and boldface (new) to the first and fourth paragraphs.]

In a couple of interesting posts (here and here), RoastedTomatoes uses responses of President Joseph F. Smith to a Senate committee, and of President Hinckley to the media, to ~~argue two conclusions~~ float for thought and discussion two propositions that many believing Saints would find startling. While I am interested in the relationship of such sources to doctrine, the particular arguments are interesting in their own right, and here I recycle and extend my own take on how the prophets understand these two points.

One startling proposition is that

Judging on the basis of President Joseph F. Smith’s sworn testimony from the beginning of the twentieth century, it would seem that the church has in fact survived through periods of years without revelation to its president. Furthermore, if President Hinckley’s statements at the end of the twentieth century may be taken seriously, it would seem that the church currently survives for significant stretches without revelation or inspiration.

I agree with RoastedTomatoes that there aren’t any indications that spectacular manifestations occur frequently, but I don’t think the prophets understand this as an absence of revelation.

RoastedTomatoes’ quotation of President Woodruff, cited the current Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society manual—published with the Church’s logo, copyrighted by Intellectual Reserve, Inc., and including an approval date (presumably by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve)—are a better indication of what the prophets think than pressured Senate testimony. President Woodruff’s reference to the necessity of daily revelation is closely related to the common view of having the ‘constant companionship’ commonly associated with the gift of the Holy Ghost, God’s fulfillment of his promise in the sacrament to “always have his Spirit to be with you.” In the context of the guidance of the Church by revelation, this means that the leading quorums have enormous faith in the process of unanimity in councils (D&C 107). In exercising their legitimate stewardship, when 15 people with the gift of the Holy Ghost start a discussion from 15 different points of view and come to unanimity, they understand this as the Lord having guided their decisions (or at least it not being grossly against his will).

The other unusual proposition, derived ~~from~~ using President Joseph F. Smith’s mention of hundreds who did not accept plural marriage while remaining in good fellowship as a specific example, ~~an acquaintance who didn’t believe in plural marriage~~ is that

…diverse systems of belief and even disbelief are compatible with full fellowship in our church. …even people who flatly reject important doctrines taught by church leadership are allowed to remain in full fellowship and good standing,

an assertion parlayed into putative prophetic endorsement of “legitimate dissent, which is apparently okay or even encouraged…,” based a media interview by President Hinckley.

However, the observed fact that people are not automatically kicked out of the Church for having some different beliefs than the authorities does not imply that the prophets have ever thought there was such a thing as “legitimate dissent” within the kingdom of God, outside of one’s stewardship. (Here, distinctions must be drawn between questions/doubts/criticisms, and the publication thereof.) Rather, their messages to the Church—as opposed to the outside media, including Joseph’s famous ‘they govern themselves’ quote—seem pretty consistent in considering dissent with the united voice of the leading quorums a shortcoming, and spiritually perilous. All Church members have all manner of ‘shortcomings’ (in the leaders’ view) for which they are not kicked out, but this does not mean the prophets think such things are “legitimate” or “encouraged.”

In the media exchange quoted in a comment to RoastedTomatoes’ post, President Hinckley acknowledges that “People think in a very critical way”—when?—“before they come into this Church. When they come into this Church they’re expected to conform” (emphasis added). The reporter then presses President Hinckley about questioning within the Church, at which point he makes an artful dodge by referring to all the thinking going on at ‘the largest private university in America’—BYU. But translating the homage he renders to ‘thinking for themselves’ into ‘encouraged dissent’ within the Church is an unjustified leap, given what we know about BYU: there are serious limitations on academic freedom and dissent on subjects related to the Church. There may be all kinds of questioning and thinking and dissent going on at BYU—of worldly philosophies! But the debates and dissent and questioning at BYU are not about, say, the First Vision, or Book of Mormon historicity.

While the specifics of these propositions are interesting, I hope to discuss an overarching issue in a separate post: whether Church members should make serious doctrinal conclusions based on statements made in the face of secular questioning that ranges from hostile, to unsympathetic, to shallowly curious.

Justin Butterfield, Mormon Wasp and Nauvoo Neighbor

2006-03-09T08:25:00.000-05:00

Q: How does Justin Butterfield, proprietor and editor of Mormon Wasp, know so much about Mormon history? A: As anyone who has read Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling knows, he lived it firsthand as the U.S. Attorney for Illinois during the era of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo.

Butterfield, then and now, seems to be a straight-shooting, just-the-facts ma’am sort of guy, whose occasional presence on both ‘sides’ suggests an aversion to overtly ideological or partisan agendas. Back in the day, he could on the one hand relentlessly dissect Joseph’s opaquely byzantine financial arrangements in an attempt to recover a debt Joseph incurred in the purchase of a steamboat that wrecked only weeks after its purchase, while simultaneously saving Joseph’s hide in an unrelated case, by successfully convincing both governor Thomas Ford and the Illinois Supreme Court that the extradition of Joseph to Missouri was unconstitutional. In the modern era, Butterfield holds the Church’s feet to the fire with contexts and differentials highlighted by juxtapositions with original documents, while also calling demagogues on the carpet as they grind their axes and deploy them in hatchet jobs against Mormonism.

What are we to make of this superannuated lawyer/historian, who can be both Wasp to the Mormons and Neighbor of Nauvoo? (Butterfield’s blog has used both names. Original readings are available for both of these Nauvoo newspapers—The Wasp, and its successor, The Nauvoo Neighbor. Their mottoes, reflective of Butterfield’s two modes: “Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again,” and “The Saints’ Singularity—Is Unity, Liberty, Charity.”) Some might think the name a bizarre coincidence, or a clever pseudonym (of who? Jed Woodworth, young Mormon scholar and prominently-named assistant for Rough Stone Rolling?). I prefer to think he’s one of the Three Nephites, called ensure the long-term viability of God’s work by both keeping it honest and defending it from unfair critics. (To cite another motto of more recent vintage, The Truth is Out There.)

Blogger Comment Feeds

2006-03-06T19:45:00.000-05:00

A ‘newsreader’ is an application or website that allows users to ‘subscribe’ to any website with a ‘feed.’ This allows them to keep abreast of many websites—blogs, for instance—without having to check them individually, by providing a single location at which they are automatically notified of new content at any and all of the websites to which they subscribe. Blogger provides feeds for posts, but not for comments to posts, which means that users may be automatically notified of posts in their newsreaders, but must manually check at each individual site for new comments. I have a trick for generating a comment feed with Blogger, but it has a couple of important limitations.

The trick is to set up an auxiliary blog in your Blogger account—whose feed will become your comment feed—and use Blogger’s capabilities for interactions via email to automatically route comments from your ‘real’ blog to your new auxiliary ‘comment’ blog. For example, if your main blog is ‘myblog.blogspot.com,’ you can create an auxiliary blog called ‘myblogcomments.blogspot.com.’ You will also need to create a dedicated email account, for example ‘myblog.comments@gmail.com,’ at an email host capable of automatic forwarding.

Here’s how to tie it all together. At myblog.blogspot.com, under the Settings tab and Comments subtab, at the bottom of the page put myblog.comments@gmail.com in the blank labeled “Comment Notification Address.” At myblogcomments.blogspot.com, under the Settings tab and Email subtab, in “Mail-to-Blogger Address” fill in something of your choice, such as “myblogcomments,” to make an address ’[Blogger username].myblogcomments@blogger.com’—and be sure to check the ‘Publish’ box next to this address. Finally, set up the email account myblogcomments@gmail.com to automatically forward to [Blogger username].myblogcomments@blogger.com, and voila, ‘http://myblogcomments.blogspot.com/atom.xml’ is your new comment feed! (The intermediate email account is necessary because Blogger will not allow a Mail-to-Blogger Address to be used as a Comment Notification Address.) As a final touch, you can add a line of HTML to the template of myblogcomments.blogspot.com—to which users may arrive from their newsreaders—that will automatically redirect them to your main blog.

I was initially quite pleased to have come up with this trick, but there are two serious limitations that are among the reasons I will be moving to WordPress in the near future. First, it does not seem to be completely robust: after 483 comments it crapped out for some mysterious reason, with all subsequent comments arriving as posts with ‘Draft’ status at myblogcomments.blogspot.com, instead of being automatically published. (So my comments feed is currently broken!) I don’t know why this happened—perhaps space or frequency limitations of some kind were exceeded—but I haven’t bothered to go to the effort to figure out the problem. The second serious limitation is that the form of the comment feed is not one that Mormon Archipelago and LDSelect can automatically use in their comment aggregations, unless the proprietors of these sites could be prevailed upon to write a special parser for these ad hoc Blogger comment feeds. I haven’t tried to persuade them; perhaps if enough people used this approach they might be willing to look into it. (Unfortunately Blogger comment email notifications only contain a link to the main post and not the individual comment, so even with special parsing the aggregators could not provide a direct link to the comment.)

Back in Black: Clearing Out the Muddled Middle

2006-02-23T22:37:00.000-05:00

After referring RoastedTomatoes to two previous posts of mine, his response made me wonder if isolated readings of various of my posts might give conflicting ideas about what I ‘really think,’ or incorrect or at least incomplete ideas about how I see the big picture. In part this is a reflection of genuine internal disarray on my part, but that’s not the whole story. As suggested by my opening post, I have rather skeptical inclinations these days. But perhaps impertinently, that doesn’t stop me—as can be observed in scattered threads and comments—from opining on what Mormonism really is, as opposed to what some might wish it to be or become. In doing so I have often asserted a conservative version of Mormonism—almost always, I think, with regard to behavior and practice, though I have expressed a variety of views on the relationship of freedom of thought and expression to doctrine.

So in the aggregate, there’s a sort of good cop / bad cop thing going on in my posts, reflecting a natural inclination on my part to see and clarify things in relatively black and white terms. The good cop in me tends toward challenging those who would like a ‘grey,’ pick-and-choose form of Mormonism they can more easily live with—a challenge that takes the form of trying to understand and explicate Mormonism on its own terms (i.e. how its prophetic leaders understand it). But also, the bad cop in me explores whether the epistemological underpinnings of Mormonism can be relied upon at all (as in the two older posts I referred RoastedTomatoes to).

The overall project is sort of consistent: to question and probe both ‘white’ and ‘grey’ forms of Mormonism, and to ask whether the ‘black’ of a secular worldview makes more sense, and if it could possibly make a fulfilling and more realistic life. (My intention was to reflect this not only in my opening post, but in the blog description at the top of the page.) I recognize that aficionados of ‘grey’ will see this as pushing the ‘grey’ into a ‘white’ straw man that the ‘black’ can more easily overcome. I don’t know what to say about that, except, let’s have the discussion.

I should also say that in the process I have come to appreciate a rare handful of people who are willing to thoughtfully consider the full range of issues, perhaps ‘grey’ to some extent, but who also seem to retain a clear understanding that a Mormonism without real top-down textual and/or institutional authority—authority with ‘teeth’—is simply incoherent. I appreciate being able to try and understand their ways as a possible alternative to both secular ‘black’ and what I see as unworkable versions of ‘grey’: the untenable notion that a cafeteria, pick-and-choose sort of Mormonism is viable, or the quixotic wish that a bottom-up, grassroots reformable Mormonism is in the cards.

Get off the speculation train

2006-02-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

I know this title is unoriginal, but I decided to hijack it for my present snarky purpose of busting Geoff J’s chops. (Geoff, sorry dude! This is probably ill-advised, but I’m just gonna get it off my chest anyway. To put a positive spin on it, take the individual treatment as a back-handed compliment. ;-> Though I should clarify up front that some of what I say below ended up slanted to cover no only Geoff’s brand of speculation, but also more material (i.e. relevant to real life) pickings and choosings among statements of varying authority that I would not attribute to Geoff—a subject I planned to post on separately, but that also ended up getting entangled with this one.)

I haven’t been a regular participant in Geoff’s threads, but I interactively test-drove a couple in the last week or so. In the end I found the immersion in speculation to be a frustrating wrestle with a Tar Baby. (And I suppose this briar patch of a post is my way of trying to make a self-styled Br’er Rabbit escape.) I’m not sure what Geoff is trying to do: serious pursuit of truth, or admittedly personal and unverifiable expressions and explorations of what he happens to feel is an æsthetically pleasing metaphysics, or just mental gymnastics for the sake of pure intellectual diversion. To make a parallel analogy with another oft-expressed faculty in our world, are we talking a serious attempt at procreation; a mutual and loving but heavily æsthetically-motivated non-procreative encounter; or purely recreational habitual auto-eroticism? Perhaps my frustration derives from an incorrect assumption that the first of these options—serious pursuit of truth, the siring of actual knowledge—is the goal.

What restrains our speculations? Geoff seems to just want to know if what he suggests is absurd or impossible. However, there is little that is absurd or impossible as a matter of logical or semantic necessity. A few more things are ‘impossible,’ or at least incomprehensible, according to known physical law and the more plausible interpretations of historical data; but believers accept some such ‘long shots’ on the basis of trusted prophetic experience and revelation, hoping for revisions and extensions of current scientific and historical understandings. Beyond physical law and history (physical, geological, biological, cultural, …), the only thing one has to suggest anything about eternal realities is revelation—if, of course, one accepts prophetic authority.

In this context, it is the manner of handling the revelations in the process of dealing with subject matter that can only be known by revelation that gets my goat, raises my hackles, blows my stack (and here I begin to speak beyond Geoff alone). I am sympathetic to, even persuaded by, the notion that scripture may be heavily human-mediated (or worse); but I think one is really at sea—or lost in space, to anticipate a comparison I will make momentarily—once one’s cosmic scenarios require the throwing of various pieces of scripture to the wind while retaining others, without some sort of method or specified basis for doing so beyond intuition, idiosyncratic preferences, desired alignment with particular modern social mores, or even personal revelation. Uncoupled now not only from physical law and history, but freed from the constraints of canonized revelation and authoritative statements as well, the cosmic discussion enters a kind of fantasy realm in which the reliability of the relation to eternal realities is about the same as that of science fiction novels and blockbusters—but without the mythic relevance and entertainment value (and possibilities for eye candy) of engaging sci-fi plots (and characters) of epic proportions.

Which is not to say that revelatory speculation might not be a fun hobby, or more seriously for some (not Geoff), even a compelling need in order to believe and act in accordance with what simply must be so without facing the pain of a material break with one’s socio-religious milieu. Maybe I’m reading intentions incorrectly, but I just don’t think we should kid ourselves that it ultimately amounts to anything beyond the expression of personal preference among the unlimited range of imaginative scenarios—anything that can be convincing, or be taken seriously in a public way as a kind of eternal worldview.

A Proposed Taxonomy of Bloggernacle Pathologies

2006-02-15T19:28:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of communal self-deprecation, I offer the following conjecture. Every participant in the Bloggernacle suffers from one—or, usually, more—of the following: (1) compared with your typical practicing Mormon, above-average discomfort with some aspect of Church doctrine, history, and/or practice; (2) compared with your typical practicing Mormon, above-average emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual loneliness; (3) compared with a typical practicing Mormon’s desire to share truth, a messiah complex.

With some trepidation I leave this post open for comments, subject to the following rule, which I imagine will suppress a large volume of potentially tempting applications: You may not affirm or deny the applicability of this conjecture to any specific person but yourself. Exception: If someone claims that the conjecture does not apply to they themselves, everyone is welcome to pile on and show them how it does in fact apply to them!

Mormon Topos Amongst the Political Quadrants

2006-02-12T17:24:00.000-05:00

I am no political scientist, but it seems to me that to a large extent politics consists of arguments about where policies should fall along a ‘control continuum’ ranging from paternalistic government compulsion to personal discretion, judgment, and responsibility. In a comment, Robert C. says it is hard to reconcile what he calls Ezra Taft Benson’s “libertarian” views with President Hinckley’s expressed willingness to legislate morality. But I think Robert’s dilemma is somewhat alleviated by conceptualizing two orthogonal axes of control continua, which off the top of my head I will call ‘economics’ (taxation, welfare, and so on) and ‘pleasures’ (sexuality, gambling, and so forth).

This results in four quadrants, to which I give the following impromptu labels:

Republican: Personal responsibility over economics, government control of pleasures
Democrat: Government control of economics, personal responsibility over pleasures
Libertarian: Personal responsibility over both economics and pleasures
Totalitarian: Government control over both economics and pleasures

I have named two quadrants after the two dominant contemporary political parties, whose current philosophies roughly fall within the given descriptions. Libertarianism is also a recognized but not currently ascendant political philosophy (and political party). ‘Totalitarian’ requires more explanation, as I am using it idiosyncratically: I do not mean the autocratic rule of a dictator or oligarchy, but a government that, in controlling both ‘economics’ and ‘pleasures,’ regulates the ‘totality’ of life to a greater extent than the philosophies of the other quadrants—a totality of regulation which can, however, be brought about in a democracy, imposed on a minority by the electoral will of the majority.

Now, back to Robert’s dilemma: I think the 20th century Church has been consistently willing to endorse legislation along the ‘pleasures’ axis. In this, there is likely no distinction or inconsistency between Ezra Taft Benson and Gordon B. Hinckley. However, things get a little more messy along the economics axis.

In recent decades at least, the Church as a whole has been rather neutral along the economics axis, which, when combined with a preference for government control of pleasures, means that official Mormonism today straddles the line between the Totalitarian and Republican quadrants.

However, some past individual official voices (Heber J. Grant and Ezra Taft Benson come to mind) and most individual Church members seem to absorb ‘work ethic’ together with ‘pleasures’ under a rubric of ‘individual worthiness,’ and seem to prefer its ‘schizophrenic’ implementation in the Republican quadrant, rather than one of the ‘consistent’ Libertarian or Totalitarian quadrants. (Weird! My guess is that this is a legacy of Heber J. Grant’s underappreciated transformative and lasting imprint on the Church, which among other things included a combination of willingness to endorse Prohibition with his revulsion at ‘the dole.’)

Those less common Mormons for whom social justice is seen as a government imperative tend in practice to go Democrat rather than Totalitarian, probably both to be in a party that actually has some power, and also to avoid the despised ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ labels. (These are so despised that pseudonyms seem required. Cases in point: RoastedTomatoes of LDS Liberation Front and Watt Mahoun of MormAnarchy. I’m not sure where these guys fall, but if in addition to their social justice concerns they agree with the Church’s support of legislating the pleasures axis, their placement in the Totalitarian quadrant would make their title concepts of Liberation and Anarchy highly ironic!)

Are government welfare programs Satanic?

2006-02-10T18:54:00.000-05:00

Drawing upon uniquely Mormon resources provided in Alma and the Book of Moses, J. Nelson-Seawright (a.k.a. RoastedTomatoes) has cobbled together a nifty liberation-theology-style argument about poverty being Satanic that Catholics could only dream of. I’m no fan of poverty, and I am definitely a fan of JNS/RT’s fine blog; but I wonder, could similar logic be used to arrive at a result expressly repugnant to what I would guess this Latter-day Left-winger’s political predilections might be?

Money quote:

Within Mormon theology, the concept of being compelled to make a spiritually desirable choice — and therefore losing agency and blessings with respect to that choice — is associated with Satan. Indeed, some program or other built around these ideas is typically presented as having been Satan’s plan in the preexistence. This discussion has argued that poverty plays a partially coercive role in people’s moral and spiritual lives to the extent that, as Alma says, it compels humility and acceptance of the gospel. Hence, there is some reason to believe that poverty is, in Mormon theological categories, a Satanic force in our world.

So here’s my question: If coercion is the key diagnostic of Satanic forces, are government welfare programs—in which a spiritually desirable choice (helping the poor) is enforced by involuntary contributions in the form of taxes—also Satanic?

I suppose it might be argued that taxes are levied by democratically elected officials, and are therefore voluntary in some corporate sense; but in terms of morality and spirituality, it is individual motives that matter, and any individual who chooses not to pay taxes for any length of time will soon find out how voluntary they really are.

[Note: I didn’t take the time to read the comments on JNS/RT’s post. I hope someone already didn’t come up with this question, or I will look really foolish.]

Become a blog reader with the baddest newsreader

2006-02-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

I used to use Bloglines to subscribe to feeds of blogs I wanted to keep up with, but I switched to Google reader. (Google is starting to rule the world, rightly so, with its variety of fine resources and services.)

The thing about Bloglines that can get overwhelming is that if you have a lot of subscriptions you sort of feel obligated to check them all out, clear every unread item.

In contrast, Google reader’s default mode is “relevance.” The way it works is there is a “lens” you scan over unread items and click on something when you want to read it. (There is also a mechanism for “saving” things by marking them with a “star.”) As time goes by it learns what you’re most interested in—presumably which blogs, which authors, which subject matter, etc.—based on what you actually click on to read. Whenever you refresh the reading list it takes the unread items from all your subscriptions and sorts them with some mysterious algorithm involving both how recently posts were published and your interests based on past reading selections.

This way the new and interesting (to you) stuff tends to automatically show up near the top of your list, and you can just let the stuff lower down the list slough off without the guilt of seeing all these “unread” indicators in Bloglines.

So join Google juggernaut on its rise to world domination. Use the Google reader—with, of course, your first subscriptions being the posts and comments here at The Spinozist Mormon:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSpinozistMormon

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSpinozistMormonComments

Let me know if you’re interested in subscribing but need a little more help to get started.

(P.S. As this post neared completion I noticed its unintentional chiastic structure, born not of conscious literary design but its natural ‘in and out’ logical structure...)

Abstaining Your Way to Athletic Prowess

2006-02-08T22:24:00.000-05:00

If you noticed this old post of mine, or the inordinate intellectual effort I expended on an embarrassingly large number of comments on this thread, you may have guessed that I am not a fan of abstinence. Gold star! You have divined correctly. Hence an article on the front page—above the fold, no less—in today’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye: in honor of the approaching Olympics, a discussion on the use of abstinence to improve athletic performance. (The connection to economics, or political and foreign affairs affecting economics—the W$J’s usual bread and butter—remains obscure.) There is a dispute between tradition and science about abstinence’s effectiveness, and the Book of Mormon even weighs in on the issue.

The article begins with a history lesson: Plato informs us of Ikkos of Tarentum, whose preparations for his Pentathlon win in 444 B.C. included the consumption of “large quantities of wild boar, cheese, and goat meat,” and coating himself “in olive oil to make his rippled body gleam.” But he also “believed that abstinence before competition was essential for preserving athletic vigor.”

The article goes on to mention several modern Olympians who employ abstinence, including “a married ice dancing pair on the U.S. Olympic figure skating team [who] will be ‘saving their energy for the ice’ in Turin,” and a U.S. Olympic triathlete who “says he went 233 days without sex before the 2004 Athens Olympics.” (I’m thanking my lucky stars I did not marry an ice dancer, and that I was able to resist the overpowering allure of devoting my life to triathlons.) One U.S. swimmer who won three gold medals in 1996 blames his failure to qualify for the 2004 games on his blissful encounter with his wife only hours before the trials. Oh, the lifelong regret stemming from a moment of weakness: “I wish I’d planned a little better.”

But abstinence is not only for Olympians. “The abstinence tradition is particularly strong in such sports as boxing and football, where the theory holds that sexual frustration leads to increased aggression.” One boxer “typically goes without sex for 11 weeks [Where does that number come from?] before a major fight. ‘If you have sex, you’re in a very good mood,’ Mr. Corrales says. ‘That’s a problem when you get into the ring.’ ” Several NFL teams require their players to check into hotels, even before home games; the Steelers coaches conduct room checks. (Hence the Super Bowl victory, no doubt.)

However,

Several scientists have looked for physiological evidence about the effects of sex, in an eclectic collection of small and sketchy studies. They offer no support for the ritual of abstinence—and some even suggest sex could help an athlete. [Now we’re talking!]

In 2000, the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine published a comprehensive review of the topic titled “Does Sex the Night Before Competition Decrease Performance?” [your government research dollars hard at work.] … According to the article, normal sexual intercourse between married partners expends only 25 to 50 calories—the energy equivalent of walking up two flights of stairs. [Is this a definitive result in real-world conditions, or a commentary on the stagnant routinization of married love?] In addition, the article dismisses the notion that sex leads to muscle weakness, citing several studies involving hand-grip strength tests. [Sweet!]

A study published in 2000 in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness … concluded that sex had ‘no detrimental influence on the maximal workload achieved, or on the athletes’ mental concentration.’ (As part of the study, the athletes were given a math quiz shortly after having sex.) [Note: unlike the other parenthetical asides in square brackets in this extended quote, the preceding parenthetical is a genuine part of the article.]

Some beneficial athletic effects cited included a finding that “sexual stimulation has a powerful analgesic effect in women, and can markedly increase a woman’s tolerance for pain.” Also found were increased testosterone levels that enhance muscle development, and a reduction of the stress and anxiety that accompany competition, “crucial in sports that require fine motor coordination, such as archery, golf, diving, pool, and pistol shooting.” (Perhaps this is why Minnesota Fats never won a major billiards tournament.)

Which is right, tradition or modern research? Abinadi came down on the side of tradition, asking the same question of the priests of Noah that modern NFL coaches ask today: “Why do ye commit whoredoms and spend your strength with harlots?” (As I recall this comes through even more vividly in the Spanish translation as ‘dissipating your vigor.’) But perhaps the physiological findings and coaches’ experience can be reconciled by that perennial American source of higher wisdom: old baseball hands. “Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player,” notes legendary former Yankees manager Casey Stengel. “It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

Spinozist Karma in Super Bowl XL

2006-02-05T18:29:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: Post-game comment below.]

I don’t watch sports hardly at all—they're more fun to play than to watch. But I do try to watch the championship games in most sports.

I usually don’t have strong feelings for either team. I do have a general sympathy for the underdog (mostly in hopes of an exciting game), and also a mild prejudice for teams from the west since I grew up in California. Both of these factors point to the Seahawks, but what really puts the gods on their side is their sweet uni’s: can’t beat the Spinozist monochrome color scheme. If they win I may even add fluorescent green accents.

UPDATE: Well, Seattle couldn’t get it done; in the end an interception and a successful gimmick play by the Steelers did them in. Imagine how bad it would’ve been without the Spinozist color scheme karma.

The silver lining of the loss is that I don’t feel any obligation to add fluorescent green accents to the template. And that, win or lose, the color scheme still looks good on the Sea Gals.

A Masterpiece? Alma 36

2006-02-04T14:34:00.000-05:00

A recent comment in which John F. playfully proclaimed himself “the chiasmus Nazi” renewed my curiosity about the subject. Some, like John F., are unapologetic (forgive the anti-pun) about chiasmus as evidence for ancient origins; other interested students are more nuanced in their claims. (The brilliant doggerel in the first link of the preceding sentence, so apropos to the thread in which it appeared, is not to be missed. I wish I knew the identity of its true author so I could offer well-deserved recognition.) John’s comment provoked me to read both “Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm” by Earl M. Wunderli in the latest issue of Dialogue, and “A Masterpiece: Alma 36” by John W. Welch in the FARMS compilation Rediscovering the Book of Mormon. Here, in addition to mentioning some questions raised by Wunderli, I offer my own half-baked speculation as to how inverted parallel structure with significant ties to the meaning of the text could arise without an author’s conscious intent.

A number of considerations may induce doubt as to whether Alma 36 is an objectively verifiable, purposeful, carefully crafted masterwork of chiasmus. Differences in Welch’s chiastic parsings over time and differences between the chiastic structurings perceived by different authors undermine the objectivity of its alleged presence. In a couple of instances the chiastic structure is imperfect, with no apparent subsidiary purpose for the deviations; this is implicitly admitted in Welch’s graphical constructions, but goes uncommented in his brief accompanying commentary. Some claimed pairings exhibit nontrivial imbalance. Selectivity seems to be an important question: some words designated as key to the chiastic structure occur in other places, but are not given much weight as evidence against a tight chiastic construction. Another manifestation of potential selectivity is that some important ideas seem not play a role in the chiastic structure—a structure that relies in part on seemingly less-significant words.

Having noted these cautions against the manifest presence of tight crafting, there nevertheless seems to be an overall sense of inverse parallel structure—more than Wunderli seems to credit—but I’m not sure it’s obviously purposeful. John F.’s elite Oxford breeding leads him to believe that

…intricate literary forms that combine both substance and form into the structure of a passage so that because of the substance the form conveys its meaning even more strongly simply do not happen unconsciously.

I don’t know how John’s Oxford colleagues feel about Alma 36, but I offer two suggestions as to how this very thing could happen unconsciously—one specific to Alma 36, and the second more generally applicable.

For one thing, Welch seems to think that Alma made an astutely appropriate æsthetic choice in selecting the chiastic form for a conversion story centered on the Savior, but this argument can be turned on its head: the spontaneous narration of pre-conversion conditions, a conversion to Christ, and the contrasting post-conversion aftermath could quite naturally take on an unconsciously inverse parallel form like that in Alma 36.

More generally, and by way of explaining some detailed features, in laying out a linked chain of ideas it could be somewhat natural for the human mind to ‘drill down’ into the argument in one direction, and then follow the same logical chain back out again. This may be particularly so for (originally) oral texts, where I get the sense most chiasms originate. (Note in particular the oral origin of Alma 36, either with Alma talking with his son or Joseph dictating his imagination of this scene. Are we to think that Alma carefully crafted a written masterpiece for the occasion of parting counsel to his sons? And moreover, that he then read it to his first son, but not to his other two sons?) To begin and end with the same logical point is of course naturally pleasing, and may even be the explicit intent of the orator/author. However, the overall inverse parallel structure might not necessarily represent artistic purpose, but instead constitute a window into the orator’s mind working its way back on the fly—not by fixed memorization or deliberate composition, but by active (and sometimes meandering and imprecise) real-time logical processing back to the starting point. (N.B.: work on this post last night was interrupted by putting our girls to bed, during which our three-year-old uttered a spontaneous elementary inverse parallelism: “Tuck me in, mommy, tuck me in!”)

The possibility of ambiguity and selectivity in the attempted extraction of a tight and precise chiastic masterpiece, together with a possible cognitive explanation of the spontaneous generation of an inverse parallel structure, constitute sufficient reasons to not consider Alma 36 as incontrovertible objective evidence for the Book of Mormon’s historicity; but the content, as opposed to the form, of this very chapter yields an even more important reason for believers to not lean on it heavily:

And I would not that ye think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God. Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things.

This suggests a scriptural claim that should give us pause: no objective evidence—the kind demonstrable by secular arguments, and available even to carnal minds—could ever yield conviction of the truths important to Alma and other believers. When presented with claims to the contrary, beware: if Alma’s assertion about the nature of his knowledge is to be believed, such ‘evidences’ are almost certainly not as incontrovertible as they are occasionally made out to be.

Apologetics: Place and Purposes

2006-02-01T21:33:00.000-05:00

Encountering some concerns of mine about apologetics (here and here), David J is moved to ask if I think “there’s a place for apologetics at all”. At the risk of repeating myself, let me clarify: I do think there are uses for the engagement of Mormonism with secular evidence and styles of argumentation. But I think that from within a believing Mormon perspective, the places and purposes for it are rather circumscribed.

I think that almost always the appropriate place for such engagement is ‘unofficial discourse,’ which is conveniently defined as everything that falls outside of ‘official discourse.’ (This of course places the definitional onus on ‘official discourse,’ which for me includes that which occurs in formal Church meetings, and anything published under the Church’s name—today, that which is copyrighted by Intellectual Reserve, Inc.) I’m glad that FAIR and FARMS and alternative publications and blogs exist to populate this realm of unofficial discourse, since I believe that secular evidence and arguments can occasionally be useful probes of religious doctrine and claims of authority. (Only occasionally, because religious claims tend to be otherworldly, and the evidence for and fruits of these claims difficult to objectively assess—all of which tends to preclude secular approaches. Sometimes the rare opening for secular analysis is on foundational matters of great moment, however, such as the Book of Mormon.)

For someone working from within a believing and committed Mormon perspective, I think appropriate purposes for engaging secular evidence and styles of argumentation would be (1) to refute demonstrable falsehoods propagated by detractors, and battle skeptical arguments back towards neutral ground by offering possible alternative interpretations of inconvenient data, thereby providing room for faith for investigators, and serving as a safety net for those who waver for intellectual reasons; and (2) to improve one’s understanding of the meaning of scriptural texts through knowledge of their cultural background. I think it would be very rare for (1) to be a good idea in official discourse, since it unnecessarily exposes members spanning the complete ranges of experience and interest to potential difficulties they might never otherwise encounter. But (2) may sometimes be suitable for official discourse, if any differences from scholarly consensus can be honestly presented—rather than elided—without distracting from official discourse’s core aims (which, I suspect, will very often be a problem).

In either official or unofficial discourse, I think going beyond these valid purposes—with attempts at secularly accessible ‘proofs’ of the Restoration, or presentation of affirmative publicly assessable evidence to induce faith—would be misguided for two reasons.

First, the secular evidence is probably never sufficiently clear-cut, so that attempts to make strong affirmative arguments—especially with the degree of simple clarity required by the imperatives of official discourse—lead either to intellectual dishonesty (in the forms of shading arguments or omitting evidence) or eventual egg on the face, thereby undermining the cause in the long run.

Second, and more important, is what we might call ’the intellectual Tower of Babel problem.’ Use of secular evidence and argumentation is not the way the scriptures have outlined for acquiring faith. From a believing perspective, such would constitute an end run around the appointed means—means that are alleged to result in the acquisition of godly attributes, and not mere cognitive assent.

Open Thread on Julie’s Closed Thread; or, How should we interact with authority?

2006-01-31T17:40:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: Julie revised the verbiage explaining her decision to turn off comments. My references to 200 comments and the babysitting she didn’t want to take on allude to the original version.]

If Julie doesn’t want 200 comments on her post on women’s authority, I'll take them. (Actually, since the T&S readership is about 200 times the readership of this blog, we might expect this post to garner of order 1 comment.) As for the babysitting she didn’t want to take on, I won’t bother; I trust you to behave as the courteous adults you are. I’ll kick things off with two observations, one specific, and the second more general.

First, regarding Paul’s parallel Christ:God :: woman:man, Julie argues that “The relationship of woman to man–as paralleled to Christ and God–is not eternal. …since Christ ultimately inherits all that the Father has, it implies that the heirarchical aspect of the male-female relationship is temporary.” I don’t think Joseph’s teachings support this. I quote from Bushman, who quotes the King Follett discourse:

“I saw the father work out a kingdom with fear & trembling & I can do the same & when I get my K[ingdom] work[ed out] I will present [it] to the father & it will exalt his glory and Jesus steps into his tracks to inherit what God did before.”

The words evoked a hierarchy [!] of gods, succeeding to higher stations of greater glory as kingdoms are presented to them and as rising souls below them ascend to godhood.

So while Jesus becomes like the Father and gains all that he hath, there remains an eternal hierarchy.

Second, in a couple of places where she cannot obtain a satisfactory reading, she seems to feel free to disregard it, saying “Paul is making an argument from nature/culture that probably won’t persuade many modern readers.” Why not apply that to the entirety of Paul’s teachings on women—or, if “cultural baggage” is pervasive, to all of scripture? What are the criteria used to separate the wheat from the chaff? If it is ‘that which is not persuasive to modern readers,’ we may as well treat all of scripture not as if it has normative authority, but ‘only’ with the same seriousness we take any other great literature worthy of our attention and consideration, but not necessarily our obedience (a result, I confess, to which I am rather tempted).

Jim F. provides more questions than answers in his lessons, so I can’t know for sure; I don’t get the fundamentalist inerrancy vibe, or a drive for harmonization, but I get the sense that he would rather leave questions unanswered than presume to dismiss any canonized text. I still don’t quite get what he’s doing, and I don’t know if I can be persuaded do the same; but there seems to be something special in his approach (‘patience’ and ‘gravitas’ come to mind). There seems to be querying, even respectful probing; but then simply listening, sometimes, perhaps often, for answers that do not come; but in no case does there seem to be an impatient need to force resolutions.

It is, I suppose, a remarkably mature trust in and patience with the word, and those granted custody over its canonization status—neither of which is expected to be perfect, but is also not to be transcended. Again, for myself I am not sure it is a trust I can muster, but his posture is one I can respect. I can see either taking the whole ball of wax with a grain of salt—a kind of passive leave-taking—or, alternatively, thinking and waiting patiently; but when the issue is a text (or Church) claiming legitimate authority from God, a kind of pushy activism aimed at change is a stance I am not sure makes much sense.

Use and Abuse of Hidden Biases

2006-01-30T19:15:00.000-05:00

Recently published:

Studies presented at the conference, for example, produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often influence why people choose their [fill-in-the-blank], and that [fill-in-the-blank] stubbornly discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.

What would you guess goes in the blanks?

As you can read in today’s Washington Post, the terms in the two blanks above are not ‘religion’ and ‘believers’ as you might have feared, but “political affiliations” and “partisans.” Perhaps there is still reason for concern, however: it’s no accident that politics and religion are proverbially linked as subjects to be avoided in social situations calling for decorous avoidance of conflict. The following phenomenon, for example, surely rings true for religious as well as political partisans:

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy—but only in candidates they opposed.

So what do the brain scans have to do with this? This is where it gets interesting:

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats—the scans showed that “reward centers” in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.

Ah, the sweet rewards—or should we say guilty pleasures?—of uncritical loyalty and devotion.

It seems reasonable to guess that a biologically measurable tendency like this has an evolutionary basis: aside from the fact that the tendency to follow the leader of the pack surely preceded the ability to rationally question him, in terms of survival (and happiness) value Social Coherence probably gives Truth a serious run for its money.

Perhaps we can be grateful that the human brain’s primal addiction to filtered information, its natural capacity for cognitive dissonance, prevents valuable bonds from unraveling unnecessarily or prematurely; but as with any evolved tendency—whose very existence at least hints that it ‘works,’ or at least used to, at some level, for something—there are reasons to not allow it unchecked sway. (Cases in point: sex and violence.) We rightly value valiant fidelity and half-blind, long-suffering charity. But it is also written that some wrenching conversions are necessary, even if they divide families, and promise not peace but the sword.

Listening—giving new and scary views fair consideration—doesn’t seem to have a lot to recommend it, since it may cost you your life, or at least your life as you know it. And yet, depending on party affiliation, we cannot help admiring and hoping to emulate the likes of Joseph and Jesus, or Spinoza and Socrates—all men who found unexamined religious and even physical lives not worth living, and preferred the truth that made them lonely but free to the loyalty that would have made them happy and prosperous.

Ensign Apologetics After All

2006-01-28T23:34:00.000-05:00

I recently said that “there may have been a trend towards leaving the sort of work FARMS does out of official Church discourse—magazines, lesson manuals, conference talks.” Unfortunately for my predictive credibility, the very next issue of the Ensign happens to contain an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls by Andrew C. Skinner that strikes some distinctly apologetic chords. More unfortunately, however, examples of bad argumentation and bad arguments in this article illustrate my larger point: including apologetics in the Ensign and other vehicles of official Church discourse may not be the best idea.

A discussion of ancient scriptural media wraps an accomodating archaeological fact in a mantle of overblown argumentation that saps this fact’s impact for the thoughtful reader. After explaining that in ancient times scriptures were usually recorded on scrolls rather than ‘books’ bound from individual pages, Skinner remarks that “Metal plates are an important exception.” Because he is discussing archaeology, the fact that he does not specify any examples of these metallic books leaves the mistaken impression that this is an archaeological conclusion, when in reality he can only be thinking of the stacks of plates mentioned in the Book of Mormon. He goes on to say that “The Prophet Joseph Smith’s claim to have translated the Book of Mormon from metal plates was given significant credibility” by the discovery of the Copper Scroll among the discoveries at Qumran. If out of the enormous numbers of scrolls from the ancient Near East we have only a single example of a metallic scroll (not book!), can we in good conscience declare that “the use of metal as an important scribal material in the Holy Land is now beyond question”?

Note that in two separate cases here he claims how “important” metallic records were—a conclusion that cannot be sustained on the basis of a single isolated example of a metallic scroll. Metallic records are “important” to believers in the historicity of the Book of Mormon, but this is (or ought to be) of no moment in an archaeological argument. The conclusions of an archaeological argument ought to rest on the publicly verifiable physical evidence; but because in official Church discourse the historical reality of widespread ancient use of metallic media is a foregone revealed conclusion, a more evenhanded presentation of the physical evidence seems impossible. Such manifestly unbalanced presentations are an indication that evidentiary discussions of this kind simply do not belong in a dogmatic venue like the Ensign, which is understandably and rightfully overtly partisan.

The article goes on to mention many features of the Qumran community with resonance for Latter-day Saints: records buried to come forth in a future day, an expanded canon, apostasy and restoration, priesthood hierarchy, consecration, separation of a holy community from the world, interest in the temple and associated requirements of worthiness and purity, and so on.

But other features contrary to the faith of the Latter-day Saints make it clear they were not ancient Mormons. They had no Melchizedek Priesthood, or any temple ordinances like ours, and some of Jesus’ teachings seem like direct rebuttals to some of their ideas. Skinner describes them as having good intentions and doing the best they could. “They accomplished much, but without the Melchizedek Priesthood and authorized prophets they erred in many things.”

In the end, Skinner’s attempted apologetic summary based on these considerations backfires, potentially detracting from rather than supporting Joseph's claims. His conclusion is that

…we can certainly see how some of the theological ideas found in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could have been perfectly at home in an authentic ancient setting. [Big surprise, since Mormonism is after all a Biblical religion!]

It is important to remember, though, that LDS doctrines and practices paralleling some of the ideas found in the Dead Sea Scrolls were in fact brought forth by Joseph Smith long before the discovery of those ancient documents. … Joseph Smith was not a lucky forecaster. He was the Lord’s prophet of the Restoration…

Why is this an unwise argument to make? Note the implication of the fact that all these ideas resonant for Latter-day Saints could be generated from an Old Testament legacy by the well-meaning but uninspired and unauthorized Qumran community: a modern group in possession of the same rich Biblical legacy—led by Joseph Smith, in our particular case—also facing the problem of a fragmenting religious tradition showing symptoms of worldly corruption, could also have generated similar ideas without divine aid. If we view the Qumran community as being well-intentioned but mistaken about having a divine commission, we must ask if the same is true of us as well.

This is an interesting and informative article, unfortunately marred by the apologetic flourishes. Of course, it’s the apologetic conclusions that make it relevant for the Ensign. Maybe it confirms the convictions of the masses, but I think we have here an example in which for those able to step back from foregone conclusions and read between the lines, it potentially detracts from rather than confirms faith.

The Relevance to Evolution of Brigham’s Science-friendly Statements

2006-01-25T15:58:00.000-05:00

Jared has a nice post on the changing publication history of a very interesting quote from Brigham Young, and Jeffrey and Clark give some other interesting statements of Brigham’s. No question it’s gratifying to perceive support for one’s own sympathies for science in general, and interpretational flexibility of Genesis in particular, from someone of Brigham's stature; but there are some reasons for enthusiasts of naturalistic evolution to not to get too excited.

First, Clark italicizes a statement that, taken out of the context of the totality of Brigham’s thought, seems open to evolution; but Brigham surely did not intend it as such. In saying “Our spirits are His: He begot them. We are His children; He set the machine in motion to produce our tabernacles,” the ‘setting in motion’ Brigham had in mind could only have been the initial procreation by divine beings of the first parents of the human race, and not the initiation of naturalistic evolution by the creation of rudimentary single-celled (or even sub-cellular) life.

Second, the full statement Clark cited has potentially conflicting ideas on God being subject to natural law and God decreeing natural law, and also gives some ammunition to Intelligent Design advocates. Says Brigham,

But it is hard to get the people to believe that God is a scientific character, that He lives by science or strict law, that by this He is, and by law he was made what He is; and will remain to all eternity because of His faithful adherence to law.

So far, so good; sounds like God as Engineer. But then he immediately says

It is a most difficult thing to make the people believe that every art and science and all wisdom comes from Him, and that He is their Author. … It is strange that scientific men do not realize that, all they know is derived from Him; to suppose, or to foster the idea for one moment, that they are the originators of the wisdom they possess is folly in the highest!

Here Brigham is either not recognizing a distinction between God as Engineer and God as First Cause, or is at least denying man’s ability to discover the regularities of nature through the scientific method without divine inspiration. Finally, a general teleological argument:

As for ignoring the principle of the existence of a Supreme Being, I would as soon ignore the idea that this house came into existence without the agency of intelligent beings.

For more on the distinction between God as First Cause and God as Engineer, and the styles of arguments from design they respectively inspire, see this post.

Finally, with regard to the ultimate relevance of Jared’s well-done and much-appreciated detective work: when it comes to what people and organizations take as religious doctrine, older and original are not always deemed more true. In fact, the opposite may be true. (This is contrary—not inappropriately, for science of course, and perhaps also for a religion with acknowledged infallible authorities and an open canon—to the usual values historians deploy in plying their craft.) We applaud Brigham for applying this principle in recognizing the limitations of the creation account in Genesis, by taking account of what we ‘know’ today—either by science or revelation/inspiration—that previous prophets did not. However, this freedom to set aside older statements is a two-edged sword: we may be less excited about the contemporary Church availing itself of this principle in selecting for current consumption only the portions of Brigham’s statements that are today considered good doctrine by the current presiding authorities.

[This is cross-posted from Mormons and Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

Poisoned Fruit, Interstate Commerce, and so-called ‘Domestic Spying’

2006-01-24T10:14:00.000-05:00

This week the Bush administration executes a blitz aimed at turning a political liability into a club with which to beat those wimpy Democrats over the head yet again on issues of national security. If you are an active Mormon, not only will you be a patriot; statistically you’re overwhelmingly likely to also be a political conservative, who will therefore want to support this righteous cause. The playbook: (1) Explain the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ problem when liberals whine that we already have the FISA court, and (2) Insist on the adjective ‘transnational’ instead of ‘domestic,’ and for good measure throw an analogy with the commerce clause in their face.

You see, Bush’s mere redefinition from “domestic spying” to “terrorist surveillance”—which may be sufficiently effective with the public at large—will not cut it with your smarty-pants friends around the water cooler. In the comfortable complacency that goes with taking one of the great blessings of this free nation for granted—abundant supplies of chilled water in workplaces everywhere—your American-self-loathing friends will dismiss the manifest imperative to ‘get the terrorists’ with a casual (and limp-wristed) wave of the hand, and hold forth instead with high-minded indignation, using eloquent (but nasal-toned) phrases like ‘infringing our liberties.’

You can’t compete with their fancy words, but you know they’re wrong, and that if it wouldn't mean losing your job you could take a page from the CIA’s playbook and get them to admit their self-deceptive errors with a modicum of waterboarding. (How do you like that chilled water now?! Ready for some domestic survellience yet? No? Have some more then!)

Since this option is sadly unavailable, read on and prepare yourself to administer crushing blows on the amateur intellectual battlefield, armed with armchair legal arguments. Depending on how much actual legal knowledge your pencil-necked friends have, you will either impress them greatly or embarrass yourself horribly. But at least you’ll have something to say.

The first argument in Bush’s favor has to do with why even the FISA allowance for 72-hour backdated warrants in the case of emergencies are insufficient. Having watched Law and Order episodes since you were a babe on your mother’s knee, you know that such warrants still must be obtained without any ‘fruit of the poisoned tree.’ That is to say, suppose the only thing I have on American citizen Abu is an intercepted international call—selected only on the basis of automated data mining—saying “Abu, Osama says you should execute the plan next week.” I could not use this evidence to justify a back-dated warrant to obtain this same evidence. And yet it seems like a reasonable piece of evidence to obtain and act upon.

The second point is that a key legal element seems to be the international nature of the communications. Seize on this as a conservative revenge on the commerce clause. (School desegregation was of course a good thing, but just to show the slenderness of the legal threads upon which such weighty conclusions are hung, I am told that Brown v. Board of Education relied on an obscure footnote in a case on interstate shipments of milk.) Just as the commerce clause gives the federal government the right to regulate essentially anything—from abortion to guns—with the most remote or tangential interstate connection, so transactions traversing the nation’s borders give the Commander-in-Chief considerable leeway in making use of them for national defense. So there!

Go forth, conservatives, and spread the good word: not only is Bush pushing the religious right’s agenda of moral purity we Mormons crave, he’s kicking terrorist arse wherever he finds it. Not only does he assure us that “I'm mindful of your civil liberties and so I had all kinds of lawyers review the process”—he’s got quality legal backing from the Spinozist as well.

Chapel Hill, NC: Young Rock and Religious Studies

2006-01-16T10:37:00.000-05:00

An unfortunate and unprecedented pair of back-to-back trips: on the (Tar)heels of last week’s travel, this week I spend a few days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of the University of North Carolina.

It’s perhaps not surprising that there aren’t many movies relating to Chapel Hill. In fact the only thing I could find to continue my recent tradition of movie images commemorating my travel destinations was Chapel Hill: Young Rock, a documentary of this university town’s music scene during it’s peak of the early 90’s.

UNC also boasts Professor Charlesworth, famous expert on the Pseudepigrapha with occasional connections to FARMS. I seem to recall an account of John Welch showing him the chiasmus in Alma 36. Was he persuaded it constituted evidence of antiquity? As I recall his response was something along the lines of, ‘Mormons are fortunate. Their book is very beautiful.’

Another thought on religious studies at UNC: A few weeks ago I heard part of an interview with Bart Ehrman, the chair of the UNC religious studies department on the NPR show Fresh Air, who is, oxymoronically, agnostic. Is this common in religious studies departments? I may not be remembering this exactly right, but it seems he had gone from something like Episcopalian to fundamentalist Evangelical to agnostic, based on the fact that the words and message of the New Testament could not be recovered with sufficient accuracy to be relied upon.

On the radio show he spoke of how the four gospels had different theological agendas and that harmonization of them ought not be imposed. As I recall he said Mark depicted a suffering, bewildered Jesus, while Luke portrayed a more transcendent, powerful Christ (for example, compare the Mark’s plaintive ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ to Luke’s Christ confident of arriving in paradise declaring, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit.’) He argued that Jesus’ suffering in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood, is not in the earliest manuscripts of Luke, and that it was likely added by a later scribe in an attempt at harmonization with, say, Mark’s theology of the suffering Christ. This would seem to be an interesting question for Latter-day Saints, since King Benjamin speaks of the drops of blood. Any insight out there from all you LDS Bible scholars out there? In any case, Ehrman’s many works on the New Testament look interesting.

Perhaps what I need to know more urgently, however, is whether the music scene in Chapel Hill remains sufficiently vibrant that I might be able to catch a decent act on a Tuesday or Wednesday night (tonight is out, as I’d like to watch the continuing season opening of 24!).

One final connection: Aaron Fenton, the Duke lacrosse player whose stolen image represented Aaron B. Cox, gives rival UNC headaches!

Two Classes of Argument from Design, Which Both Fail

2006-01-13T14:09:00.000-05:00

In a recent post that took Alma’s encounter with Korihor as a springboard, my discussion of the possible evolution of Joseph’s views on the nature of God turned on the assumption that Alma’s argument from design points to a kind of God—which for convenience I will call God as First Cause—who is somehow outside the universe, and logically prior to its natural laws, and therefore the ultimate potentiator of the universe’s observed order. I mentioned parenthetically that it was debatable whether Alma’s argument took this form, and invited commenters to call me on it, but no one did. Hence I take it upon myself to clarify the matter by pointing out that there is a second type of teleological argument, and that it is not clear which Alma had in mind. Then I do that effort at clarification the dubious honor of rendering it moot on the larger issue: while it might make some difference for how we interpret the evolution of Joseph’s theology, when it comes to evidence for God it doesn’t really matter which type of argument Alma (or Joseph writing Alma) had in mind (or if he even thought carefully enough to distinguish them), because they both fail—leaving us, in the end, with the testimony of direct experience as the only potential evidence for God’s existence.

The version with God as First Cause takes the apparent messiness of nature as a starting point, and proceeds to the uncovering of simple laws that give rise to these complicated phenomena. It is then the simple underlying universal laws—rather than the complicated phenomena—that are taken to be the hidden manifestation of God’s wisdom. A possible example of this might be Kepler’s faith-shaking discovery that—horror of horrors!—planetary orbits are ugly ellipses with varying speed, rather than uniform circular motion pure and undefiled. Perhaps this result was rendered more palatable to some—which is to say, more consonant with alleged divine æsthetic sensibilities—by Newton’s derivation of a single set of beautiful laws to unify not only different kinds of orbits, but also terrestrial gravitational and projectile phenomena. Here, underlying the bewildering diversity of phenomena, was the hidden simplicity worthy of divine wisdom.

This argument is turned on its head in the other class of argument from design. In this version, simplicity is not the hallmark of God’s handiwork, but marvelous complexity. Simple laws are not the manifestation of the mind of God, since these alone can lead to meaninglessly messy behavior; the real genius is in the use of these laws—whether by setting up special initial conditions, or through more prolonged regulating interventions—to bring about his purposes. In this more organizational version of creation, instead of God as First Cause we have God as Engineer. (If it were not so unwieldy and inflammatory, we might also say God as Most Excellent Advanced Alien Technologist.)

This perspective of God as First Cause has a grave difficulty. What does it mean to say something outside the universe interacts with it? Considering God outside the universe seems to be nonsensical; the right thing to do is expand one’s definition of the universe to include everything that interacts with us, including God. Similar comments apply to alleged non-material entities like souls (or God himself): if it interacts with our physical bodies, it too ought to be defined as material. Moreover, on what basis could this God’s actions be judged good, or even be orderly, except by fidelity to some set of principles external to himself?

Mormons who believe in God as Engineer—a finite and embodied God within the universe, the nature of whose existence depends on laws and order bigger than him and beyond his control—can be justifiably proud of escaping the above-mentioned (and other) dilemmas presented by God as First Cause. They can also avoid a problem facing religionists who, in accepting something like Intelligent Design, believe in both God as First Cause and God as Engineer: If complex things like human bodies must be designed, and the designer is also a complex thing, then who designed the Designer? Even those Mormons disinclined to attribute the origin of humanity’s physical body to an infinite regression of physically procreating Gods can nevertheless hijack the basic concept and renovate it as an infinite regression of designers.

But God as Engineer faces another problem that not even Mormons can avoid: the reality that we have both theoretical and empirical examples of systems in which random initial conditions can give rise, without intelligent intervention, to ‘special’ outcomes that are both orderly and complicated. There are multiple mechanisms for this; I will mention two examples.

One class of order without intelligent intervention might be called ‘specialness amidst randomness,’ arising from the presence of a statistical ensemble with variations in properties. An example here is planetary systems, of which 150 or so have been detected since the first discovery about a decade ago. None of these systems have conditions similar to Earth suitable for life. It is almost certain that this results from a known observational selection effect, but observing the degree of variety we have so far, it is clear that fundamental natural laws are not sufficient to ensure that all planetary systems have suitable conditions like those of our solar system. But the point nevertheless remains that there are billions and billions of planetary systems out there, and given observationally plausible ranges of conditions, it would be surprising indeed if none of them had suitable conditions. Hence regardless of whether Alma means that divinely ordained fundamental laws on the one hand (God as First Cause) or divinely arranged initial conditions on the other (God as Engineer) are responsible for the “regular form” of our planetary system’s motions, he is dead wrong in asserting to Korihor that it constitutes an evidence of God’s existence.

A second class of order without intelligent intervention—which might be called ‘specialness from randomness’—is exemplified by nonlinear dynamical systems with ‘attractors,’ that is to say, systems that deterministically drive arbitrary initial conditions to one of a few special ‘final’ conditions (manifolds of bounded volume with smaller dimensionality than the entire dynamical phase space). Philosophically similar to this—if less mathematically clean—may be evolution, which in Darwin’s view involves the channeling and ratcheting, via natural selection, of arbitrary variations in species characteristics into certain obviously useful features: eyes, for instance, which I gather have been shown by genetic evidence to have independently evolved several times, by different paths from different initial conditions, to functionally similar ‘attracting’ final states.

Does Alma’s argument from design refer to God as First Cause or God as Engineer? The fact that it is more offhand reference than sustained argument means that it’s difficult to say—and difficult even to tell if Alma (or his creator) had thought carefully about it at the time the statement was authored. Alma’s statement has two parts: a general reference to “all things,” and a more specific reference to the regular motion of our planets. Each part could arguably be motivated by either of the two styles, though I tend to think the first reference to “all things” sounds more like God as First Cause, and the second to planets in their “regular form” like God as Engineer. (Note that in arguing for an evolution of Joseph’s conception of God I deftly combined the two parts to slant interpretation of the combined argument towards “God as First Cause.”)

However the conclusion is that neither style of teleological argument from design for God’s existence holds water. To make an analogy admittedly more poetic than strictly accurate, the fact that certain texts are attributed to, say, Aaron B. Cox is not sufficient to establish Mr. Cox's existence. And works alleged by some to depend on God’s intervention—like the creation of Earth and life upon it, or the Book of Mormon—may be similarly pseudepigraphic. (The analogy is deficient because, having observed that most texts arise from human authors, it is most likely that texts attributed to Mr. Cox were also written by some human. But since we have no clear examples of intelligent minds creating either individual organisms or large-scale biospheres, no ‘watchmaker’ argument can be made remotely rigorous, and every example of ‘specialness from randomness’ renders such less necessary—and perhaps, in combination with observations of biological deficiencies and exaptations, less plausible as well.)

Hence scriptural statements connecting God with creation cannot be understood as arguments for his existence. Given other reasons to believe in him—presumably, direct experience with him or his heavenly messengers—such scriptural statements then, and only then, may tell us something about the nature of our relationship to him, and perhaps also something about his and our natures. To the extent Joseph is responsible for the content of the Lectures on Faith, he deserves credit for reflecting this perspective. And to Alma’s credit, his rebuttal to Korihor started off well, with reference to the testimonies of the prophets and other saints; it’s just that that’s where he should’ve stopped!

[This is cross-posted from Mormons and Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

Mr. Spinozist Goes to Washington

2006-01-09T15:29:00.000-05:00

I arrived in our nation’s capital yesterday evening.

Unlike the iconic Mr. Smith, I didn’t here to clean the place up; when it comes to corruption I am content to express sardonic ridicule. Nor am I here to see the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, though it would interest me greatly; if I had sufficient time or insomnia I’d be interested to watch the whole thing live or in late-night C-SPAN rebroadcasts. Nominally, I am here for something greater than Politics: Science, specifically the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

In fact, however, like many pilgrims to this place where levers of power are pulled, the attraction is something even greater than Science: Mammon. Or, as a minor character in my secular holy book puts it, “the spondulicks the cash the moolah the bread the bread.”

In fact, perhaps a more extended playful likening of this passage unto ourselves is warranted. In the quote below the minor character Hawthorne Crossley is broadcasting rock music, in the days of its adolescence, from a rusty tin can of a ship off the coast of England because of the illegality of such broadcasts on the mainland. In the wee hours of the night he reaches out over the air to his mother, who was shamefully abandoned by his father to follow unnatural proclivities (and has since degenerated into unnaturalness of her own). Hawthorne is caught in the middle, between loyalty to his mother who dutifully raised him under difficult circumstances, and the financial support of his depraved father needed to support his righteous work:

If you’re listening, Antionette Corinth, you witchy insomniac, and I know you’re listening because you always are, then this one’s for you. This comes to you from Hawthorne with love… This one is to honor your genius, O queen of the black arts, princess of the pentangle, Baroness Samedi, priestess of Wicca, adept of the secrets of the Great Pyramid, dispenser of all good things, dressmaker extraordinaire, O Mother who gave us suck. We took your name and you at once let it go, espousing, instead, the noble Corinthian tradition. Mother forgive us for we are royally arseholed. Forgive us Mother for we have taken the shilling of him what done you wrong. As you have surmounted your bitterness towards him, as you have found it in your mighty soul to transcend your most righteous anger, so also let us not come into your bad books, if that’s at all possible, because we really needed the spondulicks the cash the moolah the bread the bread. Forgive us Mother for we are soldiers of the Queen our Father and this is wonderful 199, Radio Freddie, and for all you night owls and our own dear Mum here’s Manfred Mann to promise us that god is on our side.

In the present application of this passage, the mother is likened to all you dutiful taxpayers, who may wonder why your hard-earned money is being spent on work like ours; the father is likened to our unnaturally corrupt government; and Hawthorne is likened to research groups like ours doing righteous work eminently worthy of government funding.

You see, a recompetition of the program under which our collaboration’s work is funded will be occurring over the next few months, so our fearless leader is leveraging this AAS meeting’s fortuitous location in Washington by arranging for a special poster session showcasing our collaboration’s most glorious work. The idea is to present an overwhelming united phalanx (facilitated by matching mandatory Microsoft PowerPoint poster templates imposed upon all collaboration members) designed to impress not so much our fellow scientists—we’ve never done anything like this for any other conference—but specially invited representatives from the relevant funding agencies.

Anyway, the bottom line: tell me what you like or recommend in Washington, D.C.!

FARMS Harm?

2006-01-08T20:07:00.000-05:00

I wonder, might FARMS in some instances do more harm than good? I mention two potential areas of concern. (I’m even less familiar with FAIR than I am with FARMS, but perhaps much of this applies to them as well.)

One potential problem is that in addressing arguments against Mormonism, FARMS makes Church members aware of potential problems they never knew existed. A personal example of this can be found in this recent thread. During a discussion of a particular feature of the Book of Mormon narrative, I speculated whether this feature might be explainable in connection with the possible reflection in the text of some nineteenth century concerns. I was subsequently chastised for having “bought Vogel’s argument.”

What’s ironic about this charge is that I have never read any Vogel, or either of the volumes edited by Metcalfe, for that matter; what I know of their arguments I know from a couple of FARMS articles railing against them. But even without reading the original arguments, being only dimly aware of their ideas from reading FARMS critiques thereof, in subsequent readings of the Book of Mormon the passages that might be used as a basis for the anti-historicist ideas pop out with at least a superficial plausibility. Moreover, the relatively few less-than-sanitized books on Mormonism I have read are ones of which I was made aware through the FARMS Review.

A second potential problem with FARMS intellectual sword-crossing is that the confrontations with detractors and anti-Christs in the Book of Mormon raise the question of whether this is even an appropriate way to address critics. In these encounters, it does not seem they are ever beat at their own game; they are never convincingly defeated by argument. Time and again it is the prophets’ personal revelatory experiences that fortify them as individuals, and open demonstrations of divine power—to either the destruction or miraculous conversion of the detractors—that end up convincing the entire community.

The moral of these stories seems to be that one should trust in the power of God and in prophetic and personal revelation even when—as may always be the case—the naysayers’ arguments cannot be otherwise answered convincingly. Individual members could follow this lead, refusing to engage the critics on an intellectual basis at all, but relying only on personal revelation and attacks on critics’ worthiness as license (or indeed a moral imperative) to ignore them. (Come to think of it, perhaps some FARMS authors do some of this reasonably well!) And on a public basis, perhaps it is not FARMS that is needed against the likes of Vogel and Metcalfe, but President Hinckley striking them dumb. It’d be nice if our dispensation had its share of spectacular public showdowns.

Now don’t get me wrong; I personally am glad FARMS exists. To me, a failure to intellectually examine and evaluate available evidence and ideas would be both unthinkable and unconscionable—a betrayal of a legacy of independent pursuit of truth exemplified by, for example, John Taylor (not to mention Brigham Young and Joseph himself). I tend to think that only by knowing as much as possible about the scriptures and their background can it possible to appreciate them for what they truly are, whatever that may turn out to be.

But given the two concerns above, I can see how some might think otherwise, and why there may have been a trend towards leaving the sort of work FARMS does out of official Church discourse—magazines, lesson manuals, conference talks. I get the sense that voices like Nibley’s or B. H. Roberts’ used to be welcome in the first two of these official channels, and of course Roberts spoke in conference, but I don’t know the extent to which his intellectual bent penetrated his conference talks. But nowadays I can imagine the leaders saying, ‘Okay, let FARMS be out there as a safety net for those unfortunate souls infected with the intellectual bug, but let’s bring it under the ægis of BYU to ensure that in some future day it doesn’t end up taking strength unto itself. Moreover, let the intellectualism in the Church be quarantined there. In official channels let’s avoid engagement with an intellectual mode of discourse, but instead stick with material that brings the Spirit, helps for practical gospel living, and affirms our unique identity as Saints; and let any doctrinal material be largely restricted to past authoritative statements (let’s start the Gospel Classics series!) and summary articles written by reliable authors willing to steer clear of controversy.’

Kickback Mountain

2006-01-06T08:14:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: Note the Mormon connection in the first comment.]

While I’m a Republican, I’m not a big fan of corruption. Nor, as I have previously stated, am I fond of Tom DeLay or the religious right (Ralph Reed is also apparently caught up in Washington’s latest paroxysm). So even as a Republican I got a chuckle out of this:

So glad some people have too much time on their hands.

In case you’re familiar with Jack Abramoff and his current relevance for happenings in our nation’s capital, but have no idea what this image is supposed to be about—it’s hijacked from this movie. If you have no idea who Jack Abramoff is, go read a newspaper.

(Hat tip: Wonkette)

Do all things denote there is a God?

2006-01-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

Suggesting a resonance with the Intelligent Design approach to biology, Matt Evans mentions Alma’s teleological argument to Korihor in Alma 30: the observed order, or “regular form,” of “all things” shows there is a God. There are questions, however, as to whether Alma’s argument is consistent with Joseph Smith’s mature views on the nature of God, and also with the ancient Hebrew worldview from which Nephite culture sprang.

Is God (a) somehow outside the universe and responsible for its laws and its order, or (b) a finite and embodied being within the universe, the nature of whose existence depends on laws and order bigger than him and beyond his control?

I think most Mormons would say Joseph believed (b) during the Nauvoo era. But an early (I think the 1832) account of the First Vision, in which he marveled at the heavens in language somewhat like Alma’s—and also language in D&C 88—may suggest he believed something more like (a) in his earlier years. It would not be surprising if Joseph had been exposed to teleological arguments in, for example, the youth debating club he participated in, mentioned by Richard Bushman in his books on Joseph.

To the extent Alma’s statement represents (a) (this may be debatable—I leave it for commenters to explain why), how to account for its difference from and possible incompatibility, or at least tension, with (b)? One possibility is that Alma did not know as much as Joseph Smith about the nature of God and eternity. This seems plausible; we know from Alma’s teachings to Corianton that Alma did not know as much about the afterlife as Joseph came to know. But a second possibility is that Joseph is the true author of Alma’s argument, and that it therefore reflects Joseph’s early beliefs rather than those of ancient prophet. (Similarly, in this scenario Alma’s hazy picture of the afterlife could be a reflection of Joseph’s haziness on the matter prior to the reception of D&C 76.)

A reason to prefer the theory that Joseph is the source of the Alma’s teleological argument can be derived from a recent post by Jim F. by way of background on the Old Testament. (The responsibility for this use of Jim’s post is mine; he may well not endorse the argument I make here.) Jim describes the very different way ancient Hebrews wrote history: the existence of God and his action in the world was a universal assumption brought to both the writing and the reading of literature, to the extent that to write a meaningful history was to describe God’s involvement in the events of the world. An argument like Alma’s seems completely out of place in such a narrative tradition, in which God’s existence is not something to be argued for, but instead is an unconscicous necessity before a text can even be meaningful. Alma’s argument is much more comfortably situated as a typical believing response, characteristic of Joseph Smith’s era, to issues raised by the Enlightenment.

As a parting comment, I note that Joseph’s mature Mormonism, embracing (b), seems in important ways to be philosophically much closer to atheism than traditional Christianity, which embraces (a). This may be a reason why Mormons imbued with (b) who leave Mormonism tend to become atheist or agnostic rather than active in a denomination of traditional Christianity.

Clinging to Deterministic Freedom, Postponing Causal Explanation

2005-12-31T12:38:00.000-05:00

Blake has offered the first step of his planned argument, asking for more clarity on my assumptions about determinism and causality. I’ve only read the Stanford Encyclopedia (SEP) link he offered so far, but I don’t think I need to read the other to respond to his comment.

In my first couple of posts related to this topic I was content with the term ‘determinism.’ I think I started—perhaps ill-advisedly, I am not yet sure—using the term ‘causal determinism’ after reading Blake’s Dialogue article. After reading the SEP article I am content to leave ‘causal’ out of it—I don’t know that any of my posts depend on it, though I would be glad to know how, if they do—and revert to naked ‘determinism’ as defined by the SEP to take as my premise:

Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.

I am also content with the statement near the top of the article that “there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case.” I see this statement as consistent with the idea that taking determinism as a premise and seeking to work out a compatibilist view of freedom is a reasonable project. That is to say, there is no consensus that such a project is necessarily doomed to failure.

I don’t think the existence of eternal intelligences in LDS thought entails any unavoidable ‘space invader’ problems that invalidate this SEP statement. One can always maintain faith that relativity (or something like it), or a non-toroidal topology of space, prevents the action of intelligences as space invaders (objects of unbounded speed affecting a system at say, t=0, whose arrival was not logically entailed by states of the world prior to t=0).

Further, one can posit that the intelligences contemplated by LDS tradition do not have libertarian freedom, in the sense of having genuinely open futures; but instead arguably enjoy what I might call autonomous freedom: they possess a meaningful independence of action from certain other objects in the world—characterized by the capacity for scenario formulation and selection according to their own internal rules and values—while still having specific material aspects of their future (e.g. which kingdom of glory they will inhabit) that necessarily and uniquely follow from the infinite regressions of their own internal prior states and those of God.

I am rather hazy on the whole issue of causation, which is why I am basically punting on that aspect of Blake’s comment. I suppose that as a physical scientist my general sympathies lie with notion that efficient causation—as I understand it, the laws or regularities that describe the mechanics of how things happen—has some sort of primacy I am not presently equipped to describe well. (Nor can I offer a detailed efficient causal account of how what I have called autonomous freedom arises in humans, but think it plausible that such an explanation is possible.) I don’t even remember the specific names of Aristotle’s other forms of causation. I suppose my prejudice is that other forms of causation may give ‘insight’ and ‘meaning’ in human terms, but are not ultimate or fundamental “pushy explainers” that “make things happen in certain ways” (to use phrases from the SEP article).

Finally I suggest that while LDS scripture and doctrine declare humans to be ‘free,’ they are not sufficiently philosophically precise to distinguish between what I have labeled ‘libertarian’ freedom and ‘autonomous’ freedom. It is also not clear to me that they rule out the sufficiency of efficient causation as the ultimate “pushy explainer”—which sufficiency I tend to assume on the basis of parsimony, taste, and (admittedly limited) experience.

Taking Stock on Determinism and Freedom

2005-12-29T12:57:00.000-05:00

As several posts have gone by on issues related to free will, and the questions of whether and how to proceed with the discussion have arisen, it might be a good idea to explain more precisely what I am interested in arguing about. I will also use this post as a place to collect links to my posts on this subject.

I am not trying to prove causal determinism as a conclusion. It is true that I have expressed skepticism that a future that is open in the sense required by libertarian free will can avoid luck or randomness. From my skimming of the links Blake provided, my initial sense is that this is deemed, by at least some serious and competent people, an open problem in the technical philosophical literature. I confess that at this point I don’t have much interest in following these technical arguments closely. Until the project I describe below is a demonstrated to my satisfaction to be a failure, for reasons of time and interest it is not a discussion I intend to engage closely here.

Because of my distaste for the notion that randomness would play a material role in individuals’ eternal outcomes, and because of my skepticism that libertarian-style programs will prove successful in avoiding randomness, I am more interested in asking the following: Given causal determinism as a premise, can notions of freedom and responsibility be constructed that are meaningful, reasonable, consistent with our experience, and—on the Mormon track of my thought—consistent with a viable form of Mormonism? In this series of posts I have essayed to argue in the affirmative.

Persistent Morality and Praiseworthiness

2005-12-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

Blake has steered the conversation on free will to the nature of morality, and the question of what makes actions ‘moral,’ worthy of praise or blame; see this comment. Does determinism imply that moral systems are mere social convention, and further that no actions are worthy of praise or blame? I don’t think so.

Determinism does not imply willy-nilly moral relativism, or that anything under the sun might be arbitrarily agreed upon by social creatures and actually turn out to be workable. (Hence in answer to Blake’s question ‘Why is Zion desirable?’, I would suggest it turns out to be that which is permanently sustainable—uniquely so, in a Mormon perspective.) I agree with Blake that there are deep instincts or tendencies in us that are very closely related to our capacity and need for relationships that range from cooperative to loving, and that these instincts underpin widely-shared (Blake would say universal and absolute) moral precepts.

But whether or not these deep tendencies amount to eternal, unchanging moral absolutes, or instead merely appear to be so compared to typical human lifetimes and experience, depends on which track of my thinking I’m on at the moment. In an eternal Mormon view I suppose they might be taken as eternal and unchanging. In a non-religious naturalistic view, I see the deep instincts—not all of which are ‘morally praiseworthy’—as products of evolution, existing in an uneasy balance that ‘works.’ (Recall that part of the ‘genius’ of evolution is that that which does not work is eliminated.) It is a persistent balance, one exhibiting strong hysteresis, but not utter permanence: it can shift and adapt, to some extent purposefully and to some extent automatically, with the ever-changing conditions in which humanity finds itself.

These changes are due in no small part to humanity’s technological capabilities: consider for example changes in what society tolerates in terms of sexuality as a result of birth control and disease prevention, simply because these technologies allow a wider range of mixes of deep tendencies toward variety and jealousy to be expressed without unacceptable social costs.

I note in passing that the possibility of unchanging moral absolutes under a Mormon perspective does necessarily make them (or at least their proper ethical implementation) easily recognizable. Consider a wedding feast described by Joseph, which featured (post reception of the Word of Wisdom) his blessing of “three servers filled with glasses of wine” passed around: “I doubt whether the pages of history can boast of a more splendid and inocent wedding and feast than this for it was conducted after the order of heaven” (Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, p. 310; the context makes clear that by “order of heaven” Joseph was referring not only to the ceremony itself, but the entire social experience). Obviously there has been a change since then, to absolute prohibition of alcohol. Or, consider the change from many wives to one. Do these changes represent unmitigated progress towards implementation of the true moral absolutes, or are they temporary ‘law of Moses’-style exigencies required by the conditions of external society, with previous practices to be restored at a glorious future day? Mormonism provides no ready answer, for unprecedented progress and restoration were both ideas Joseph readily drew upon as needed.

Enough on the consistency of persistent (and not merely arbitrary) morality with determinism; how about the praiseworthiness (or blameworthiness) of actions? I would suggest that whether we attach moral meaning to someone’s actions affecting others results from two things: first, a sense that their processes of scenario formulation are functioning accurately (i.e. that they are not mentally ill); and second, that their decision reveals internal rules and values consistent with those deemed ‘worthy’. These two criteria for praise- or blameworthiness do not require a genuinely open future, but are consistent with causal determinism. The deceptive perception of causal openness may simply be an artifact of our not being privy to the internal rules and values used by the agent to ‘compute’ a selection among scenarios until these rules and values are (partially) revealed by the observed selection.

For a final insight into the true minimality of the threshold of our perceptions of merit and blame, I refer to a past comment of Blake’s about dogs simply urinating where they please, in contrast to humans. This is wrong: dogs can and do learn to control themselves, and can learn many other more complicated things besides. Observing properly-done tasks, their masters say “Good boy!”—and such praise is not empty, but sincerely considered well-deserved.

The Relationship of Consciousness to Rationality, Responsibility, and Will

2005-12-23T17:44:00.000-05:00

As an immediate follow-up to my discussion of scenario formulation and selection, in addressing Blake’s emphases on ‘rational thought’ and ‘moral responsibility,’ I think it may be useful to recognize, and perhaps put in proper place, the role of consciousness. Humans, apparently uniquely, have a cognitive capacity for recursion that seems important for both language and consciousness. If I understand correctly, lesser apes have some capacity for symbolic communication, but not the ability to talk about what Alice is talking about Bob talking about (this sort of multi-leveled ‘nesting’ is what I mean by ‘recursion’). Similarly, it may be that apes ‘think’ in some immediate sense, while not having the recursive ability to think about their thinking—the phenomenon we call consciousness.

Now, Blake has emphasized the term ‘rational thought.’ I am not sure I understand the motivation behind the emphasis, and think behind it is undue placement of weight on consciousness. Consider again the elaboration and assessment of, and selection among, future scenarios by an expert chess computer program. Would Blake call it rational or irrational? I would prefer to call it ‘rational’ (centuries of philosophical tradition be damned if necessary!). For me, I suspect in contrast to Blake, rationality is a matter of accuracy, reliability, logical rigor, and so on, rather than a conscious feeling of control (see below on mental illness). In terms of freedom, more distinguishing between chess programs and humans than rationality (which I would say they share) or consciousness (which humans have and chess programs lack) is the auto-rewritability of humans’ rules and values (see the immediately preceding post).

On to ‘moral responsibility,’ which I would say involves the initiation of, regulation of the nature of, and termination of social relationships (note this description encompasses even judgment by God and assignment to kingdoms of glory). If I declare expectations to someone, spelling out what will happen to our relationship based on various behaviors she might exhibit, and she can therefore (like an expert chess program) accurately formulate and assess future scenarios, then she is ‘responsible’—she can respond to these expectations according to her values. (Similarly but more primitively, in an airplane on autopilot we may say that the onboard computer is ‘responsible’ for the maneuvering of the plane.) Along with this, I ‘hold her responsible’ by regulating my participation in the relationship in accordance with the expectations I laid down. Now if someone is mentally ill, they are incapable of accurate scenario formulation and/or assessment, and therefore cannot respond accurately—they are not ‘responsible.’ Likewise, recognizing this incapacity, I may not ‘hold them responsible’—lay down expectations or regulate the relationship in the same manner as with some someone sane.

Now, there are degrees of responsibility, and we may choose to distinguish the higher degrees that require consciousness by the name moral responsibility. In the documentary March of the Penguins, the colony does not allow a mother penguin who has lost her egg or offspring to steal that of another. The enforcement of the relationship would be the same whether or not the mother penguin’s behavior results from faulty brain wiring (‘mental illness’). This is because penguins, not having the recursive capacity of consciousness, cannot think about other penguins’ thinking, or assess their assessments. In contrast, the regulation of human (and presumably divine) relationships proceeds in part on the basis of thinking about and assessing the thinking and assessments of others—a recursive activity requiring consciousness. None of these features of responsibility, however—whether amoral and unconscious, or moral and conscious—seem to require the absence of determinism.

Finally, on the relationship of consciousness to ‘free will.’ Blake tries to evade causal determinism, while disclaiming “mere indeterminism,” by saying that “What accounts for why an agent chooses A rather than B is that the agent has a power to agent cause the decision that is inherent [in] the very fact of having a will that is free.” But it seems to me that this statement is meaningless without an operationally useful notion of a ‘will.’ I think it would be useful and meaningful to use the term ‘will’ to describe a situation in which the assessment of future scenarios is itself being self-assessed—in colloquial terms, that a conscious mind is ‘observing’ its own deliberations. While we do not presently understand how consciousness arises, I do not know of anything precluding the possibility that this entire process of our brain or eternal intelligence monitoring its own assessments proceeds entirely under causal determinism.

Scenario Formulation and Selection, and the Evolvability of Character

2005-12-23T17:28:00.000-05:00

Along with others, Blake has made detailed comments on three previous threads (here, here, and here) relating to agency and free will. After saying something about where I’m coming from in approaching this subject, I will state what I see as areas of broad agreement and spell out some specifics of potential continuing disagreement on scenario formulation and selection. In an immediate follow-up post I will comment on notions upon which Blake lays much emphasis: ‘rational thought’ and ‘moral responsibility.’

Aside from lacking intimate familiarity with the standard philosophical history and terminology of this subject (an accurate assessment on Blake’s part), and aside from the inherent difficulty of the problem (as evidenced by the fact that it’s still around after thousands of years of study), and even aside from my limited intelligence and writing ability, one reason Blake may have reason to call my thinking and presentation “muddled” is that my thought is proceeding on two parallel tracks that I have not always been careful to distinguish in my presentation: a Mormon account involving uncreated individual intelligences, and a naturalistic account where the human brain is all there is. From this point on I may need, where relevant, to be more clear and careful about distinguishing these two tracks (even though I have thought both may be deterministic in some sense).

Blake has suggested I may in fact be a libertarian of some kind, and it may be that we are in fact somewhat close. We agree there is in humans a capacity for conscious imagination of future scenarios. We agree there is ultimately a choice, a selection among these scenarios. It seems we agree there is something inside an individual, in some meaningful sense independent of its environment, that contributes to or constrains or determines the particular selection.

But we may continue to disagree on the nature of these processess of imagination of future scenarios and the selection among them.

On the process of imagination: Does the individual in some sense create previously non-existing scenarios, as Blake seems to suggest? Or is the imagination of the future more in the character of recognizing the various logical possibilities consistent with the individual’s degree of knowledge of current states—a recognition (as opposed to outright creation) by deterministic means that, to give a non-conscious example more primitive than human capacity, might be akin to computations done by an expert chess computer program?

On the process of selection: Does a particular selection arise with, perhaps not ‘mere indeterminacy,’ but any material degree of indeterminate spontaneity, as I understand libertarian free will to require? Or does the particular selection necessarily and uniquely follow from specific rules already present inside the individual at the moment of decision, by which the imagined future scenarios are assessed against specific ‘values’ already held by that individual—values that might be anything from protecting the king for a chess program, to physical homeostasis for an animal, to the establishment and preservation of social relationships for a human?

Please note well: this latter position of ‘selections necessarily and uniquely follow from an individual’s current state’—a position I am calling ‘determinist’—does not imply that either the rules or values the individual uses to conduct assessments—which we might call ‘character’—cannot change, or that anyone (including probably even God) can predict what changes may arise in an individual’s rules and values.

Brain wiring—and rules and values, assuming these are encoded in brain wiring—often do in fact change, on the basis of experience: memories of past outcomes can change the nature of future assessments. Profoundly, ‘intelligence,’ in both secular and Mormon theological senses, may correspond to just such a diagnostic and adaptive capacity—one that may nevertheless unfold deterministically.

In a Mormon context, we may add to naturalistic learning in the brain the reprogramming of an individual’s rules and values by the divine power of the atonement—his law engraven on the heart, as it were, with repentance and acceptance of grace involving the granting of the necessary permission to the Savior to do the engraving. The appearance of different outcomes even in a powerful and benevolent plan of God—the ultimate necessity of degrees of glory—would ultimately (and only) derive from two key uncreated and unchangeable capacities that eternal intelligences possess, beyond God’s control, in different degrees: the ability to accurately diagnose one’s need for reprogramming, and willingness to allow it to be done. God’s plan, unfolding deterministically, will grow each intelligence to the full potential allowed by the degree these key uncreated characteristics are possessed. In this perspective, anything other than determinism would result in outcomes that would be, to my taste, unjust.

Response to God and science

2005-12-21T11:22:00.000-05:00

Since Geoff B mentioned me by name, I feel inclined to respond. Statements from his post are in italics, and my responses follow.

As an example of how God might fit into scientific articles, consider articles about the origin of life on earth. There could be a whole array of scientific hypotheses put forward, all of which could lead to scientific tests, especially in the field of genetics.

As I look over Pratt’s list that follows this statement they all seem, contrary to what Pratt says, either untestable at present with little hope for future testability, barring God’s detailed and public disclosure of his role (b through d, g and h); or falsified, with regard to organisms’ physical bodies (e and f).

A refusal by the scientific world to accept God in any of its respected experiments these days makes for incomplete studies and false science.

Science does not include God in its hypotheses because no one has discovered indications of his actions that are sufficiently precise, testable, and publicly shareable to be amenable to the methodology of science. The range of questions that can be addressed by science is obviously limited (though it has grown steadily over time), and in this respect science is certainly “incomplete.” But that in no way makes it “false.”

As any student of the history of science will know, Sir Isaac Newton and even Einstein accepted the existence of a Creator.

Neither man accepted an anthropomorphic, embodied God. I think for Newton, infinite and absolute space and time (that is, the entire ‘stage’ on which everything plays out) were essential aspects of God’s very being. As far as Einstein goes, one quote I quickly found through Google put it this way:

He rejected the conventional image of God as a personal being, concerned about our individual lives, judging us when we die, intervening in the laws he himself had created to cause miracles, answer prayers and so on. Einstein did not believe in a soul separate from the body, nor in an afterlife of any kind…

…he was also struck by the radiant beauty, the harmony, the structure of the universe as it was accessible to reason and science…

…it seems likely that he believed in a God who was identical to the universe—similar to the God of Spinoza. [!] A God whose rational nature was expressed in the universe, or a God who was identified with the universe and its laws taken together.

I don’t think Mormons can really look to either of these guys for support in specific theology, or that creationists of any stripe can point to them in support of their perverse notions of science pedagogy. That they had interests and perspectives that included things beyond science is a good example for all of us, but says nothing about what should be in science classes—which, after all, is only one slice of life. Ironically, by insisting on including God in science classes, creationists may have already given in or sold out: they shoot themselves in the foot by implicitly conceding and adopting the point of view that the scientific method is the only path to knowledge, insight, happiness, and so on.

Do they honestly believe that the study of science in a Millennial world will be the same as it is now?

If there is open communion with the heavens in a Millenial world then yes, the range of questions addressable by science will be expanded, because there will then be precise, testable, and publicly shareable indications about God’s nature and his past and current involvement with Earth and humanity.

And, lastly, if science classes are incomplete without factoring in the “God factor” in their experiments, isn't there room for at least bringing that up in evolution or astronomy classes?

I think science classes should reflect the content and methods of mainstream professional science, with protracted discussions of its limitations and alternative putative ways of knowing left to other areas of the curriculum (philosophy, “Guidance” class as they call one subject in our local district, etc.), and to other venues (churches, books, blogs, seminars by charismatic circuit tour speakers…)

In this connection I am against the inclusion of so-called ‘teach the controversy’ approaches involving Intelligent Design in science classes, because this does not reflect mainstream science. However such discussions may have a useful place in classes on philosophy, social studies, science and society, etc.

Having said that, I do not think claims should be overstated in science classes, and I do not think all subjects should be taught at all levels, and this leads me to a particular kind of science pedagogy I think should prevail. What belongs in science classes are tested hypotheses for which the students are capable of understanding the nature of the tests. Because I think science classes should leave students with a ‘feel’ for the practice of science, even more than filling their brains with specific facts, I think it would be poor science pedagogy to present even well-established conclusions of professional scientists at a point before students can have some understanding of how those conclusions were arrived at. This approach would, to some extent at least, both allow and teach students to evaluate evidence for themselves. Adherence to this approach would also serve as a prophylactic against the temptation to bandy about the latest and greatest hypotheses at the margins of knowledge before they are tested—as often happens in the media—which often leads to the unfortunate false impression that science is continually overturning itself, when in fact there is steady accumulation of well-established facts and ‘laws,’ and new theories reduce to well-established old ones in the limited conditions addressed by the old theories.

Doctrinal Modesty on Varieties of Free Will

2005-12-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

In my preceding thread on a deterministic version of free will, Geoff referred to a post of his containing a sentence I wish to contest: “Needless to say, traditional determinism and compatibilism are at odds with Mormon doctrine.” My rejoinder, in brief: Needless to say, just as the scriptures are not a detailed scientific manual, neither are they a detailed philosophical handbook; which is to say, they are not sufficiently precise and jargon-laden to distinguish between libertarian and compatibilistic varieties of free will.

For this reason I am puzzled by Geoff’s repeated insistence in my previous thread on what “the revelations indicate,” since as far as I know he has given no detailed exegesis with an explicit hermeneutic. I strongly suspect such an attempt would fail, because the gross mismatch between what Jim F. would call the ‘universes of discourse’ of (a) scripture and (b) the traditional philosophical technical debates on free will is sufficiently severe to render preposterous any claims one way or another on what Mormon ‘doctrine’ (whatever that is) says about libertarian vs. compatibilistic free will.

The only thing scripture says is that we are free, and obviously adds no modifiers, either libertarian or compatibilist (that the thought of the scriptures using words like these simply makes us laugh justifies my use of the word “preposterous” in the preceding paragraph); hence I would hope both sides could bactrack from strident claims about what Mormon doctrine is on the specific nature of freedom, and recognize that in these arcane matters we are pretty far out on narrow limbs, with little if any support from the trunk of scripture. It is not accurate, much less helpful, to speak of people who “heretically believe” a version of compatibilistic free will relying on uncreated individual intelligences, or to imply that such people are “trad[ing] the gem of the gospel for a mess of pottage.”

The scriptural lack of relevant theoretical apparatus means that neither libertarian nor compatibilist free will is either heterodox (much less heretical) or orthodox, and normally this would make me relatively uninterested in debating doctrinally unresolvable eternal imponderables; but in this case I am interested in exploring the potential viability of purely materialistic (even atheistic) conceptions of freedom and responsibility. Now, on the basis of this exploration, you are free to call me a heretic. Just don’t do it on the basis of openness to uncreated individual intelligences.

Deterministic Freedom Explained

2005-12-18T18:34:00.000-05:00

In a comment and in an email Blake Ostler suggested I might benefit from reading his Mormonism and Determinism (Dialogue, Winter 1999, p. 43), in which he responds to Determinist Mansions in the Mormon House? by L. Rex Sears (Dialogue, Winter 1998, p. 115). (These articles can be found at the Dialogue website by searching on the author name and article title.) I made an immediate response to Ostler, but now I respond (with only a modest attempt to make my response self-contained) after a first reading of both Sears’ and Ostler’s articles, and provide my own inkling as to why our deterministic behavior nevertheless feels ‘free.’

I do not believe in absolute foreknowledge. This makes some of Sears’ arguments for determinism, and I think even more of Ostler’s arguments against determinism, irrelevant for me. (Though I note with regret that what strike me as two of the most interesting Mormon scriptures relating to the question of God’s foreknowledge—the prophecies of Joseph Jr. and Sr.’s names, and the complex of Book of Mormon and D&C scriptures associated with the loss of the 116 Book of Mormon manuscript pages—were not mentioned by either Ostler or Sears.)

Pervading the arguments of Ostler and to some extent Sears is the false assumption that determinism necessarily entails predictability of human behavior. Unfortunately, this commonly-held but false notion appears to lead Ostler (and perhaps certain authorities he cites) to the dubious conclusion that the unpredictability associated with the sensitive dependence on initial conditions exhibited by some nonlinear systems (i.e. chaos) negates determinism on scales relevant to human cognition. In fact, the practical limitations on our knowledge of initial conditions that result in our inability to predict in practice in no way imply that a chaotic system is doing anything other than following precisely the nonlinear equations governing it—that is, that the system is behaving deterministically—starting from particular (albeit unknown to us) initial conditions. It is perfectly consistent to believe or assume that determinism reigns even if neither God nor mortals are capable of predicting individuals’ behavior.

It seems to me that this severing of the connection between determinism and predictability/foreknowledge disables most of Ostler’s arguments against determinism (as well as one of Sears’ major arguments for determinism). All Ostler has left are arguments based on what he considers palatable notions of responsibility and on the apparent immediate experiences of “rational thought” and “free will.” I confess I find descriptions and definitions of these phenomena along the lines of Sears’ self-determination, mutual responsibility, etc. more satisfying than Ostler’s arguments from common sense. In Sears’ formulation,

to be a free agent with respect to a particular individual is to be possessed of a deterministically operative power of self-determination; to have been instructed by that individual to do or not do certain things; and to have the ability to determine, by choosing to obey or disobey the admonitions received by that individual, the nature of one’s future relationship with her. Having the relevant expectations held of us by her, in turn, makes us responsible to her, and to be a free agent with regard to a particular individual is just to be responsible to her.

To explain the key point further in my own words, the uniquely human capacity to imagine the future allows for the uniquely human experience of free will and capacity for responsibility, in a context that is nevertheless deterministic: our imagination and expectation of future consequences is an important causal feed entering (along with other causes) into our decision-making, and this is what makes us responsible—literally, ‘able to respond’—‘freely.’

How, then, to account for our immediate experience of ‘freedom’? I strongly suspect that our (often subconscious) assessments involve the probabilistic weighing of multiple imagined, as-yet unrealized future scenarios—which our brain may know, handle, and experience differently than knowledge of past events and associations stored in memory—and that this perceived difference between the accomplished past and the imperfectly ascertainable future accounts, particularly when the assessment is subconscious, for the powerful psychological perception of libertarian-style free will in the process of decision-making. (Note that this proposed existence of a qualitative difference between reflections on the future and the past could be tested with real-time functional brain imaging of conscious subjects.)

Aside from the manifest elegance of my utterly compelling explanation ;->, another reason I find deterministic formulations of agency and responsibility more satisfying is that I think Ostler has failed, as he claims, to have a third option breaking a dichotomy between causal determinism and random indeterminacy. According to Ostler,

A libertarian could adopt a process view of freedom where a free act is a creative synthesis of the prior states of the world. Thus, there are causal relations or nexus from which a free act flows; however, there are several different outcomes for which the causal conditions are adequate but not sufficient…

Human freedom consists of a synthetic unity of experience not present in the stimuli or causes from which consciousness arises. Human creativity is the additional element which must be added to the totality of past causes necessary to explain human choices.

But this appeal to a synthetic human creative input begs the question: in a given instance, how does a particular creative input emerge? If it necessarily follows from the nature of one’s eternal, uncreated individual intelligence—or, in my naturalistic formulation above, ‘under the hood’ it is simply a (conscious, subconscious, or both) mechanical best estimate by the brain of which is the most likely among imagined future scenarios—then we have in the end necessary determinism (though partially of an internal or self-determined variety). Otherwise, the appearance of a particular creative input arises with some component of randomness.

Hence it seems to me there is in fact no third option; and in the absence of a viable alternative, and assuming the existence of eternal uncreated intelligences, I prefer to think that the input from my intelligence would be causal rather than random—especially since this is the component upon which I ultimately would be judged!

Science and Replicability

2005-12-17T14:31:00.000-05:00

In a discussion of natural and unnatural methods of childbirth, it was asserted that “Scientific data is intended to be replicated—indeed, must be replicable—and objective”. I don’t have anything to say about childbirth, but I would like to point out that depending on what is meant by “replicated,” the above formulation has the potential to give an overly narrow or even misleading notion of science.

Being able to set up and perform an artificial experiment at will is less important to the definition of science than that data be publicly available and that there be sufficient objective control on hypotheses. It is great when a repeatable artificial experiment is possible, but such historical disciplines as geology, paleontology, in some cases astronomy and astrophysics, and so on depend in part on events (and sometimes even observations) that are not repeatable: we will not observe a real-time magnetic field reversal in our lifetime, dinosaurs will not go extinct again, SN1987A will not explode again, and so forth. Nevertheless the public shareability of recorded observations of these events and adequate cross-examinations to control interpretations justify calling their study ‘scientific.’

Statements like ‘many different people can analyze relics of the event and come to the same conclusion’ or ‘more dinosaur bones could be found’ are arguably instances of ‘replication’ in a different sense than repeatable, artificially controlled experiments; but I resist considering these as alternative ways of satisfying some putative overarching scientific ‘replicability criterion,’ for the first may simply collapse to the more useful notion of public transferability, and the second is obviously too restrictive: the study of dinosaur bones would remain scientific even if no new ones were ever found.

Finally, there is a danger in overemphasizing repeatability without sufficient attention to public shareability and objective controls (in this connection I appreciate the use of the word “objective” in the above formulation, I just think it deserves more emphasis—hence my present ascent to the soapbox). For example, it might be observed that instances of Mormon testimony are eminently repeatable (like the McDonalds’ slogan, Millions and Millions served), while the generation of Earth’s biodiversity by evolution cannot be replicated in the size or time scales of human laboratories and lifetimes. With an overemphasis on replicability some might therefore be tempted to call Mormon testimony ‘scientific’ and the study of evolution ‘unscientific.’ (I hasten to say that the commenter I quoted above didn’t say anything remotely like this; perhaps there are very few Mormons who would consider testimony a form of scientific knowledge, though Alma 32 might tempt some to say so. I am simply using her statement as an occasion to take off on an unrelated tangent that may be of little interest to anyone but myself.)

The problem here is that the more important consideration than replicability to the question of whether testimony or evolution are scientific is whether the experiences motivating belief in the respective principles are publicly transferable and controlled by objective data against plausible alternative explanations. In the case of testimony the answer is ‘no,’ and it must therefore be considered unscientific, notwithstanding its wide (if far from universal) replicability. To the extent the answer is ‘yes’ to various aspects of evolution, those aspects are scientific, in spite of the fact that we have only a single precious example of the historical unfolding of a great pageant of life.

Chicago

2005-12-08T09:33:00.000-05:00

Time for another traveling Spinozist shout-out.

Destination: Chicago. I leave this morning.

When I posted about going to Seattle last month I got several great suggestions. A highlight was being introduced to Ethiopian food by J. Stapley. He also taught me some great slang. Let me demonstrate one phrase I picked up from him: J. Stapley has “serious bandwidth.” (In keeping with the image I’ve put in this post, I’ve also added one to the Seattle post, also featuring a skyline.)

Anyway, if you have any restaurant or sightseeing suggestions for Chicago, I’d love to hear them!

Devolved but not Devalued

2005-12-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

By way of brief respite from heavy philosophizing, let’s discuss ‘devolution.’ Rather than wade through some academic-sounding definition, you can familiarize yourself with this concept by watching a fantastic advertisement for Guinness. From human to primitive amphibian in 60 seconds may seem like a Hollywood fantasy, but one day a week or so ago, The Spinozist Mormon suffered a similar fate overnight. Of course my heart sank, but I was reassured by the fact that the Spinozist's market value held firm or even rose during the same period.

The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB) ecosystem is a blog ranking system consisting of 14 ecological niches, ranging from Higher Beings at the top to Insignificant Microbes at the bottom. A blog’s rank is based on the number of other blogs that link to it. You can see TTLB’s links to The Spinozist Mormon here (this link is permanently on my sidebar near the bottom).

For awhile The Spinozist Mormon oscillated between a Flappy Bird and an Adorable Little Rodent, apparently depending on whether one of my posts was current at Mormon Archipelago; but after my sudden devolution (talk about punctuated equilibrium!), I now find myself oscillating between a Lowly Insect and a Slimy Mollusc. After initial panic—Did everyone suddenly dump me from their blogroll because of something controversial I said?—I saw that Times and Seasons was no longer a Large Mammal or even Marauding Marsupial, but a mere Flappy Bird, and I felt better. Later I found the sudden renormalization explained here.

When I speak of The Spinozist Mormon’s market value, it is with reference to another blog ranking system called BlogShares. To quote the site itself, “BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by incoming links.”

BlogShares information on The Spinozist Mormon can be seen here (also linked on my sidebar). One interesting thing about BlogShares is that it categories blogs by “industries,” and one of these is “Mormon / Latter Day Saints,” which you can peruse here. Perhaps surprisingly, Times and Seasons is not number 1, but number 2. The Spinozist Mormon is way down at number 44.

Are any bloggernacle denizens active in this BlogShares trading game? I bought shares in myself, but that’s it, and I’m not following it actively. I stumbled across my blog’s listing there by accident, and I have no idea how it got listed. Unlike many of the Mormon blogs on the list, The Spinozist Mormon has many shares available for purchase.

The bottom lines of this (oh so important!) post are twofold. (1) Link to me. I am willing to reciprocate. Push me up the food chain, increase my market value. I may never be an exalted Higher Being, but it’s always nice to move up. (2) The Analyst’s Report at BlogShares says of The Spinozist Mormon: “This is a growing blog (BUY), This stock is underpriced (BUY).” Buy Spinozist!

Must a secular ‘way of being’ be ‘broken’ and devoid of the sacred?

2005-12-01T23:11:00.000-05:00

Here I continue the discussion of a previous thread, and also begin to respond to Jim F.’s unpublished paper “Theology as a Hermeneutic of Religious Experience,” which he was generous enough to send me privately. If this makes this post especially confusing to other readers, I’m sorry. (If it is unfair to Jim to respond like this without his text being available to all to speak for itself, I apologize for that too!) Because Jim’s paper is not (I hope) written for the layman, I am not equipped to get all one could out of some of its technical terminology and arguments; but still I found it unusually fascinating and thought-provoking. I hope I was able to take some significant ideas away. My responses will show whether that is so, or whether instead my technical inadequacies have allowed me to go grossly astray, landing me flat on my face.

From Jim’s paper I think I got a better sense of what he called at one point in his last comment a “world-view/mythology/universe of discourse/world.” I hope I will not conflate too badly the two senses of this he mentioned in that last comment, but if left uncorrected, here and in subsequent installments of my response I will simply use the term “way of being” (short for “way of being in the world,” and closely related to “myth,” with the latter narrating the former)—the preferred term in his paper, which I agree is a quite enlightening way to think about it.

…myth shapes human existence by giving us a structure on which we hang our understanding of society and the world…

As a framework or ordering that makes understanding possible, the symbolic realm of myth and ritual is broader than that of philosophical and theological reflection. Indeed, myth and ritual are not merely ways of understanding the world, means for reflection. The myth and ritual of any particular religion manifest a way of being in the world—an attitude in the root sense of the word, a way of fitting, an aptitude—namely, the way of being of the religion in question. Reflection and understanding occur within the myth or ordering given by that way of being…

The term ‘way of being’ really comes into its own with the following insight:

Like many, perhaps even all religions, biblical religions call us to live in a certain way. They may do so conceptually, but they need not and, for the most part, they do not. For the most part, they call us to engage ourselves in the world in a particular way, and they do that with scripture and ritual and, especially, in their practices. As Kierkegaard points out, “The Christian thesis goes not: intelligere ut credam, nor credere ut intelligam. No it goes: Act according to the commands and orders of Christ; do the Father's will—and you will become a believing-one.”

Hence, for example, the Mormon emphasis on worthiness as a prerequisite to testimony.

These quotations refer specifically to religion, but I believe they can also be applied to secular or scientific ways of being. For instance, science arguably has its own “scripture and ritual and, especially, … practices.” Only those who practice it—who are immersed in this way of being—can really begin to appreciate its power. Laymen are often not truly converted, but instead mere sign-seekers willing to consume the technological fruits of science upon their lusts. They lack what Stephen J. Gould calls an “intimacy with the world of science (knowing its norms in their bones, and its quirks and foibles in their daily experience)…”. With their lips they draw nigh to science, but they deny the power thereof. For when the moment of temptation arrives—when the results of science threaten to open new possibilities for the construction of secular myths offering alternative meanings of our lives, and reasonable norms that might govern them—those not deeply rooted succumb. Unable to “apply a professional’s ‘feel’ for the doing of science to grasp the technical complexities…in a useful manner inaccessible to [non-scientists]” (Gould again, here and previously in a different context), they are seduced by such false doctrines as young-earth creationism or Intelligent Design—perverse abominations to those who live and breathe and practice science.

(Jim’s paper and previous comments make clear that he is not one such apostate of the scientific myth, even if he might wish for reforms. While he would reject secular myths of human meaning built on present scientific understandings, he does not reject scientific findings or methods in what he would consider their own sphere, nor attempt to inappropriately bastardize either scientific or religious myth.)

Down off my soapbox, and back to Jim’s paper: I’m not familiar with the detailed analysis, but am generally aware that objectivity pure and undefiled is not possible, and so tend to accept as very likely the assertion that not only ‘religion’ but also ‘secularism’ also operates within the context of a particular myth or way of being. (Indeed, the preceding paragraphs illustrate that I accept it.)

If I understood Jim’s paper correctly, his main argument is that if analysis of religion is to be undertaken, it ought to be done within the context of its own religious myth and not through the lens of the secular myth.

He goes further, saying it is not, as usually asserted, the religious myth that is “broken”—in the sense, I gather, of being blind to its own mythical underpinnings, and unable to account for itself—but the secular one. I think the overall tone of the paper may be too pessimistic towards the possibilities of a more viable secular myth. For one thing, secularism need not be conceived as monolithic. There is no single religious myth or way of being, and the same is true of secular myths. I am not persuaded that all possible versions of secularism that might be constructed are necessarily broken. Just as Jim suggests it may be possible to reflect validly and meaningfully on a religion from within its own way of being, the same may be true of a secular way of being.

As as final note in this first part of my response, I urge that care be taken with the religious/secular dichotomy that has been set up here. I do think it’s workable with sufficient wisdom and discretion. In particular, the possibility exists that, with appropriate definitions, both religious and secular ways of being could each have sacred and profane elements or aspects. I assert that religious ways of being do not, or should not, enjoy hegemony over sacredness. Consider, for example, the feeling evoked by Darwin’s closing sentence of The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful have been, and are being, evolved.

As for profanity in religious ways of being, religiously motivated terrorism comes immediately to mind in the harshest sense of ‘profane.’ More benignly, one may consider the frequency with which sentimentality is passed off as spirituality in lessons and talks, or—more visually—the kitsch in a Deseret Book catalog. (I hasten to add that when I say “profane,” I do not necessarily imply inappropriateness—there’s nothing necessarily inappropriate about, say, green jello or missionary open houses—it’s just that they may not be sacred, regardless of how ingrained they may be in our religious way of being.)

God’s Garden

2005-11-30T16:01:00.000-05:00

In a comment on a recent post of mine on agency, Mike W. asked if the form of determinism to which I subscribe is ‘defined by an external modifier’ or allows for an ‘internal motivator.’ Here I explain why I don't think a ‘blank slate’—in which people are completely determined by external conditioning—could be the whole story in either a mortal or eternal perspective.

In a purely mortal perspective, I am sympathetic to E. O. Wilson’s position discussed a few posts back: human nature was forged over millions of years of evolution, leaving us an inheritance of deeply-seated emotions and “biased channels of learning.” I would call these influences on us ‘internal’ because they are integrated into our individual biological selves. However, because our ‘selves’ exhibit some plasticity, contemporaneous external conditioning still plays a very important role, and external events can have lifelong impacts: childhood training, fatal accidents, and so on can have a big say on our ultimate mortal fate.

A Mormon eternal perspective adds two things that fundamentally change the deterministic factors that ultimately affect an individual’s final status. The first factor is the existence of an uncreated, eternal, individual ‘intelligence’ beneath whatever biological and cultural legacies we have inherited. This intelligence can be compared to a particular seed that, given the right conditions, will grow into a particular kind of plant. The second factor is reservoirs of time and divine power beyond the grave.

In this eternal perspective, the Father would eventually bring each individual intelligence to its full potential. He would use agents where he could but would expend his own individual time and resources if it were necessary, on earth or in heaven, to provide the conditions for each individual to (deterministically) unfold to its greatest potential. Time and divine power beyond the grave would allow any earthly biological or cultural factors to eventually be overcome. Hence the only factors that ultimately matter would be the uncreated individual intelligence and God’s provision of the needed conditions for its development. Whether I had good or bad parents or Church leaders, had ever heard the gospel, had been killed prematurely, etc. would ultimately not matter to my individual fate. (Whether my parents had been good or bad to me, whether someone shared the gospel with me, etc. would play an important role in determining their individual fate, however.)

I’m far from convinced that any perspective beyond a mortal one corresponds to reality; but if there is an eternal perspective, the version that makes sense to me is that God’s works are like a garden that in the end is perfectly tended: taking the many seeds he is given—which have a range of inherent potentials—he ensures that each is ultimately able to unfold to its best possible final state.

Kiss of Death

2005-11-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

Are you a Mormon parent or leader ever on the lookout for new ways to scare youth into living the law of chastity?

If so, consider adding this story to your arsenal. It may help to persuade your hormone-drenched youngsters that they should not even kiss.

(Hat tip: Drudge Report.)

Agency in Nature, Agency in Humanity

2005-11-25T10:50:00.000-05:00

In an interesting thread on theodicy by LisaB at Feminist Mormon Housewives, the question of whether ‘nature’ or ‘the elements’ have ‘agency’ arose, and at one point several scriptures in the Abraham creation account describing the ‘obedience’ of various subsystems of creation were cited.

While the term “obey” is in fact used in the Abraham creation account, if the scriptures are meant primarily to teach us about the meaning of human life, then I'm not sure we should read too much into the word “obey” telling us something fundamental about the nature of everything in a scientific sense. “Obey” might simply be a user-friendly, non-scientific way of expressing the idea that the Gods worked with or even simply watched over complicated systems—systems operating by natural law, not moral agency—until they were satisfied that they would be stable over the time scales they intended for human history.

Or instead, we could presume a tight connection between ‘agency’ and the scriptural use of “obey,” but turn it on its head and give it a Spinozist twist. Say we know those systems referred to in the Abraham passages operate by natural law; then “obey” is simply a description/definition of the orderly and stable operation of a complex system; then the passages are also teaching us, indirectly, that our own human ‘obedience’ and ‘agency’ are also ultimately nothing more than the orderly operation of a complex physical system operating completely and deterministically under natural law. (I’m guessing this perspective won’t garner many takers!)

(A few other self-centered notes on the FMH thread: I entered it with a quip about the male-centric phrase “man’s inhumanity to man” being used on a feminist blog, but was then persuaded to give a more substantive take on theodicy here and here. I engaged the question about the elements having agency here.)

Seer Stones for All

2005-11-23T17:01:00.000-05:00

In connection with my theorem on the use of seer stones by modern church leaders, Clark reminded us of D&C 130:10-11, in which Joseph taught that everyone in the celestial kingdom will receive a seer stone—specifically, a white stone that will function as a Urim and Thummim (see also here).

It turns out there’s no need to wait for the celestial kingdom; the future is now! These white stones are already available, ahead of schedule. And if you’re like me, you’ll choose a black one instead!

Capable of storing up to 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos, or 150 hours of video, that’s not a bad Urim and Thummim in my book. Especially when there’s no righteousness or burning of the bosom required: if you’ve got $299, your physical eyes and ears will deliver its digital clarity directly and unambiguously to even the most carnal of minds (I guess they call that priestcraft). The only thing it lacks is a wireless connection, but the growing sophistication of mobile phones, Blackberries, etc. shows that this isn’t far off either.

While such devices might give us a glimpse of what might be possible in the celestial kingdom, they don’t give us any insight into Joseph’s seer stone, which is extant and known not to contain any technology like unto an iPod or mobile phone. I’ve already disclosed on the other thread that I don’t think the seer stone played any physical role in the receipt of revelation. But as I said at the end of that thread, I have yet to synthesize what I think some possible weaknesses in my seer stone theorem are. Stay tuned.

Seer Stones Are Used by Modern Church Leaders

2005-11-21T16:06:00.000-05:00

Theorem. President Hinckley, his counselors in the First Presidency, and the members of the Quorum of the Twelve use seer stones today.

Proof. The men listed in the theorem are sustained as seers. “…the possession and use of these stones were what constituted ‘seers’ in ancient or former times…” (JS-H 1:35). But “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and in him there is no variableness neither shadow of changing” (Morm. 9:9 and many others). Q.E.D. (Note the cute alternate meanings for this Latin abbreviation!)

Remark. Note that Mosiah 8:13 and 28:13-16 are not strong enough to make this argument. From these we learn that possession and use of seer stones are sufficient to call someone a seer, but their language does not entail the necessity of their use. It is from JS-H 1:35 that we learn that use of stones is constitutive of seership.

Something to keep in mind the next time you sustain them. ;->

Is There Equality in the Heavens?

2005-11-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

Frank asked, “So which matters more, inequality or poverty?” Russell seized on one phrase of my answer: “Let’s face it. Equality is not a value of the heavens.” Citing several proof-texts, he said I was “totally, spectacularly, and ridiculously wrong.” I’ll admit my response was a bit flippant, but if I’m going to be that wrong, let’s not hold back! For the sake of argument, in the venerable spirit of Bible-bashing I’ll cite a couple of other scriptures in response—if only to dig myself in deeper, and maybe learn something in the process.

In eternity, capacities and opportunities to build kingdoms will be exercised, and this requires ‘capital’ in some broad sense, for which the scriptures do not guarantee ‘equality’ as this term is often conceptualized. My original statement referred not to one’s relationship to God—which, as Russell pointed out, would be irrelevant—but instead to “degrees of glory,” as I said in my original answer. I was thinking along the lines of “an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory” not available to all; and even beyond that, highlighting ‘inequalities’ even among those who are “true and faithful,” the parable of the talents. Note that even the profitable servants did not at either the beginning or end of the parable have the same amount, but each received and produced according to their capacity. (I suppose a philosophy of eternal beings that are 'uncreated unequal' underpins this, cf. Abraham 3).

What did equality come to mean with Joseph and Brigham in practice? They had by far the most ‘capital’ (wealth, lands, wives, authority, etc.). Presumably this was because they were most capacitated to do something worthwhile with it. In this light, the scriptures Russell cited might be interpreted in a couple of different ways. (1) They might involve early conceptions of a young, naive, immature Joseph, idealistic in a manner simply not consistent with reality. The latest scripture Russell cited was recorded in 1832. (2) The scriptural sense of ‘equality’ might mean not that everyone has the same amount of ‘stuff’ or ‘capital,’ but instead a condition in which the various grades of intelligences have access to the resources necessary to reach their full potential, and therefore maximize the benefit they can be to others, and therefore maximize the general welfare and prosperity.

Bannergate: Print Edition

2005-11-19T08:57:00.000-05:00

An article on the Banner of Heaven appears in today’s Salt Lake Tribune.

The article features responses to Bannergate from a random John and Julie in Austin. Consider yourself warned: whatever you say on a blog, even as a commenter, could suddenly become more widely read than you realized! If you’re paranoid about such things, it’d be a good idea not to say anything on a blog you wouldn’t want quoted in a newspaper.

Hand-wringing After All: Polygamy’s Pendulum

2005-11-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

I said that I couldn’t bring myself to wring my hands too much about 19th century Mormon polygamy. But maybe I will after all—just a little.

Why say more? Two reasons. First, I came across a news story about the French complaints that Muslim polygamy played a role in the riots. This filled in some lacunae in my sketchy memory of the skimpy blurb on MSNBC I mentioned yesterday, and inspired another thought—this time, a hand-wringing one. Second, yesterday’s post generated no comments as of this writing, and for some perverse reason I feel inclined to continue a conversation (well, monologue for the moment) in which there seems to be little interest.

It turns out that what I called “French authorities” were senior conservative politicians whose specific complaint was that youth from large polygamous families become anti-social due to the lack of a father-figure, presumably because the father has to divide his time. (I suppose racism and the ghettoization of minorities would not be the first possible explanations to occur to such conservatives.) Given Mormon conservatism today, I find it interesting that it’s conservatives arguing against large (and polygamous) families.

This inspires the following armchair thesis: the signature Mormon ‘hyperisms’ of social conservatism and patriotism—and associated allegiance to the Republican Party—are lingering overcompensations for our polygamy, resistance to federal authority, and indifference (or worse) to the cause of the Union (Lincoln’s Republican Party famously railed against polygamy and slavery as the ‘twin relics of barbarism’). In the 19th century we were sexually, economically, and politically radical; but a pendulum was deliberately swung all the way to the other side at the opening of the 20th century as our people’s entrance fee to American society.

This hanging pendulum may now be a sort of hangover (forgive the mixed but homophonic metaphor), suspended still in its high unstable extremity, awkwardly now as the society whose acceptance we craved a century ago moves on and forgets the particular norms of the era in which Mormonism’s modern identity happened to be expediently forged. Have we been left holding the bag with this historically contingent socially conservative identity (I’m loving the word ‘contingent’ this week), now irreversibly hardened into our consciousness—once again a peculiar people as the 21st century opens, strange and backward in the eyes of the world?

Polygamy’s Bitter Fruit?

2005-11-16T18:39:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about a room in Seattle’s Watertown hotel is that its television sits high on a swivel, so that you can turn it around 180 degrees so as to watch it in the mirror while shaving (see the description near the top and fourth picture down here). This morning, over a banner that I think read “Polygamy Problems,” it was briefly reported on MSNBC that some French authorities are blaming their recent marathon of riots on the fact that large Muslim polygamist families are producing too many disturbed young Arab men. This led, of course, to the sort of deep insight that can only come while shaving.

“Disturbed” young men: What, are they mad about all the young women being taken by the powerful, older elite men? So that’s what’s behind these riots. I can see how that could lead to a lot of pent-up frustration…

“Too many” young men: Maybe these French authorities aren’t aware that polygamy is alleged to reduce the overall fecundity of a population. Before I heard of this claim, I used to like to explain polygamy to my bewildered/snickering non-Mormon friends by saying that without its capacity to generate large populations I wouldn’t be here today. Hence the obvious necessity of polygamy: Where would the world be without me? But this claim must be modified if the social scientists’ critique of lower fecundity holds water. I guess now the argument is that, while I might still be present somewhere on this planet without polygamy, I wouldn’t be the high-octane badass you see before you without the genetic and cultural legacies bequeathed by such elites as John Taylor and Nathaniel Jones. Let no one call me a bitter fruit of polygamy!

(Parenthetical 1: This—quality rather than quantity—may be the true meaning of Jacob’s explanation of polygamy, as opposed to the nearly universal (but perhaps naive and short-sighted) interpretation in terms of raw numbers. The corollary is that polygamy undertaken by the unworthy or unfit would be especially abominable.)

(Parenthetical 2: Ancestry that includes John Taylor is—along with ownership of a deluxe leather-bound limited special edition of Mormon Doctrine and fond (and detailed) memories of the Truman Madsen Joseph Smith tapes—another commonality I share with the illustrious Aaron B. Cox that I forgot to mention. Good company.)

While I’ve written tongue-in-cheek here, I must say that contemplating the historical contingency of my particular existence drives home the lesson of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, writ large to apply to the history of my Mormon ancestry. According to Mormon theology my premortal spirit—‘me’ in some sense—still would have ended up here on Earth, somewhere, sometime. But my present phenotype—‘me’ in a much fuller sense—consists not only of heavenly and earthly genotypes, but the epigenetic totality of my experience and unfolding development in the presence of various historical and environmental factors. There may be unpleasant things in our individual and collective pasts; and while we may need redemption or see a need to change directions as we face the future, to contemplate actually erasing our past is as unbearable as the thought of annihilation. For ultimately it would be tantamount to annihilation: there is an important sense in which material alteration of the past would mean that ‘I,’ as I am today, would simply not exist. (This insight into the ‘vale of tears’ that is this mortal probation is perhaps what led BYU professor Eric Samuelsen to call Eternal Sunshine “the most ‘Mormon’ film of the last two years.”)

It is an insight that may translate with greater, even existential force into a Spinozist perspective. Hence in my bones I love and embrace my people and the totality of its history as it was and as it produced me as I am today. I simply can’t bring myself to wring my hands too much about any ‘bitter fruit’ of 19th century Mormon polygamy.

Spinozist in Seattle

2005-11-14T12:01:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE, 8 December 2005: I’m adding an image that shows the Seattle skyline roughly as it looked from my window at the Watertown hotel, and also reminds readers of the source of this post’s title!]

Travel being an occasional part of my work, I thought it might be interesting to start giving a shout out to those places I visit.

You see, reading Ronan’s post about his recent trip to Utah made me feel the loss of a similar missed opportunity. I gave a talk in the Physics and Astronomy department at BYU the last week of September, but by failing to announce that trip here at my blog, I deprived Utah Bloggernacle readers of the opportunity to hear about “Core-collapse Supernovae: Phenomenological Bonanza, Computational Challenge.” I tremble to think of the irredeemable loss caused by this unconscionable oversight!

This time: Seattle. I arrive today and depart Friday morning. I’ve been there a few times before—love the place—but I’m always grateful for sightseeing and restaurant suggestions from the locals (and anyone else with local knowledge). And if by chance you’re attending SC|05, be sure and stop by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s booth, to learn about the National Center for Computational Sciences, the supernova simulations going on there, and—of course—to say hello.

A Harvard Scientist Throws Down the Gauntlet

2005-11-10T18:09:00.000-05:00

Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson has a short opinion piece in New Scientist (hat tip to David Bailey, a subscriber to Eyring-L) that describes “three opposing images of the human condition,” and suggests that we should consign religion to the dustbin of history (not his words!).

The three worldviews he lists are (1) the great monotheistic religions, in which humanity is created by and responsible to God; (2) political behaviorism, which sees humans as blank slates molded by historical contingency and moldable by cultural/political/economic systems; and (3) scientific humanism, a “more radical view” (and by far the minority one), which claims that human nature was forged over millions of years of evolution, leaving us an inheritance of deeply-seated emotions and “biased channels of learning.”

He claims that political behaviorism implies communism, which has been tested on large scales and found to be a miserable failure; and that while monotheistic religion remains with us, it is problematic, leaving scientific humanism as the best option:

There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost?

If you heard Wilson make these claims and ask this question at a cocktail party, how would you respond?

“Voluntary Suspensions” Required by “Scriptural Theology”

2005-11-09T10:20:00.000-05:00

Attempts at systematic theology in Mormonism tend not to stand the test of time; it is the revelatory and historical narratives that retain vitality and endure to be reinterpeted and reapplied on an individual basis in every generation. This means that most believers end up with an ad hoc, informal, often subconscious and implicit worldview. However, philosophers cannot help themselves, and in an interesting post Jim F. describes what he considers a legitimate form of ~~systematic~~ theology. His “scriptural theology” is defined by a method (“keeps its eye on the word of God as its origin”) and a goal (“intimate relation”—understanding and experience of “human being and our relation to God”). I complained that this approach seemed to require “voluntary suspension of the totality of our experience and knowledge, and the urge to integrate it all.”

Jim F. explained further, but I’m not sure I’m really ‘getting it’ yet, beyond recognizing the possibility that what I called an “artificial boundary demarcation” (or might also call ‘putting blinders on’) might be considered instead a helpful focus—on “the God we worship” rather than “the metaphysical god.” I am not yet sure these can be separated. The claim that they can be separated seems to require abandoning (Joseph’s?) claim in the Lectures on Faith that one comes to rely on God because of knowledge of his (metaphysical?) attributes. (Of course, the Lectures on Faith may be the Mormon index case of pathological theology Jim F. argues ought not be done: after all, they were dropped from the canon, in spite of the fact that their presence was responsible for the word “Doctrine” in the title Doctrine and Covenants, as the 1835 edition makes clear.)

In any case, I’ll try here to articulate what I meant by my “voluntary suspension” statement by giving one example in terms of method and one that suggests why “metaphysical questions” might in fact be relevant to the goal of intimacy with God.

First, an example of “voluntary suspension” in terms of method. The word of God teaches me about God’s creation of myself and my world. Presumably I am taught these things in order to convince me that (a) I have a relationship with God, and (b) it is a relationship that ought to be characterized by my obedience to him. However, allowing “the totality of our experience and knowledge” into the picture (scientific evidence in this case) raises the possibility that the scriptural account of creation is inaccurate, with possible consequences for the notions of whether I have a relationship with God or what is legitimately required in terms of obedience. Because I consider science a valid enterprise, I am uncomfortable with a focus on scripture that excludes consideration of the impacts of scientific claims on ‘theology.’

Next, an example of the “voluntary suspension” of questions relevant to the goal of intimacy with God. The word of God teaches me that God has control over the elements, and gives numerous examples and warnings of his willingness to exercise that control as a way of rewarding faith and punishing disobedience. (This is a major difference with the members of one’s family, and reveals an important limitation of the analogy with familial relationships.) On the other hand, our day-to-day observations of the world show that the elements cause considerable pain to innocent others. This raises questions about God’s existence, power, or benevolence, and therefore has potential consequences for my trust in and intimacy with him. By enforcing focus on the word of God, Jim F.’s “scriptural theology” would by fiat exclude from consideration our observations of pain to innocent others; but I am uncomfortable with the exclusion of such obvious empirical input.

I recognize that by legitimizing questions of theodicy based on observations of pain to others, I am at odds with a principle I have previously espoused when it favored me in my guilt—withholding judgment when one is not personally affected. I think I must retreat from that position to some extent, or at least qualify it. Our social interactions are sufficiently complex as to rely not only on direct reciprocity, but also indirect reciprocity and a presupposition of general adherence to cultural norms. In this context the establishment of reputations becomes necessary, and basing them in part on well-established observations that do not directly involve us may become legitimate. (Our proclivity for gossip suggests that in bygone ages or under dysfunctional civil authority it was/is necessary or at least effective, sort of like black markets in dysfunctional economies.) Therefore, it might be argued, it is legitimate to establish a reputation for God based on his observed actions with respect to the elements. I suppose one rejoinder may be that God is not just another member of our society but is a unique outsider above and beyond it (‘Where wert thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ and so on), and could never be in our debt, and therefore the concepts of reciprocation and cultural norms and reputation do not apply to him. Another (related I guess) is that it may be impossible for us to justly evaluate the facts, both because he operates on spatial and temporal scales beyond normal human consideration (‘My ways are higher than your ways’ and so forth), and because we may not be privy to comfort he may in fact provide innocent others in their extremities.

Spinozist Musings

2005-11-08T12:01:00.000-05:00

On this page—linked permanently on the sidebar for your convenience—I collect links to my more, uh, ‘inspired’ posts on questions of faith and evidence. While some are impatient with such “beginners’ questions” and “threshold issues,” they are important in setting a proper direction, and therefore repay careful and continued consideration.

The identity and nature of the muse that inspired these musings is not clear.

People of the (newly-forged) Relics

2005-11-07T12:01:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I made on offhand comment about “Mormon confidence in and taste for ontological realities.” The true magnitude of that taste for concreteness was subsequently opened to my view during a perusal of the Deseret Book Christmas catalog. Check these out:

The Deseret Book web pages for the Brass Plates and the Liahona reveal that these are not intended as gimmicks, nor mere kitsch. This is indicated not only by the nontrivial price tags ($295 each), but also by the inclusion of an accompanying “certificate of authenticity” (!). Also apparently on the way soon—I kid you not—the Sword of Laban ($345). (Speaking of which, I also note that some are not satisfied with commemorative reproductions: a counselor in a stake presidency once told me enthusiastically of the credence he gave a supposedly well-sourced rumor that the First Presidency retains the Sword of Laban in its vaults.)

I wonder what the FARMS folk think of these newly-forged relics. In the Editor’s Introduction to a recent issue of the FARMS Review of Books, Daniel C. Peterson derives a mocking corollary to Dan Vogel’s hypothesis that Joseph fabricated a crude mock-up of plates to deceive his followers:

But once we’ve posited a previously unnoticed Deseret Custom Design Metal Foundry operating under Joseph's management on the outskirts of Palmyra, that industrial concern also needs to produce the breastplate seen by various witnesses, as well as the brass plates, the Urim and Thummim, the sword of Laban, and the Liahona. One wonders how many skilled metallurgists and craftsmen were available in the area at the time, what the local wage scale was, and why nobody ever seems to have reported the noise and the belching smoke of Joseph’s fraud-producing furnaces.

(According to the Deseret Book online descriptions, the modern masters of curious workmanship busy filling out Peterson’s shopping list have not taken the name Deseret Custom Design Metal Foundry, but instead simply LDS Artifacts.) Despite the disdain this statement manifests for the theory that Joseph may have fashioned a (possibly well-intentioned) fraudulent prop aimed at boosting faith among his intimates who did not share his capacities as a seer, I would not be surprised if hard-core apologists in Peterson’s mold were among those most delighted by these modern celebrations of the transient Nephite artifactual irruptions into the real world that accompanied Mormonism’s birth. Perhaps more than one such apologist will be lucky enough to find one of these treasures under the tree this year!

Reading over what I have written here, I am not sure I should be happy with its unmistakably (if mildly) derisive tone. I wish I could say that I’m merely amused by Mormon artistic tastes and dispassionately following Brother Peterson’s signature stylistic lead. In fact, I suppose questions surrounding the nature of divine manifestations touch a nerve with me. I may simply be proud, fancying myself passionate about verifiable ontologies (I am, after all, a physicist) and rightfully suspicious of inadequately supported ones. Whatever my degree of guilt for intellectual pride, I am frustrated by evidence purposefully withheld: if, in the interest of requiring the exercise of faith, God has seen fit to take the original artifacts unto himself (except perhaps, as noted, the Sword of Laban!), who are we to forge reliquary Towers of Babel as celebratory substitutes? (I’m aware that “reliquary” is, officially, only a noun. I invite you to consider my present use as an adjective not erroneous, but linguistically groundbreaking. ;-> )

If we consider ourselves—like other great monotheistic faiths—‘People of a Book,’ do we mean the text, or the putative physicality of its elusive relics? It is, I suspect, principally the latter. Present-day exercise of authority correlates and governs the details of Mormon life to a much greater extent than the specifics of the Book of Mormon text—and the source of that celebrated authority is not the self-evident wisdom of scriptural precepts and contemporary prophetic teachings, nor the democratically elaborated consent of the governed, but the perceived concreteness of the founding manifestations.

Technorati Brings Traffic from “Real Media”

2005-11-04T07:46:00.000-05:00

If your posts ever refer to articles from the mass media, I recommend getting your blog set up with Technorati (see for example the link on my sidebar). The reason is that the “real media” seem to be setting up links in their articles along the lines of ‘What are blogs saying about this article?’ In the case of the Washington Post, at least, this facility is autmotically powered by Technorati; this resulted in your humble blog here being linked to by the Washington Post twice yesterday (here and here), since I cited two of their articles on Sam Alito. I don’t know how many outlets are doing this yet, or if services other than Technorati are being used, but this is the kind of thing that seems likely to spread. Notice also that cable news channels sometimes have segments along the lines of ‘What are the blogs saying about this?’ All of this suggests that blogging is becoming a permanent and more influential medium.

Sam Alito: Two, make that Three Quickies

2005-11-03T22:40:00.000-05:00

Two of the first things I read about Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination were, while not profound, kinda funny.

The first has to do with my nomination conspiracy theories. Like any conspiracy theory worthy of the name, the part about the Miers nomination being phony from the beginning as a long-prepared distraction is completely untestable. The testable part of my prediction—that the new nominee would be announced on Friday, the same day as the Libby indictment—turned out to be wrong. But that’s only because the White House realized that not even the American people could be fooled by so direct and crass an attempt to keep the indictment of a White House official out of the news. With Rove dodging the bullet, and lingering coverage of the Miers withdrawal the day before as a mitigating factor, they decided they’d be better off with one very bad news day on Friday than with charges of being completely craven in their manipulation of news cycle. Then they could start fresh on Monday, announcing Alito’s nomination before anyone woke up, and dominate the coverage the entire week.

Anyway, to get to the first point (I guess that hasn’t been so quick after all): The timing of the nomination has in fact been effective in submerging the indictments, for which I offer two pieces of evidence, one official and one funny. Quoth the Washington Post regarding the Democrats’ motivation for their closed session stunt: “Democrats were dismayed that President Bush made no apologies after the indictment and that his naming of a new Supreme Court nominee Monday knocked the Libby story off many front pages.” It’s a point made more incisively, however, by the very first thing I read about Alito’s nomination: the rules of this drinking game.

The second amusing thing I read about Alito that first day was the very end of Monday morning’s Washington Post story, a point that should thrill religious social conservatives everywhere:

In the area of church and state, Alito has been consistently supportive of the conservative view that the courts should be more accommodating when considering state entanglement with religion. He wrote a majority opinion in ACLU v. Schundler, holding that a city's holiday display that included a creche and menorah did not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it included secular symbols as well, such as Frosty the Snowman.

Wow! Able to demolish the ACLU with Frosty the Snowman! Now that’s what I call a badass conservative judge. Imagine the good for humanity he could do if he were teamed with Spiderman, or Batman and Robin, or the Fantastic Four!

Bonus third quickie, an entire article actually, since it took me several days to get around to writing this: today’s Washington Post amasses piles of anecdotes from his Senate courtesy calls that lead to a devastating conclusion: Sam Alito is a nerd, big time. Even though “Washington is a town of geeks and misfits who, for the most part, suppress their inner dorks much of the time,” Alito apparently stands out, especially in contrast to John Roberts:

Alito has the disadvantage of following John Roberts, who was just as smart but carried himself like a big man on campus: athletic build, quick humor and good looks. Compared with Roberts, Alito looks as if he were in town for a “Star Trek” convention.

While the piece seems to be regrettably tainted by (male) reporter Dana Milbank’s evident mancrush on John Roberts, we can nevertheless be grateful for this stellar example of the elite media’s serious and insightful coverage of this critical confirmation process.

Blogging and Lying: A Guilty Response

2005-10-31T10:35:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE, 1 November 2005: Eric Russell has written a thoughtful review of the actual content of the Banner, as opposed to its real-world morality play aspects.]

Until now I haven’t engaged the thread Blogging and Lying at Times and Seasons, regarding the Banner of Heaven episode. Now that fearless leaders Steve and Brian (and fearless fellow-soldiers Naomi and David) have, I too shall venture forth—well, sort of, from the safe distance of my own blog. (With some trepidation: When I read Shannon’s comment about Brian and Steve's undergraduate romantic escapades, I laughed and shook my head, thinking, “These are the guys I followed willy-nilly into this fiasco?! I should have known!” Surely the first lesson to be learned here is, ‘Think twice, listen to the hair raising up on the back of your neck, when a couple of Benson scholars come to you with a proposition.’ Nevertheless once again I follow them into the breach.)

I am guilty of being involved in something that, in its deceptive execution, turned out to be mean and hurtful to many participants. I regret this. I am also sorry that Times and Seasons and the Archipelago page were used even tangentially, and regret causing the dismay of the unsuspecting proprietors of these sites at their consequent unintentional and faultless association with the affair. (The knowledgeable proprietors have presumably already been flogged by their own.) I don’t know that I’ll ever create any more online fiction, but if I do I will clearly label it as such. I ask for forgiveness from those hurt and offended.

In human terms it’s surely too soon for me, as a guilty participant, to try to draw—much less prescribe—larger lessons from this; but the Bloggernacle moves faster than natural human processing speeds, so I will anyway. I am going to name some names to give examples of where I would like to express appreciation for what they have done over the last few days; having a faulty human memory I will surely leave some out, for which I apologize in advance. I would be happy to update this post with other examples once I am reminded of them.

I am grateful to those such as Rosalynde Welch, Jonathan Green (also here), and John Welch—and even, in his brilliant geekiness, Nate Oman, the instigator of that sprawling brawl of a thread—who deployed their intellectual gifts in an effort to create some meaning out of it all. This impulse—an effort “to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness”—is the noble core of the best artistic/prophetic endeavors.

Since the motifs of participatory self-revelation and transgression/contrition/redemption have become fashionable in these analyses, I’ll throw my two cents in. Think back on Rosalynde’s guest post Smile at the Camera at the Banner just before the unraveling, which in hindsight was a prescient warning shot across the bow: beware, artists, what your compositions say about you; beware, viewers, what your (soon to be manifested) reactions say about you; be aware, one and all, of the deceptions of self and others you are engaging in your every action and reaction. (My comment to her post, under my real name, that “the creator(s) may not even know the meaning of what they’ve wrought,” is surely a candidate for Understatement of the Year.)

What have we learned about ourselves? I have discovered something unflattering about my appalling willingness to be thoughtless, inconsiderate, even mean in the service of fun and pride. Through their public comments in various places, I have learned something about the aggrieved direct participants—people like Kurt, Sue, annegb, Laura (and here), a random John, Eric, Jordan, Jeffrey (also here and here), and others—namely, after varying degrees of shock and hurt, great nobility of soul, manifested in a healing capacity for forgiveness, a steadying sense of proportion, and even the simple happiness of appreciative, bemused retrospective humor. Thank you for your goodness in the face of my lack of it.

And now, while Adam has a point, I shall now nevertheless fail to heed it. (Adam, feel free at this point to add a double meaning to “A Guilty Response” in the title of this post.) I am less sanguine about something else in human nature that has been manifest. Bryce commented that with regard to the transgression/contrition/redemption story, “some would say we’re particularly bad at it.” I think the examples above show that on an individual level, many directly affected are in fact quite good at an important part of this story—forgiveness. And those not so directly affected? Concern, on the part of non-participants, for the impact on direct participants is understandable—and, to a point, laudable. However, it also seems that, for some reason I don’t understand (surely there’s a profound evolutionary explanation in our small-group-hunter/gatherer roots ;-> ), our taste for the pound of flesh seems redoubled when the debt is not even owed us personally. Whatever the primal source of this tendency of the natural man, I wonder if the civilizing and restraining influence of our legal system has something to teach us here, with regard to the concept of having the ‘legal standing’ to demand and administer justice.

And that brings me to my fantasy finale to the Times and Seasons edition of the playing-out of this episode. A thread opened by Nate with insight derived from arcane points of law deserves to be transcended by, what else, another post by Nate with insight derived from arcane points of law. It would be a post I am not equipped to write, but I can suggest a title: Standing and Stone-throwing.

Brilliant Conspirators

2005-10-27T10:05:00.000-04:00

No, I’m not talking about the Banner of Heaven (see here, here, and here). I’m talking about President Bush’s political operation. I haven’t seen or read any news coverage yet, but my wife just called to tell me the Miers nomination has been withdrawn. Brilliant! It’s perfectly timed, of course, to compete with news of Rove and Libby indictments. The next brilliant step will be to announce the new nominee tomorrow to increase the background noise on the very day of the indictments.

This much is obvious to everyone; but it gets even better, and more sinister. Here’s my conspiracy theory: They’ve known for months that indictments were likely, so they put up a phony nominee on purpose, possibly with her own knowledge and complicit participation, knowing it would create an outcry and prove untenable—all with the purpose of carefully preparing long in advance a sufficiently big distraction to blunt the impact of the indictments.

Such is the corrosive and wide ranging impact of the Banner—I am now inclined to distrust the Bush administration, which I generally support. (Of course, I can’t help but notice that Rusty’s numbers must be huge… I’m not above parasitically tagging along on the excitement of the whole thing to try and bring a little attention to what Aaron once called my little ”puny ass blog” here. Aaron, you’re the bomb. You go girl!)

Music of the Spheres

2005-10-23T22:40:00.000-04:00

Such was the title of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s program this past week, the first in this year’s “Masterworks” season ticket package. Included were Holy the Firm: Essay for Cello and Orchestra (2002) by Jake Heggie and Gustav Holst’s immortal The Planets (1916).

In a preview discussion an hour before the performance, conductor Lucas Richman described the two pieces as exploring spirituality from two different perspectives: one inner and personal, and the other external and cosmic.

Jake Heggie (1961- ) is alleged to be a rising star among American contemporary composers. I gather he is best known for his opera Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean. His second opera, based on Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, premiered last year at the Houston Grand Opera. His output consists mostly of vocal music, including many songs in addition to his operas. Maestro Richman has been a friend of Heggie’s since their student days at UCLA; along with a few other friends they formed a kind of composers’ club, “Lo-Cal” (“local,” light, Southern California, … ), that forced them to continually compose for the concerts for which they cobbled together support every couple of months or so.

Holy the Firm, written for cello soloist Emil Miland (who appeared in this performance, as well as the premiere in the recording linked above), is named after Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s short story. I haven’t read it, but am given to understand that it is about a young girl severely burned in a plane crash, and trying to understand how God could allow such things to happen. Apparently the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred in the early stages of composition, with the result that the work took on added meaning as a response to this event. Not having read Dillard’s story yet, I haven’t learned for myself the understanding it finally reaches; the music, however, never seems to reach a resolution. It opens with a strikingly pleasant chord, shortly undermined by an unsettling melody that haunts the first portion of the piece. (The cello—featuring an acoustic cavity similar in size to the human torso—is apparently the stringed instrument most similar in register to the human voice, and is perhaps particularly appropriate for vocalesque expressions of human feeling.) There are some violent and harsh moments, and an anguished cadenza. In the last minute or two of the 27-minute piece the same (or a similar) pleasing chord as the one at the beginning suddenly appears, giving a brief hope of a triumphal or at least peaceful resolution at the last minute; alas, it too is undermined by a more poignant conclusion. It would seem no clear understanding or hope of complete healing is ever reached. The opening sentence of Dillard’s story perhaps provide a preview of the most that can be hoped for:

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.

Such courageous gratitude for whatever we are fortunate enough to have on loan from this indifferent universe is about the best a die-hard Spinozist would have to cling to in the face of disaster. One of the reviewers at Amazon took away the following message: “There is no God that will directly intervene and tell us what to do, or save us. He is as ruthless as he is merciful.… And we must remember that we control most of the things in our lives directly.”

In contrast, in composing The Planets, British composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was motivated by a more fateful belief in the effects of ongoing celestial influences—specifically, as understood by astrology. As I recall (as is often the case, I’m too lazy to read my own link) the idea behind astrology is that a fluid—called ‘influence,’ literally from the Latin ‘to flow in’—flows from heavenly bodies to Earth, directly affecting terrestrial events. The work consists of seven essentially unconnected movements; each is pretty much an independent tone poem (the two missing planets are Earth, which has no astrological significance; and Pluto, which had not yet been discovered). The first movement—Mars, the Bringer of War—is a popular favorite, and is absolutely electrifying to experience live, with its big brass parts and relentless staccato rythms in ominous 5/4 time. (No doubt it suitably represented World War I.) There is a beautiful, stately melody in the middle of Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, that I think is in unison in most all the string parts, that brought Kimberly to tears. Another favorite moment for me is the end of the last movement—Neptune, the Mystic—in which a wordless chorus of high-pitched womens’ voices achieves an incredibly eerie effect.

We were able to learn a few other interesting tidbits. Our copy of The Planets, the one linked above, also includes two pieces from movie scores by John Williams: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Main Title from Star Wars, which perhaps have ties to The Planets. For example, Star Wars is reminiscent of Mars, and in Close Encounters there is a vocal segment similar to that in Neptune. In the pre-concert discussion I asked about this, and Maestro Richman—who has some movie work to his credit, as noted in his biography linked above—said that it is common for directors to have some kind of fill-in music (I forget the technical term) that gives the composer a rough idea of what is called for. He said it’s quite possible that George Lucas used Mars as a fill-in in the case of Star Wars. Also, Kimberly thought the melody in the middle of Jupiter seemed familiar from a choral piece. She didn’t manage to ask in the pre-concert discussion, but we happened to see the Maestro, soloist, and symphony managing director after the performance, a couple booths away at the wonderful Riverside Tavern overlooking the Tennessee River. Mr. Miland had changed into a Hawaiian shirt, and Maestro Richman looked every bit the artiste with his goatee, flowing mane, unbuttoned silky purple shirt, and lingering perspiration from the evening’s exertions. They were gracious in answering our questions. Kimberly learned that the familiar melody was Holst’s famous Hymn of Jesus (I thought it reminded me of background music in the Shire in Lord of the Rings). I asked Mr. Miland what soloists do during the rest of the program after their piece is finished—Listen in the wings? Go to the green room and watch TV? Bail to a bar, or to the airport? In this case he had snuck into the balcony to watch the performance. Maestro Richman told of a violinist who liked to shed her fancy soloist garb during intermission and sneak in to wing it among the second violins in standard concert black.

Well, in this self-indulgently long journal piece I hope that for once I’ve made good on the promise in my blog description of perspectives from ‘high culture’—even if the forms of spirituality suggested by the two pieces here are not likely to be enthusiastically endorsed by Mormons!

The Spinozist Take from General Conference, October 2005, Day Two

2005-10-02T12:02:00.000-04:00

Below are one- or two-sentence first impressions of talks from the second day of General Conference, to be updated after each session.

Sunday Morning Session

President Monson: By example, Joseph taught us courage, faith, honesty, patience, diligence, the importance of missionary service, and love. His message of the Restoration continues to change lives.

President Packer: The standards upon which civilization depends have been swept away, but we can be optimistic because we have the word of God—both the permanent foundation left by Joseph Smith, and continuing revelation exemplified by the LDS edition of the scriptures, the restructuring of the curriculum, proclamations, seminaries and institutes, family home evening, Preach my Gospel, and Church magazines.

Elder Bateman: The gospel, on Earth since Adam, is universal; its appeal is not limited to Americans.

Sister ???: Reading and living the scriptures morning, day, and night, they become written in our hearts, and build a tradition of righteous living.

Elder Scott: People naturally turn to God in deteriorating conditions. Satan is effective in causing them to ignore it, but people should turn to the true Plan of Salvation, which they knew in the premortal life, but memory of which is withheld to make this life a valid test. The Restoration was so important that the First Vision is the only known instance of a visit by both the Father and the Son.

President Hinckley: Forgiveness is the most-needed virtue on Earth. If someone throws a frozen fowl through your windshield, forgive them.

Sunday Afternoon Session

Elder Nelson: Jesus Christ is the Master Healer. Real joy awaits each of us on the other side of sorrow.

Elder Hales: As previously noted by President Packer, Tyndale, in translating the Bible into English, told a clergyman he would make it so a ploughboy could understand the scriptures better than he could. About 80% of the King James Bible relies on Tyndale’s work—a Bible later read by ploughboy Joseph Smith.

Elder ???: Do not be afraid of sacrifice; enjoy the blessings it brings.

Elder ???: By keeping covenants, the challenges of life can be transcended.

Elder ???: With so many roads and intersections in life, Jesus continues to define the true path.

Elder ???: Peter was commanded to feed the Lord’s sheep; Joseph also. Minister to people according to specific needs.

Elder Uchtdorf: Basics of flight, and basics of Church membership: faith, hope, and other Christlike attributes provide forward thrust and upward lift. Oh, and by the way, stay in your own homeland, please.

President Hinckley: It has been an inspirational feast at the table of the Lord. You’re all invited to Joseph Smith’s 200th birthday extravaganza.

The Spinozist Take from General Conference, October 2005, Day One

2005-10-01T15:12:00.000-04:00

Below are one- or two-sentence first impressions of talks from the first day of General Conference.

Saturday Morning Session

President Hinckley: Like the now-defunct British empire, the sun never sets on the empire of Christ the Lord, the restored Church of Jesus Christ. Temple work moves forward, with new temples and a new computer system to avoid duplication of ordinances.

Elder Perry: Accept President Hinckley’s challenge to read that tangible witness—the Book of Mormon, written for our day—by the end of the year.

Elder McMullin: Contemplating calamities in our age of natural disasters, wars, and licentiousness of epic proportions, we are to ask: What part of my life needs to change so chastening won’t be necessary? Tragedies never triumph where personal righteousness prevails.

Sister Tanner: Our physical bodies are part of the divine plan. Sweet rolls can ruin spirituality.

Elder Wirthlin: Like those who were kept safe from the tsunami by following the timely advice of an old fisherman in a coastal village when the ocean receded, those who follow the prophets avoid sorrow and difficulty. Abandon sin and journey to higher ground.

President Faust: Those with our “blockbuster beliefs” have a recognizable light in their eyes, while those partaking of today’s growing secularism have a different look about them. He had a testimony as a young boy; it always seemed to be part of his consciousness, and not the result of any specific event.

Saturday Afternoon Session

Elder Oaks: Employing two not-always-popular words, he notes that priesthood authority is patriarchal in the home and hierarchical in the Church. Our theology and practice are ultimately family oriented: our origins, mortal tasks, and eternal salvation are all defined in family terms.

Elder Holland: On the occasion of a first grandchild becoming a teenager, counsel for young women. You are treasured, but flip-flops in Church (which is not a beach), plastic surgery, and great and spacious makeup kits seem frowned upon.

Elder ???: Happiness comes by obedience to the will of God.

Elder ???: There has been great growth and progress of the Church in Mexico among the children of Lehi, a sign that the work of the Father has commenced in restoring the house of Israel.

Elder ???: Seek to find the lost one. Invite someone (literally) today to hear the prophet (literally) tomorrow.

Elder Eyring: The great test of life is to choose to obey God in the midst of the challenges of life. This requires early and steady obedience and faith in Jesus Christ.

Elder Ballard: On the tenth anniversary of the Proclamation on the Family, a mission statement for mortality: Build an eternal family. Alluding to Harold B. Lee, the Church is a scaffolding for the building of families.

Priesthood Session

Elder Bednar: Are you of the seed of Abraham? You’re no mere civilian. You’re a missionary.

Elder Didier: Hear and heed the word of the Lord. Wrong religious beliefs lead to wrong religious behavior.

Elder Johnson: General Conference provides the spiritual guidance we need.

President Faust: Be in harmony with the Brethren; obtaining spiritual guidance depends on it. Be in harmony with local leaders too. In particular, don’t put your Bishop in a dunking machine.

President Monson: Deacons pass the sacrament and collect fast offerings. Teachers home teach. [I was so bummed in the ward of my youth, when, shortly after becoming a Teacher, Teachers began being called upon to collect fast offerings too.] Priests continue home teaching, and bless the sacrament. Miracles are everywhere to be found when the priesthood is magnified, when selfless service replaces selfish striving.

President Hinckley: Great numbers of brethren have traveled long distances to provide help in the gulf states that have suffered. [Of this I can testify.] This old world is no stranger to calamity, from the great flood when waters covered the earth and eight souls were saved, to [insert sampling of disasters over the centuries here], and more are expected in the future. D&C 88:89-91. The best storehouse is the family storeroom. Without righteousness we cannot expect the help of the Lord, as the Jaredites and Nephites learned the hard way. If ye are prepared ye shall not fear (fine print: whether in life or in death, however, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust).

Love: An Intimation of a Deeper Spiritual Reality?

2005-09-03T14:03:00.000-04:00

In a comment on my post on the evidentiary value of spiritual experiences, Mike wondered if love is an example of a category of truth, a “deeper spiritual reality,” whose discernment requires trust in feelings.

In terms of whether it is the evidence or the target knowledge that is ‘concrete’ or ‘ethereal,’ knowing the gospel is true and knowing someone loves you are more opposite than alike. In trying to discern via the Holy Ghost if the gospel is true, we interpret ethereal perceptions (our own thoughts and feelings) as evidence of a concrete reality (e.g. God’s existence) to which we don’t have direct access. In trying to discern if someone loves us, clues from observable expressions, behavior, and speech allow us to make inferences about something ethereal—someone else’s thoughts and feelings. (Such inferences are less that perfect, of course, as in the proverbial conundrum faced by women: ‘Is that a just a banana in his pocket, or does he actually feel glad to see me?’)

Now, if we want to get hard-nosed about it, we can talk about love in strictly concrete, empirical terms. (By the way, here and here are two relevant definitions of “hard-nosed”—I have an insatiable curiosity about the origin and usage of words and expressions.) For example, this news story in Science that discusses different patterns of brain activation in (1) early, consuming, obsessive infatuation, (2) longer term relationships, and (3) orgasm itself, for both men and women. (Subscription required—not, thankfully, to experience these forms and facets of love, but to read the article. For those bereft of institutional subscriptions to academic journals, contact me by email and I’ll send it to you.) I also remember reading an intriguing review in Nature of a recent book by Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History: Why We Love : The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. At first it sounds like Ms. Fisher fell in love with her brain scans:

When I first looked at those brain scans, with the active brain regions lit up in bright yellow and deep orange, I felt the way I feel on a summer night when I gaze at the sparkling universe: overwhelming awe.

But overwhelming as brain scans might be, apparently the book also contains a healthy sprinkling of real-world quotations reminding us that brain scans cannot compete with living the subjective experience, as evidenced by Richard Burton’s observation of 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor:

She was so extraordinarily beautiful I nearly laughed out loud. She... was famine, fire, destruction and plague... Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered... those huge violet eyes... had an odd glint... Aeons passed, civilizations came and went while these cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon.

(Note: Fisher’s book is now available at Amazon.com in paperback, at a discount. I’ve placed it on my wish list, to make it easy for appreciative and generous readers to make their love for me concrete and observable. ;-> )

Of course, Richard Burton’s initial reaction to Elizabeth Taylor was probably not the sort of “deeper spiritual reality” to which Mike referred. Along the same lines as Mike, my mother has also expressed a similar idea:

Aren’t the really transcendent moments of life, those of true connection in love with another human being or with “nature,” spirit-to-spirit, that are life-giving and life-changing a reflection and intimation of the Eternal World? What, strictly by human effort alone, can compare with those moments?

My response is something like Ada’s response to her father’s otherworldly philosophy in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain:

Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which we ought aim all our yearning. And Ada had then agreed.

But now, as she looked out at the view, she held the opinion that what she saw was no token but all the life there is. It was a position in most ways contrary to Monroe’s; nevertheless, it did not rule out its own denomination of sharp yearning, though Ada could not entirely set a name to its direction.

Does the existence of love imply, as Mike and my mother suggest, the existence of a “deeper spiritual reality”? Obviously I cannot prove this proposition false, but I confess I find a mortal origin and destiny of this phenomenon reasonably persuasive.

Whatever its origins, it is clear that love is a mystery of sufficient potency to have inspired longings for another world, and spawned the construction of powerful social structures—structures that define and control the ways in which we are by turns commanded, and forbidden, to acquiesce to its allure and nourish its growth and perpetuation. I cannot help wondering, however, if the long, otherworldly shadow cast by the perception of divine origin and eternal dictates over love hasn’t, in many cases, hamstrung the possible fullness of its mortal expression.

What Did Nibley Think of Evolution?

2005-08-14T23:47:00.000-04:00

Many Church members—even some who profess an interest in Mormon thought—resist discussion of evolution. Early in his career, Hugh Nibley discussed the subject in his classes; then, for a period of time, he decided “it was a waste of time;” and finally, he recognized that the alleged evolutionary origin of humanity is “a subject that is impossible to avoid,” and was willing to weigh in on the matter. He expressed his view in Before Adam, an address to the BYU community delivered in 1980 (also available in CWHN, Vol. 1, Ch. 4). While he commendably took scientific findings much more seriously than material published by the Church, in the end his view does not stand up in the face of currently available data.

Nibley deserves credit, first of all, for recognizing the need for a reconciliation between scientific data and scriptural accounts. He urges us to get beyond the “nursery tales” and “Sunday-school recitals” that many take away from Biblical stories, but he also disparages those who “fall into adolescent disillusionment” under the influence of their “emancipated teachers.” When it comes to getting beyond these default options, he declares that “We have drawn back from that assignment, preferring to save a lot of trouble and take sides with the traditional schools.”

Nibley is not kind to these “traditional schools.” “…we have been the spectators of a foolish contest between equally vain and bigoted rivals, in which it is a moot question which side heaps the most contempt on God’s creatures.” In the same vein, on the surface it would seem to be a moot question which of these “rivals”—“apostate religion” or “an always inadequate science”—receives more contempt from Nibley. With these, “…the issue is never the merits of the evidence but always the jealous rivalry of the contestants to see which would be the official light unto the world.”

In fact, however, his bark is worse than his bite; his sarcastic dismissals seem to be a rhetorical stance adopted out of concern over theories “that turned some of our best students away from the gospel,” and perhaps also an effort to assure his audience of his bona fides before taking a step or two beyond traditional doctrine. “Am I willing to stake my eternal salvation on their highly conflicting opinions?” No, Professor Nibley, we are persuaded you are not. But we can see past the red meat your audience demands to the way you have voted with your feet: your summaries of worldly learning, copious references, and ultimately your attempt at accomodating what you accept as stubborn facts all constitute a high compliment, betraying the time and thought—and therefore serious respect—you have accorded the scholars and scientists, and some of us are grateful.

Whether or not his mockery of the would-be official luminaries is merely rhetorical, it’s not, of course, as though Nibley himself is without an official light: “This means that Joseph Smith is the only entry.” Relying primarily on his ‘grown-up’ interpretation of the Book of Abraham, but sensitive to the facts uncovered by geology and paleontology, Nibley parses the account as a description of the creative enterprise more or less in line with scientific realism. He makes as much as possible of available resources offered by the text, emphasizing changes in perspective, the earth and waters being “prepared” to “bring forth” life, the waiting and watching to see that things “obeyed.” He paints an interesting picture “entailing careful planning based on vast experience, long consultations, models, tests, and even trial runs for a complicated system requiring a vast scale of participation by the creatures concerned.”

Predictably and perhaps necessarily, his congeniality towards science begins to wane as he approaches man, and he is ultimately at a loss to provide a clear-cut solution to the Adam problem (though he does in the end throw a desperate “Hail Mary,” mentioned below). He vacillates, on the one hand seeming to need and want the theoretical space afforded by eight “roles” and four “senses” of “Adam,” and acknowledging the existence of “100,000-year-old villages;” but in the end he chooses the other hand, and denies the authority of archaeology and anthropology to say anything about us. Regarding “creatures that looked like men long, long ago,”

…their world is not our world. They have all gone away long before our people ever appeared.…That gap between the record keeper and all the other creatures we know anything about is so unimaginably enormous and yet so neat and abrupt that we can only be dealing with another sort of being, a quantum leap from one world to another. Here is something not derivative from anything that has gone before on the local scene, even though they all share the same atoms.

By thus positing an unbridgeable gap in time and type, when it comes to man he makes a decisive break with evolution.

In making his case, Nibley positions himself above the fray, occupying the high ground cleared by Joseph’s sweeping revelations, and adopting the strategy of triangulation long before anyone ever heard of Dick Morris. Seeking a solution beyond those proferred by the equally inadequate jealous rivals, the idiosyncratic picture Nibley ends up with has important affinities to the position staked out by B. H. Roberts in his (until recently) unpublished manuscript The Truth, The Way, The Life. (One wonders if Nibley arrived at his views independently, or if perhaps he had access to this embargoed work of Elder Roberts.) Knowingly or unknowingly following in Elder Roberts’ footsteps, Nibley’s synthesis valiantly attempts to thread the needle–accepting more than is customary (for a Mormon) from science, while taking more seriously than is customary (for a scientist) the scriptural accounts. In conceding the reality of death before the fall and the existence of “a lot of creatures running about long ago who looked like men,” he risks alienting the Priests; in ultimately rejecting an evolutionary origin of mankind, he finds himself hopelessly at odds with the Scientists. His intriguing and dramatic finale, a bold coup de gras, is almost literally deus ex machina: a not-so-subtle hint at a resort to private acceptance of some form of the Adam-God doctrine in order to resolve the problem of Adam, whereby he manages to simultaneously offend both Priest and Scientist in equal measure—a situation probably inevitable in any attempted reconciliation anyway. (Nibley here provides a roadmap for getting away with this sort of thing with an academically unwashed audience of faith: first, let the impression fall as gently and subtly as possible, like the dews of heaven, that you know a hell of a lot more than they do; and second, make as explicit as possible—and as bombastically as occasion allows—your unalloyed allegiance to the Restoration, by roundly condemning its detractors while overtly wrapping yourself in the ægis of Joseph’s revelations. Must be fun to throw lightning bolts from that rhetorical Olympus.)

I like this piece of Nibley’s, for its willingness to take on the subject, its erudition, and its engaging, bold, almost flamboyant style; but I think it fails on scientific grounds, right where it matters most: the origin of man. It is not at all clear that the gaps in man’s nature and descent that he requires are there; on the contrary, everything seems to point to us being an elaboration of anatomy and culture possessed by ancient and different ancestors. (The modern genetic evidence seems particularly definitive regarding historically contingent descent of the physical body; see this post for a specific example.) Nibley seems tolerant of evolution of the animal kingdom, but is unwilling to take it all the way to man. (I suspect that if President McKay accepted evolution, as often alleged, it was only in this limited sense that does not ‘give away the store.’) The necessity of this gap is a legacy of the fundamental Mormon doctrine of an anthropomorphic, procreating God, whose consequences for the expected nature of exaltation will not easily be relinquished.

[This is cross-posted from Mormon Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

More on Worthiness and Testimony

2005-07-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

One subject mentioned in a recent post was the connection between worthiness and testimony. Discussions with Pete raised a couple of interesting issues.

First, the outliers Saul, Laman and Lemuel, and Alma: Why did they receive concrete manisfestations, that are usually thought of as being reserved for the most worthy?

Second, there seem to be two different paradigms of the mechanism by which unworthiness impairs spiritual communication: (1) God withdrawing his presence, and (2) the unworthy individual’s ‘reception’ of a divine signal of constant strength getting mucked up. I made a subsidiary, more or less æsthetic argument against mechanism (1), saying that it seems unlike the way I would hope loving parents would act towards disobedient children. Pete brought up a different perspective, one that suggests mechanism (2): “it’s simply the difference between the kid running around shouting vs. the kid who is sitting still and listening—both have access to the parent in the room talking to them.”

Does Mormon doctrine clearly spell out which mechanism is at work? Scriptural notions of ‘God not dwelling in unholy temples’ and ‘the Spirit ceasing to strive with man’ seem to support mechanism (1). On the other hand, the notion of ‘hearts hardened against the word’—more in line with mechanism (2)—also appears in the scriptures.

Thinking naturalistically, and wondering about the extent to which the subjective experience of ‘testimony’ could be explained without the existence of God or the Holy Ghost, I discussed the possibility that the worthiness requirement’s efficacy may derive from the peace of social conformity, and therefore may not be good evidence of the reality of the Holy Ghost. In this connection, a description of testimony by Elder Richard G. Scott is instructive:

A testimony is fortified by spiritual impressions that confirm the validity of a teaching, of a righteous act, or of a warning of pending danger. Often such guidance is accompanied by powerful emotions that make it difficult to speak and bring tears to the eyes. But a testimony is not emotion. It is the very essence of character woven from threads born of countless correct decisions. These choices are made with trusting faith in things that are believed and, at least initially, are not seen. A strong testimony gives peace, comfort, and assurance. It generates the conviction that as the teachings of the Savior are consistently obeyed, life will be beautiful, the future secure, and there will be capacity to overcome the challenges that cross our path. A testimony grows from understanding truth, distilled from prayer and the pondering of scriptural doctrine. It is nurtured by living those truths in faith and the secure confidence that the promised results will be obtained.

I appreciate Elder Scott’s recognition that powerful emotions are not necessarily diagnostic of the Holy Ghost. I also think his description of testimony as the essence of character (think ‘worthiness’) and trusting expectation (think ‘desire’)—having both behavioral roots and peaceful, optimistic fruits—is accurate, and perhaps even telling. Notice that choices generate conviction. What I don’t see in this description is anything of evidentiary value; it strikes me as a plausibly naturalistic process, not necessarily connected to a putative spiritual reality. It ‘works’ in some sense, leading to a functional, peaceful, and meaningful community; but it may be a working system of our own human devising. After all, the Amish system works just fine too, in its own ‘Pleasantville’ way.

Yes, My Stake President is a Lawyer

2005-07-19T09:44:00.000-04:00

It is the written policy of our stake that some are forbidden from having internet access and watercraft of any sort. Are these desperate preventive measures against the expanded dominions of the destroyer who, nowadays riding in power not only upon the face the waters (see the section heading to D&C 61, and verses 14-19), but upon cyberspace as well, is ready to consume both literal and virtual surfers?

No, it turns out these are not severe prophylactic measures against the wiles of the adversary, but remedial elements of our stake’s welfare policy, from which I quote (capitalization is in the document as I received it from our high councilor):

When is a person ready to receive welfare assistance from the Lord's sacred funds?

Church assistance is available only after the members have:

1. exhausted all personal resources

2. eliminated all expenses not essential to sustain life (i.e.. cable TV, cell phones, internet services, most pets (cats, dogs, birds etc.) monthly payments not necessary to sustain life, including but not limited to furniture or other rentals, etc)

3. have sold off all items of value not necessary to sustain life (i.e.. second, third or even a single expensive vehicle, watercraft of any sort, expensive electronic equipment, jewelry other than wedding rings, etc)

4. have downsized their housing, if possible,

5. HAVE REQUESTED ASSISTANCE FROM FAMILY MEMBERS,

6. are willing to work,

7. ARE LIVING THE STANDARDS OF THE CHURCH, including:
a. paying a full tithe
b. living the Word of Wisdom
c. living the law of chastity
d. attending church meetings
e. fulfilling church assignments, including home and visiting teaching

When members have met these seven standards, they are ready for temporary assistance from the sacred funds of the Church. When they do not meet one or more standard they are not ready. That a bishop may help someone when they are not ready and will benefit less is always possible, but the Bishop must make sure that such aid from the Lord's sacred funds is no more than is needed to sustain life and that the member is working towards meeting all seven standards.

This policy got me into trouble. The problem was not that we’re on Church welfare and were found in violation, but the lack of decorum characterizing my response when it was read over the pulpit in our ward. Knowing that our stake president—a lawyer—authored the document, and hearing the lawyerly turns of phrase (“including but not limited to”) and exhaustive bills of particulars, my amusement grew until it broke through the surface in audible laughter at the phrase “watercraft of any sort,” earning me a sharp elbow from my wife.

(The phrase “watercraft of any sort” is actually a nontrivial matter that merits the specific mention it receives in the above policy, because of its impact on fishing, which is mostly done from boats on lakes and rivers in east Tennessee. As in the book and movie A River Runs Through It, fishing takes on a near-religious importance for some in this region, as exemplified by a bumper sticker on our ward mission leader’s pickup truck: “Everyone believes in something. I believe I’ll go fishing.”)

Existential Mormonism?

2005-07-12T15:59:00.000-04:00

My post On the Evidentiary Value of Spiritual Experiences started an exchange with Nate that I ’ve decided to promote to another thread. Even if you don’t want to read the entire previous thread, I’d suggest starting at least with Nate’s comment here , as the present post is not completely self-contained, and will seem somewhat random and unorganized unless understood as a response to previous discussion.

I appreciate and sympathize with the pragmatic, existential approach manifested in Nate’s comment. I don’t think it’s the usual Mormon position, at least for most Mormons on most days. It seems to me that the usual Mormon position involves strong epistemic claims that are used to legitimize demanding moral/ethical prescriptions.

I do think it’s possible in principle to come to valid epistemic judgments about the relative viability of doubts about kicked stones and Heaven’s Gate, but I agree that (usually reliable) baseline judgments of “dysfunctionality” strongly filter the time and effort people are willing to put into making such epistemic evaluations.

It’s true that modern Mormonism is much more “livable” than 19th century Mormonism. I suspect society at large would consider 19th century Mormonism “dysfunctional” (to use the word thrown out above)—with modern Mormonism being merely unnecessarily rigid, or at worst somewhat impractical, but still sufficiently demanding to make many less than excited about putting a lot of effort into evaluating its unusual epistemic claims.

I’m not so much bent on proving a claim for a manifestly superior system of rational belief, as in examining the validity of the asserted connection between the epistemic claims and moral prescriptions. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more honest for Mormonism to take a more existential approach more in sync with Nate’s comments on the other thread: acknowledge that conclusive knowledge of cosmic realities is not realistically obtainable (or at least not expected to be generally manifest), and instead take the approach that being Mormon boils down to a choice of values, one (perhaps the “highest,” if you like) among many “functional” ways to live a life, rather than asserting with such definitiveness that everyone else is wrong on the epistemic issues. This would still be consistent—perhaps even more than the worthiness/revelation paradigm—with the idea of mortality being a probation, in the very important sense of manifesting our choice to live in a particular way.

An existential approach to Mormonism has difficulties, of course. One is that modest deviations from Mormon morality are not sufficiently dysfunctional to motivate the demanding requirements in the absence of epistemic authority. Perhaps more relevant to understanding how Mormonism’s historical development has led to our present circumstances is the fact that strong epistemic claims were required in the past to motivate behaviors that were “dysfunctional” from a mortal perspective: secret and defiant polygamy, leaving civilization for the wilderness, leaving families for long missions, etc. The heavy reliance upon epistemic authority remains as a kind of historical hangover, part of our habits and self-identity, even now that Mormonism is sufficiently “livable” in mortal terms to make arguments for it primarily as a good way to live a mortal life.

I suppose saying the struggle for revelation is somehow necessary to the gospel’s probative and transformative purposes is about the best answer that can be given to my concerns, but depending on the phase of the moon and what I eat for breakfast, I find myself of late anywhere from quite disappointed (at best) to very skeptical (at worst) about this. I’m not so sure the epistemic torture is helpful or healthy; I can’t help thinking that the gold plates traveling roadshow would actually be helpful, as it would motivate us and free us to get on with what would be the manifestly necessary (if challenging) work of individual repentance and community development. (In this sense, I share frustration about continuing harangues about fundamentals!) But without the golden plates traveling roadshow, emphasis on fundamentals is continuously necessary to persuade conversion from—and dissuade conversion to—worldly alternatives that are eminently functional and, for many, more attractive from a mortal perspective.

Concern for the Fate of Humanity, Rendered Quantitative

2005-07-02T02:40:00.000-04:00

Did you like numbers in the mission field? If so, you'll love this.

Be sure to scroll down far enough to see the rapidly increasing counter. And if you scroll down further, you can see how they derive their numbers. And if you scroll down even further, you can see they have more where this came from!

On the Evidentiary Value of “Spiritual” Experiences

2005-06-21T15:42:00.000-04:00

A recent electrifying post of Rosalynde’s describes an experience of the kind many would describe as “revelatory.” Unfortunately, the information content of this experience was contrary to her convictions and commitments; hence she quickly rejected its revelatory status, ascribing it instead to a naturalistic cognitive phenomenon. (She also briefly discussed the possibility of Satanic revelation, but this was not—correctly, in my judgment—her preferred explanation.) Here I address two of her lessons learned: first, the idea that other manifestations of the Spirit are primary (and presumably more reliable), an assertion that elicits skepticism on my part; and second, the sobering realization that “personal religious experiences are not self-authenticating, irreducible, or epistemologically independent”—a notion I subscribe to with strong conviction, and one whose implications I think have been inadequately considered. In particular, the necessary social context of the prerequisites of desire and worthiness to spiritual experiences severely weakens their independent evidentiary value.

Rosalynde’s experience involved a sudden punctuation of meandering thoughts:

My mind drifted in and around this dim cul de sac until, in an acute flare of clarity, I thought, “Joseph built the church on a foundation of revelation, but that foundation is of sand, and it will collapse.” The thought, its rushing intrusion and its plainness, literally opened my eyes, and I lay in bed, fully awake, wondering what had happened.…

I’ve been accustomed to understanding that sort of experience—the lucid minute, the intruding insight, the stereoscopic layering of different angles of information to yield an added dimension of meaning—as one of the languages of the Spirit. I don’t think I’m alone in this…

Far from being alone in so interpreting such moments, Rosalynde is in the best of company: her description is remarkably similar to Joseph Smith’s famous characterization of “the spirit of revelation” as “pure intelligence flowing into you,” giving you “sudden strokes of ideas” (TPJS, p. 151). Given this consonance with Joseph’s teachings, it’s not surprising that in the past she has shelved “a dozen other such flashes…with ‘spiritual experiences’ in [her] mental library.”

However, in light of this recent experience, “cognate in nearly every way” with the others, she understandably concludes that “it does require [her] to reconsider [her] readings of similar moments in the past,” giving primacy instead to other kinds of experiences, enumerated in a subsequent comment:

Well, there’s the emotional response (goosebumps, or burning, or tears, or pounding heart, or whatever it is for you) to something I’m reading or witnessing. There’s the sustained sense of under-the-surface peace. There’s a more sustained and rather more gradual enlightening of the mind (as opposed to the ah ha! instant). And then there are voices and other forms of direct, dialogic communication.

I am uncomfortable with regarding these as more reliable. For with each of these other types, it seems that with a little reflection most of us could write a post like Rosalynde’s (albeit with considerably less lucidity and eloquence), demonstrating an experience we’ve had which we would not read as having been due to the Spirit. In fact, for the first above-listed alternative—emotional response—Rosalynde herself has described an experience of her own that demonstrates the dubious paternity of this particularly common mode of putative spiritual communication.

At the very least, we must concede that others whose beliefs differ from ours claim similar experiences with doctrinal implications that contradict ours, and that we cannot get inside their heads to know if our experiences are somehow different from and more “genuine” than theirs—which brings us to the second, larger lesson, the inescapable social context of our spiritual encounters. From first acquaintance with things spiritual, our perceptions are far from private: gently, subtly, almost imperceptibly—but nevertheless persistently, even relentlessly, like wind and water that flatten mountains and carve canyons—our categories are formed, our expectations are honed, the patterns against which future streams of experience will be matched are laid down in our interactions with those with who, by choice or necessity, have influence over us.

It is not as simple as truth cutting its own way, as B. H. Roberts would have it. For the convert, there is the necessary relationship of trust, the opening of the heart, followed by instruction in feeling and recognizing the Spirit. For the child and youth, there is the all-important training up in the way one should go, and cautions about the friendships one keeps. For all, there are warnings against exposure to (let alone production of) alternate voices—movies, music, worldly learning and philosophies of men and false religion in multiplying forms of media—whose allegedly deceptive influence might blur, corrupt, or even supplant orthodox frames of reference, and redirect heartfelt desires in directions that might weaken trust in and attachment to those frames of reference. If spiritual truth truly cut its own way, it would not be so delicate and brittle as to require hedging about with such strenuous efforts at quarantined isolation and protection.

To choose a community of belief is to submit to that community’s authority; and because that authority delineates and modulates the permissible content of spiritual experience, it is not just our expressions, and not only our interpretations, but even our very perceptions that are filtered accordingly. Thus we cannot say our spiritual witnesses are independent; instead, their (often subconscious, even automatic) identification and interpretation involve a hidden reliance upon authoritative guidelines of approved form and content. Such reliance is made possible by our desires for promised blessings and place in community, which motivate us to trustingly invest in stories of some prophet’s empirical, sensory experience that, somewhere back along the line, anchors the authority’s legitimacy.

Desire and worthiness are often identified as two grand keys to testimony, but justifications of why this should be so are rare; perhaps the above considerations fill in this explanatory lacuna.

Human psychology seems to be such that in the face of ambiguous (or less) evidence, wanting to believe something takes one most of the way there. Desire enables us to entertain claims whose supporting evidence is insufficient to persuade indifferent observers (let alone antagonistic ones). Desire guides our cherry-picking among satisfying cognitive and emotional experiences that are the common birthright of humanity upon exposure to ideas, art, and people with which we resonate, and motivates their attribution to the Holy Ghost. Desire mediates our selection of correlated (co-incident) events, separating the wheat from the chaff: correlations that fit expected patterns are treasured up as evidence of the Lord's hand, while those that do not are subconsciously jettisoned, rejected by the automatic filter of belief as white noise (or worse, spam from Satan). If I accidently stumble upon a remarkably fitting quote by Gould (see below) to buttress my skeptical argument just as I'm about to finish this post, it is a coincidence. But if a favorite hymn happens to be played in a moment of spiritual need, it is a tender mercy.

Perhaps counterintuitively, desire also looms large in the the second great pillar of testimony: worthiness, which boils down to attitudinal and behavioral conformity. One who achieves such enjoys the underlying peace and comfort of one who does not rock the boat—and hence avoids the risk of overturning the boat or, more relevant in the present context, being thrown overboard. Avoiding the terrors of solitary drowning in the raging sea is an overarching concern, born of our species’ particular niche as intensely social creatures. Our dependence upon others in infancy and childhood is obvious, but a sense of integration into a protective and supportive community persists into adulthood as a powerful psychological need—one whose evolutionary and historical origins, and ongoing necessity, seem fairly obvious (or at least eminently plausible). For the “unworthy,” life-supporting ties to family, friends, and fellow congregants (not to mention hopes for eternal salvation) hang in the balance. Our community holds the words of mortal and eternal life; to whom shall we go? Hence when we waver or wonder or wander, the efficacy of our prayers is not so much in what we tell ourselves it is—access to independent evidence, that we may be more willing to obey—as to reconcile ourselves to alignment with our larger, deeper desires for what we perceive to be our best bet for long-term safety, at the expense of more fleeting attractions that authority and community insist we abandon. The peace of achieved alignment should not be misread as unalloyed external evidence of the truth of the community’s propositions or standards; for conformity with community yields a powerful intrinsic reward, one that creates a profound conflict of interest that clouds evidentiary judgments.

And thus we see that the heavy—even determinative—dependence of testimony on desire and worthiness casts serious doubt upon the value of “spiritual” experience as a gauge of cosmic truth. Desire to know what the truth is would be a reasonable prerequisite; requiring desire that particular propositions be true—as prescribed in Mormon tutorials of truth-getting—is highly suspicious (not to mention utterly impractical, as such could not possibly be applied to the worldwide panoply of religious notions, as a “fair trial” would require). That God would not trust power or authority to those who might abuse it is a reasonable expectation; that he would not even communicate with those of a different mind and action—as implied in the notion that the Holy Ghost, the alleged medium of divine communication, does not dwell in unholy temples—contradicts the experience of loving parents towards disobedient children, as well as the behavior of the Savior towards publicans and harlots. Seen in this light, the principles of Alma 32—desire to believe, and nourishing the word with good works—are not so much the path to evidentiary enlightenment as a how-to manual for talking and behaving oneself into alignment with a community whose existence depends upon unverifiable assertions. These principles are to a large extent untethered to ontological reality, and might be equally effective in maintaining both well-meaning and craven communities.

Interestingly, the evidentiary weakness of desire and conformity with social expectations has been emphasized, with a warning we should consider heeding, by Stephen J. Gould in a completely different context. He wrote of a concept—now discredited—that was widely accepted in scientific circles for a century or so, not because of empirical support, but because it

…validated the oldest social traditions and deepest psychological hopes of Western cultures—the strongest possible reason for turning our brightest beacon of skepticism upon so congenial a conclusion defended by so little beyond emotional satisfaction.

Desire and “worthiness,” then, are just about the weakest and most manipulable bases of “evidence” one might come up with; treasuring their fruits, rather than “turning our brightest beacon of skepticism” upon them, opens one wide to being misled by ourselves and others. The mantra that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a worthy one, but I would cast it in a more aesthetic form. The claims of the restored gospel, if true, are the greatest claims in eternity; they ought to be worthy of far firmer, deeper, and open epistemological underpinnings.

Political and Cultural Rorschach Test

2005-06-14T07:45:00.000-04:00

I found my reactions to this photo to be surprisingly complex, to the point that I'm not even going to try to articulate them.

What are your reactions?

Well, I guess I'll state my initial and final reactions, and elide intermediate thoughts. Initial reaction: Laughter at the joke, and mockery. Clinton---how appropriate he's a Democrat. What an ass. Final reaction: Curiosity. Why did the political parties pick such ridiculous animals as their symbols? Glancing at Wikipedia articles on Republicans and Democrats, I see that perhaps they weren't so much chosen as thrust upon them, in political cartoons by Thomas Nast in the 1870s in Harper's Weekly.

Looking for a Father's Day Gift?

2005-06-12T15:28:00.000-04:00

If so, you're in luck---I've found the perfect gift! Check this out:

I quote from the original ad:

Surprise him with a 10K gold nugget-style ring made just for him. Round diamond accents add a touch of class. Imported.

Just think, you could wow him with the twin virtues of "surprise" (Can't you hardly wait to see the look on his face?) and exotic "class" (Sporting this "imported" jewel, he'll be a cut above the others in his High Priest group!).

The only thing I can imagine that would improve on this would be a matching nugget-style CTR ring. Anyone know if such an item exists to satisfy what must be an overwhelming clamor?

Dad, I know you're worried that by making the world aware of this opportunity there's a danger they'll sell out before you get your hands on yours. Don't worry, yours is safely ordered. Sorry I ruined the surprise, but I simply could not contain my excitement!

Procreation or Design: Pick your Poison

2005-06-01T12:52:00.000-04:00

In an earlier post I argued that God as Literal Father and God as Engineer are mutually exclusive ways of understanding God's role in the creation of the human physical body. (Both are anathema to the hard-core evolutionist; hence the title of this post.)

I've created a new poll, available on the sidebar, where you can declare your best guess. The options are not binary: there are several variations of God's possible "design" involvement; an option that includes both design and procreation; and, just so no one feels left out, an option for skeptics/unbelievers as well.

Previous polls (which still accept votes) can be found here.

[This is cross-posted from Mormon Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

A More Sustainable and Inclusive Motherhood

2005-05-29T08:15:00.000-04:00

This is the fifth installment of a talk entitled The Divine Role of Mothers.
Overview | Previous | Next

Having discussed the divine role of mothers as creators, redeemers and saviors, and judges, I would now like to introduce a discussion of ways in which this role might be made more sustainable, and also more broad and inclusive.

Considering the sacrifices motherhood entails, it would not surprise me if the prospect of an eternal progeny as innumberable as the sands of the seashore seems, to some, more ominous than glorious. Historically, childbirth routinely claimed womens’ lives; thankfully, modern medical advances have ameliorated much of this danger. But also, it seems that motherhood has historically worn out many womens’ lives as well, taking not just a physical toll, but mental and emotional tolls as well---and I don’t know that as much progress has been made on this front. I suppose only those living and experiencing it could say. It's true that we don’t know in any detail what motherhood in eternity would be like; we may speculate that it is different than it is here in mortality, in ways that will make it more bearable. One might hope so, if it is a role that is to last forever!

But since we don't know for sure that the nature of celestial motherhood will be drastically different, perhaps we should "plan for the worst," so to speak. Regarding our own responsibility to make heaven heavenly, I like the following thought from Brigham Young regarding the heavenly city, described by John the Revelator as having streets paved with gold:

...we will have to go to work and get the gold out of the mountains to lay down, if we ever walk in streets paved with gold. The angels that now walk in their golden streets, and they have the tree of life within their paradise, had to obtain that gold and put it there. When we have streets paved with gold, we will have placed it there ourselves. When we enjoy a Zion in its beauty and glory, it will be when we have built it. If we enjoy the Zion that we now anticipate, it will be after we redeem and prepare it. If we live in the city of the New Jerusalem, it will be because we lay the foundation and build it. (JD 8:354-355)

Hence we should not simply presume that all will magically be different in eternity, and this includes motherhood: we should take responsibility in the here and now, to learn to do it in a way that would be sustainable throughout eternity if necessary.

There is necessarily sacrifice, a setting a portion of one’s life apart for this divine purpose instead of one’s own interests; but even the Savior received succor in the midst of his atoning sacrifice. Moreover, while infinitely deep, the Savior's distress was quite limited in space and time, and soon afterwards came the resurrection. By comparison the sacrifices of motherhood are, if not as deep, more sustained and extended in time. Ongoing succor, and some early installments of “resurrection,” or “new life,” in the midst of the sacrifice would, I imagine, be welcome.

Overview | Previous | Next

New Biological Evidence for Middle Easterners in the New World: The Smell Test

2005-05-27T07:44:00.000-04:00

Jeff Lindsay and Clark Goble have brought the paper Human Lymphocyte Antigens: Apparent Afro-Asiatic, Southern Asian, & European HLAs in Indigenous American Populations to the attention of the Bloggernaccle. I am going to be lazy here and sound off without reading anything beyond a preface to the article, which I quote below.

Would that this had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal more directly related to microbiology. It doesn't sound like it was written or peer-reviewed by people with the relevant training and expertise in microbiology. Instead, it was written by someone with a "long interest" in microbiology, and published and publicized by outlets with an axe to grind on a subject (trans-oceanic cultural influence on the Americas) not directly related to microbiology. Here is the preface to the linked article:

In our pursuit of cultural and physical human diffusion around the globe, NEARA encourages research exploring "hard" scientific evidence. Over the years, Jim Guthrie has published numerous articles in the NEARA Journal on many subjects. Now, his long interest in micro-biology has culminated in a comprehensive article on human lymphocyte antigens and their dispersal into indigenous American populations, published in Pre-Columbiana, Volume 2, Number 2 & 3, December 2000 & June 2001. Pre-Columbiana, like the NEARA Journal has a limited circulation and the NEARA editorial team felt that this work is so important, that it must reach as wide an audience as possible, scientist and layman alike. In collaboration with Pre-Columbiana editor Stephen Jett and with permission, we are pleased to make this ground-breaking research available on through the internet.

This provenance smells funny to me; but of course, this alone doesn't mean it's wrong. It simply means it's hard for me to get excited about it until those with the relevant expertise weigh in. I hope to learn more about this as this occurs. But its initial impact (on me at least) would have been much stronger if the relevant microbiology had been published in a journal that peer-reviews microbiology; then the anthropological claims could follow later.

Three Not-So-Glorious Degrees

2005-05-23T20:35:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Steve for mentioning a post of mine in his reliably witty Weekly Zeitgeist at Bloggernaccle Times.

Picking up on Steve's pun on "three degrees of glory," let me tell you about three not-so-glorious degrees I learned about from one of my grandfathers, Shirrel Young. Upon finishing my Ph.D., he looked me in the eye and said, "Christian, do you know the significance of a Ph.D.?" "Well, I'm glad to be done," I replied. "Yes, it's been a long road," he said. "First, you got a B.S., and we all know what that stands for. Then came the M.S.---More of the Same. But with a Ph.D.---well, now it's just Piled Higher and Deeper!

Both of my grandfathers were smart guys that accomplished more without college degrees than I imagine I ever will with degrees. Recording here the lore I remember off the top of my head, which may need some fact-checking: a fascination with airplanes got Shirrel Young working for an aeronautical company as a very young man, and he ended up having a career as an engineer ranging from work on the P-51 Mustang (a WWII fighter) to spy cameras on the SR-71 Blackbird (1970s high-altitude spy plane---not sure if they're still in use). My other grandfather, John Cardall, started a degree in chemistry at the University of Utah, but ended up marrying and settling down in the Los Angeles area before finishing. Setting up his own chemistry lab to do experiments, he developed a chemical pool cleaning company named PoolChlor that continues successfully to this day.

I love these men and the heritage they represent (which of course is much more than I can indicate here). I'm proud of them, in case you can't tell. Aspects of their lives were exasperating (and worse) to their families, something that weighs on me as I ponder the effects of my life on those close to me. But that doesn't diminish my affection for my grandfathers. I suppose distance makes that easy for me. I hope my descendents will be able to look back upon me with similar fondness.

A Rollback of the Classical Mormon Perspective on Humanity's Origin and Destiny?

2005-05-22T21:31:00.000-04:00

While the evidence is mixed, certain recent statements by President Gordon B. Hinckley can be read as hinting at a distancing of the current public stance of the Church from classical Mormon ideas on the origin and destiny of humanity. This hinges on an oft-underappreciated distinction between two very different ways of understanding God's role in the creation of human beings. And it may represent a humble and courageous willingness to open oneself beyond dogma.

By "the classical Mormon perspective on the origin and destiny of man," I mean notions of God as Literal Father. A comprehensive formulation of these ideas was articulated succinctly, and surprisingly recently, by a President of the Church in a formal setting. In the April 1977 General Conference, President Spencer W. Kimball gave a talk entitled Our Great Potential, which seemed to endorse each of the following ideas: self-existent, eternal intelligences; divine procreation of spirit bodies to clothe these intelligences; divine procreation of Adam and Eve; and the capacity to procreate both spirit and body as the destiny of the faithful in eternity. Here I mention three features of President Kimball's talk that illustrate some of these ideas. Quoting Brigham Young, President Kimball stated:

Millions of us have contributed toward the creation and the development of a spirit, but “the germ of this, God has placed within us. And when our spirits receive our bodies, and through our faithfulness we are worthy to be crowned, we will then receive authority to produce both spirit and body. But these keys we cannot receive in the flesh.” (JD, 15:137.)

In addition, President Lorenzo Snow's couplet “As man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become” was quoted in this talk---not once, but twice. To close the talk, President Kimball read the words to the hymn O My Father, penned by Eliza R. Snow (sister of President Snow), which refers to both a Father and a Mother in heaven.

Restricting themselves to metaphorical interpretations of the fatherhood of God, mainstream Christians are likely to conceptualize God's role in the creation of humanity in a very different way: God as Engineer. Perhaps Mormons have not always perceived an incompatibility here, but it doesn't take much reflection to see that procreation (what a literal "Father" does) and design (what an "Engineer" does) are distinct, mutually exclusive activities. One is the unleashing of an automatic biological process; the other is a more direct, deliberate, and ongoing "hands on" arrangement of raw materials into a desired form.

Perhaps surprisingly in light of classical Mormon ideas, some statements by President Hinckley seem to be more sympathetic to and compatible with the perspective of God as Engineer. In the following quote from a First Presidency Message in the Ensign (originally given as a student fireside at BYU), note the use of the word "design," as well as the phrase "eternal spirits," which may negate the notion that spirit bodies had a beginning (and hence a "birth"):

Look at your finger. The most skillful attempt to reproduce it mechanically has brought only a crude approximation. The next time you use your finger, look at it, and sense the wonder of it....

I believe the human body to be the creation of Divinity. George Gallup once observed, “I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone—the chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.” Our bodies were designed by our Eternal Father to be the tabernacle of our eternal spirits. (August 1992)

Regarding the Lorenzo Snow statement, it is reported that in three interviews in 1997, President Hinckley seemed to minimize its importance. (I'm not excited about linking this source, but the original news outlets probably don't have these quotations online.) He seems to hedge on the certainty with which we know it would entail something as specific as the divine procreation contemplated by the classical Mormon perspective; he prefers to refer instead to a more generic "eternal progression" whose nature is unspecified. Asked by the San Francisco Chronicle if God was once a man, he replied

I wouldn't say that. There was a little couplet coined, 'As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.' Now that's more of a couplet than anything else. That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don't know very much about.... Well, as God is, man may become. We believe in eternal progression. Very strongly. (April 13)

On PBS, regarding the possibility of becoming gods in the afterlife:

Well, they can achieve to a godly status, yes, of course they can, eternal progression. We believe in the progression of the human soul. … We believe in the eternity and the infinity of the human soul, and its great possibilities. (July 18)

To Time, again regarding whether God was once a man:

I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it … I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it, and I don't think others know a lot about it. (August 4)

To be sure, there are factors mitigating against a putative change in doctrinal direction. For example, sensitivity to audience and the vagaries of quote selection need to be taken into account in assessing these statements in the press, as President Hinckley himself observed in the November 1997 General Conference:

I personally have been much quoted, and in a few instances misquoted and misunderstood. I think that’s to be expected. None of you need worry because you read something that was incompletely reported. You need not worry that I do not understand some matters of doctrine. I think I understand them thoroughly, and it is unfortunate that the reporting may not make this clear. I hope you will never look to the public press as the authority on the doctrines of the Church.

In addition, in a General Womens' Meeting in 1991 he noted (with a tone that possibly hints of reluctance) that as a matter of history the idea of a Mother in Heaven was "not corrected" by Joseph Smith, that her existence is suggested by "logic and reason," and that the doctrine "rests well" with him (even if prayer to her does not). One may ask, then, why he would think logic and reason suggest a Mother in Heaven if divine procreation were not part of the picture; are male and female needed to be "joint engineers" or something?

When it comes to the status of the classical Mormon view of divine procreation, what are we to make of this mixed bag?

Someone interested in a reconciliation with evolution might be tempted to make the following argument: God as Literal Father and God as Engineer are mutually exclusive; President Hinckley argued for God as Engineer in 1992; President Hinckley was not President of the Church in 1992, and as a counselor he would never dream of unilaterally overturning doctrine; therefore, God as Literal Father must never have been doctrine. (And as a corollary, because God as Literal Father was taught by President Kimball in General Conference, it must be that being taught by a President of the Church in Conference is not sufficient to make something doctrine.)

It may be that the truth is not yet clear, but the reality is likely to be much murkier than this clean argument suggests. For one thing, perhaps the argument is simply wrong: President Hinckley may not perceive an incompatibility between God as Literal Father and God as Engineer, either because he's smarter than me (not unlikely) or because he hasn't thought about it carefully in this way (not impossible).

But beyond this is the fact that all such simple arguments are at best simplifications of the complexities of the real world. One might marvel at the somewhat inchoate cluster of ideas represented by the above quotations in comparison with the relative clarity of the formulations of, say, President Kimball's talk cited above, or Elder McConkie's systematizations; perhaps it represents the growing pains associated with a desire to be less dogmatic, born of a sensitivity to the realities of data not previously given adequate consideration. We then witness the buffeting that results from a release of one's death-grip on dogma, arising from a challenging set of diverse circumstances with sometimes-conflicting requirements: a desire to motivate belief in an unbelieving world (August 1992); the public relations needs of a global missionary Church (April, July, August 1997); the need to assure members of doctrinal purity, consistency, and (perhaps most importantly) continuity (1991, November 1997); and the necessity of reigning in aberrant ideas and practices (1991). All this, in the presence of the overarching perennial problem: The lack of clear, unmistakable revelation on the nature of cosmic realities.

[This is cross-posted from Mormon Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

Elder Oaks' Credential Touting

2005-05-19T21:54:00.000-04:00

Seems like the Mother's Day talk could use an intermission.

Within the space of a week, I became aware of two recent talks by Elder Oaks---one at the Joseph Smith Conference at the Library of Congress, and the other to the J. Reuben Clark Law Society---in which he discussed his impressive legal credentials. Two things about this interested me. What purposes do such recitals serve? To what extent can such credentials really be considered a joint enterprise of husband and wife?

Elder Oaks' experience is impressive: after receiving a J.D. from the University of Chicago, he served as a clerk with Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court, as a lawyer in a Chicago firm, as a professor at the University of Chicago law school, as the president of BYU, and as a justice of the Utah Supreme Court. (Did I miss anything?)

The phenomenon of recounting one's own history seems a little strange---at least, I imagine that in a talk, as the focus of attention, I would feel self-conscious. (I also wonder about this when I hear President Monson recount his own personal experiences of service. Inspiring, yes, but how do we know when we've crossed the line to doing what Jesus forbad in the Sermon on the Mount? Superficially, the Sermon on the Mount seems contradictory on this point: "Let your light so shine" (Matthew 5:16) and so forth, but also "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" (Matthew 6:3) and so on.) On the other hand, I suppose it's not so uncommon, as the topic arises in conversation, to discuss one's own experience and accomplishments---for example, me, this morning. But what purpose does it serve? Is it appropriate to recite one's own resume as a model to others, or would it be better to do so with other peoples' lives, to avoid any appearance of bragging? In the case of General Authorities, do mortal credentials serve to increase faith in spiritual authority?

Elder Oaks' description of his decision to leave law practice and accept a position at the University of Chicago was interesting, as he cast it in the first person plural. After pondering and prayer with his wife, `We decided it would be a valuable preparation for us,' or something along those lines. (I think he said he wrote this in his journal at the time.) The context of the remarks may suggest he was thinking of preparation for service in the Church. Was this really a preparation for "us," or for "me"? Sacrifices made by women are often framed as sacrifices for children, but what portion of these sacrifices is actually in the service of a husband's ambition, whether professional or ecclesiastical? (I'm not saying a desire to do well at one's chosen vocation, or a desire to be of service, are bad things.)

Mothers as Judges

2005-05-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

This is the fourth installment of a talk entitled The Divine Role of Mothers.
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Now for the third divine capacity, mothers as judges. It is a role many children experience early on. Many mothers have taken primary responsibility for managing a household, and as part of this they do a good deal of teaching, training, and disciplining. Like the mighty judges of ancient Israel (at least one of which---Deborah---was a woman), mothers are sort of like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches all rolled into one.

Mothers are often compassionate in this role. How many of us as children, when Father was apt to anger too quickly or react too harshly, saw Mother act as “an advocate with the Father”? Like the Savior as Judge, mothers tend to see their children through rose-colored glasses, accentuating every possible good, and taking into account every mitigating circumstance. (At least they do so when one step removed in time or space from daily frustrations!) As the saying goes, “A face only a mother could love”---and the same sometimes goes for personalities, and souls.

For all this forbearance, there is also a sense, even long after leaving home, of not wanting to let her down, of wanting her to be proud. The practical rhythms and skills of life we learn from our mothers serve us through the years, and echos of the wisdom and standards they teach linger with us as as a persistent influence. I seem to recall seeing more than once in war movies an invocation of Mother coming to a dying soldier's lips in his final moments, perhaps as an involuntary desperate plea for help; but also, in one’s final moments, a review of one’s life, and a hope that mother would be proud.

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This concludes Part I, "Descriptive."

Mothers as Redeemers and Saviors

2005-05-15T22:10:00.000-04:00

This is the third installment of a talk entitled The Divine Role of Mothers.
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Next, consider mothers as redeemers and saviors. Is it blasphemous to compare any mortal role to the Savior’s atonement? It must not be, because we already do so, in connection with salvation for the dead. Drawing on a scriptural phrase, those performing ordinances for those beyond the veil are conceptualized as “saviors on mount Zion.”

The essence of the saving and redeeming aspect of temple work for the dead---as well as the saving and redeeming role of Jesus---is that it is vicarious service: Something is done for others that they cannot do for themselves.

Young children have much they cannot do for themselves: they cannot feed themselves, clothe themselves, bathe themselves, shelter themselves, comfort themselves, teach themselves---or clean up after themselves, at least at first. It's an exhausting list to read, let alone execute continually on a daily basis, without holidays or breaks on the weekends! Allow me the creative license to take the words of President J. Reuben Clark---who spoke of the relentlessness of interest on debt---and adapt it to parental responsibility:

[Responsibility for childrens' needs] never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours.... Once [a parent], [responsibility for your childrens' needs] is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you. (CR, April 1938)

Now, President Clark was speaking of debt, with consequent interest payments, as something to be avoided; in contrast, we are to seek the responsibility of parenthood, to "multiply and replenish the earth." It is a commandment that "remains in force," according to the Proclamation on the Family, which adds that "Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children." Indeed, there can be little question that historically it has been mothers that have borne the overwhelming majority of the responsibility for caring for children, sacrificing their individual time, and often their talents, interests, and dreams in the process.

There are senses in which the burden of motherhood is like the burden of Gethsemane. These sacrifices seem more portentous in light of the Proclamation's additional assertion that "Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." Like the sacrifice of the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," the sacrifices of motherhood seem foreordained; there is no evasion, or getting around it; there is only "through." Drinking this sometimes-bitter cup not just once, but day in and day out, "Not my will, but thine, be done" becomes not only an isolated instance of submission to God, but a habitual response to the demands of family needs. And all too often, it is a wine-press trodden alone.

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Mothers as Creators

2005-05-11T21:05:00.000-04:00

This is the second installment of a talk entitled The Divine Role of Mothers.
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Consider, first, mothers as creators. By giving us mortal life, our parents have in some sense given us all that we have. The capacity to create---particularly, to procreate---is, in our theology, a large part of what makes God a god. "Of all the titles [God] has chosen for himself, Father is the one he declares," explains Elder Jeffrey R. Holland. "Creation is his watchword---especially human creation, creation in his image."

Elder Holland describes this capacity in terms of a sacrament. He explains that while we use this word to denote the partaking of the emblems of the Lord’s supper, it has a more general meaning. A sacrament in this more general sense is a

union between mortals and deity, between otherwise ordinary and fallible humans uniting for a rare and special moment with God himself and all the powers by which he gives life in this wide universe of ours….

Those special moments of union with God are sacramental moments--such as kneeling at a marriage altar, or blessing a newborn baby, or partaking of the emblems of the Lord's supper. This latter ordinance is the one we in the Church have come to associate most traditionally with the word sacrament, though it is technically only one of many such moments when we formally take the hand of God and feel his divine power….

[Human intimacy] is also, in its own profound way, a very real sacrament of the highest order, a union not only of a man and a woman but very much the union of that man and woman with God. Indeed, if our definition of sacrament is that act of claiming and sharing and exercising God's own inestimable power… I know of nothing so earth-shatteringly powerful…as the God-given power available in every one of us…to create a human body, that wonder of all wonders, a genetically and spiritually unique being never seen before in the history of the world and never to be duplicated again in all the ages of eternity---a child, your child---with eyes and ears and fingers and toes and a future of unspeakable grandeur….

And I submit to you that you will never be more like God at any other time in this life than when you are expressing that particular power. (emphasis in original)

This distinctive Latter-day Saint perspective on divinity---including our proximity to and potential for it---is not peculiar to Elder Holland, but derives from revelation to the prophet Joseph Smith:

...verily I say unto you, if a man marry a wife…by the new and everlasting covenant,…[it] shall be of full force when they are out of the world; …[they shall receive] their exaltation and glory in all things, …which glory shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.

Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue. (D&C 132:19-20)

According to Joseph Smith, then, the capacity to extend and continue oneself through the creative capacity of fatherhood and motherhood is central to divinity.

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Elements of a Divine Role

2005-05-10T15:20:00.000-04:00

This is the first installment of a talk entitled The Divine Role of Mothers.
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Brothers and Sisters, the Bishropric has asked me to speak on a specific topic: “The Divine Role of Mothers.” I am at a decided disadvantage in comparison with the previous two speakers, because I have no actual experience as a mother. Moreover, I have made the task even more challenging for myself: I have set a personal goal to address this subject without once referring to either the “sons of Helaman” or their mothers.

The phrase “divine role” reminds me of a principle I taught as a missionary. [Holding up a copy of the missionary discussions] Here is a copy of the missionary discussions, as they were when I was out in the field. The principle I’m remembering came from the sixth discussion. This is Kimberly’s copy; I could not find mine. She had them bound together, but I had kept mine loose. In going out each morning and afternoon I would only put in my bag the discussions we planned to teach that day. This means that my copy of the sixth discussion was in much better shape than the first discussion, because it was used much more rarely---one gives many more first discussions than sixth discussions. Sixth discussions being comparatively rare, I’m surprised this principle came back to me after all these years.

Unlike mine, Kimberly’s copies of the discussions, being bound together, each appear equally heavily used. They’re still legible, but the fact that they’re legible doesn’t mean I’m going to read to you the principle I have in mind. Now, missionaries are taught to present the ideas in their own words as the Spirit directs, and not read directly from the lessons. But that’s not why I’m not going to read it to you. It’s also true that these six discussions have been superceded---the missionaries now teach from a different set of lessons. But that’s not the reason I’m not going to read it to you, either. I’m not going to read it to you because it’s in Spanish.

But I will translate for you, from Principle 1 of Discussion 6.

The Role of Jesus Christ in the Plan of Salvation.

Jesus Christ is the Creator. We have faith in Jesus Christ for many reasons. He is the Creator. In Mosiah 3:8 we read, “And he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary.” Under the direction of the Father, he created the earth and everything upon it, thus giving us all we have.

Our Redeemer and Savior. He is our Redeemer and Savior, and, through his sacrifice, we can return to live with him and with our Heavenly Father.

Our Judge. Jesus Christ will be our judge and, when we die, will judge us in accordance with our works and desires. He will be our advocate with the Father.

I remembered this principle in connection with my assigned topic not because the scripture it cites mentions Mary, the mother of Jesus, but because it was something I could latch on to in trying to understand what a “divine role” is. Jesus is a divine being; hence his capacities as Creator, Redeemer and Savior, and Judge constitute his "divine role." Now, these aspects of his role have been and will be exercised in the premortal, mortal, and postmortal phases of Jesus’ eternal existence, and they include tasks that only he could perform. Nevertheless, I think the capacities of Creator, Redeemer and Savior, and Judge provide a way to start thinking about what a mother’s “divine role” is.

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Journal of Discourses: The Divine Role of Mothers

2005-05-09T21:17:00.000-04:00

[UPDATE, 12 May: I changed the name of Part I to "Descriptive."]

[UPDATE, 10 May: I have added names to the two parts of the talk, and a bit of additional text at the bottom. Links to the various segments will be added as they are posted.]

Believe it or not, even knowing something of my Spinozist tendencies, the Bishopric of my ward asked me to give talk on Mother's Day. I was given a specific title: The Divine Role of Mothers. I spoke from rough notes; over the next several days I will flesh it out into prose and post it here in bite-sized pieces. Here is an overview.

The Divine Role of Mothers

Part I: Descriptive

Elements of a Divine Role
Mothers as Creators
Mothers as Redeemers and Saviors
Mothers as Judges

Part II: Prescriptive

A More Sustainable and Inclusive Motherhood
Judicious Use of a Precious Resource
A Shared Responsibility
More to Life

I would appreciate any constructive feedback---particularly from the sisters---for several reasons: to help me in my own interactions with women, to provide wisdom to pass along to our three daughters, and in case I should ever be called upon again to navigate the treacherous waters of a Mother's Day talk.

Schroedinger's Cat in the City of Angels

2005-05-03T13:03:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles. The Angels. A brief visit gives the Spinozist a chance to reflect upon them.

Emerging from the elevator on the 18th floor of his Wilshire Boulevard hotel, the Spinozist is greeted with a spectacular view: the temple of Los Angeles, just blocks away, gloriously outshining the lesser city lights spread out in the distance like glittering diamonds scattered across a jewler's balck velvet display cloth. Atop the temple in brilliant gold stands the most remarkable angelic denizen of this City of Angels, standing defiantly with trumpet raised, high above the city streets, in the midst of heaven, so to speak,

having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,

Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.

Musing on the singularity of the scene, and marveling greatly, the Spinozist notes that from this vantage point the herald angel's sound is somewhat muted; the heavenly ministrant faces a different direction, the sound of the trump is crowded out by the bustle of Babylon below.

The fleeting vision dissipates as the Spinozist turns away, when, in the midst of his meditation, the first vision is suddenly replaced by another. The Spinozist's assigned room is on the other side of the building; upon entry, the supplanting panorama greets him, an incarnation of a shopping list of iniquities detailed in the angelic minister's ancient record. Towering, luxurious apartment and office buildings on the other side of Wilshire reach towards heaven, latter-day ziggurats proclaiming man's wealth and power; behind them, a moat of costly Westwood residential real estate surrounds a fortress of humanity's creative and exploratory powers, where muddy bricks of Knowledge and Meaning are assembled into the spiritual Tower of Babel that animates the physical instantiations in the foreground.

This, spreading out in the shadows of the Everlasting Hills Hollywood and Beverly, is the Spinozist's destination: a modern university. On the morrow he will gather with its priestly inhabitants, famously "clothed in the black robes of a false priesthood," bustling about like diligent ants in their hive of learning. Briefly, he thinks also of the enclave's young supplicants, encountering the world of Charlotte Simmons. Tonight, like ancient Lamanite warriors imbibing their bounty before going to battle on the morrow, these apprentices check off their extracurricular shopping lists of iniquity in a bid for strength against the morning's engagement with the curricular requirement lists that will give them their permanent ticket to Babylon.

And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

Wanderlust of mind and spirit overcomes a tired body's aching for rest. By this time, so deep are the impressions made on the Spinozist's mind, that sleep has fled from his eyes, and he lays overwhelmed in astonishment at what he has both seen and heard; but what is his surprise when another vision presents itself to his mind, borrowed from another young man in another time, a commencement speaker named Alfred Kelley: a vision of another university, set in another valley, beneath another set of everlasting hills. Spreading from the then-bare Temple Hill presiding over a then-empty landscape, "temples of learning" fill the valley in the young man's mind.

It is a vision fulfilled in the Spinozist's day, complete with a temple proper crowned with another (actually, the same) golden messenger---a vision he once found sufficiently inspiring to feature in a commencement address of his own, but which now questions. The Spinozist wonders anew at the bold experiment, the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. He recalls its inhabitants, not ants clothed purely in black, but deseret in its beehive: busybodies with well-separated stripes of academic black and revelatory gold. He wonders at the mingling, and the separation, wondering what the final outcome will be. Engaging with the slow but persistent would-be revelatory solvent, will humanity's proud juggernaut of learning and wealthy competence be revealed as salt---not useless, but nevertheless ultimately to be dissolved and subsumed? Or is it oil, presently mixed in colloidal suspension by intentional shaking, only to rise inexorably to the top as the weight of empirical reality pulls the revelatory water to the bottom?

Seeking an instantaneous solution to this conundrum, and still having angels on his mind, the Spinozist recalls recently spoken words, and hopefully makes an instantaneous pilgirimage across cyberspace to consult the delphic sayings of the oracles. He ponders---weighs---the following:

The spiritual gifts described in the Book of Mormon are present in the Church today—promptings, impressions, revelations, dreams, visions, visitations, miracles. You can be sure that the Lord can, and at times does, manifest Himself with power and great glory. Miracles can occur.

Mormon said: "Has the day of miracles ceased?

"Or have angels ceased to appear unto the children of men? Or has he withheld the power of the Holy Ghost from them? Or will he, so long as time shall last, or the earth shall stand, or there shall be one man upon the face thereof to be saved?

"Behold I say unto you, Nay; for it is by faith that miracles are wrought" (Moroni 7:35–37).

Pray always—alone and with your family. Answers will come in many ways.

He remembers the words recently spoken by another seer, illustrating one of these "many ways"---remembering also his own reflections upon it, and wondering if it's the most that can presently be offered. He next remembers the words recently spoken by The Seer. In spite of Joseph's promise that Jesus would visit from time to time, and even manifest the Father (TPJS p. 150-151, D&C 107:18-19), the Seer reports that Joseph's experience is the latest and greatest---nothing like it since.

The Spinozist remembers Joseph's endorsement of tactile witness, spoken in the context of a sermon on the temple:

No one can truly say he knows God until he has handled something and this can only be in the holiest of holies. (HC 4:608)

He marvels at the fact that we have no record of Joseph testifying of having such an experience. In making such statements, was Joseph looking forward with expectation to the future reception of this blessing in connection with the Fullness of the Priesthood, bestowed---along with the longevity and superhuman powers exhibited by antediluvian patriarchs---in a properly completed temple, which he did not live to see?

Returning full circle to the first seer quoted above, the Spinozist recognizes that promises about the Second Coming require an expansive definition of "this generation," one that effectively must encompass an entire dispensation---and that in spite of the inferences Church members commonly make based on testimony-by-dropped-hints, similar logic may apply to the cited promise of continued visitations: Perhaps the Brethren have an expansive definition of what occurs "today," or "at times"---expansive enough to include our founding generation---so that they may be satisfied with what they think they perceive through the Holy Ghost, and dreams.

The conundrum, therefore, remains unresolved. Even taking the Brethren to be sincere, the ambiguity and lack of detail of their statements preclude definitive, comprehensive evaluation of their intent and meaning.

Dueling cautions now enter the Spinozist's mind, telling him that Satan would try to tempt him to rationalize for the purpose of justifying sin, and that fear of annihilation would tempt him to cling to claims of immortality in a putative spiritual realm. He would fain forbid these motives, hoping he would have no other object in view in seeking truth but the benefit of humanity, and would not be influenced by any other motive than that of building better circumstances for himself and his fellows; otherwise he might not obtain it.

The Spinozist is left to ponder on the strangeness of what he has just experienced; when almost immediately following these concluding thoughts, the cock crows, and he finds that day is approaching, so that his musings must have occupied the whole of the night. Shortly he will arise from his bed, and, as usual, go to the necessary labors of the day.

Doubletree, reads the sign on the Spinozist's place of lodging, along with an image of two interlocked trees. On an upper floor high above the ground below, he feels unnaturally lifted up, precariously suspended between the holy temple on the one hand and secular temples of learning on the other, like an aerial tram terrifyingly stuck midway through its journey across a deep chasm. He imagines these two competing temples as referents of the two interlocked trees, the Tree of Life and and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Caught between them in a baffling entanglement, he is Schroedinger's Cat, existing in a state of macroscopic quantum superposition, simultaneously and seemingly inconsistently heir to both eternal life and eternal death.

Given the limits of secular knowledge, and the limited nature of revealed testimony, he wonders if the measurement that will collapse this wavefunction will not come until his departure from this world. In one outcome of this definitive measurement, his immortal soul will survive the ordeal of death, and he will know the answer for himself. In the other, his brain and all its synaptic connections will crumble to the dust, never knowing it will wake no more---and never remembering it once thought to wonder.

NDBF Unvailed, and a Poll

2005-04-29T09:36:00.000-04:00

[UPDATE, 2 May 2005: After Gary's comments, I have changed the wording of this post in a few places in the "disagreement" paragraph, crossing out old wording and placing new wording in brackets.]

Justin is our winner! He deciphered the acronym NDBF. (Actually, it's an initialism, as Silus informed us.) Well done, Justin.

The initialism appears in the address, http://ndbf.net, of a website put together by one Gary Shapiro. Can you believe anyone would set up an entire website devoted to the notion of No Death Before the Fall? Sheesh, it's almost as bad as devoting an entire site to a reconciliation between Mormons and Evolution.

The NDBF site contains ideas I agree with, ideas I disagree with, and one statement that made me curious enough to try a poll.

What I agree with: Most of the material is devoted to clarifying what the discussion was about that led to a 1931 decision by the First Presidency, a brief part of which is quoted in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism's article on Evolution. I agree with Gary that the spin often put upon it by scientists---that it is a directive to General Authorities to refrain from contradicting the conclusions of "geology, biology, anthropology and archaeology"---is wishful thinking. Instead, it seems to be a directive to General Authorities to not, at least as part of their public ministry, attempt overt reconciliations of the theories of these scientific fields with scriptural accounts of the creation.

What I disagree with: For one thing, obviously, the idea that there was no death of any organism on Earth before about 4000 B.C. But I also disagree with Gary's claim that this idea is now ~~official~~ [settled] doctrine. (Not that it particularly matters; I think one can reasonably and respectfully disagree, in unofficial venues, even with "~~official~~ [settled] doctrine.") His claim is that while the 1931 decisions did not settle questions about death before the fall, a Melchizedek Priesthood manual from the early 1970s published by the First Presidency under President Joseph Fielding Smith did settle the issue. The manual is described as ~~quoting at length~~ [recommending numerous passages] from previously published teachings of President Smith in Man, His Origin and Destiny and Doctrines of Salvation; the selection and republication of these by the First Presidency puts an official imprimatur upon them, Gary argues. My sense is that just as ~~official~~ doctrine is not settled by private letter, it is not settled in Melchizedek Priesthood manuals either. Surely a more formal method would be chosen if officially settling a controversy were the intent; after all, we don't consider Nibley's Melchizedek Priesthood manual An Approach to the Book of Mormon to be official doctrine. Or, maybe both of these are ~~official~~ [settled] doctrine---but only to the brethren of the Church. Rejoice, sisters, you are free to believe in death before the fall! And as a bonus, the sisters don't have to wade through Nibley. (I myself enjoy reading Nibley.)

What made me curious was this statement of Gary's: "In our day, the doctrine of no death before the fall clearly is accepted as doctrine." I wonder, how many denizens of the Bloggernaccle "accept" this? Leave your input in the poll on the sidebar.

[Did anyone catch the allusion intended by the intentional misspelling of Unvailed? I would expect Justin, at least, to get this one too!]

NDBF

2005-04-28T19:50:00.000-04:00

I despise acronyms. They are bearable if fashioned into an actual word, but if not, they are simply inhuman.

I came across the acronym NDBF today, and upon finding out what it stood for, I was amused someone would bother to make it into an acronym. Can you guess what it stands for?

(Hint: The context is Mormon, but if you come up with something funny that has nothing to do with Mormonism, please share anyway. If you recognize where I got this, don't give it away!)

An Ambiguous Ecclesiastical Constitution: The Authority of the President

2005-04-27T15:01:00.000-04:00

In a previous post I mentioned that "the leading councils of the Church have the right to establish doctrine," but deliberately avoided specifics. This is because my main point was that we should not get too hung up on "doctrine" in thinking about factual matters subject to scientific investigation (such as evolution), as "doctrine" may primarily represent the community's need for bounds on official discourse, and may not correspond precisely with ontological reality.

Still, the issue of how the leading councils of the Church establish doctrine is an interesting and nontrivial one. A major textual resource---an ecclesiastical constitution, essentially---is Section 107 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which will be considered here in isolation. This section defines the leading councils and describes their relationships to one another. To put it gently, this section contains several subtleties, or complexities, or ambiguities. (No need to gratuitously unnerve anyone with the word "contradictions"!) This post examines one of these ambiguities: Does the President of the Church have ultimate authority?

The authority conferred upon the "President of the High Priesthood of the Church; Or, in other words, the Presiding High Priest over the High Priesthood of the Church" (D&C 107:65-66) is extensive, as described in two passages.

The first description of the President's authority concerns the administration of ordinances. "From the same comes the administering of ordinances and blessings upon the church, by the laying on of the hands" (D&C 107:67). Perhaps this is the source of the notion that the President of the Church holds all the keys, usually described as the authority to direct how the priesthood is exercised---that is, when and by whom ordinances are performed. As indicated, he may delegate these keys to others.

The second description of the President's authority is more broad:

And again, the duty of the President of the office of the High Priesthood is to preside over the whole church, and to be like unto Moses—--

Behold, here is wisdom; yea, to be a seer, a revelator, a translator, and a prophet, having all the gifts of God which he bestows upon the head of the church. (D&C 107:65-66)

It is a comprehensive description, in both scope of authority ("over the whole church") and access to divine power and knowledge ("all the gifts of God").

As it so happens, there are also two passages suggesting limitations on the President's authority.

The first "limitation" passage comes in a description of the First Presidency, before the office of President is even specifically mentioned. The First Presidency's decisions

must be by the unanimous voice of the same...

Unless this is the case, their decisions are not entitled to the same blessings which the decisions of a quorum of three presidents were anciently, who were ordained after the order of Melchizedek, and were righteous and holy men. (D&C 107:27,29)

This seems to be a clear indication that the united voice of the First Presidency carries greater weight than the President acting alone.

The second limitation on the President's authority arises out of a discussion of a bishop's authority as a "judge in Israel," which includes authority "to sit in judgment upon transgressors" (see D&C 107:68-84). The "most difficult cases...shall be handed over and carried up unto the council of the church, before the Presidency of the High Priesthood" [that is, the First Presidency], who "shall have power to call other high priests, even twelve, to assist as counselors" (D&C 107:78-79). It is specifically noted that

There is not any person belonging to the church who is exempt from this council of the church.

And inasmuch as a President of the High Priesthood shall transgress, he shall be had in remembrance before the common council of the church, who shall be assisted by twelve counselors of the High Priesthood;

And their decision upon his head shall be an end of controversy concerning him.

Thus, none shall be exempted from the justice and the laws of God, that all things may be done in order and in solemnity before him, according to truth and righteousness. (D&C 107:81-84)

Hence the President's authority does not extend to preventing judgment upon him by a council consisting of the other members of the First Presidency and twelve counselors chosen by them.

There is a sense among members of the Church of supreme authority vested in the President of the Church. In D&C 107 there is some language that might be invoked to support this idea, but there also seem to be clear limitations. Implications for the establishment of doctrine will be deferred to a later post, after other ambiguities in this constitutional document have been explored.

[This is cross-posted from Mormon Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Please go to the original post to comment.]

The Two Big Problems in Church Doctrine

2005-04-24T23:57:00.000-04:00

In comments on the post On Doctrine, Nate has identified two big problems in understanding Church doctrine, and judged that I have been mired in the elementary issue of fallibility of prophets that we all should have understood before leaving kindergarten. (Well, those weren't exactly his words!) I would like to get past the trivia, and understand the more important issues: "1. How do I identify what [church doctrine] is; and, 2. How do I understand its authority."

Trying to tune in to Nate's wavelength, I'll take as a starting point these two big questions. As a demonstration of good faith I have gone back and found that two of his posts are conveniently entitled What is Church Doctrine? and On Authority, and read them both, though not the comments that followed. (Reading these posts, along with On Doctrine and the comments that follow, may be advisable to make sense of this post. Even then I make no guarantees that it will make sense; in addition to the fact that I'm none too bright, it's late, and I'm tired.)

On What is Church Doctrine?: The knee-jerk response of a scientist is to be a positivist. Nate's post's dismissal of a positivist view of church doctrine consists of a single simple sentence, the assertion that we have no rule of recognition. How about the following rule of recognition: "That which is presently on offer from Correlation." What deficiencies does this have? (In suggesting this I am not demanding much of "church doctrine," only what Nate calls the "coordinating function" in response to On Doctrine.)

It seems the second question is much harder, how to understand and identify epistemic authority. Nate offers several approaches in On Authority, but no obvious winner. I suppose my present Spinozist leanings (strong skepticism, at least, of epistemic authority) can be traced to a lack of a clear solution to this question.

Again, my instincts are to require at least a positivist foothold, with the rule of recognition (of generalized authority, though not of the truth of specific statements) being simple "infallible proofs," to use Luke's phrase: clear demonstrations of power over nature (the list of signs following them that believe), handling the resurrected Savior, etc. Given these, I could be sympathetic to the Revelation Portfolio and Presumption of Correctness approaches as workaday solutions. But not convinced the postivist foothold is there, for me these last two approaches are worthless.

I agree that the Truth as the Standard approach does not work all or even most of the time, but it does work sometimes---when empirical evidence is available---and should be applied when possible. My sense is that in the rare cases it can be fruitfully applied, the prophetic track record is a history of retreat and reintrepretation rather than vindication (creation accounts, Book of Mormon historicity).

The Personal Revelation approach has a lot going for it: It has strong (almost decisive) support in restoration scripture, and makes some sense with respect to the putative purposes of mortal probation. For many it is an adequate substitute for a positivist foothold, enough of a basis to adopt Presumption of Correctness or at least Revelation Portfolio. For me it is insufficient: taken in isolation, I worry it is plausibly explainable by socialization, and psychological phenomena we know are unrelated to prophetic authority (e.g. being emotionally moved by a movie with a message contrary to the gospel, or experiencing goosebumps listening to a Van Halen song with inappropriate lyrics and a beat and style that "drive away the Spirit," or "sudden flashes of intelligence" that are indistinguishable from inherent human faculties).

Nate seems most sympathetic in both posts to the Dworkin legal philosophy/Coherence Solution, something about trying to tell a never-ending story in which each new chapter is written with an eye toward making the overall product as sensible as possible. But frankly it comes off as a last resort, what remains after all other options are eliminated, "I'll hope this works because nothing else seems to." It comes across this way because no plausible guidelines are offered for how to construct the story, how to judge what makes it "best," and what basis we have for thinking this construction of narrative is anything more than human invention. And, it doesn't seem any stories are actually offered. In fairness, I suppose this is still an unsolved problem. Any progress since these posts?

Priests

2005-04-22T14:50:00.000-04:00

The proliferation of priests on television the past couple of weeks reminds me of a joke I often heard missionaries tell in Catholic-dominated Chile.

A Catholic priest invites a mormon Bishop over to discuss issues of mutual concern in their community. The priest is a good host, but not past needling his ecclesiastical colleague: "May I offer you a cup of coffee?"

"You're very kind," replies the Mormon bishop, "but no, thank you, we don't drink coffee."

"Why, Bishop, you don't know what you're missing! How about some tea?"

"Very gracious, Father, but again I must decline. We don't drink tea either."

"Ah, you don't know what you're missing. Well, perhaps we could ease into our discussion with a glass of bourbon and a fine cigar?"

"Father, I appreciate the gesture, but we don't smoke or drink."

"Well, you don't know what you're missing! On to the business at hand, then."

Their business is dispatched smoothly. Turning back as he makes his way out, the Bishop issues a final farewell: "Give my best to your wife."

"Why, Bishop, you know we don't marry."

The Bishop shakes his head: "Father, you don't know what you're missing!"

It may be utterly juvenile on my part, but while watching the priests "pontificate" on television, for some reason the celibacy thing distracts me to the point that I can hardly hear what they're saying. In the two worldviews I've taken seriously, sexuality and reproduction play a central role: In Mormon theology, it is practically the defining characteristic of godhood; in evolution, it defines "survival of the fittest." From these perspectives, to be without family or expectations of it is to practically not exist. (In Mormonism, even those who must do without look forward to receiving in eternity all blessings they were denied in mortality.) To choose celibacy willingly seems so abnormal, so out of sync with reality, that it makes it hard for me to lend credibility to anything they say.

There is a strong emotional response on my part here. Seeing sexuality as an integral part of manhood, and unwilling to conceive of anything different for myself, it is perhaps hard for me to think of them as "real men." The revulsion is similar to that evoked by the punishment Odysseus meted out to the wicked suitors, who had their privy parts ripped off and fed to the dogs. (As I recall, for some reason the epic insists on repeating this over and over.)

But there is an intellectual component too. Now, I may have a lot to learn about the fine points of theology (even Mormon theology---I haven't read Blake Ostler's book). But I can't help thinking that for all the much-vaunted "intellectual consistency" of the Catholic "culture of life," the wheels must have come off the logic wagon in a major way when it came to celibacy. Artificial birth control is banned; how ironic, then, to bestow the title of Father upon those whose elective unnatural lifestyle amounts to the most severe method of artificial contraception imaginable! Unlike other methods, this one appears to be waning in popularity---a reality that might, someday, bring someone to their senses.

On Doctrine

2005-04-21T11:46:00.000-04:00

Greg is one of our frequent commenters, a thoughtful lawyer with an intense interest in what constitutes "doctrine," and what its significance is. His insightful questions and comments often irrupt into threads on various doctrinal concepts related to evolution. One of my comments in response became so long, I decided to promote it to a post in order to provide a place for more focused discussion of this question. This appears somewhat midstream in a series of exchanges across several threads, but I don't know that I can easily find or summarize what has gone before. Hence I simply begin here by meeting Greg on his own turf, trying an analogy with the law. (For more competent discussions along these lines by a real lawyer, explore the posts by Nate Oman at Times and Seasons.) Greg, eat your heart out!

I recognize that the leading councils of the Church have the right to establish doctrine, but I also believe that what is "official," or "canonized," or bound in leather at any given time is not pristine, perfected, glistening and crystalline Truth, but only a community's best collective judgment and perception of it, based on many complex factors I will not get into. I don't dispute that there has to be some sort of order, some mechanism for settling things (at least provisionally) for a community to cohere. I suspect, however, that the fact that it does not always represent the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth is historically demonstrable.

Where does this leave me, operationally, with notions of keys and authority and doctrine? Trying to play in your pond, here is my analogy with the law.

The Supreme Court settles "doctrine" and creates precedents that other courts must respect, for the sake of order. But this does not mean these are immune to refinement or utterly irreversible. There are law schools and think tanks where discussions rage and new ideas form. Either vertically, "up the chain of command" through appellate proceedings; or horizontally, through direct influence by way of law review articles, amicus briefs, or informal consultations, such discussions may end up influencing extensions, revisions, and (rarely) reversals by the Supreme Court of their own "doctrine."

Now, to "cash out" the analogy's application to the Church: the leading councils are like the Supreme Court. Their settled positions are accepted for the purposes of official Church discourse (and, for behavioral standards, Church membership). This means that in Sacrament Meeting talks, Sunday School and Priesthood/Relief Society discussions, and other "official" venues, I stick to the accepted positions (similar to courts respecting established precedent). But we know historically that "settled" on a time scale of years may still be "provisional" on longer time scales of decades and centuries. Moreover, experience with the real world sometimes suggests that Doctrine is not equivalent to Truth. Hence around the dinner table, and at other unofficial venues formal (e.g. magazines) and otherwise (e.g. blogs), discussion proceeds, in analogy to law schools, think tanks, etc. Some of the results of such discussions influence doctrine through vertical channels, either directly via private discussions between leaders at different levels of the hierarchy, or (probably more often in the Church) through promotion of leaders carrying their private views into office. There is probably some horizontal influence as well (though not as much as in the case of law reviews and amicus briefs in the legal setting), through consideration of the work of trusted and faithful scholars (I'll avoid the radioactive word "intellectuals" here).

A glaring omission here is the role of revelation. I don't know if any of the classical muses were associated with jurisprudence, but perhaps the notion of "revelation" might be accommodated in the legal analogy by creative legal genius divining a "right to privacy" from whole cloth, or deriving Brown v. Board of Education from a footnote in a case on the interstate commerce of milk (as I recall Nate Oman's description). Even with this omission, however, I think the description above captures something of the workaday realities of doctrinal "evolution." (My apologies for the pun---or, maybe not!)

[This is cross-posted from Mormon Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. Because the subject of this post is of wider relevance, I am going to leave this post open for comments here as well. I do this with some trepidation, mindful of the confusion that such "polygblogy" on my part may lead to. For comments on this post as it relates to evolution, please go to the original post to comment. Otherwise, you are welcome to comment here.]

Mormons and Evolution

2005-04-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

I contribute to a group blog entitled Mormons and Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation. The subject addressed by this blog involves ongoing, multipart discussions. To maximize distribution, keep my blogging corpus together in one place, and help maintain an illusion of ongoing activity at this site, I cross-post these contributions here (while pointing to the other site for comments---my house is a house of order!). This post, linked permanently on the sidebar and updated as appropriate, serves as a roadmap to my contributions---in their reverse video instantiations, for your reading pleasure.

A reconciliation of Mormonism with evolution would require an appreciation of the issues at stake for believers.

A Place at the Table: There must be assurance that evolution does not preclude God's existence.
A Redeeming Place at the Table: There must be assurance that evolution does not preclude God's miraculous intervention in the world, and his ability to give us life beyond this world.

A reconciliation of Mormonism with evolution would require coming to grips with our understanding of Church doctrine---what the very notion of "doctrine" is, what it isn't, and how various doctrines touch on evolution.

On Doctrine: For purposes of communal coherence, the leading councils of the Church have the right to establish doctrine that defines standards of behavior and the boundaries of official discourse; but what is "official," or "canonized," or bound in leather at any given time is not pristine, perfected, glistening and crystalline Truth, but only a community's best collective contemporary judgment and perception of it.
An Ambiguous Ecclesiastical Constitution: The Authority of the President: D&C 107 describes the authority of the President of the Church as comprehensive, but not unlimited.
A Rollback of the Classical Mormon Perspective on Humanity's Origin and Destiny?: Some statements by President Hinckley suggest he may be open to the idea that God is only the designer of Adam's physical body, and not its literal father, as the traditional Mormon perspective would have it.

In making a reconciliation with evolution, what should Mormons think of arguments from design? What should their attitude be towards the teaching in public schools of so-called Intelligent Design?

Do all things denote there is a God? Is Alma’s teleological argument consistent with Joseph Smith’s mature views on the nature of God, and also with the ancient Hebrew worldview from which Nephite culture sprang?
Two Classes of Argument from Design, Which Both Fail: Problems with the view of ‘God as First Cause’ are largely avoided by Joseph’s mature anthropomorphic view of God; but the resulting perspective of ‘God as Engineer’ does not make for a good teleological argument either, because of known examples of ‘specialness amidst randomness’ and ‘specialness from randomness.’
Response to God and science: Because the role of God in creation is not testable, it does not belong in scientific theories; hence if Intelligent Design is taught at all it ought not be in science class, but in other areas of the curriculum, or in other venues.

What attempts at reconciling Mormonism with evolution have been made in the past?

What Did Nibley Think of Evolution? Nibley goes further than most Mormons in taking the findings of science seriously in thinking about the meaning of scriptural creation accounts, but in the end his engaging and bold approach fails on scientific grounds, right where it matters most: the origin of man.

How are ideas related to reconciliation of Mormonism with evolution received among our readers? Informal polls (collected here) provide feedback that, while less than statistically representative of Church membership, is nevertheless interesting.

NDBF Unvailed, and a Poll: Do our readers believe in a paradisiacal creation, with no death of any organism on Earth until after Adam's Fall? By an overwhelming majority, no.
Procreation or Design: Pick your Poison: How do our readers conceptualize God's role in the creation of human physical bodies? Early indications point to a preference for God the Geneticist.