Clearest explanation for why Moroni's promise is unreliable

[_Buffalo]

Clearest that I've read, anyway:

http://goodreasonblog.blogspot.com/2010 ... dence.html

Revelation is not good evidence
I had an exchange with a Mormon friend a little while ago. His interesting but ultimately vacuous argument went something like this:

"You say you rely on evidence for the things you believe. But you're only relying on physical, tangible evidence. You're not relying on spiritual evidence, and so you're only getting part of the picture. I'm using the full range of evidence available to us."

My response is two-fold:

1) There is no empirical evidence for the claims of religion, including the existence of a god, the reality of an afterlife, or various details such as a Tower of Babel, gold plates, or Lamanites. The key doctrines of religious belief systems are either unsupported by evidence, or refuted by evidence. (Occasionally a religion will teach a principle that turns out to be valid -- the Mormon prohibition on smoking seems worthwhile on its face -- but these are things that could have occured to someone without requiring revelation.)

2) What my friend was calling 'spiritual evidence' is actually not good evidence at all. I think he was referring to something Mormons call 'personal revelation' -- messages that people think they're getting through prayer.

This is not a good way of finding out what's true. How you feel about a proposition has nothing to do with whether it's true or not. You can feel great about things that are completely false. Yet this method is at the very heart of the Mormon conversion experience -- and other forms of Christianity also place an emphasis on emotional reasoning.

Let's take a step back and see how this plays out in LDS missionary work.

LDS missionaries encourage investigators to 'experiment upon the word'. And the experiment that they propose is that you can pray and receive answers about the truth of their message telepathically from a god.

They rely on a scripture from the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4, which says to ask God, and the Holy Ghost will tell you if it's true. By doing this, the missionaries commit the fallacy of begging the question -- they claim that a god will tell you that the religion is true, but the existence of said god is the very premise under consideration.

And how does the Holy Spirit let you know?

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

That's a pretty big list of fruits. Almost any feeling could qualify as a confirmation, especially if that's the conclusion you want to come to, and you wouldn't be asking if you didn't have at least a glimmer of hope that it was true.

It should be obvious that this is not a real scientific experiment, and not just because it falls back on supernatural explanations.

* Scientific experiments use evidence that is empirical -- involving sense data that could be observed by anyone

* Experiments try and control for bias

* Experiments are replicable -- anyone can repeat the experiment, and they should get about the same result. Ideas are verified by multiple points of view.


But so-called personal revelation doesn't follow these controls.

* Your feelings can't be directly observed by other people. That makes it impossible to evaluate someone else's religious claims, and that means that religious people have to 'agree to disagree' when they get conflicting revelations.

* There's no way to tell whether the feeling you're getting is a real live revelation from a god, something from your own mind, or (worse) a temptation from an evil spirit, if you go for that. Or Zeus, Krishna, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's easy to distinguish between two competing natural claims, but it's impossible to distinguish between two competing supernatural claims.

* A scientific experiment attempts to control for bias, but here, the missionaries are subtlely biasing their subjects by telling them what they should expect to feel. It's sort of like when you're playing records backwards for Satanic messages -- it's hard to tell what the message is until someone gives you the words.

* The goalposts for this test are defined very vaguely and can be shifted. A confirmation can be ginned up out of the most meager of subjective data -- or no data at all. Many are the members who ask for a revelation, get none, and continue in the church anyway, figuring that if they have real faith, they don't need a spiritual confirmation. It's a hit if you have good feelings, and hit if you don't.

* In a real experiment, we would try to account for both positive and negative results. But here, no attempt is made to add negative results to the sample. People who report a positive result show up in church, but people who get no result don't, and are effectively deleted from the sample. In fact, if someone doesn't get a revelation, it's assumed that they are to blame for not being 'sincere' or trying hard enough. They are encouraged to repeat the test until they get a result that the experimenter will like.

* Worse still, once someone is convinced that they've received a message from a god, Latter-day Saints then make a series of logical leaps to show that the whole church is true, from the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith to Thomas Monson and beyond. All from good feelings and not from anything solid.


Not everyone is convinced by this test, but the church doesn't need everyone to buy it -- just enough people to keep the system going. And I can tell you from personal experience that when you think you've been touched by the divine, it can be very difficult to balance that against real evidence. No good evidence is going to come out of this kind of test. This is not a valid experiment. It is a recipe for self-deception. It is just asking to be fooled.

[_Buffalo]

Add that to the identical methodology used by the FLDS, and Moroni's promise is completely debunked as a valid truth test.

[_Sethbag]

They rely on a scripture from the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4, which says to ask God, and the Holy Ghost will tell you if it's true. By doing this, the missionaries commit the fallacy of begging the question -- they claim that a god will tell you that the religion is true, but the existence of said god is the very premise under consideration.

Let me first quote Moroni 10:4, so we have the words in front of us.

4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

He's specifically not telling you how to find out of God exists. He's telling you how to find out if the Book of Mormon is true or not. In order to do this, you must already believe that God exists, have "faith in Christ", in order to receive the answer.

Some ramifications of this present themselves:
1) Mormon missionaries have been doing it wrong. Moroni's Promise, on its face, won't work on non-Christians, since it specifically requires faith in Christ for the promise to work.
2) Moroni's Promise is a part of the book whose veracity is being questioned. The methodology presented in the book must simply be assumed to be true, and therefor the presentation of the method does beg the question, but not in the way you stated.
3) It ought to be a red flag that the book even contains a discussion of whether or not it is true. Methinks the book doth protest too much, if you catch my meaning. The constant theme of whether or not Mormonism, or Joseph Smith as Prophet, or the Book of Mormon, being true is itself a striking red flag, since the very question implies that this is a real issue.

[_Buffalo]

They rely on a scripture from the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4, which says to ask God, and the Holy Ghost will tell you if it's true. By doing this, the missionaries commit the fallacy of begging the question -- they claim that a god will tell you that the religion is true, but the existence of said god is the very premise under consideration.

Let me first quote Moroni 10:4, so we have the words in front of us.

4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

He's specifically not telling you how to find out of God exists. He's telling you how to find out if the Book of Mormon is true or not. In order to do this, you must already believe that God exists, have "faith in Christ", in order to receive the answer.

Some ramifications of this present themselves:

1) Mormon missionaries have been doing it wrong. Moroni's Promise, on its face, won't work on non-Christians, since it specifically requires faith in Christ for the promise to work.

2) Moroni's Promise is a part of the book whose veracity is being questioned. The methodology presented in the book must simply be assumed to be true, and therefor the presentation of the method does beg the question, but not in the way you stated.

3) It ought to be a red flag that the book even contains a discussion of whether or not it is true. Methinks the book doth protest too much, if you catch my meaning. The constant theme of whether or not Mormonism, or Joseph Smith as Prophet, or the Book of Mormon, being true is itself a striking red flag, since the very question implies that this is a real issue.

Yes, that is a huge red flag. I think Joseph, midway through, was also feeling a little insecure about the quality of the writing, hence the famous "The Lord gives men weakness that they may be humble" passage.

[_Sophocles]

I particularly like the "full range" bit:

"You say you rely on evidence for the things you believe. But you're only relying on physical, tangible evidence. You're not relying on spiritual evidence, and so you're only getting part of the picture. I'm using the full range of evidence available to us."

That line of reasoning sounds completely legit to someone who already accepts that all reality consists of a spiritual as well as physical component. If that's the case, then if you only consider the physical evidence, then by golly, you're only getting half the story!

But consider that to someone who does not already believe in "spiritual evidence," it is about as compelling as homeopathic evidence, astrological evidence, or magic evidence. To someone who has not already been trained to think along those lines, the special pleading going on here is completely transparent. Naturally, when a claim cannot be supported by physical evidence, a new category of (conveniently non-falsifiable) evidence is invented which is tailor made to support the claim.

Also, notice how the new evidence doesn't simply complement or confirm the physical. It contradicts it and must therefore overwhelm it somehow. If the physical evidence tells us that the Book of Mormon is false, but the spiritual evidence tells us it's true, then wouldn't the two, taken together, be inconclusive? Wouldn't the "full picture" be a contradictory outcome, that the book is both true and not true?

Of course, in the calculus of the believer, considering the "full range" of evidence actually means ignoring the physical completely and embracing only the spiritual.

[_beefcalf]

Let me first quote Moroni 10:4, so we have the words in front of us.

4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

He's specifically not telling you how to find out of God exists. He's telling you how to find out if the Book of Mormon is true or not. In order to do this, you must already believe that God exists, have "faith in Christ", in order to receive the answer.

Good point, but remember that Moroni 10:5 goes on to say:

And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

emphasis added

All things. All things. How about a cure for homosexuality? Have no apostles ever thought to ask God for a cure for homosexuality?

How 'bout asking for a clear method to determine if the ward's newly called Cubmaster has tendencies toward pedophilia? There is no reason for the church to ever pay another dime in hush money when they have an absolutely reliable and accurate method to obtain this information.

And why would you waste money funding BYU? Why waste all that time in classrooms, learning the worldly way, when God's method is available for all?

Sounds to me like not even Mormons truly believe in the bullcrap claims of Moroni 10:4-5.