The Truth Of Mormonism

[Fence Sitter]

Thank you.

OK, so there was a time when I would have completely agreed with you. But at some point I came to see myself as unnecessarily hewing to an artificial rigidity in how I viewed testimonies. The real problem here, in my opinion, is not that an LDS person will say, "I know the Church is true." The problem is that our culture has increasingly moved to a frankly narrow sense of what all of this means. There are different ways of knowing and different kinds of truth. I am happy to concede that a happy LDS person can "know the Church is true."

On the other hand, I do not allow for people to "know that the Book of Mormon" was written in antiquity. There simply is insufficient evidence to support such a claim, and this is also quite a different thing from saying "I know the Church is true." Here we are talking about factual claims of a non-subjective kind. My willingness to claim a book was written in antiquity does not change events on the timeline. Here is where the LDS Church has problems. LDS leaders and scholars insist it is important to believe that the Book of Mormon's narratives describe events that occurred in antiquity.

I consider that demand a deal breaker. I could stand up in a meeting and say "I know the Gospel is true," and so forth, but I will not support the idea that there are these otherwise unknown ancient civilizations described in a book that Joseph Smith appears to have written in the late 1820s. I can even support the idea that the Book of Mormon is a miraculous work, but that does not entail, in my mind, a belief that it is describing events that occurred between the 6th century BC and the 5th century AD in ancient America.

There is something wrong, I think, with fabricating false histories and imposing them on people as though they were factual. Joseph Smith had a very unusual epistemology, and so I am not comfortable saying that he composed a false history. What he did was compose an American Bible, which was not ever history in the sense we understand it today. Over time it was inevitable, thanks to changes in how people view history, that the factual and historical nature of "Bibles" would be rightly challenged. In that new light, the treatment of the Book of Mormon as history is no longer tenable, and it should be abandoned. Unfortunately, it will require a lot of work to change views on the Book of Mormon without fatally undermining Mormonism altogether.

I am happy to concede that a happy LDS person can "know the Church is true."

Many of my siblings "know the church is true" but when pressed about historical questions they wave them off as not important to that belief. What kind of "true" is the Mormon church if the Book of Mormon is fictional?

[Res Ipsa]

Thank you.

OK, so there was a time when I would have completely agreed with you. But at some point I came to see myself as unnecessarily hewing to an artificial rigidity in how I viewed testimonies. The real problem here, in my opinion, is not that an LDS person will say, "I know the Church is true." The problem is that our culture has increasingly moved to a frankly narrow sense of what all of this means. There are different ways of knowing and different kinds of truth. I am happy to concede that a happy LDS person can "know the Church is true."

On the other hand, I do not allow for people to "know that the Book of Mormon" was written in antiquity. There simply is insufficient evidence to support such a claim, and this is also quite a different thing from saying "I know the Church is true." Here we are talking about factual claims of a non-subjective kind. My willingness to claim a book was written in antiquity does not change events on the timeline. Here is where the LDS Church has problems. LDS leaders and scholars insist it is important to believe that the Book of Mormon's narratives describe events that occurred in antiquity.

I consider that demand a deal breaker. I could stand up in a meeting and say "I know the Gospel is true," and so forth, but I will not support the idea that there are these otherwise unknown ancient civilizations described in a book that Joseph Smith appears to have written in the late 1820s. I can even support the idea that the Book of Mormon is a miraculous work, but that does not entail, in my mind, a belief that it is describing events that occurred between the 6th century BC and the 5th century AD in ancient America.

There is something wrong, I think, with fabricating false histories and imposing them on people as though they were factual. Joseph Smith had a very unusual epistemology, and so I am not comfortable saying that he composed a false history. What he did was compose an American Bible, which was not ever history in the sense we understand it today. Over time it was inevitable, thanks to changes in how people view history, that the factual and historical nature of "Bibles" would be rightly challenged. In that new light, the treatment of the Book of Mormon as history is no longer tenable, and it should be abandoned. Unfortunately, it will require a lot of work to change views on the Book of Mormon without fatally undermining Mormonism altogether.

I am happy to concede that a happy LDS person can "know the Church is true."

Many of my siblings "know the church is true" but when pressed about historical questions they wave them off as not important to that belief. What kind of "true" is the Mormon church if the Book of Mormon is fictional?

It is not uncommon for people to find "truth" in things they acknowledge as fiction. The term is "truth" is used to describe such a broad span of ideas, that I find it better to ask what the person means when they use the term instead of understanding them to mean 100% factually accurate.

[Analytics]

In india, a girl is born in the village of Poovar. Her family is extremely poor so she’ll spend the rest of her life living within a radius of two miles. She’s Hindu and finds comfort in praying daily to multiple gods and goddesses. She ends up living 29,943 days on earth and her TRUTH was found by following the doctrines of samsara. On her death bed she was at peace and never spent one second wondering if the Christians were the ones following the true God. She died surrounded by love ones who shared her TRUTH. My question for the men on this board! Did this woman live a lie?

...

I served a mission in Argentina in 1989. One day we were out knocking on doors, and met a widow with young children. Her husband had died in an industrial accident just a few weeks before. She felt impressed to listen to us, and our message of eternal families really resonated with her. Over the next few weeks as she went through the discussions, she really liked the message we told. We had answers to her questions, and she told us of an uncanny dream where she talked with her husband, who was considering joining the Church on the other side of the veil.

It was a complicated situation for her, because she was a strong member of her Catholic community, and her Catholic friends and religious leaders were just shocked that the Mormons would take advantage of this woman in her time of grief to tear her away from her authentic faith community.

We ended up baptizing her and her kids, and then were quickly transferred away.

Not that long after my mission, I left the Church. The companion I had at the time, a local Argentine, also left. I had really mixed feelings about my work as a missionary. Different religious beliefs have different tradeoffs. Did we do more harm than good? That depends on the individual in question. About 10 years after my mission, I happened to take a trip to Argentina, and talked to my Argentine companion about that family. The question was raised about whether we should reach out to them and let them know the other side of the story. We agreed that we shouldn't--if Mormonism wasn't working for them they would have left on their own by now, but if it was working it would be better not to rock their boat. In either case, they had to take responsibility for their own spiritual journey.

I have weak, tentative faith that the best way to approach life is to embrace reality and to work it out based on what's real. But I don't have faith that this approach would work for everybody, and I don't see it as my job to convert people to the truth as I see it. Mormonism doesn't work for everybody, but it does work for some. If it is working for somebody, I wouldn't want to take it away from them.

[huckelberry]

I think Mike has presented an interesting and valuable question. I think it is possible to clarify the use of the word truth as Physics guy requested in a way that fits with Mikes question. There are times people use the word truth as a personal truth. To my understanding that refers to some thing that is a foundation for meaning for that persons life. It is something that is a foundation for meeting life with courage hope and respect. Those are real things without which it is difficult to live.

I believe it is clear that that kind of truth can come in many different clothing or images. Different cultures preserve and teach this foundation with different religious stories, different stories about people and different cultural political beliefs. It is part of my own religious belief that these different religions are all pointers to truth all people share.

From that theory and my own personal experience Mormonism contains truth that can point to the foundation of personal truth. I give thanks for the teaching I received in the church. They have been a value to me through changing relationship to or distance from the church. I find some agreement with Kishkumen's comments about testimonies. Even from my distance I can see a kernel of ,I know the church is true.

But as Kishkumen is pointing out human experience is not so simple as having the truth. For real humans over a lifetime there is conflict and struggle with what they have as personal truth. One may picture a child happily in the boat through teens, early adulthood, maturity, aging until they have the good death. It is rarely if ever as simple as that. There are conflicts even for people who maintain one belief system through their life.

I do not think I asked for the uncertainty I struggled with about the church. I did pass from a time of lackadasical belief to a time of earnest belief. That second step introduced me to uncertainty doubt and fear.
I think for any belief system containing some personal truth there are life conflicts that arise that force questions and uncertainty on the belief. I doubt anybody escapes.

People may deepen their understanding, strengthening a faith, change their understanding, change belief systems, or live with a good deal of specific religious dogmas removed from their beliefs. What I do not think is possible is to avoid all thought and challenge to ones personal truth.

////
Adding, I appreciate Analytics observations and agree with not wishing to push doubt on people working within belief.(unless it is actively harming other at which points some pushback is appropriate.....doesn't that open up another can of worms?)

[Res Ipsa]

A documentary filmmaker once told me about letting her subjects present "their truth". As a scientist I wasn't used to using the term "truth" for opinions that differ from person to person. I'd rather say "their views of the truth" or something like that. The documentary maker seemed to find a practical value in calling these individual opinions "truth", though: using the word "truth" in that way helped her stay on polite terms with her subjects.

I still want to have a word for the ideal absolute of objective truth. It may be impossible for humans to know for sure that we have that kind of truth, but in some fields at least we can really approach it, if we work hard and limit our focus. And even in day-to-day life, you know, I think there are such things as errors and lies. If you want to use the word "truth" in such a way that a thief can insist that it's their truth that my car is their car, then fine, but I'm going to find a way to say that what the thief said is not just not my truth, it's also not the truth. We still do need a word for that concept. "Truth" is the old word and I don't see why we can't keep it.

On the other hand, though, "opinion" and "belief" are stretched a bit thin as words, if we ask them to cover everything from "I believe in monogamy" to "I believe I'll have another drink." It's probably worth distinguishing the kind of opinions that are deeply held and highly valued from more casual views. And when people's opinions of that kind differ from each other, I still wouldn't say that both can be true, but I have to admit that there may be no practical way of telling who is closer to being right. The different opinions may have an equal chance to be true.

In the end I don't necessarily mind all that much if someone wants to use "true" and "truth" in a relativistic way, because I agree that the concept to which they are trying to refer in that way is a concept worth having. I just think it's important to acknowledge, if we do that, that we are talking about a different concept of "truth" from what people usually mean when they say things like, "It's not true that this is your car."

It could be harder than you'd think to keep that difference in mind, but I think it's important to do it. You can insist as much as you like that by "truth" you mean a relative, individual kind of truth, but I really don't think you'll be able to discuss anything for very long without falling back, at some point, for something, on the old non-relative this-car-really-is-my-car kind of truth. So if you're using "truth" to mean individual truth, you're very likely to be juggling two different meanings for the same word. That's a good recipe for bait-and-switch equivocation that lets you trick yourself into thinking you've made more sense than you really have. You have to be pretty careful, I think.

This resonates with me, PG. The terms "truth," "know," and "believe" have such a wide spectrum of meanings that I wish we could divide each into several different words. Absent a flood of new words, I think context can be a useful substitute. But that requires a substantial commitment to exercise consistent good faith when interpreting the meaning of other's words. When I try my best, it's not hard to understand the difference between an LDS believer bearing their testimony that the church is "true" and you saying it is true that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. And if I don't understand, it's fairly easy to clear up any misunderstanding by asking a question or two.

I do think your last paragraph makes an important point. It's easy to get tangled up by your own use of these fairly ambiguous terms. It's work to try and keep your own thinking straight.

[Physics Guy]

Yes. If pressed I'd be willing to accept Kishkumen's terminology of "facts" versus "truth". As long as we still have a word for plain old facts, it's not essential that it be "truth". "Truth" can get repurposed to mean something else. Nullius in verbis.

I retain a suspicion, however, that people who use the word "truth" for non-factual things are not really selecting that word arbitrarily. I suspect that even if they manage to avoid blatantly fallacious equivocation they may still be trading, connotatively, on the association of the the word "truth" with facts. It makes things sound so solid and certain. As deconstructionists would like to point out, one is apt to be especially keen to sound solid and certain precisely when things are not certain at all.

[Rivendale]

Yes. If pressed I'd be willing to accept Kishkumen's terminology of "facts" versus "truth". As long as we still have a word for plain old facts, it's not essential that it be "truth". "Truth" can get repurposed to mean something else. Nullius in verbis.

I retain a suspicion, however, that people who use the word "truth" for non-factual things are not really selecting that word arbitrarily. I suspect that even if they manage to avoid blatantly fallacious equivocation they may still be trading, connotatively, on the association of the the word "truth" with facts. It makes things sound so solid and certain. As deconstructionists would like to point out, one is apt to be especially keen to sound solid and certain precisely when things are not certain at all.

The idea that there are many truths is what Jordan Peterson talks about. Truth is what is useful is his pragmatic sound bite. Being trained in science I just can't avoid black and white empirical thinking. While I think it is impossible to know what an absolute truth is I think we can get close. The speed of light. The period of Neptune and the diagnosis of a disease can be "truths". But someone's interior subjective experience is forever hidden except for the person experiencing it. The problem with interior experiences resides in the fact they can be wrong. But that isn't the same "wrong" as getting the speed of light wrong. Interior experiences will build on the scaffolding of belief that the person constructs based on dogma, indoctrination and delusion. I think the fear of death plays an important role in creating a supernatural world view also. That is why the shelf collapse is so devastating for people. Newtonian physics being overturned by the theory of relativity didn't cause physics to collapse in the same way someone deconstructing Mormonism did for many. Was Mormonism true for a person pre-shelf collapse identical to a scientist using Newtonian laws instead of relativistic tools? I think there are brute facts that just are.

[Binger]

This thread has not caused me to change my mind about what I think of Mormonism or the claims of Mormons.

But damn y'all. I have swung like a pendulum on how to use "truth" with regards to beliefs and fiction and facts about a half dozen times in a single thread and there are not that many posts.

If I had to write about the concept of truth as it is used in a religious context, I damn sure would not be writing the same words today that I would have used yesterday.

Carry on. Enough.

[Gadianton]

When I try my best, it's not hard to understand the difference between an LDS believer bearing their testimony that the church is "true" and you saying it is true that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.

I think the typical believer does mean "truth" as in protons, neutrons, and electrons. Especially see the thread Stak has about Mormonism and physicalism. Mormonism is true in exactly the way science is true, for 99% of Mormons. Mormons are suspicious of "truth" when it means something airy or "philosophical". That's the domain of truth in other religions, not theirs. Mormons are, in fact, hardcore proponents of "scientism". I recall clear as day brother ____ bearing his testimony one Sunday -- when I was about fourteen -- letting us all know that truth we find in the gospel, and the truth found in the science laboratory are both truth -- they are both ultimately talking about the same no-nonsense stuff.

The only Mormons who hesitate on truth as anything other than physical reality, are those who have studied it enough to know they're screwed on the offense, and the best defense is to say that there are different kinds of truth.

Thankfully, there was this whole problem of the theory of representations in modernism that essentially doomed the philosophy of everyday stuff, and so for the educated Mormon who is aware of its problems has other options to explore. See pretty much everything at the new MI.

Of course, there are actual serious students of religion out there who have non-apologetic impulses for talking about different kinds of truth. I think this topic can be interesting, but only in the context of serious inquiry not apologetics.

[Res Ipsa]

When I try my best, it's not hard to understand the difference between an LDS believer bearing their testimony that the church is "true" and you saying it is true that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.

I think the typical believer does mean "truth" as in protons, neutrons, and electrons. Especially see the thread Stak has about Mormonism and physicalism. Mormonism is true in exactly the way science is true, for 99% of Mormons. Mormons are suspicious of "truth" when it means something airy or "philosophical". That's the domain of truth in other religions, not theirs. Mormons are, in fact, hardcore proponents of "scientism". I recall clear as day brother ____ bearing his testimony one Sunday -- when I was about fourteen -- letting us all know that truth we find in the gospel, and the truth found in the science laboratory are both truth -- they are both ultimately talking about the same no-nonsense stuff.

The only Mormons who hesitate on truth as anything other than physical reality, are those who have studied it enough to know they're screwed on the offense, and the best defense is to say that there are different kinds of truth.

Thankfully, there was this whole problem of the theory of representations in modernism that essentially doomed the philosophy of everyday stuff, and so for the educated Mormon who is aware of its problems has other options to explore. See pretty much everything at the new MI.

Of course, there are actual serious students of religion out there who have non-apologetic impulses for talking about different kinds of truth. I think this topic can be interesting, but only in the context of serious inquiry not apologetics.

I thought Stak's posts were really interesting. But my chats with friends and family don't lead me to believe that expressing a testimony means the same in terms of truth as 100% factual. I get the impression it's more like "profoundly meaningful."