Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

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Dr Moore
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Dr Moore »

I have seen hundreds of people bear "I know X" testimony in church meetings.

It is self deception through repetition.

Only lying if they internally have doubts. And I know many do.

The best testimony I ever heard was a young man, a few years ago in my ward. He got up and said "I don't know X is true, but I want to believe because Y."
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

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Dr Moore wrote:
Fri Sep 16, 2022 3:52 pm
I have seen hundreds of people bear "I know X" testimony in church meetings.

It is self deception through repetition.

Only lying if they internally have doubts. And I know many do.

The best testimony I ever heard was a young man, a few years ago in my ward. He got up and said "I don't know X is true, but I want to believe because Y."
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

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Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Fri Sep 16, 2022 3:37 pm
I have (for a long time now) been more than a little fascinated by this statement that gets used that "I know the Church is true". The idea that "the church is true" is at least grammatically a funny thing. It has a very specific function that isn't necessarily obvious. A Church (as a thing) can't be true strictly speaking, just as rocks aren't true and trees aren't true, and so on. Things aren't true, but propositions can be true. And so when someone says "I know the Church is true" what that really means is that they hold a certain number of propositions about the Church that they believe are true. And when you say this in a testimony meeting, someone in the congregation can say 'Amen' or say that they too know the Church is true. And by this they also mean that they hold a certain number of propositions about the Church that they believe are true.

The kicker is that they don't have to be the same set of beliefs or propositions. In fact, if you took an entire congregation, there would probably be some things that are very different from one person to the next - perhaps even contradictory things (in fact, every single member of a congregation could agree with the statement and yet apply that statement to unique sets of propositions). As a community, this sort of shared expression functions to bring people together without the need for members to visibly express the underlying diversity. Whether or not this is good or bad - I am probably agnostic about it. I would rather see people in sacrament meeting enumerate the propositions that they hold to rather than simply bundle them together, but I can also recognize that this sort of thing helps those that don't have a highly developed awareness of the propositions that they believe and hold to.

As far as the opening post goes, I am not convinced by either side of the deterministic/non-deterministic argument. I think that its likely that reality may be somewhere in between. It is interesting to me (from the perspective of Mormon theology) that the Book of Mormon seems to suggest that 1) humanity has only a limited agency (and not absolute agency), and 2) humanity is only held accountable when they are able to exercise the limited agency that they have. Consequently, Lehi argues in 2 Nephi 2 that true agency only comes after the redemption from the fall. Just as interestingly, Lehi also illustrates this by arguing that meaningful choice could only be made prior to the fall because God created specific circumstances to make it so. Without that intervention by God, there would have been no real agency prior to the fall.

A final note about the notion of lying. Lying means telling someone something that you don't believe. Lying (conceptually) doesn't care about the truth. Telling the truth and telling a lie aren't really opposites. Donald Davidson describes it this way (and I like Davidson): "In lying, one must make an assertion so as to represent oneself as believing what one does not". The example I have used in the past is of a young man who is running late for school, and leaves his homework on the table when he runs out the door. When he gets to school and realizes that he forgot it, he tells his teacher that his dog ate it. What he doesn't know is that while eating breakfast, he dripped bacon grease on his homework, and his dog, smelling the bacon has in fact eaten his homework. By Davidson's definition, the boy is lying (making an assertion of something that he does not believe) while also telling the truth. The challenge with this idea of lying in connection with an assertion like "I know the Church is true" is additionally that the assertion is ambiguous - it is a place holder for the belief about a series of propositions - which are often not at all expressed. The truthfulness of those propositions can be hard to evaluate if they are not presented.
We can be led astray by the vagaries of English grammar - lack of symmetry in expressions allows imprecision and ambiguity to creep in without our noticing.

Would making a further separation help to avoid confusion?
  • Telling a lie means telling someone something that you don't believe.
  • Telling the truth means telling someone something that you do believe.
    .
  • Saying/speaking a truth means telling someone a true fact, regardless of what you believe.
  • Saying/speaking a falsehood means telling someone something that is not a true fact, regardless of what you believe.
In the dog and homework story the boy told a lie while saying a truth; he did not tell the truth.

Alternatives for the first two (to force parallel constructions):
  • Speaking falsely means saying something that you don't believe.
  • Speaking truly means saying something that you do believe.
In the dog and homework story the boy spoke falsely while saying a truth.

ETA: I'm really not sure, now that I read what I wrote, that I helped anything - except my posting count, of course.
Last edited by malkie on Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Gadianton »

So Ben, after that explanation, do you know that the Church is true?
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Gadianton wrote:
Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:14 am
So Ben, after that explanation, do you know that the Church is true?
No. And I would be very unlikely to ever make this statement. This isn't to say that I can't enumerate my list of propositions. And, with my personal philosophical leanings, I suspect that my list would be one of those that is quite different from most LDS members (different in part because I have spent the better part of my life learning to articulate my beliefs and then watching them change as both my experience and my understanding has changed).
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

malkie wrote:
Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:10 am
[*]Telling a lie means telling someone something that you don't believe.
[*]Telling the truth means telling someone something that you do believe.
Here I think is where the issue is. Truth and lies aren't binaries. So you can lie by saying something that you don't believe. But this doesn't mean that you are telling the truth when you say something that you do believe. Further, people can say things that they believe are true, and that are in fact factually accurate, but also be lying at the same time - if that statement is intended to cause someone else to believe something to be true that you do not believe to be factually accurate. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paltering) illustrates this with this example:
When selling a used car with engine trouble, a lie of omission would be a silent failure to correct a buyer who said, "I presume the car is in excellent shape and the engine runs well", while paltering would involve deceiving the buyer with a statement such as "I drove it yesterday in 10-below temperatures and it drove well".
You say something that you believe is true, that is factually true, and yet, is intended to get someone else to believe something that you know is not factually accurate - which means that it is a lie. This quickly gets tied up in the difference between what we say and what we do when we speak (locutionary and illocutionary acts). But my simple point remains that lying and telling the truth are not exclusive opposites.

Generally speaking, I just try to avoid labeling people as liars so that I don't have to worry about this distinction about whether they believe what they are saying. Frequently Donald Trump lies, because he is saying things he doesn't believe. But regularly he says things that he absolutely believes which are not factually true. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two. So I prefer to simply deal with things as being factual or not.

Within Mormon congregations, this is complicated because, as I point out, the phrase "I know the Church is true" has developed its own special meaning which is to some extent divergent from its strict grammatical meaning. In general, members don't use this phrase as a way to deceive others (even if their range of belief is different from someone else's range of belief), rather it is used to participate within the community. And the response it generates in the intended audience isn't necessarily an understanding of a specific set of facts. So I would be really hesitant to identify anything said in a sacrament meeting as a 'lie' - especially the phrase, "I know the Church is true".
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Moksha »

Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Sat Sep 17, 2022 3:37 pm
Frequently Donald Trump lies, because he is saying things he doesn't believe. But regularly he says things that he absolutely believes which are not factually true. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two.
I would love to hear Donald Trump bear an LDS testimony, although I think he would end up talking and heaping praise on himself. "People have said that my knowing is deeper than all others and that nobody bears a testimony truer than mine."
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by Philo Sofee »

Moksha wrote:
Sat Sep 17, 2022 6:04 pm
Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Sat Sep 17, 2022 3:37 pm
Frequently Donald Trump lies, because he is saying things he doesn't believe. But regularly he says things that he absolutely believes which are not factually true. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two.
I would love to hear Donald Trump bear an LDS testimony, although I think he would end up talking and heaping praise on himself. "People have said that my knowing is deeper than all others and that nobody bears a testimony truer than mine."
For the vast majority of Utah Mormons all Trump would have to say is "Believe me, I know the Book of Mormon happened in New York, but it is not true history and the nations it describes are fictitious" and they would all fight over each other to see who believed him more, all because he... well, said so. The Mormon Prophet just has to be jealous of Trump's power of just saying something and 78,000,000 would kill if anyone else disagreed.
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

Post by IHAQ »

The key question remains - what would it take for the Church to not be true? Defining what “true” specifically means in the context of the statement “I know the Church is true” is the starting point. But good luck getting a straight answer. I’ve tried asking that question of testimony-bearing members on numerous occasions. I’ve never had an answer. They simply don’t know. It’s a meaningless phrase unless someone, anyone, can articulate what “true” means, and explain what it would take for the Church not to be “true” as they have defined it.

Dr Moore is, I suspect, on the money with his suggestion that it’s simply a way of quelling doubts and is purely self serving.
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Re: Why I Say I Know the LDS Church Is True

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