Renlund ties himself in knots during General Conference

[IHAQ]

I'm not sure why this thread has been dragged into discussing paradoxes. It's a very simple matter of Renlund contradicting himself. He claims two mutually exclusive things, which cannot both be true. Either God can only give revelation that is contrary to a commandment to the living Prophet, or God gave Nephi a revelation that was contrary to a commandment - Nephi wasn't the living Prophet at the time he received revelation to kill Laban.

It's as simple and straightforward as that.

I suspect this is a contradiction that Renlund personally struggles to get his head round. His talk makes it clear he has no reasonable explanation for the contradiction and it is therefore probably one of his shelf items. I don't get why he chose to deliver such a mess of a talk if he's allowed to choose his own subject. Maybe the contradiction has been on his mind and he thought delivering the talk was a sought of "a testimony is found in the bearing of it" thing.

Whatever he was thinking, it's a mess of talk, and his public shaming of people who reached out to him is in turn shameful.

[JohnW]

Gadianton: thanks for your post. I enjoy dabbling in philosophy, but you are clearly well versed. I'll have to read up a bit on realism and empiricism. I thought I had a good grasp on those, but after reading your post, I think I still have a ways to go.

PhysicsGuy: Couldn't agree more with your take on quantum mechanics. It has always given me the same uncomfortable feeling I get when I fix something with duct tape. Yes, quantum mechanics has to be a big part of the truth, but I'm pretty sure it will break at some point with at least the same confidence that I'm sure the duct tape will eventually give out.

[JohnW]

Sometimes the mistake turns out to be easy to correct without any disturbingly large changes in my world view. Sometimes, though, I think you have to face hard facts and admit you were wrong about something important.

Definitely! Those moments are not fun at all. We as humans tend to drag out the pain for a long time until we finally (hopefully) admit we were wrong.

[JohnW]

I'm not sure why this thread has been dragged into discussing paradoxes. It's a very simple matter of Renlund contradicting himself. He claims two mutually exclusive things, which cannot both be true. Either God can only give revelation that is contrary to a commandment to the living Prophet, or God gave Nephi a revelation that was contrary to a commandment - Nephi wasn't the living Prophet at the time he received revelation to kill Laban.

It's as simple and straightforward as that.

I suspect this is a contradiction that Renlund personally struggles to get his head round. His talk makes it clear he has no reasonable explanation for the contradiction and it is therefore probably one of his shelf items. I don't get why he chose to deliver such a mess of a talk if he's allowed to choose his own subject. Maybe the contradiction has been on his mind and he thought delivering the talk was a sought of "a testimony is found in the bearing of it" thing.

Whatever he was thinking, it's a mess of talk, and his public shaming of people who reached out to him is in turn shameful.

Sorry. Yes, we got distracted, but boy, what a great distraction. Again, that is one of the main reasons I keep coming back to this board. I know I've found my people when the distractions lead to discussions on philosophy and quantum mechanics.

[Marcus]

I'm not sure why this thread has been dragged into discussing paradoxes. It's a very simple matter of Renlund contradicting himself. He claims two mutually exclusive things, which cannot both be true. Either God can only give revelation that is contrary to a commandment to the living Prophet, or God gave Nephi a revelation that was contrary to a commandment - Nephi wasn't the living Prophet at the time he received revelation to kill Laban.

It's as simple and straightforward as that.

I suspect this is a contradiction that Renlund personally struggles to get his head round. His talk makes it clear he has no reasonable explanation for the contradiction and it is therefore probably one of his shelf items. I don't get why he chose to deliver such a mess of a talk if he's allowed to choose his own subject. Maybe the contradiction has been on his mind and he thought delivering the talk was a sought of "a testimony is found in the bearing of it" thing.

Whatever he was thinking, it's a mess of talk, and his public shaming of people who reached out to him is in turn shameful.

He’s told a couple of these stories before, but for some reason I can’t open general conf transcripts w the OP link, to check whether he linked the nephi story before. Is there another way to access the transcripts?

[drumdude]

I'm not sure why this thread has been dragged into discussing paradoxes. It's a very simple matter of Renlund contradicting himself. He claims two mutually exclusive things, which cannot both be true. Either God can only give revelation that is contrary to a commandment to the living Prophet, or God gave Nephi a revelation that was contrary to a commandment - Nephi wasn't the living Prophet at the time he received revelation to kill Laban.

It's as simple and straightforward as that.

I suspect this is a contradiction that Renlund personally struggles to get his head round. His talk makes it clear he has no reasonable explanation for the contradiction and it is therefore probably one of his shelf items. I don't get why he chose to deliver such a mess of a talk if he's allowed to choose his own subject. Maybe the contradiction has been on his mind and he thought delivering the talk was a sought of "a testimony is found in the bearing of it" thing.

Whatever he was thinking, it's a mess of talk, and his public shaming of people who reached out to him is in turn shameful.

He’s told a couple of these stories before, but for some reason I can’t open general conf transcripts w the opening post link, to check whether he linked the nephi story before. Is there another way to access the transcripts?

When opening the link in the OP with a desktop web browser, you can see all the talks in a list on the left panel.

[Marcus]

He’s told a couple of these stories before, but for some reason I can’t open general conf transcripts w the opening post link, to check whether he linked the nephi story before. Is there another way to access the transcripts?

When opening the link in the OP with a desktop web browser, you can see all the talks in a list on the left panel.

Ok thanks I’ll try that.

[Dr. Shades]

Will you please give me an example?

During this process, I cut a natural gas line. Natural gas lines simply weren't in my calculations. I didn't realize PVC was sometimes used for natural gas lines. As an aside, shortly after this event I hired the job out.

I know this isn't a great example, but right before I cut that gas line, I was sure it was a water line. I was so sure that it took me quite a few seconds for the truth to work past my logical construct.

That isn't an example of something illogical that is true. That's merely an example of you making a mistake.

You asserted that there are some things that are illogical but nevertheless true. Will you please give me an example of something Illogical that is nevertheless true?

[Moksha]

Either God can only give revelation that is contrary to a commandment to the living Prophet, or God gave Nephi a revelation that was contrary to a commandment - Nephi wasn't the living Prophet at the time he received revelation to kill Laban.

What about a third alternative: Joseph found that stories of murder and war caught and held the listener's attention. I could bear my testimony that this ingredient makes the murder mysteries on PBS Masterpiece so enjoyable. Visions of a paradox muddy Joseph's story. It should be heard as a simple, but gruesome tale involving murder, theft, and escape from the Jersusalem police. No need for philosophical analysis. Think more in terms of the Hounds of the Potifers upon the moors or dodging around the corner of Fleet Street onto Falafel Avenue.

[dastardly stem]

The usual definition of truth starts with non-contradiction, and so it would be impossible for a paradox (something that when false is true, and true if false) to be "true".

However, continental philosophy went in a different direction, and doesn't want to grant the law of non-contradiction as base rock reality. There are no explicit discussions about this, but I think it's what it amounts to.

phenomenology and existentialism take physical reality as primal. And back around 2000, I ran into a physicist who had no connection to postmodernism, who argued that a contradiction might be possible in some universe even if we can't imagine it. At the time I didn't appreciate how important it was for a physicist to be saying that, and years later I was never able to find the conversation. (I'm not saying he was right, but that he appreciated the end-game of empiricism without having a phil background).

The fundamental tension is between realism and empiricism. realism = some kind of ultra-math model behind everything. empiricism = what do my instruments record (that physicist I mentioned).

Most people who consider themselves commonsense non-nonsense people waffle back and forth between "logic" and "evidence". The problem with empiricism is relativism of the kind JohnW might be suggesting. However, "logic" isn't any better. Making logic bedrock leads to the explorations of modal logic and essentially, theology, that common-sense people hate. All the new atheists are more in the empiricism, bordering on relativism camp than camp logic. That's why you can never find a decent debate between an atheist today and a Christian (with the exception of Sean Carroll, who to PG's horror accepts many worlds), because atheists today have no interest in logic as a formal discipline. That's where Christian debaters want to begin, because it validates theology at least so as an exploratory means, where atheists want the quick kill, and get right to physical evidence and dismiss the case with prejudice.

I'd think most atheists, even new atheists, as they were called, tend toward fallibilism. Empiricism gets involved because what other tools could we possibly rely on to get somewhere in trying to determine what appears most true? Some may take it too far rhetorically, because after all what really does next to no evidence provide us?

One of my big problems with past discussions and debates on God between atheists and theists is not so much the atheists reliance on empiricism to shut the door, but the odd burden shedding of theists who think if they can make the hypothesis of God sound logical they have somehow made their case. I'd say, like Sean Carroll, for the most part, the logic suffers on theism and fails to even give a viable case for the hypothesis. Even if theists' arguments were sufficiently logical enough to establish the hypothesis they have an enormous hill to climb to prove out the hypothesis with testable and repeatable observation.

I think I can parse these quotations out so it's not so long, but I'll them leave as is because that's easier:

The opposing position–namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable–is called fallibilism. To believers in the justified-true-belief theory of knowledge, this recognition is the occasion for despair or cynicism, because to them it means that knowledge is unattainable. But to those of us for whom creating knowledge means understanding better what is really there, and how it really behaves and why, fallibilism is part of the very means by which this is achieved. Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better. In contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek (and typically, to believe that one has found) ways of securing ideas against change. Moreover, the logic of fallibilism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions or finds problematic. So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth–the beginning of infinity.

The quest for authority led empiricists to downplay and even stigmatize conjecture, the real source of all our theories. For if the senses were the only source of knowledge, then error (or at least avoidable error) could be caused only by adding to, subtracting from or misinterpreting what that source is saying. Thus empiricists came to believe that, in addition to rejecting ancient authority and tradition, scientists should suppress or ignore any new ideas they might have, except those that had been properly ‘derived’ from experience. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes put it in the short story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’

But that was itself a capital mistake. We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are. Consider the nerve signals reaching our brains from our sense organs. Far from providing direct or untainted access to reality, even they themselves are never experienced for what they really are–namely crackles of electrical activity. Nor, for the most part, do we experience them as being where they really are–inside our brains. Instead, we place them in the reality beyond. We do not just see blue: we see a blue sky up there, far away. We do not just feel pain: we experience a headache, or a stomach ache. The brain attaches those interpretations–‘head’, ‘stomach’ and ‘up there’–to events that are in fact within the brain itself. Our sense organs themselves, and all the interpretations that we consciously and unconsciously attach to their outputs, are notoriously fallible–as witness the celestial-sphere theory, as well as every optical illusion and conjuring trick. So we perceive nothing as what it really is. It is all theoretical interpretation: conjecture.

Thus fallibilism alone rather understates the error-prone nature of knowledge-creation. Knowledge-creation is not only subject to error: errors are common, and significant, and always will be, and correcting them will always reveal further and better problems.

And so the maxim that I suggested should be carved in stone, namely ‘The Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting human life’ is actually a special case of a much more general truth, namely that, for people, problems are inevitable. So let us carve that in stone: Problems are inevitable.

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us. So let us carve that in stone too: Problems are Soluble.

That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment. It motivates all traditions of criticism, as well as the principle of seeking good explanations. But it can be interpreted in two almost opposite ways, both of which, confusingly, are known as ‘perfectibility’. One is that humans, or human societies, are capable of attaining a state of supposed perfection–such as the Buddhist or Hindu ‘nirvana’, or various political utopias. The other is that every attainable state can be indefinitely improved. Fallibilism rules out that first position in favour of the second. Neither the human condition in particular nor our explanatory knowledge in general will ever be perfect, nor even approximately perfect. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity.

These two interpretations of human progress and perfectibility have historically inspired two broad branches of the Enlightenment which, though they share attributes such as their rejection of authority, are so different in important respects in that it is most unfortunate that they share the same name. The utopian ‘Enlightenment’ is sometimes called the Continental (European) Enlightenment to distinguish it from the more fallibilist British Enlightenment, which began a little earlier and took a very different course. (See, for instance, the historian Roy Porter’s book Enlightenment.) In my terminology, the Continental Enlightenment understood that problems are soluble but not that they are inevitable, while the British Enlightenment understood both equally. Note that this is a classification of ideas, not of nations or even individual thinkers: not all Enlightenment thinkers belong wholly to one branch or the other; nor were all thinkers of the respective Enlightenments born in the eponymous part of the world. The mathematician and philosopher Nicholas de Condorcet, for instance, was French yet belonged more to what I am calling the ‘British’ Enlightenment, while Karl Popper, the twentieth century’s foremost proponent of the British Enlightenment, was born in Austria.

--Deustch (2011), The Beginning of Infinity, pgs 9-11 and 63-66