NDEs, Mopologetics, and the Resurrection of Christ

[DrStakhanovite]

I guess my question is this: Which direction should this go? Or, if the line of inquiry is bidirectional, how do the Mopologists determine which way it should go? Is it really all just faith-promoting? Science is great when it discovers lines beneath the tropical rainforest canopy in the Amazon, thus suggesting that there might have been cities there roughly when the Book of Mormon allegedly took place. But science applied to the Jaredite barges or to the notion of an afterlife? That's "lazy" and "pointless." Well, why?

Mopologists are a bit like Buridan’s ass.

On one end of the spectrum you have an explicit doctrine of materialism (D&C 131:7) and a doctrine that makes it undeniable that the Heavenly Father and the Son have physical bodies (D&C 130:22). The other end of the spectrum holds the allure of Metaphysics that exist outside the domain of modern scientific investigation.

The fact that the Heavenly Father and the Son actually have physical properties and exist within timespace undeniably makes them subject to the natural sciences. To make matters even worse, another important and basic assumption is that the Heavenly Father and the Son routinely interact with earth and its inhabitants in a systematic and rational fashion. It is a religion where almost every distinctive feature is very amenable to modern scientific scrutiny.

As a Mopologist, what do you do? You can’t retreat to the mansions of philosophy because it inevitably ends in heterodoxy, which then defeats the purpose of being a Mopologist in the first place. You also can’t embrace the methodology of contemporary science because that would require you to produce some kind of speculative model on how the Mormon worldview even works. Such a project that wasn’t immediately falsifiable would have more in common with the literary genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy and lack even the appearance of scholarship, but if you can’t play the role of the formidable and learned scholar then the entire point of being a Mopologist is once again defeated. Hugh Nibely is the paragon to imitate, not Stephenie Meyer.

Daniel and his merry band of commenters can only hope to tread water by paying lip service to the natural sciences while simultaneously insisting that the core of their religion conceptually rests just outside the bleeding edge of scientific advancement. Anything that gives the slightest appearance that it might confirm the Mormon worldview is immediately thrust into the spotlight to be marveled at and anything that gives the slightest appearance of hostility is summarily dismissed as crass scientism.

[DrStakhanovite]

Oh, anticipating your quick draw on 'insular communities', if you can figure out a way for me to post at SeN or MDDB without getting banned immediately, I'll consider it. Do you know why Gemli hasn't been banned yet?

I think it might have been Dr. Scratch himself who pointed this out, but I can't remember. Gemli survives if for no other reason, because he doesn't fall into the trap of reading about Mormonism. His comments are general enough that they don't hit home the same way as they would if he seriously studied the three witnesses, and then got into specific details that are trigger points for the apologists. Ironically, he's welcome there because specifically, he ignores their demands to read about Mormonism.

Gemli’s continued existence on Daniel’s blog fascinates me.

You can tell by the way Daniel and company speak about him that they fundamentally view the guy as some kind of village idiot who needs constant correction, but with each rebuke comes some implicit acknowledgement of his value. Gemli provides the perfect opportunity for Daniel and Midge to flex on someone in real time and the sport of it all gives the proceedings an air of dialectical legitimacy.

The consistent appearance and refutation of Christopher Hitchens’s ‘God Is Not Great’ plays a similar role. Daniel has been taking shots at that book since its release in 2007 because it is the perfect foil for his shtick as a cultured mandarin of BYU’s bureaucratic kingdom. The book itself is a fun piece of polemics written in a readable prose but also lacks substance, leaving it wide open to be easily picked apart by anyone with Daniel’s education. The book’s popularity and the author’s iconoclastic reputation simply make it irresistible to him.

Daniel will, with regularity, question whether an atheistic worldview can give a meaningful account of morality. This is usually preceded by a folksy paragraph from C.S. Lewis followed by a hot take from Daniel consisting of a few sentences that contribute almost nothing to what the audience just read from ol’ Clive. Now Daniel will never actually read a book by a real philosopher giving just such an account; Erik J. Wielenberg’s monograph ‘Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe’ from Cambridge University Press gives a modern Aristotelian account of morality that is expressly atheistic. Despite Wielenberg’s book dealing with atheism, moral philosophy, and Aristotle, (all these things fall squarely within the realm of Daniel’s professional and intellectual interests) Daniel won’t even feign interest in engaging it.

Why? Because Daniel doesn’t see much value in engaging with complex material written by people from the other side who have dedicated years of their life to subjects of inquiry. His brand of apologetics only mentions such works if it can be used to bludgeon someone, reading the other side on matters when it is his side in question. The ironic beauty is that Gemli has more in common with Mormonism than Daniel has in common with any Christian philosopher.

Think about it.

Suppose Gemli were to complain that Moroni 10 doesn’t make sense because the Heavenly Father is so far away from earth that even if our prayers were traveling at the speed of light, we’d be dead long before the prayers even reached Heavenly Father. This would elicit nothing but ridicule from the Sic et Non peanut gallery and Daniel or Midgely might even jump in with the recommendation that Gemli ought to read this Christian philosopher or that one.

Yet I’m not aware of any Christian philosopher living or dead that ever believed that God the Father was a physical bipedal being inhabiting another planet that may be in another galaxy entirely from our own. There is no transcendence to the Mormon concept of Deity, God is not something outside of time, or radically non-human in nature. Within the ontology of orthodox Mormonism, the Heavenly Father appears as a glowing or illuminated ape with a perfected body because that is exactly what he is.

So Gemli’s hypothetical objection to Moroni 10 is entirely consistent with Mormonism and is an absolutely appropriate question to ask. Gemli would agree with Joseph Smith that there is no such thing as immaterial matter and he would also agree that if God did indeed exist, then God probably has some kind of physical manifestation that obeys the laws of nature. Daniel and Gemli are on the same page. Daniel and every other Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosopher or theologian? Not even close.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Dr. stak, as usual, you grace us with wisdom from your dusty confines here at Cassius. To underscore your point I share this exchange on Dan’s wholly unserious vanity blog:

Fred Kratz > DanielPeterson

In my world, I'm trying to figure out how a flesh and bones God can manage a universe some 93 billion light years in diameter, while at the same time judging each and every human? Does the cosmic speed limit not apply?

——————-
moonshine > Fred Kratz

FK, do you think relativity is the final great theory of physics and cosmology that will never be supplanted by future research and theories?

Einstein had less faith in it than you do.

And consider that Latter-Day Saint Christians already believe in a corporeal God who ordered the earth and everything on it and also hears the countless daily prayers of all people, is it such a stretch to imagine that such a Being can manage all of space?

You know all that, but why waste an opportunity to make our views look silly with the right turn of phrase?

You're fundamentally unserious.

It’s interesting to me that in order for the believer to continue their great larp, they must always place their fantasy just outside the reach of scientific inquiry. “Paying lip service” to science seems to be a sort of silly game they play because science is both credible and dogmatically adversarial to the believers’ worlds. It’s akin to a Trumper begrudgingly giving a Democrat kudos on some facet of governance, but quickly reverting to old hostilities due to ideological incompatibility.

- Doc

[Gadianton]

Daniel will, with regularity, question whether an atheistic worldview can give a meaningful account of morality. This is usually preceded by a folksy paragraph from C.S. Lewis followed by a hot take from Daniel consisting of a few sentences that contribute almost nothing to what the audience just read from ol’ Clive. Now Daniel will never actually read a book by a real philosopher

All true. It's all doubling down on fluff to convince himself that he's going to cheat death. Gemli is exactly right, that his greatest fear is death. Did you know it's been nearly 30 years since Disney's Beauty and the Beast first showing? It's very unlikely he will live to double the time since he saw Beauty and the Beast in the theatre for the first time. Hey-- we're all going to go. Myself included. I'll never fully accept death, but I believe my primary angst over it was passed in my early twenties, when I accepted that the Church is false. But this guy is going to keep the hope alive in every sound-byte he posts, and in every upvote he receives from his desperate sycophants. The problem is, his legendary confirmation bias will never leave his fundamental intellect in the rearview mirror. The fear is there and it lurks. Gemli senses it. There is no mission in the spirit awaiting, and there is no eating meat-based food forever. It's silly, and at some level, he has to know that. How about a poem?

It's been thirty years since Beauty and the Beast first showed;
there is no endless meat to eat,
nor a mission call from the spirit world.
for all there is, is death.

Gemli would agree with Joseph Smith that there is no such thing as immaterial matter and he would also agree that if God did indeed exist, then God probably has some kind of physical manifestation that obeys the laws of nature. Daniel and Gemli are on the same page. Daniel and every other Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosopher or theologian? Not even close.

I both agree and disagree with you here. I agree that they are on the same page in a certain way. They represent the extreme poles of their communities. But as you stated earlier, he tends to cite fluff evangelical apologetics that doesn't really fit with Mormonism. Gemli believes in the physical law stuff and the other guy should also, but to me he tries to escape it. Yeah, he does accept it, such as in his "social trinity" stuff, but in any way he can make Mormonism as if it's in line with traditional theism he does so.

[DrStakhanovite]

Dr. stak, as usual, you grace us with wisdom from your dusty confines here at Cassius.

You have a standing invitation to visit Dr.Cam, it would be nice to have a conversation with you when you're not breaking my guard and tapping me with a straight ankle lock during open mat.

It's been thirty years since Beauty and the Beast first showed;
there is no endless meat to eat,
nor a mission call from the spirit world.
for all there is, is death.

You know Dean, this reminds me of an anecdote Freud tells in a paper called ‘Observations on Transference Love’. The paper itself is about the implementation of technique and how compromising one’s practice can damage a patient’s treatment, but Freud tells a quick story about a pastor who visited a dying man that also happened to be an insurance agent. The agent was an unbeliever and the family hoped that the Pastor’s ministrations could finally bring their beloved to Christ. The pastor’s private visit lasted some hours and the family’s hopes correspondingly rose that a change of mind had occurred. When the pastor finally leaves the dying man and rejoins the family, we discover that no one was won over to Christ but the pastor does “go away insured”.

Now obviously Freud was having a bit of fun with some lurid fiction, but I think it fundamentally speaks to Mormon apologetics greatest failure: presenting us with a worldview that we ought to accept that isn’t couched in terms of what you stand to gain in the afterlife. I mean really, couldn’t an accurate description of a Mormon’s sacred covenants with God be rendered if they are identified as life insurance policies? At its very core it is nothing but a transaction that is contingent on an individual’s performance here in this mortal probation, included with penalties if the contract is broken!

[kairos]

“Anything that gives the slightest appearance that it might confirm the Mormon worldview is immediately thrust into the spotlight to be marveled at and anything that gives the slightest appearance of hostility is summarily dismissed as crass scientism. “

That’s the most truthful insight I have read
In months! This kind of truth makes my day!!

k