Coggins7 wrote:
Unfortunately, the attempt to perceive the nature of the Restored Church through a strictly naturalistic filter is doomed to the most inexorable failure. Our perception of the world is, as always, conditioned by the perceptual filters,or perceptual transducers (theoretical, paradigmatic, socio-cultural/intellectual templates) through which we perceive it. Assuming a purely sociological and anthropological origin of the Church will, of course, provide one with precisely that; the evidence will accumulate in that direction.
You do realize, don't you, that the same can be said for the attempt to see the "restored church" through a purely "spiritual" filter. All we have are stimuli and perceptions, and those are filtered through our expectations. You expect spiritual explanations, and you get them.
But Mormons don't attempt to see their Church through a "purely" spiritual filter. That's the rub and that's where secularists are trapped within their own Bolero Shield. We have always understood the Gospel to be adapted to the needs and cultural conditions of the times and places in which it has been revealed. Revelation is understood to come, in most cases, in the language, symbolism, and adapted to the sociological conditions of the peoples to whom it comes.
Therefore, a prophet can receive revelation, mix this with his own language and idiom, couch it in symbolism and archetypes familiar to his cultural milieu, and it can still be revelation, still be Gospel truth, and still be binding on humans to accept. The Gospel exists within and works through culture. No one is denying this. The only culture in which the Gospel cannot work is the culture of Babylon; the culture of Satan that is wholly hostile to it. Babylon, spiritually speaking, exists in all cultures, to one degree or another, but human culture of any sort is not in itself hostile to the Gospel nor need it be thought of as compartmentalized from it.
The testimony, or pure and certain knowledge of the Gospel's truth is a spiritual phenomena that supersedes earthy phenomena its true, but keep in mind that, according to LDS theology, to the Lord, all things are spiritual. This implies that "all things", including all earthly, temporal, mortal phenomena, are also spiritual phenomena, and this implies then that all phenomena are, in essence, spiritual phenomena at different levels of manifestation, such as the teaching that the physical elements of the earth and of which we are created are a form of spirit matter, but of a grosser, denser nature than the higher, more refined matter which composes the bodies of pure spirits or gods.
It would be more appropriate to say that LDS see the world through a spiritual filter and that this filter, since all things are various forms or manifestations of spiritual phenomena, is much more like a 'room with a view" for the Saint then the the well that contains the frogs bound to a strictly naturalistic world view.
I'm going through all this because your criticism above could only lead to epistemological relativism. The secularist sees only secular explanations and the Mormon only spiritual. Ultimately, no knowledge is possible either way. But this dichotomy is a false one. The perceptual filter of the Gospel and the Spirit allows a
panoramic view of the universe (as over against the fundamentally tightly focused, limited, and peripheral views available to human beings through science and scholarly analysis) and this differentiates it substantially from the secular, in which the perceptual filters are severely and finally delimited by their own methodologies, expectations, and assumptions. If the Gospel teaches us anything, it is not to assume anything, but let the Spirit lead and teach us as we are ready to accept light and intelligence. This is why we must become as "little children" symbolically; we must be humble, teachable, and accepting of phenomena we may not have thought possible or never imagined given an otherwise narrow, parochial secularist viewpoint.
But here's the problem. Anthropology and sociology may involve speculation, but they can be quantified and interpreted. The spiritual is by nature completely subjective and unapproachable through reason or science. The same cannot be said for the social sciences.
I don't see how this helps your case. Quantifying the kind of deeply qualitative, fragmentary, and ambiguous data that make up the bulk of what is actually studied in disciplines such as Anthropology and Sociology, while better than free flowing wishful thinking, doesn't necessarily lead us closer to the truth, and indeed, as it has many times in the past, led us away from it. Quantification is also dependent upon the quality of the collection, interpretation, and categorization of data, all of which, in the social sciences we are discussing, are fraught with human subjectivities and bias.
The statement "The spiritual is by nature completely subjective" is a naked assertion. Upon what basis do you make this claim? If I were to see Jesus Christ, and he were to reach out and touch me, that would be a perfectly empirical phenomena by any definition.
Upon what basis need spiritual phenomena be approachable by human science at its present level of development? Upon what basis is this made a requirement for the acceptance of the phemonena claimed to exist by the Gospel?
And you seem to be limiting your perceptual range to the spiritual. What's the difference?
The difference is precisely this, I am not limiting my perceptual range to the spiritual; indeed, I accept science, logic, critical reason, and rational analysis as important human perceptual tools. However, I accept them only as tools in which inhere severe limitations and conditions, beyond which perception is not possible. The spiritual view "takes up the slack" here, so to speak, and allows us to perceive things beyond what is available through those other perceptual tools but never abandons those tools themselves. The Gospel simply places those other perceptual tools within a greater, panoramic frame of reference within a larger perceptual field. It is the secular naturalist,or humanist and only he who is perceptually limited, not the follower of the Gospel (unless he rejects the other kinds or perception, which the Gospel does not teach him to do and for which there is no necessity).
Quote:
In other words, the limit of your intellectual paradigm is the limit of your perception, and the limit of your perception defines the boundary of your mental and cognitive world; the boundary of both critical thought and imagination.
That's a truism. But what you seem to fail to recognize is just how limiting your paradigm is. You simply cannot allow for a naturalistic explanation of Mormonism. In the end, that's no less a handicap than rejecting a priori the existence of the spiritual, which many of us do not do in the first place.
If I reject the naturalistic in favor of the panoramic, and I'm wrong, I lose nothing, as the panoramic view allows me to immerse myself in the naturalistic to my heart's content, so long as the larger view does not become opaque to me in so doing. If, on the other hand, I reject the possibility of the panoramic for the microscopic, I lose the panoramic, and I cannot, from that limited frame of reference, immerse myself in the panoramic as I can the naturalistic and microscopic from the panoramic point of view. I cannot do this because the highly focused, concentration on naturalistic phenomena and empirical verification demanded by science by definition limits my field of vision to precisely and only those things upon which I am focused and the methodology necessary to perceive it in an accurate way.
In other words, the soaring Eagle does not understand everything he sees, but he sees. The frog in the well may see the sides of the well and other objects in the well around him very clearly, but the world outside the well is closed to him utterly.
The Eagle, at least, has the opportunity to fly down and take a closer look at things. The frog won't even try to climb or jump out of the well to take a look at the moon, because he will tell you that the moon doesn't exist. How does he know that? Well, none of the other frogs in the well have seen it, and no frog scientists have ever seen it, There's no empirical evidence that it exists, and as we all know, that which is not approachable by science does not exist. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The Eagle knows better.
