I submit that human beings - Mormon and non-Mormon - are socially, psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually such, that we very often don't want the truth at all. After all, truth can be the source of very great pain; and widespread recognition of this fact is why we have common phrases like "don't shoot the messenger", "he's in denial", "he can't see the truth even though it's staring him in the face", "the truth hurts", and "that hit too close to home".
This is all very true, but the Restored Gospel exists precisely to bring its adherents to a point at which this genuine human failing can be attenuated and finally purged completely. That is the purpose of the Gospel.
For if we are devout Mormons, say, we wind up with only two possible explanations for why only the tiniest fraction of those exposed to Joseph Smith's stories ever accept them as true (or continue to accept them for any length of time): cognitive defectiveness, or character defectiveness (that is, either people are too dumb to understand "the gospel", or they are too (insert perjorative here: "proud", "lazy", "desirous of worldly fame", "set in their ways", etc.)
While I know of no teaching in the Church claiming that anyone save the mentally retarded, are too "dumb" to understand the basic truths of the Gospel, your second point is well represented in the parabolic teaching of the sower.
And the "character defectiveness" explanation boils down to: "they just didn't want the truth". So devout Mormons are committed to the belief that the overwhelming majority of human beings do not want the truth (taking as a global population sample the vast percentage of people who decline to accept Joseph Smith's "true" stories once exposed to them, and the growing membership defection rates).
1. The overwhelming majority of human beings presently living have still yet to hear the Gospel preached, and many who have heard of the Church have still yet to hear the Gospel taught in a systematic, coherent manner.
2. Growing membership defections, to the extent this is a real phenomenon, has been prophesied as is an expected aspect of the "weeding out" phase of the Church in the last dispensation before the return of Jesus Christ. The wheat is being separated from the chaff within the Church and also outside of it. As an argument against the viability of the Church in the modern world, this is really kind of like throwing ping pong balls at a M-1 Abrams.
Billions of human beings, from all cultures, times, places, and ages, who died before the age of accountability, including those stillborn, or who died in infancy, are heirs to the Celestial Kingdom of God, and have heard and will hear the Gospel. I don't know what the retention rates for this class of the Father's children are in the spirit world, but one must assume its better than those within this veil of tears.
But secularists are committed to that same belief, including, I venture, Dr. Shades. For if we believe that we are the result of evolution, then we believe that certain traits and actions conferred survival advantage on our ancestors;
As the philosophical and scientific aspects of evolutionary theory now stand, it is more than possible for a faithful LDS to believe that evolution "produced" us in the sense of the biological/structural origin of our physical bodies and its systems, while rejecting the claim that the process itself was blind, random, unguided and undirected, or that there was no divine template upon which evolution works and upon which it is predicated. For secularists, evolution is a religious belief, comparable to the concepts of creation common to religious believers but lacking teleology. In this scientistic sense, Darwinism confers a patina of scientific justification for value relativism (and hence its overwhelming popularity), while it is only necessary that it convey information on the cause and effect dynamics inherent in the development of organic life. It is quite possible to see the teleology inherent in evolutionary processes and in the biomechanical design of organic systems. Secularists will not see such evidence because science and sceintism are only contingent siblings; they only appear to support and sustain each other under specific philosophical circumstances, and not under others.
and the important thing about actions is that they very often result from beliefs; and the important thing about those beliefs, from an evolutionary perspective, is that beliefs do not need to be true in order to lead to actions conferring survival advantage. Therefore, when by all accounts of evolution, the human brain has evolved such that it tends to attribute less importance to the truth of any particular claim, than to the benefits of believing that claim, so that in most clashes between the two, the most beneficial will win regardless of the truth, secularists simply cannot say that "we all want the truth". Rather, we tend to want what it is most beneficial to believe.
This is the kind of tautological, ex post facto thinking that has given evolution a bad name among many. The brain does not "appear to have evolved" to any specific intellectual or philosophical ends whatever, and there is not a shred of substantive empirical evidence (nor, it should be noted, could there be) that the complexities of our psychological and philosophical lives can be reduced to survival of the fittest cliches. Tal here, like most metaphysical materialists, conflates cause and effect; intermingling what the highly complex human actually does with its capacities and potentialities. The survival value of the human brain is simply in its complexity and sophistication. What it actually does, once this survival has been for all intents and purposes, secured (food, shelter, security from enemies, and a reliable environment within which DNA can be passed on to future generations) in the creating of systems of philosophy, religion, morality, and cosmology; the explanatory superstructure within which human beings take their bearings upon the universe for which evolution has nothing whatsoever to say. This is catastrophic news to the secularist because he needs evolution to explain away the other explanations, as they are always inserting themselves, in an unwanted manner, into his concept of himself as a little god who, atomized, autonomous, and self sufficient, is the "measure of all things". This is a textbook example of the degree to which, once the serious acknowledgment of God as a concept is lost, human beings sink to the deepest abyssal plains of reductionism, materialism, and metaphysical Sociobiology in an attempt to reintroduce teleology--meaning-- into a non-teleological world of their own creation.
Strangely, it never crosses the minds of secularists of this kind that the same concepts they use to deligitimize religion can be turned against their own system. Secularism is a belief system; an interpretational framework, and scientism, the religionification of science, is a philosophy constructed around certain idiosyncratic interpretations of scientific facts and evidence predicated upon other a priori assumptions about the world that guide mental processes and perceptual bias. In other words, religion.
So religion begets religion in an attempt to escape and destroy religion. Religion is not the Opium of the masses, but the attempt to circumvent it. Secularism is a religion that sets itself against traditional theistic religion but can in no way be thought of as "non-religious" simply because of its sociological function as gadfly to traditional forms of belief.
The very structure of scientific methodology tacitly concedes that often humans, at some level, don't want the truth.
There is no necessary reason to belive this is the case. The structure of scientific methodology need only impy that our perceptual limitations and subjective biases preclude, in many cases, accurate and clear interpretation of data--raw observational facts, especially at fine levels of detail. Scientific method is a technique of sequestering and attenuating, as much as possible, those biases and perceptual limitations. There is no implication of overt resistance to "truth" in scientific method (however, the present AGW debate does imply that, as Kuhn predicted, paradigms can have a monumental task shifting to take factual reality into account even when evidence is overwhelming that the standard paradigm is deficient. But this is a special case, is it not? AGW began as an ideological movement and became driven, as such do, by ideological passions. The geology, topography, and atmospheric dynamics of Mars are quite interesting, but have nothing to do with "the terrible questions" directly. Hence, debates regarding gaps in our understanding do not involve the same passions that imbue religion and politics. Science advances our understanding of Mars not because we don't want to know the truth about it, but precisely because we do and we want to be as accurate as we can be in that knowledge. The only people who do not want to know the truth about Mars are certain people who need to believe that there are pyramids and other structures on Mars and for whom geology and meteorology are passe.
Overt bias; bias that is conscious and cultivated, cannot be stopped by scientific method, as the work of individuals such as Margaret Meade, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, Rachel Carson, Michael Mann, etc, and other specific individuals attests.
I could go on forever...but the point is, it is a very dubious (though laudable in its charity), claim that "we all want the truth". Why should most of us, anyway, when "matrixes" can be so pleasing to our vanity, so crucial to our identities and social relationships, so responsive to our most primal emotional needs, so (net) beneficial in terms of survival over eons?
Its true, again, that many of us do not want the truth, but you provide no epistemological frame of reference through which heads or tails can be made of our actual situation. Again, our complex brains and there capabilities are enough to insure survival (and survival, after all, is really noting more that guaranteeing subsistence and the passing on of genetic material). But what we actually concern ourselves with--teleology--has no survival value (of course, a committed Darwinist can concoct a hypothetical set of such, given the a priori assumption that evolution does, indeed, explain everything, but this is a circular exercise in intellectual curve fitting, not science) but does have value once survival is, as far as can be in a biological sphere, ensured. We want to know why we are here, where we came from, and where we are going (that is, "we", not just our organic structures). Neither science or evolutionary theory per se can answer those questions. The attempt to force them to do so is a religious project, not a scientific one.