Willful Blindness

I am currently reading the book "Willful Blindness" by Margaret Heffernan.  One subject Heffernan discusses is how we tend to cling to our beliefs no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.  This can apply to political views, religious beliefs, or our beliefs about ourselves.  Since this is a blog about religion I want to focus on the religious aspect of this phenomenon.

As I write this, there is a case pending before a British court wherein Thomas S. Monson is being charged with fraud under a new statute (as of 2006) for using false claims to benefit financially.  The false claims include certain Mormon beliefs that can be demonstrated scientifically to be false.  The financial benefit comes from tithing, which in the Mormon church constitutes 10 percent of gross income and is mandatory for baptism and temple attendance.  Monson has been named because he is the sole of a corporation sole that is responsible for collecting and managing the tithing funds of the church.  Thomas Phillips, who has filed this criminal case as a private British citizen, has documented cases where members had to go into debt to pay back tithing in order to qualify to attend their children's wedding in a Mormon temple.  The contrast between this method of extorting money out of its members, and freewill offerings collected in other churches is one of the main reasons that this case has been allowed to get this far.

Phillips has included 7 teachings of Mormonism that can most easily be demonstrated to be false.  Some of the items are the same things that caused me to lose faith in Mormonism.  One belief is that a group of Jews came to America in 600 BC as told in the Book of Mormon.  This can be proven false through archeological, DNA, linguistic, and cultural evidence.  Another belief is that the Book of Abraham is a literal translation of an ancient papyrus by Joseph Smith that contains the writings of Abraham.  This can be demonstrated to be false because this papyrus still exists and has been translated by Egyptologists, who found it to common funeral text.  Other beliefs include mankind descending from a single couple who lived about 6,000 years ago and a world-wide flood about 4,500 years ago that killed all but eight people.  These beliefs are incompatible with the natural history of the world as revealed through geology, biological evolution, and genetics.

My main purpose is not to debate these beliefs or to provide evidence for them.  The evidence is readily available and is overwhelming.  The question that interests me is the subject of Heffernan's book: how intelligent people can maintain beliefs despite overwhelming evidence against them.  According to Heffernan, belief takes much less energy and cognitive resources than skepticism and doubt.  This is not to say that doubters are smarter than believers, but only that they had the time, motivation, and available cognitive resources free from distractions to do the difficult mental work required by skepticism and doubt.  Maintaining belief is the default, easy, comfortable behavior while changing requires great effort.  This contrasts sharply with the idea of many believers that doubters have taken the easy way out.  Not only is doubt more difficult and less comfortable than belief, but doubters have also often paid high social costs as well.

When my ex wife learned of my doubts she accused me of arrogance and reminded me that lots of smart people at BYU knew about these issues and still believed.  Given Heffernan's insights this should not be surprising.  The easier, more comfortable path is maintaining belief.  This is what our minds want to do.  It is much more significant to change.  That so few are willing to change their beliefs speaks to our natural tendency and desire to maintain the status quo, not to the weakness of the evidence that created the doubt.

The reasons some maintain belief and some do not is a frequently discussed topic on support message boards.  An often discussed theory is that somehow skepticism correlates with intelligence.  However, this is an overly simplistic view.  Everyone knows some very smart people who believe all sorts of things that are not backed up by evidence.  It is not raw general intelligence that makes the difference, but applying that intelligence to grappling with the difficult questions and not being afraid of what we might find when we look into the forbidden box.

No Heaven for Me

I have had many conversations with Evangelical Christian friends.  One thing we have discussed is our differing views on heaven and hell.  As I understand it, the Evangelical view is that heaven and hell are very literal, the one being the ultimate joy the other being the worst imaginable pain and torture and that each lasts forever.  The only requirement to enjoy heaven rather than hell is to confess Jesus as your personal savior.  I am not exactly clear on what constitutes a valid confession, but it seems that it would be very important to get it right given the extreme difference of the two possible fates.

Every Evangelical I have spoken with is quite confident that they are "saved," and they speak of it in the past tense even though being saved is presumably something that happens in the future (i.e. going the heaven instead of hell).  This is something I do not understand at all.

Apparently, very few will actually be saved.  The vast majority of humanity is doomed to endure the fires of hell for eternity.  As some have explained it, we all deserve this fate, but God in his mercy chooses to save a few of us if we are lucky enough to know we must confess Jesus and then we actually do it.

I don't see how we all deserve such a horrible fate.  We did not choose to be created and we did not choose to be a part of such a seemingly arbitrary and extreme system of reward and punishment.  Since God basically put most of humanity into a no-win scenario, I think that he is the responsible party.  (I am only speaking about this hypothetical God as described to me, which is not the way I personally view God.)

If this system is true, then I am afraid that there can be no heaven for me.  Here is the problem.  I would never be able to enjoy heaven with the knowledge that so many were suffering in hell, including friends and family members.  How could parents enjoy heaven if even one of their children were not with them?  I would rather go be with them and stand beside them in their suffering, in solidarity and silent protest of such a cruel system.

Don't misunderstand me.  The Evangelicals I have known are very good people.  They are concerned with the fate of humanity, which is why they try so hard to convince others so they can save as many as possible from the fate of hell.  However, beliefs such as this can make people behave irrationally and even cruelly, doing things like flying planes into buildings, because no earthly suffering can compare with hell.  Therefore any means can be justified if it can only save some from this fate.

My own view is that hell is mostly self inflicted.  I would rather focus on alleviating suffering, if I can, here and now in the only world that I have any firsthand knowledge about.  Sometimes I wonder what it says about someone who is attracted to such a cruel and exclusive world view.  It probably plays right into the natural human tendencies to want to be unique, special, and right.

The Devil Incarnate

I am still officially a Mormon, but I do not practice nor do I believe in many of the unique tenets of Mormonism.  A while ago one of my children informed me that his former bishop warned him that I was miserable and that I wanted my children to be miserable like me.  Where did this come from?  How could anyone say this about a parent's desires for his children?  Not only is everything about this bishop's statement untrue, but it reveals something very disturbing about the Mormon mind set.  I do not believe that this man is the only Mormon who would make a statement like this.

I believe that this former bishop was highly influenced by this passage from the Book of Mormon.  "Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself." (2 Nephi 2:27, emphasis mine)

The italicized portion of the above passage is based on the idea that misery loves company.  That phrase appears nowhere else in the Mormon scriptures.  In other words, it only applies to the devil in Mormon scriptures.  The implications are quite clear.  This bishop was equating me with the devil.  His belief is that I am miserable because I have left the fold (an idea Mormons use to scare the faithful into obedience).  He also believes that I want to drag down as many people as I can to my level, even if that means causing suffering to my own children.

Happiness is very subjective, but I certainly perceive that I am happier now than I was when the Mormon church consumed a good portion of my time, money, and freedom.  Furthermore, if I actually was miserable, I would do everything I could to help my children avoid making the same mistakes I have made.  I would not wish my own suffering upon them, but I would only wish their health and happiness.  Normal parents are strongly influenced by their genetic makeup to sacrifice for their children's welfare, and I am no different.

I might find it alarming that someone with such a responsible position in the Mormon community actually believes this except for the fact that I thought this way too not that long ago.  Even more disturbing is that this bishop actually thought he was doing good by informing my son that his dad only wants him to be miserable.  Maybe Mormon leaders have not led their followers to an isolated island and given them cyanide-laced Kool-aid, but this tendency to demonize those who question or leave strikes me as rather cult like.  This bishop is not just some hayseed ignoramus.  He holds a PhD., he is the CEO of a large business, and he is well respected in his community.

Yes, most Mormons are nice people.  I believe that many of them are very good people, but they are the victims of in-bred thinking can be so far afield from reality as to be quite scary and even, at times, emotionally abusive.  Most Mormons have enough sense not to reveal everything they think to the uninitiated.  They are very good at putting up a front that is palatable to the general public.  This is all the more reason to beware of some of the underlying philosophies that they only share among themselves.

Families can be Forever

One of the biggest selling points of the Mormon religion is their belief that families can be forever.  This has been a frequent theme of their many ad campaigns and is featured in their proselytizing approach.  A closer examination of Mormon belief reveals a surprising twist where the deeper implied meaning of this slogan is far different from the surface meaning.

Nearly every religion that believes in an afterlife believes that social relationships will continue in the next life.  This includes relationships with family members.  When Mormons say that families are forever, they are not offering anything that other religious people do not already believe.  What they are really saying is that only Mormon families will be together forever.  According to Mormon doctrine, you have to be married in a Mormon temple to have your family with you forever.  In other words, the Mormon slogan actually declares that the vast majority of families will not be together forever.

Forever families can only be created in Mormon temples sealed by the Mormon priesthood, and this comes at a high cost.  You must first become a Mormon if you are not already one.  Then you must pass a temple recommend interview in order to qualify to enter the temple.  Among other things, this requires that you give 10 percent of your gross income (before taxes) to the Mormon church.  Depending on your tax bracket and paycheck deductions, this can in practice be as much as 40 percent of your take-home pay.

This is not all you will be expected to donate.  Once a month Mormons refrain from eating for 24 hours and donate the money they saved to the church.  In actual practice, church leaders counsel members to be generous and donate many times the actual cost of the food not eaten.  I actually think that this is a great idea because this money can be used at the discretion of the local bishop to help the needy in his own congregation and only the excess is sent to church headquarters, but the members are already giving 10 percent of their income, which goes directly to the central, corporate church.

Other requirements for entering a Mormon temple to make your family last forever include refraining from consumption of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and tea.  Refraining from smoking tobacco is a good idea for a health conscious individual, and excessive alcohol consumption can have both health and social consequences.  However, moderate and responsible consumption of alcohol, coffee and tea have known health benefits.  The proscription of these items seems like a completely arbitrary obedience test rather than something that actually benefits anyone at all.

The financial costs and the following of arbitrary rules are only the beginning.  The Mormon church also requires a significant time investment.  Mormons attend three hours of church on Sunday with additional meetings occurring during the week that vary depending on a member's age, gender, and role.  Each member has one or more jobs, which they refer to as callings.  These are not voluntary.  Members are appointed to these callings and are expected to never refuse or resign from them.  A conscientious Mormon can easily spend 20 hour per week on church related activities and even more for those in leadership positions.  The church does not pay local leaders so all this time is in addition to their regular careers.  Ironically, meeting all the requirements of having your family forever means that you will have very little time for them now.

Even after meeting all the requirements to go to the temple and being sealed by the authority of the Mormon priesthood, there is still no guarantee that your family will be forever.  My "eternal marriage" lasted 19 years, and then it ended, against my wishes at the time.  Here is concrete evidence that, despite promises, some Mormon marriages fall quite short of the forever promise.  This is true for many Mormon marriages.  The divorce rate among Mormons is just as high as in the general population.  Mormons point to a divorce rate among Mormons married in the temple as low as 6 percent, but this article explains why this claim is very misleading.  The discrepancy is likely because not all divorced Mormon couples bother to have their temple sealing cancelled.

My divorce was supported and even encouraged by the local bishop.  This was not because there was any abuse or neglect of any kind, or because I no longer wanted to attend church.  I continued to attend church, support my family, and was kind and loving toward them.  It was simply because I did not believe that the Book of Mormon represents the record of an actual, historical people who lived in ancient America, a belief that I kept private until my ex insisted that I tell the bishop.  The evidence against this Mormon claim is so overwhelming that even the main offshoot of the Mormon Church, the Community of Christ, no longer requires its members to believe it.  My family was broken up because of a private belief of mine that is overwhelmingly supported by evidence.  See this blog for more details.

The Mormon proclamation that families can be forever is one of the many items that John Larsen, the creator of the Mormon Expression podcast, was referring to when he said, "The Mormon church takes away something you already have and then sells it back to you."  The Mormon church sells it back at a very high cost and then snatches it away if you get out of line.  The real Mormon belief is that very few families will get to be together forever because they will not do things just right.  This is very much a case where "Caveat Emptor" applies.  In the words of Paul Harvey, "Now you know the rest of the story."

I Still Remember What It's Like

Nearly every teenager feels misunderstood at times.  As parents, we sometimes like to point out that we have been teenagers once too, so we understand more than they think we do.  On the other hand, they have not yet been parents.  Consequently, our world view includes a memory of something like theirs, but transcends it because of all our subsequent experiences.

Similarly, I was once a sincere believer that Mormonism is the one and only religion that has the entire truth and the sole authority to perform ordinances that are acceptable to God.  I no longer hold those views, but I still remember what it was like to be a sincere believer.  I also remember nearly everything I was taught as a Mormon.  I am still learning about Mormonism from my new perspective.  I do not believe that my current views have anything at all to do with misunderstanding Mormonism.

Once, when I was participating in a father-son camp-out with my sons, the bishopric held a trivia contest with prizes.  My sons knew about my disbelief, but no one else at the camp-out knew except the bishop.  The contest asked questions about Mormon history, doctrine, and scriptures.  I was the only one at the camp-out who could answer every question correctly.  My sons and I won a couple of prizes for questions no one else could answer, and then we let others answer and win some of the other prizes.  It came somewhat as a surprise to my sons that I was a non-believer, and yet I knew the answers better than all of the believers present.

Before we met, my wife was visited by a well-meaning member of her stake presidency, a meeting that her son set up just before he left on his mission.  The stake presidency member outlined the Mormon plan of salvation, a lesson more appropriate for a child or an investigator than a life-long, well-informed member.  He labored under the misconception that anyone who disbelieves must not understand.  My wife also had an experience similar to my camp-out experience with a trivia contest at a ward Christmas party.  She answered every question correctly, or at least whispered the answer to her daughter.  Her daughter finally asked her, "Mom, how do you know all this."  She replied, "I left the church.  I did not turn stupid."

Believing Mormons can sometimes be by puzzled by how someone who once believed can later come to disbelieve.  Common beliefs include that the person wanted to sin without accountability or that they were offended.  A perusal of exit stories from sites such as exmormon.org and this research spearheaded by Mormon Stories founder John Dehlin reveals that this is seldom the case.  A typical active Mormon might be aware that there are attacks against the church on the internet, but they may not know much about the specific criticisms, nor do they know that the basic facts are not in dispute.  Apologists acknowledge the basic accuracy of most of the points that critics make.  What they argue is not that the criticisms are untrue, but that they do not matter.

A good example of this is the Book of Abraham.  Apologists acknowledge that the papyrus was discovered in the 60s, and that the actual translation has nothing to do with the Book of Abraham.  What they will argue is that these facts do not matter because maybe Joseph Smith received the text by revelation, or maybe we have the wrong papyrus (even though a careful examination of the facsimiles indicates that we do have the right one).  Another example is DNA and the Book of Mormon.  There is no dispute that DNA analysis of Native Americans does not support the Book of Mormon story of a 600 BC migration from Jerusalem to America.  Apologists instead argue that these facts do not matter because maybe the Lehite group was so small that their DNA was overwhelmed by that of other people who were already here.

It is not my intent in this post to argue these points.  They have been argued extensively elsewhere.  My point here is that there are legitimate reasons for someone to reject LDS claims that have to do with examining the available evidence rather than having anything to do with sin, being offended, or ignorance of Mormon teachings.

When I expressed my doubts to my ex-wife, her response was "who are you to think that you are smarter than the smart people at BYU who know about these issues and still believe?"  She said this without knowing that the basics facts are not in dispute, but only their interpretation.  She herself denies the basic facts that the apologists acknowledge, considering them "anti-Mormon lies."  In other words, if she were more informed, she would have discovered that she disagrees with those "smart people" who she believes have all the answers.  This phenomenon has been labeled "Internet vs. Chapel Mormons" and is described here and many other places.

When I expressed my doubts to my former bishop, he suggested that I read the Book of Mormon and pray.  I told him that I have been doing that for years, but it does not provide answers to the evidence that disputes the church's claims.  I told him that I have read the Book of Mormon over 30 times, but I would try once more to see if the next time might make the difference.  It didn't.

The issues I have been discussing here are issues of belief, not issues of active participation.  Many people no longer believe, but choose to continue participation for various reasons.  Some are open about their disbelief, and some keep it a secret.  In my case, I continued to participate for more than 6 years.  For 5 years, no one knew about my disbelief.  My reasons for leaving have less to do with my doubts than with how some people responded to my doubts, but that is a subject for another post.

I remember very well what it was like to be a believer.  I can still talk the talk if I choose.  I can empathize with believers.  I don't think they are stupid, and I don't think they are bad people.  That part of me is still there.  I have friends and family still in the church.  If it makes their lives better, I am happy for that.  It just does not work for me any more.

Who is the Audience?

Mormons are one of the most active proselytizing of religions.  From the beginning, the Mormon message has been aimed at other Christians rather than non-Christians.  The same is true for most of the apologetics.  Mormons seem content to leave general Christian apologetics to other Christians.  Consequently, Mormon apologists are generally poorly equipped to handle challenges coming from a secular, agnostic, atheist, or non-Christian religious perspective.  The missionary discussions also suffer from this weakness, being presented with the assumption that potential investigators already accept Christ and the Bible.

The first missionary discussions I became familiar with in the early 80s were commonly referred to as the rainbow discussions.  It is difficult to find much information online about the specifics of past missionary approaches so most of this information is from my own memory of my experiences, although this article from Sunstone Magazine is helpful.  The rainbow discussion where so named because the printed discussions were kept in a binder with each discussion on paper of its own pastel color.  These discussions contained extensive text that was expected to be memorized and delivered word-for-word.

In 1981 when I was in high school, one of my friends listened to the first few missionary discussions with me sitting in.  These were from the rainbow discussions.  I remember that the first few discussions introduced Joseph Smith right away and told the story of the First Vision, Moroni's visit, and the Book of Mormon.  Material about Jesus was sprinkled in here and there and mostly focused on the unique aspects of Mormon theology where it differs from mainstream Christian beliefs.  Missionaries reasoned from the Bible, the assumption being that the investigator already accepted the Bible.  The focus was on trying to convince the investigator that the unique aspects of Mormon belief are at least in harmony with the Bible, even if they cannot all be completely derived from the Bible.

What happened when the missionaries encountered someone who did not already believe in the Bible?  Missionaries were poorly equipped to handle this case.  In contrast, some of the Catholic apologetic books I have read spend much of their effort on arguments for the existence of God, at least arguing that belief in God is reasonable.  Regardless of whether these arguments would convince a skeptic, it is significant that at least the attempt is made, which is hardly ever the case in the Mormon missionary approach and Mormon apologetics.

The missionary discussions changed sometime before I served a mission from 1983-85.  The discussions I learned did not contain nearly so much material to memorize, and we were more free to put some of it into our own words.  The order also changed.  The first discussion introduced the Mormon take on Jesus and the second introduced the Mormon plan of salvation.  The Joseph Smith story was not introduced until the third discussion.  This change was primarily made to answer the criticism that Mormons are not Christian rather than to introduce Christ to non-Christians.  Whether Mormons should be classified under the Christian umbrella is the subject for another post.  The main point here is that the Mormon approach was still generally inadequate and ineffective among non-Christians.

I served a mission in North Carolina where the majority of people we met were Bible believers.  The new approach actually worked rather well, as long as we used our own modified version of the first discussion that was unique to our mission.  The version we learned in the MTC was way too basic so we adapted it for our primary audience.  Postponing a discussion of Joseph Smith gave the impression that we could have been just another Christian church.  Then, once we had their trust, we would spring the Joseph Smith story on them, hoping that we had dispelled some of their previous prejudice against Mormons with the first two discussions.  Still, the approach fell flat with the occasional Jew, Muslim, or secularist we happened to encounter.  If we knew a household was not Christian, we would generally avoid it.  We had nothing to even get a conversation started.

The first anti-Mormon literature I encountered around this time was The God Makers by Ed Decker.  Ed Decker left the Mormon church to become an Evangelical Christian.  We were advised not to read books like this, but I bought the book and read most of it on my mission anyway.  While I found some of its contents disturbing as a sincere believer in Mormonism, it did not really effect my belief.  Its sensational, dark tone did not resemble my experience with the Mormon church. I threw away the book before I finished it.  When I returned from my mission, my institute director (teacher of off-campus college-level Mormon religion classes) gave me a book called, The Truth About the God Makers by Gilbert W. Scharffs, which is a refutation of Ed Decker's book.  I found Scharffs answers quite satisfactory at the time.

Another book I read on my mission and then re-read when I got home was The Day of Defense, by A. Melvin McDonald.  This book presents a mock trial where ministers of various Christian denominations accuse the Mormon missionaries of teaching false doctrines.  The judge is a Jewish Rabi.  The combatants make a series of arguments from the Bible with the missionaries getting the better of the ministers.  The judge rules in favor of the missionaries who defend themselves convincingly while the prosecution cannot even agree among themselves.  McDonald drew some of the material for this book from actual live debates in which he participated.

These two examples of '80s apologetic literature illustrate a Biblical-based approach to apologetics.  Just as in the missionary discussions, the focus is on demonstrating that Mormon beliefs are in harmony with the Bible.  These are defenses aimed at other Christians who accept the Bible.  One of the major flaws of this approach is that it uses a technique called proof-texting, where passages are taken out of context possibly obscuring the original intent of the author.  However, the main weakness is that this approach has no meaning at all to someone who approaches the Bible from a historical-critical point of view recognizing that each author has his own agenda and that the various Biblical authors do not speak with a uniform voice.

Recently, the Mormon church has begun to lose a significant number of members, not to other churches, but to a rational, skeptical, scientific world view.  Church apologetics are struggling to catch up with this trend.  A book that was influential for me and for many other skeptical-minded former Mormons is Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan.  Sagan debunks many paranormal and supernatural claims including UFOs, alien abductions, psychics, and religion.  The apologetic arm of the church is aware of this trend as evidenced by this review of Sagan's book on the Maxwell Institute website, published in 2005 by Allen R. Buskirk.

Given that the Buskirk review was not published until 10 years after Demon Haunted World, it is clear that the church did not view it as a threat at the time.  It was only after increasing numbers of disaffected Mormons mentioned the book that the Maxwell Institute decided that they better do some damage control.  The gist of the review is that Buskirk agrees with Sagan regarding pseudoscience, but does not agree that the same critical thinking can be applied to religion.  Buskirk is missing the whole point of the book.  It is less about the specific cases than about critical, skeptical thinking in general.  Sagan is trying to give people tools to think for themselves and recognize that confirmation bias, misunderstanding of probability, and the human propensity to find patterns in randomness often lead us to believe things that are not true.

The church is probably fighting a losing battle against rational skeptics, but they could probably do better among religious non-Christians.  When a new area is opened for missionary work, other denominations typically outperform Mormons in gaining converts to Christianity among non-Christians.  This blog post by a believing Mormon recognizes this need and provides some suggestions.  The problem is that grass roots efforts are very difficult in Mormonism because information typically flows only one direction: from the top down.

Emotional Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and how we know things.  A central belief of Mormonism is that we can know things through our emotions, which I have labeled "Emotional Epistemology," a phrase I first heard when John Larsen used it in a podcast on the Mormon Expression website.  While believing Mormons will express this in different words, I believe that the meaning is essentially the same.

In this post, I will argue that emotion-based knowledge is unreliable.  In other words, it is not really knowledge at all.  According to Epistemology, a proposition must actually be true for it to count as knowledge.  Just saying we know something does not make it knowledge.  If it turns out to be false, it was never knowledge.  Strength of conviction makes no difference.  It is the nature of our emotions to be convincing so we pay attention and perform a behavior that may be essential to our survival.  While emotions are useful, and even essential, they are not fool proof.  They are easily subject to manipulation if we do not understand where they come from and how they function.

In Mormon culture, it is common for a believer to say that they know some aspect of the faith to be true.  Once a month an entire worship service is devoted to allowing regular members to stand up in front of the congregation and express what they "know" to be true, a practice Mormons refer to as "bearing testimony."  Describing how they have acquired this knowledge, Mormons will typically say the "Spirit" or "Holy Ghost" revealed it to them.  This revelation comes through feelings, as summed up in this passage from the Doctrine and Covenants 9:8-9

...if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.  But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings...

Many believing Mormons will take issue with the statement that their beliefs, or what they would call knowledge, are based on emotions.  They claim to be able to distinguish between the Spirit and emotions.  However, I believe this distinction is merely an acknowledgement that we experience a wide array of emotions.  This website lists 147 different words that describe the complex and subtle range of emotions humans are capable of distinguishing.  Just because the feeling on which Mormons base their testimony may be different from the feeling they get when their favorite team wins the championship, this does not make it something different from an emotion, but merely a different emotion.

Emotions are essential to the survival of the human species or we would likely not have them.  Emotions encourage us to act without thinking.  Our subconscious mind has been refined through millions of years of evolution to act in ways that promote our personal survival and the survival of those closely related to us, or at least those who we perceive to be closely related.  Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, explains that our instinctive survival behavior is best understood as our genes trying to preserve copies of themselves, whether they exist in us or in those closely related to us.  The primary aim of the book is explain how altruism arises at the organism level when evolution seems to imply selfishness.  Dawkins proposal is that the selfishness occurs at the level of the gene, which can lead to altruism, or self-sacrifice for the benefit of another, at the organism level.

Evolutionary change also led to our conscious intelligence.  Our subconscious communicates to us through emotion so we can act quickly without thinking when speed is of the essence.  Our conscious mind is more deliberate.  It may ultimately lead to a more accurate view of the world, but it takes more time.  These two aspects of human thought are complimentary.  The combination has proved effective in the past or it would have been weeded out through natural selection.

This is an oversimplification.  Human intelligence and emotion are complex, subtle, and not completely understood.  What is understood is far too extensive for me to write about in detail here.  The essential point is that emotion, by its nature, is meant to convince us to act, and to do it quickly.  Without emotion, we would find it difficult to act at all.  People who have a disorder causing them to feel no emotion do not act like Spock on Star Trek.  They have difficulty making even the simplest of decisions, such as what to eat for dinner or which pair of shoes to wear.

As a fully believing and active Mormon I once made a comment on this subject in an Elder's Quorum meeting, which involves only adult men.  I said that knowing things through the Spirit is not exactly the same as knowing things from experience.  For example, I know that Denver, Colorado exists because I have been there many times.  I have driven through it and have walked around in it.  If I say I know I continue to live after I die, that is something different.  I have not yet experienced it.  When we say we "know" it we really means that we believe it or are convinced of it.  One of the members of the class took offense at my comment.  He told me I was wrong and that he really did "know" those things.  His reaction illustrates how deeply ingrained this idea is in the Mormon psyche.

In Episode 77 of the Mormon Expression podcast, one of the panelist described an experience very similar to the one I had in Elder's Quorum.  During a testimony meeting, his wife stood up and said, "Why do we say we know?  We don't know.  Nobody knows."  This led to a flood of fervent testimonies with people saying that they really do know.  One of the other panelists pointed out that this was much like the case of Shakespeare's woman protesting too much.  We do not usually talk this way about things we really know, such as our work expertise.  They fervency of these threatened testimonies seemed to be as much to convince the speaker as anyone else.  I wrote in more detail about this phenomenon in this blog post on the Power of Conviction

It is convenient that many of the elements of a Mormon testimony are not testable by other means.  However, some of them are.  One important belief is that the Book of Mormon is the word of God.  Essential to this point is that the Book of Mormon is genuine ancient American historical document.  This is a question that can be examined scientifically.  I have an entire blog devoted to this question here.  I am still adding entries as I continue to examine various aspects of this claim.  The sum of my personal investigations, and those of many others, is that the Book of Mormon is a 19th Century creation, not a translation of an ancient document.  This is one of many examples that discredits the idea that we can definitely know anything through our feelings.  Many of my own personal experiences have convinced me that feelings are not reliable truth detectors.  If emotions prove unreliable when we can verify by other means, I have little confidence in their ability to reveal the unknowable.

Bearing testimony in the Mormon style seems to be an attempt to preempt all rational arguments.  Once a Mormon bears his testimony, the argument is over.  Evidence-based examination is rendered meaningless in the face of a testimony. How do you argue with someone's strong conviction?  That is why an important starting point, for me, is to question the very idea that feelings can reveal knowledge.  Natural selection did not favor certain emotions because they reveal truth, but because they promote survival.  Truth may be an occasional byproduct, but not a guaranteed one.  Utility is more important than truth from an evolutionary stand point.

I am confident that these arguments will not persuade most people who hold strong convictions.  Perhaps some, however, will at least consider the idea that these feelings may not be the fool-proof truth detectors we sometimes take them to be.  After all, believers in many religions base their convictions mostly on feelings, even though their beliefs differ one from another.  They cannot all be right.