“I don’t think that reason is “just another” framework, but it isn’t as reliable a shortcut as your remark (almost certainly too short to say what you’re thinking) suggests because it cannot be untied completely from frames.

You’re right, I didn’t make myself clear. I didn’t mean to express absolute conviction that Reason (coupled with Sensible Evidence) is the one and only path to The Truth. I just meant to explain that reason is what some (like me) turn to in a desperate effort to escape confusion, a grasping reach for some modestly reliable handhold—which, I recognize, in the end may or may not “hold.”

And in case the motivation of my recitation of details remembered was also unclear, let me state clearly that I meant to convey warm appreciation and admiration. Here was somebody getting beyond surface orthodoxies to substantial, weighty matters: Principally (in that lecture) conveying the value of the unfairly maligned ideas of postmodernism, but also exemplified in the recognition that the important thing about shoes is comfort, and that there are things more worthy of time and attention than a fastidious adherence to a rather arbitrary requirement of keeping one’s hair above one’s ear.

Thanks for your honest wisdom about what faith entails! I don’t know if Elder Ballard would consider it “pure testimony”; but for me, its refreshing modesty makes it more real, more true to what seem to me to be the limiting realities of our perceptions of the world, than the usual recitations. This true-to-lifeness makes it one of the most compelling “testimonies” I’ve encountered. (Maybe that’s partly because I haven’t read the Christian existentialists you suggest; I’ll work on that.)

But reason isn’t some something that is outside of all frames, so it also isn’t a sure guide. I don’t think that reason is “just another” framework, but it isn’t as reliable a shortcut as your remark (almost certainly too short to say what you’re thinking) suggests because it cannot be untied completely from frames.

Reason is certainly relevant to thinking about religious experience, but it isn’t enough–and you’re right, we don’t have time to try out all of the putative faith systems and weigh them, one against the other. So, to mix metaphors, it seems to me that the only option is to play the hand you are dealt (which includes the possibility of conversion–a possible card).

I’ve been dealt the hand of growing up in a Christian culture in a church-going family, hearing the gospel as a teenager, and having a powerful spiritual experience that gave me a testimony. No rational analysis can show that to be the best or only choice. Nor can it show that the experience I had was more than some odd psychological phenomenon. (Indeed, I think that there are multiple explanations for probably every phenomenon, and that more than one explanation–though not every one–can be true, another long and complicated issue.) But joining the Church was, indeed, my only choice. I’m not denying that in some technical sense I could have refused to accept the revelation I received. But in a very real sense I couldn’t. Having received a testimony, I couldn’t do anything but join the Church. So I live with my history knowing that other histories were possible and that other people have very different histories. I think that is part of what it means to have faith, to trust that what makes sense in a lived live, even if it doesn’t make complete rational sense, is right, that God will accept what I have done, just as I trust that he will accept what my Buddhist friends have done and, if we Mormons are right, offer them the opportunity for more.

Christian, you need to read some existential Christians–Kierkegaard is a good place to start, but there are a lot of them. (As the link to Mark Wrathall on the side bar shows, there are even existential Christian rockers).

As for the olive suit, Birks, and longish hair: Since I’ve not bought a new suit that wasn’t blue in a long time, I probably still wear the suit you are talking about, though the one I’m thinking of is tan rather than olive. When I must wear shoes, I still wear Birks, though I have also found a pair of slip-ons that I like. I still don’t get a haircut as often as I should. My failure to get haircuts isn’t a statement of some kind, just something that is too much trouble and, so, gets continually put off. And, I confess, I am a Democrat. I dont’ think there is any connection between the last of this list and the items that came before, but you never know.

Of course, it could be that socialization is the whole point—discovering who wants to seek out, join, and stay in Zion.

…the problem is only a problem from outside.

I agree, but I worry about a statement by a character in one of Rushdie’s novels: “The only people who see the picture are those who step outside the frame.” Of course, as you taught us in a guest lecture in a Physics Department science/religion seminar a dozen years ago, one is always within some frame. (Don’t know how accurate it is, but my memory is of you wearing an olive suit with Birkenstocks in that lecture, with longer-than-average hair for BYU, and talking about Levinas on his deathbead, in addition to clearing postmodernism of the bad rap it had gotten from some in the administration in those years. I remember thinking, I’ll bet he’s a Democrat! I’m still a Republican, but I did get a pair of Birkenstocks the in the next year or so.)

On my understanding, the one great whole of the gospel is the great whole of a living human being, not the whole of a rational, theoretical, or systematic understanding. What is incommensurable in thought can be commensurable in a lived life, and what is imponderable–too heavy for thought to carry–may be livable and lightly so.

Where my feelings rebel here is that, as in the soap opera title, we have only one life to live, which makes me question the feasibility of this putative mortal probation. There simply isn’t time to “try on” and live in depth the innumerable approches to faith (and lack thereof) to the extent that would be required to experience them in the manner you describe, in order to judge among them. Hence the strategy of searching for rational understandings, as a kind of shortcut enabling one to try and place the smartest bet one can on how to live one’s life.

In this matter the gospel’s requirement of “worthiness” as a prerequisite to knowledge is an important fulcrum. Other sects and traditions have similar requirements; it was also part of the alchemists’ search for knowledge, maybe a more general perspective of the Renaissance, and perhaps nearly universal before the Enlightenment’s rejection of it with the rise of modern science? The thing about such “worthiness” requirements is that they keep one’s “lived life” firmly within one perspective, and create a high opportunity cost for obtaining the kind of experiential knowledge you’ve extolled. The placing of a premium upon it raises red flags as to whether it’s simply a particularly effective mechanism of social control. So I have trouble deciding whether “keeping the commandments”—that oft-invoked requirement for testimony—is the Grand Key of Enlightenment, or an instance of Insidious Shackles of Ignorance.

While I think this does happen, I don’t think it is the end-all of faith. There is a faith that is simply a gift of God, granted through the grace of God in response to obedience and prayer. It is, in some sense, an emotion or spiritual response, rather than an intellectual process. It replaces the emotional doubt. It is not a knowledge, but it is the “assurance of things…not seen”. Thus it is a replacement for evidence, internal or external.

There may be, in principle, no resolution to those kinds of incompatibility. Part of what it means to be a human being is to live in multiple worlds that are incommensurable to thought. On my understanding, the one great whole of the gospel is the great whole of a living human being, not the whole of a rational, theoretical, or systematic understanding. What is incommensurable in thought can be commensurable in a lived life, and what is imponderable–too heavy for thought to carry–may be livable and lightly so. We are, after all, embodied beings and not accidentally so. So, we ought not to expect the unity of our lives to be found only in consciousness, in one aspect of our embodiment, something that annegb, UKAnne, and Mary W have pointed out.

But I may not understand your question. Are you asking how one can distinguish between true revelation and false? How we can distinguish between what the Holy Ghost inspires and what is merely our own invention? In either case, if there were a cut-and-dry rational answer to your question, then the “problem” of the multiplicity of religions and religious experiences would have long ago been solved.