For me, the key is honest doubt as opposed to unproductive skepticism. From my own experience, if I had never doubted my faith, I would still believe that Jehovah is the father of Jesus Christ. Learning more about the gospel led me to doubt that aspect of my faith and to question until I achieved what I know see as a more perfect faith in the one I worship. We need to recognize that our faith is based on our human understanding and is therefore imperfect. While we should not be consumed with doubt, failling to recognize its value is the height of hubris.

It seems contradictory to say that doubt can be productive and useful and then to say that it also could have no value. President McKay said that the testimony that has not served an apprenticeship of doubt is not worthy of its name. I think that\’s true.

As far as making one person spiritually superior, I see that as an entirely separate issue. In my view, it is not possible under any human circumstances to assign one person a spiritual value and assign another person a lower spiritual value. But I don\’t tihnk we have to do that to evaluate the value of doubt. In my own experience, doubt has been better than no doubt.

I would say that adopting an a priori disbelief in the historicity of all Old Testament accounts because you have become convinced of the less than full fidelity of just one of them, is indeed adopting an attitude of spiritual doubt. Looking for the moral to the story is a good thing, but in my opinion, the primary message of the Old Testament is void if the accounts are not understood to be predominantly literal, either literal history or prophecies of what someday will indeed have a rather literal fulfilment.

And that message of course, is the the great lengths that the Lord God of Israel will go to both chasten, and ultimately recover his chosen people, and all those others who will are willing to abide the terms of the covenant. Ruth for example.

There are several other related messages, the most interesting of which is the soveriegnty of God, and the way he can turn things upside down, molding persons and nations as clay upon a potter’s wheel, all without unduly constraining our agency, indeed fulfulling both his purposes and our often unrighteous goals at the same time(!), turning good for evil.

The grand theme of every book of Old Testament prophecy is the temporal judgment upon Israel for iniquity, and the latter day restoration and glorification of Israel. Unless one believes those events actually did, and actually will take place, even according to the words which they spake, the writings of those prophets is largely in vain.

Also, does the distinction between doubting and questioning change based on the time period? For example, if I questioned the historical accuracy of the creation story in the late 1800s or early 1900s when scientific inquiry sparked hostility between science and religion, I think a much stronger word than “doubt� would be applied to my faith (or interpreted lack thereof). Whereas today, the consensus seems to be that it doesn’t matter if you interpret the creation story literally as long as you understand the symbolic value of the story.

Secondly, he is not suggesting that we replace secular or natural knowledge with *faith*, he is suggesting we radically augment our natural understanding with *revelation*. Faith is not knowledge. Full stop. Faith in God leads to knowledge, by leading the holders thereof to act accordingly to learn the truth by spiritual experience and personal revelation.

We often see talks about the putative dichotomy between faith and reason. That is a false dichotomy – the real tension is between reason and revelation. It is a first order principle of our “faith” that reason and revelation are perfectly reconcilable.

Now the problem with reason, in the modern sense, is that it is purely analytical – it can demonstrate where problem areas are, but strictly speaking deduction is an information losing or filtering operation, not an information gaining operation, and furthermore must start from axioms that cannot be known be reason alone. In short, reason by itself is impotent. And to resolve this utter impotentence, most worldly philosophies start engaging in semi-rational speculation, the vain imaginations Joseph Smith was talking about.

And where they do not, they resort to radical skepticism – literally the doctrine that anything we do not understand or prove cannot be true. That borders on solipsism, of course.

Now from a religious point of view, if one has even the most rudimentary testimony of the power of God, his justice and mercy, the question is not can anyone prove that revelations are true, but rather can anyone prove that revelations are false, or more mildly speaking what difficulties does the rational analysis of revelation raise, and what avenues are available to us to resolve those difficulties.

That is a fundamental difference in attitude – one is faith seeking understanding, and the other is doubt seeking confirmation. The latter doubt is what the scriptures roundly condemn.

Where in the world did you get that? What I said is that it does not solve the problem of knowledge. The reason it does not solve the problem of knowledge is that it simply exports (lock, stock, and barrell) to a new locality. Instead of asking, “what worldly knowledge is correct?” we have the question, “what inspiration is correct?” And those two questions abound in all the same problems.

The implication of many scriptures (like the one that you quoted by Paul) is that an obedient follower should be willing to eliminate any single worldly piece of knowledge and replace it with something based on faith. The problem is that the scriptures don’t talk about the threshold past which continued changes make the entire endeavor of faith untenable (the people in the documentary Waiting for Nesara are an easy example of folks that have gone too far; I saw it at the Boston Underground Film Festival, and it was quite a good documentary). But there’s got to be such a threshold–there has to be some point at which I can say, “No. That requires me to surrender too much of what I know is true by other means.” This, for example, would be my response to the hypothetical order to kill someone. If that threshold doesn’t exist, then I think that the term fanatic is entirely appropriate. The fact that this threshold does exist makes worldly knowledge key to our religious faith. And all this compare and contrast stuff about seeing things with spiritual eyes vs worldly eyes is just so much Pauline nonsense.

The scriptures do not say that there is no value in secular or natural understanding, prior to revelation. The scriptures say that revelation is necessary for understanding the things of God. The reason why this is the case is the things of God are not natural laws, but divinely authored laws and ordinances.

Attempting to derive an empirical proof of the fulness of the gosepl, is like trying to read someone’s mind without asking them any questions. How many journalists do you know who are capable of that?

In short, if one wants to know the will of God, and his rationale and reasons for what he does, the purposes and intents of his laws and ordinances, the relationship of divine law to natural law, and in what way the latter constrains the former, one must either ask God directly, or work with the records of those who did, gradually resolving paradoxes and apparent contradictions in faith, line upon line, precept upon precept, the same way Joseph Smith himself did.

This is a first order joint intellectual and spiritual exercise. As Joseph Smith said:

… the things of God are of deep import; and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity–thou must commune with God. How much more dignified and noble are the thoughts of God, than the vain imaginations of the human heart!
(TPJS, 137)

Note that the idea here is not to understand natural law alone, but to understand the *thoughts* of God.

By the way, It seems to me that hardly a week goes by without me learning some new aspect of the way the writings of Paul teach some of the most profound and deep doctrines ever recorded. Same goes for Joseph Smith.

Someone who has limited inspiration one cannot go very far without running into serious, and unresolvable problems. Neither Joseph Smith nor Paul were such men. Their writings are an endless source of inspiration to me, far more than any philosopher, particularly any secular philosopher.

A philosopher who denies free will and the world of the spirit is like a one watt light bulb compared to a 100 watt light bulb in any philosopher or theologian who takes free will and the world of the spirit seriously, insofar as moral and social matters are concerned.

I like Joseph Smith’s lumping together of wordly and spiritual knowlege. I wish more of us took our religion that seriously. I have always objected to the human impulse to compartmentalize aspects of our lives in isolation from each other.

“This is my work persona … And this is my Church persona over here…”

I also don’t object to killing when required by God. And I’ve never been in so much as a schoolyard fight. I routinely avoid stepping on ants. However, when the voice is clear, I would hope I’d obey. But I also recognize a LOT of safeguards that have been placed on that possibility by both scripture, revelation, and the revealed Church organization. So I’m hardly someone who is going to go on a bloodletting without a lot of good reasons.

I also think that “fanaticism” is often a label applied by people who don’t take God seriously in order to riducule those who do take Him seriously.

I’ve joked about it elsewhere, but I hope you wouldn’t be willing to kill someone just because you received a revelation. I’ve stated elsewhere (contra Paul) that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son is not to be chalked up to righteousness and obedience.

As far as your take on the kind of stuff that you quote from Paul, I reject that out of hand. Indeed, Joseph Smith does not seem to have made the same division that we do between spiritual and worldly knowledge. In a response to my fictional co-blogger Aaron Cox at Banner of Heaven, I responded quiet clearly about the role that education plays in salvation. I want to be perfectly clear here: I think that anyone who is willing to discard all worldly knowledge to attain the Kingdom of God is a nut (and yes, Paul was a bit of a nut) and belongs in a cult–a real cult, like the nuts in Waiting for Nesara.

I think that DKL was right to argue that doubt must be understood within a critical methodology to have any significance. That being said, I wonder if you are conflating critical thinking and skepticism. Most people would agree that we don’t need to engage in Cartesian skepticism to justify our beliefs. That seems pretty uncontroversial. But saying that exposing beliefs to criticism doesn’t increase their epistemic justification is more controversial. Most people, who doubt, do so because they are confronted with arguments that they find very challenging. They do not just sit back and try to doubt the existence of the external world. Philosophically speaking I think that people who have confronted those arguments have a more mature set of beliefs. If one takes their intellectual engagement seriously, then I think exposing one’s beliefs to criticisms does increase their justification.

Theologically speaking, I think you are right. I see the main problem with the doubter’s “holier-than-thou” belief comes from placing too much value on intellectual activity. As you say, righteous action is considerably more important than justified belief.