Thanks for following your inspiration.

Now I certainly don’t want to devalue traditional more empirical or especially pragmatic ways of knowing. Neither do I want to claim God will always clearly answer our questions about everything. (He certainly doesn’t for me) I do think though that if a prophet is making a controversial claim that our prior way of determining if he is right is via the spirit.

Of course in practice I think things often are a more subtly blending of the empirical and spiritual ways of knowing. Certainly it’s frequently that way in my life.

More significantly I think this is taught in various ways in the Old Testament. That is while I think Hazony raises a great point about the OT he expands it too much. Not just overlooking the competing authorship issue but the very different sorts of assertions in the text.

I suppose I do hear this from time to time, but I’ve always just accounted that to people not being familiar with more nuanced views of faith and knowledge.

Now there may be some things where that’s not true of where we have to take a bit more faith. (It’s for this reason that I’d love to know how Hazony reads Job where God is presented as unknowable in a way perhaps opposed to how Jeremiah presents him)

I’d add that this has long been a part of the Mormon psyche going back at least to LeGrand Richard’s A Marvelous Work and a Wonder where utilitarian arguments are made to justify commands given by revelation. (I should note as an aside that I think if anything Mormons have gone a tad too far in this direction – especially relative to the Word of Wisdom)