Like you are apparently I’m rather dubious of practices even many Mormons do like the throw open a scripture and think it’s from God. That’s not to say a certain random element can’t be affected by the spirit. I remember on my mission doing a fast and prayer to find someone to teach. It was in an area where they actually had good teaching records kept. It was a collection of 3×5 cards with each ‘successful’ contact written with address. We prayed that we’d find someone to teach, opened it up, selected a card we felt was right (mostly at random, not by reading through them) and went to that address and did a cold call. We ended up having a successful teaching experience and I believe the person got baptized. Not clear evidence obviously for a variety of reasons (the person had already had some discussions, so clearly had an element of interest, the teaching environment could have been aided rather than the address selection, etc.) Still I wouldn’t totally discount ‘randomness’ as a way to help with answers. After all the scriptures give many examples of drawing lots as a way of discerning divine messages.

To your final point, I don’t think gift of discernment is a dodge. Rather he suggests there are counterfeits and it’s only by figuring out something trustworthy that one can judge. Admittedly he doesn’t go into how you do that, but I do think that’s addressed elsewhere.

My posts on epistemology is going to address that. I was hoping to post those all last month. Unfortunately work got rather pressing after I posted the first one. I’ve not had time to post much since. I’ll try and do that this week.

I’ve also had a few false and misleading revelations. They have a very different flavor, and never a feeling of peace, or usually even a feeling that it was from God. I decided that the communications were from God based off of my (faulty) reasoning, and not because the communications actually felt like they were (or even could be) coming from God.

The “but how do you know if it was REEELY from God” argument is nothing new. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to the question; every man must gain knowledge of it by experience for himself. Study and by faith.

Though, if someone comes along with a false revelation, there’s certainly plenty enough signs that THOSE can be known by.

“One should also note Joseph Smith’s careful distinction between what we’d call an emotional state and information conveyed by the spirit.”

Joseph Smith makes no mention of what we would call an “emotional state.” He clearly says that false spirits and the devil are behind other religious claims and claims by his followers that he thinks don’t square with things he has claimed to be revelation or with the teachings in the Bible. He also doesn’t outline what information is conveyed by the spirit (aka Holy Ghost). All he says is that you can’t know anything about god unless it be through the real Holy Ghost. JS gives no details in this talk about what is to be known through the spirit or about how one should distinguish whether some perceived revelation is from the Holy Ghost or a false spirit. It is basically a long rant about how people saying and doing things that he doesn’t think are doctrinal are inspired by false spirits. He doesn’t address any of the questions I posed.

“So I don’t think the points you raise are particularly new. Indeed Joseph raises many of them.”

Maybe they’re not new, but I most certainly can’t any straight answers to them from believers. Joseph Smith may pose some questions that are similar to the ones that I posed, but gives no substantive answers. Gift of discernment? He’s not really saying anything substantive or informative there, now is he. He only begs the question of what having the “discerning of spirits” is and how one acquires it. The talk amounts to: the other guys are wrong because they are misled by false spirits and I am right because I say so in an authoritative sounding voice and because I can quote some passages of the Bible that seem to confirm what I say.

The key part though is that he thinks counterfeits of the spirit are common among the church. That’s an important point. His ultimate argument is that it’s only by the gift of discernment one can ultimately resolve the issues. Again, an important if troubling point. He’s pretty forthright about this circularity problem.

“…if it requires the Spirit of God to know the things of God; and the spirit of the devil can only be unmasked through that medium, then it follows as a natural consequence that unless some person or persons have a communication, or revelation from God, unfolding to them the operation of the spirit, they must eternally remain ignorant of these principles.”

One of his solutions is a known prophet acting as a trump. (That doesn’t resolve everything obviously but at least gives a burden of proof for those raising conflicts)

The questions you later raise really are the same problems Joseph Smith addresses. There’s an inescapable circularity although when we put our purported revelations in tension with other accepted sources (prophets, scriptures, etc.) then that gets a little easier.

Certainly Joseph is assuming his revelations are right and others wrong. Just as we do today. So I don’t think the points you raise are particularly new. Indeed Joseph raises many of them. I don’t think the epistemological questions are unresolvable. But they aren’t resolvable in a simple fashion. Instead we’re lead towards a hermeneutic circle.

Unless claimed spiritual experiences lead them to convert to a non-LDS religion, behave in ways that are against the leaders’ counsel, and challenge widely accepted LDS doctrinal precepts. The LDS church leaders would pretty much prefer that people just fall in line with what they say more or less without question.

What about people who have left the LDS church because they think that the spirit told them to do so? There are many like that. I.e., Christopher Nemelka.

“Likewise those already living by the spirit probably have already figured things out themselves.”

In other words, being a loyal LDS person = living by the spirit. So how do we know that someone is living by the spirit? Because they are a faithful LDS person. What exactly are the independent criteria that one would use to determine whether or not someone is living by the spirit?

Read it more carefully. Joseph Smith’s point is that there many who claim to feel the spirit but are actually being deceived by Satan. Strongly implicit in his argument is the idea that claimed knowledge is coming from the real Holy Spirit if it conforms to what is said in the scriptures and to what Joseph Smith says is true. It can be derived from Joseph Smith’s words here that one should be extremely careful in seeking knowledge through the spirit. The question is begged (both from Joseph Smith’s words and from the study mentioned in the OP and the comments), what is the point of seeking the guidance of the real Holy Spirit (provided it actually exists) if one can supposedly be so easily deceived by the devil, as Joseph Smith was claiming, who is somehow able to mimic these feelings, and if the feeling that is generated is nothing more than something caused by our own biology and not an actual external force? What exactly are the criteria to determine that a particular feeling was actually caused by the Holy Ghost and couldn’t have been caused by the devil or one’s own brain? If anything, it would seem that the study is making it more hard for believers to make that distinction. How are believers to be so sure that particular beliefs are actually true as evidenced by the spirit and that they are not being deceived? Pray and seek more spiritual feelings? See the problem here?

While the Church does at times discuss the dangers in interpreting spiritual experiences, by and large it’s main focus is in just convincing people to try and have them and follow them. This tends to mean the downsides of false positives get overlooked. Yet these can affect people. The cliche is the joke about a BYU student thinking they’ve had a revelation to marry someone. But the problems pop up in all sorts of ways. I suspect everyone has been misled at some time or an other. Yet I also suspect most members have had experiences where they followed through and the consequences strongly suggest a real spiritual communication.

Exactly how to balance care and skepticism with faith so one acts isn’t clear. I rather suspect that were the Church to push the warning part that the very people who need to try and listen to the spirit would be less inclined. Likewise those already living by the spirit probably have already figured things out themselves.

Second, one should always be careful about fMRI studies that have been so popular the last decade (primarily because they’re cheap and easy to do and often guarantee a paper and press response) By and large what they imply about the brain isn’t entirely clear. More significantly fMRI studies often involve small samples (15-20 people is typical) and rarely are studies reproduced (a key aspect of good science). Scientific American had a good discussion of this a few years back. In particular there’s a “correlation not causation” problem due to the way the experiments are conducted.

In any case certain emotional trappings of an experience aren’t the same as the experience itself. One should also note Joseph Smith’s careful distinction between what we’d call an emotional state and information conveyed by the spirit. (Due to what he considered counterfeits by say Pentacostal practices)

I do suspect, though, that many Mormons have a hard time distinguishing between the actual presence of the Spirit and those wonderful feelings they get at times when something connects with them emotionally. I’ve felt strong emotions about all sorts of things, including religious things, and the effect is not the same as the presence of the Spirit, which, at least in my life, is extremely rare. So this study may not have been measuring anything related to the Holy Ghost. It may have been measuring only a person’s emotional response to something they hold dear.

For more on this theme, read the essay by Armand Mauss, “Feelings, Faith, and Folkways: A Person Essay on Mormon Popular Culture.” It’s a chapter in the book Proving Contraries: A Collection of Writings in Honor of Eugene England (Signature Books, 2005). Here is a paragraph from the essay. Mauss uses the now ever-present box of tissues under Mormon pulpits to symbolize the newer feelings-based approach so popular now in LDS teaching and speaking.

It is as though the tissue box symbolizes a more frequent resort to tender feelings at the expense of an earlier greater reliance on intellectual substance in preaching. It symbolizes the triumph of feeling over understanding; of a softer worship style over a harder one; perhaps of an evangelical — or even pentecostal — homiletic over an analytical style; of personalized adaptations of scripture over appreciation of historical context. It represents the triumph of the heart over the head in popular Latter-day Saint religious expression.