“I think someone who believes in the Bible purely on faith ala the stereotype of Kierkegaard with zero evidence that the miraculous events narrated happened is behaving irrationally”

You’re basically saying that to believe something purely on faith is not rational/reasonable. Therefore do you think that faith does not equal reason? That is what I have been saying all along. I don’t know what the stereotype of Kierkegaard is. I think you gave an unintelligible non-answer here. Part of the game you’re playing.

“Such as why rational evidence needs to be examined by everyone”

Again you distort my words (more game-playing on your part). You really seem to be tripping on your tongue to nail me on this, but you can’t when you correctly represent my words. Back to your unbelievably false equivalence of you having a private “sacred” experience and physicists doing top secret research. Physicists with top secret security clearances test and verify each other’s ideas and experiments, don’t they? Plus, we have every reason to believe that were information about these physicists’ top secret experiments to leak out that they would valued as not only reasonable but highly valuable by physicists across cultures. Let’s say that you were discussing your “sacred” experience with other believers and one of them recorded you secretly and leaked you talking about your “sacred” experience. Do you really think that that would be seen as reasonable and valuable by people across cultures? No.

On your excerpt, reason requires non-culture-specific (in other words objective) verification. There are simply too many claims about the supernatural that we couldn’t possibly consider every last one of them to be reasonable.

As for religious beliefs incompatible with reason, I think someone who believes in the Bible purely on faith ala the stereotype of Kierkegaard with zero evidence that the miraculous events narrated happened is behaving irrationally. (Which is not to say they are being bad of course) It’s easy to come up with these.

For how I distinguish truth claims for me (since we’re talking about the justifications for a particular person for a particular belief) is whether there’s evidence. It’s just that you persist in thinking that doesn’t count.

I am engaging your arguments. You just keep making bad arguments and seem unable to understand why they are bad. Further for many of your key claims you don’t even bother to make an argument. (Such as why rational evidence needs to be examined by everyone – what’s the evidence for that?)

Let me help you. Let’s take the example from one of the links I provided that you didn’t read. It’s useful because it’s something both of us probably disbelieve and doesn’t have the baggage of religion so you can see the logic better without prejudice coming to bear.

Let us say you are walking in the forest one day and bump into a cloaked spaceship.[4] You know something is there because you can feel it with your hand. You walk around it not knowing anything about the technology enabling it. You know you are in good health with no mental problems. Do you know it’s a spaceship? Well I’d say what you might be nearly justified in your leap, it’s probably going a tad too far. Maybe it’s some high tech device from Los Alamos that partially broke down. You just know there’s something there beyond our technology. You may believe it’s a spaceship but thinking through it you’re probably getting ahead of yourself in your interpretation.

You decide to come back with some friends. It’s gone. Neither you nor they see it or feel it. Are you still justified in thinking there was the hidden object? Again I’d say yes. But recognize that this is completely a private experience. You are unable to share the experience even though you can describe it.

The next day you come back. It’s back and this time a door opens up and an obviously non-human humanoid steps out. It talks to you and says his ship broke down and he’s under the Prime Directive not to interfere but that he’s determined some food he’s able to digest and could you get him some. He continues that you aren’t to tell anyone about it. You give him (although you’re not sure it’s a “he”) some food and he eats it. He tells you his warp drive broke down and he should have it fixed soon. You say that’s impossible because as a physicist you know faster than light travel is impossible. Further that if you did it you’d have a working time machine. The alien replies, “fat lot you know and if I were trained as a physicist instead of an underpaid pilot servicing deep space probes I’d prove it to you.” You reply that’s nonsense and the fact he can’t prove it just demonstrates it’s false. He turns to you, rolls his eyes, and says, “then how did I get here?” He then enters the spaceship and flies off, never to be seen again. No one else saw the spaceship since of course it was cloaked.

Now as a physicist who believes in General Relativity I’ll admit I don’t think it’s possible for aliens to visit let alone go faster than the speed of light. Further I don’t believe anyone who claims to have seen an alien. But even so I’d say that for a person who had this experience that they were justified in believing in aliens, spaceships and possibly even faster than light travel. Now since I’ve never had that experience and don’t think it would happen I’m not so justified. Indeed if someone came up to me making those claims I’d not believe them at all without some very good reasons.

You seem to be missing every one of my points and/or simply not validating them and giving back responses only to score points in a sort of game you are playing rather than honestly engage my arguments. I am beginning to find that having a reasoned discussion with you is a near impossibility.

And of course the other move I can easily make is simply to put the burden of argument on you. You are claiming that to be reason evidence must be “shown at great detail for others to verify and test.” What’s your argument for that claim? I think I can easily show counter-examples of why it’s wrong but you’ve provided no reasons that it is true.

2. It is not at all clear that evidence is culture specific unless one adopts a kind of cultural relativism that sees scientific evidence as cultural specific as well. Again what’s your argument for this?

3. Your claim here is just repeating your prior claim. It’s not reason because it’s not “objectively” verifiable with objective meaning public in a strong sense. But again you’ve not demonstrated that is true.

4. I never asserted what you claim here at all. Again (and I was very explicit) I was talking about why your arguments are invalid. Inferring from that claim that somehow I’m arguing that because of that my claims are therefore true is very erroneous reasoning.

2) The verification that Joseph Smith saw God is culture-specific. In LDS culture, feeling the spirit is regarded as evidence of God revealing that Joseph Smith saw God. In order to get someone to accept this as evidence they have to be conditioned. In modern reason, there is no cultural conditioning needed to get people across cultures to accept something as true. And this is what sets reason apart from a good number of religions.

As for appeal to authority, I will qualify what I said before. Mormonism is not reason-based because its main tenets are based on Joseph Smith receiving revelation (not a body of independent researchers conducting reasoned inquiry and rigorously questioning and verifying each other’s evidence and data), which is objectively unverifiable. By contrast, I can obtain the same/similar knowledge as an expert witness in a court by seeking similar study and work experience. However, you can’t achieve prophethood by imitating Joseph Smith, can you? There is a huge difference between authority and expertise. In the world of modern reason, there are no authorities, only experts. In Mormonism, there are authorities with authoritative views that cannot be questioned because you must accept a certain core of beliefs to be true simply on the basis that an authority figure said that they were true. In the world of modern reason, every idea can be subject to question. In Mormonism, massive offense is taken if someone questions key tenets.

3) “Not knowing why individual suicide bombers are acting I can’t speak to whether they’re acting rationally.” You’re really going to leave space open that Muslim suicide bombers are acting rationally??? I think you’ve dug your pit deep enough here that we can quite well bury you.

4) “I’m not saying modern academics lead to Mormon truth claims.” I never said you were. Your invocation of quite well-known academics and philosophers to defend the possibility of Mormon truth claims being true implies that these leading academics and philosophers would be willing to back Mormon truth claims. This idea is insane.

As for why the evidence isn’t readily available, I think it is readily available. But it’s readily available only on a personal not public level.

In any case you’re going down a tangent. The example of secret physics was merely an example that disproved your claim about reason. You said reason was public. I gave an obvious well known counter-example. Thus your argument failed.

2. The verification that Joseph saw God that I know of comes from God or other such figures. As I said I have zero problem admitting that at a certain level many (but not all) of the epistemological grounding rests upon appeals to authority. It’s just that it’s not the kind of appeal to authority you present. Nor is it necessarily an unjustified appeal to authority. (After all in many cases appeals to authority are completely sound)

3. Not knowing why individual suicide bombers are acting I can’t speak to whether they’re acting rationally. Certainly I can imagine cases where they were acting rationally in terms of the information they had. That seems quite different from whether we’d agree they were acting rationally with the information we have. After all when discussing reason we have to acknowledge the problem of what information we reason with.

Again though I’m not appealing to an authority who claims revelation though but rather appealing to revelation itself. I fully agree that blind faith in some human authority is problematic. I can’t t think of any major religious doctrine I believe I know that I think I know because of an appeal to Joseph Smith or some other prophet. I suspect that’s true for most believing Mormons. It just honestly seems weird that you even think that given how Mormons talk about all this.

I mean I can completely understand you’re disagreeing with us. It’s just interesting that you get wrong what we believe so fundamentally though. It’s not as if personal revelation is a minor part of Mormon belief. It’s the ground underneath which everything else is girded.

4. Not sure how you keep missing what I’ve said. I’m not saying modern academics lead to Mormon truth claims. I’m saying fairly well known things in academics explain why you keep making bad arguments. Saying why your argument is bad is not saying my argument is right. This is logic 101. I’m trying to help you make better arguments. You can have a bad argument for a true conclusion and a good argument doesn’t necessarily entail a true conclusion.

1) What information about physics has the US government kept entirely secret? I would imagine that the most safeguarded was information for how to make nukes, and yet the US’s mortal enemy North Korea is making them. Are you safeguarding evidence about the truthfulness of Mormonism because of fear that someone might obtain it, convert, and get saved? It doesn’t make any sense. The argument I frequently hear is that evidence for Mormonism is not made readily available so that that people exercise faith. But that supports my point that Mormon belief is faith-based and therefore not compatible with reason. Plus even if the US is safeguarding information about nukes, we all know they exist and have a good sense of what destruction they can do. They aren’t safeguarding information so that people will exercise faith that their experiments are true.

2) I’ve asked repeatedly, where is the verification that Joseph Smith saw God? This is unverifiable. As I have said before, lots of people believe to have private experiences leading them to know that they are reincarnated. Belief in reincarnation is not a claim made on the basis of reason. Are you willing to defend that it is? You have yet to show how and why Mormon truth claims can be defended on reason and other religious truth claims, such as reincarnation, cannot. To say that all religious truth claims can be defended on reason is lunacy.

3) Muslim suicide bombers claim to be following what God told them to do. Are they acting reasonably? Appealing to authority isn’t necessarily unreasonable. It just depends on who the authority is and on what grounds they are making their claims. Appealing to an authority who claims revelation is much different from appealing to an authority who has informed themselves through modern education and work experience.

4) “These things are very well researched and written about in academics.” Again, I have to repeat, modern academia, just like the most renowned philosophers, does not support Mormon truth claims. The only academics who support Mormon truth claims have been Mormons for years, and are mostly born and raised in the LDS church. Mormon truth claims have not gained any traction outside the BYU environment. Plus, many Mormon intellectuals who do try to defend Mormon truth claims claim that the only know to truly know that they are true is by praying and feeling the spirit. They acknowledge that they cannot be defended using the tools of modern reason.

To say something is private is simply to be talking about a different issue from whether it can be verified.

Regarding authority, while authority certainly is an issue I’d dispute the way you put it. If God tells me something I feel I am justified to the degree I have reasons to think he knows and have reasons to think his communication is trustworthy. It’s analogous to any expert testimony. So I’d certainly agree that say the ways I know Jesus was resurrected are ultimately an appeal to authority. I’m not sure that means it’s an appeal to Joseph Smith’s authority. It certainly isn’t for me although I can’t speak for everyone.

Regarding the positivists, it’s not a cop out, it’s a way to pointing to extensive arguments on the subject. You might disagree with those arguments in which case I’m more than happy to discuss it with you. But some education on the subject simply is necessary before it’s worth talking about. These things are very well researched and written about in academics. I even posted a link to a very well written article on it to help you get up to speed. So I’m not “copping out” or avoiding the discussion. Quite the opposite. I’m more than happy to discuss it but you need to get the basics down so discussion is possible.

I might as well say that your thoughts sound like those of the Orthodox Mormon Theologians (or whatever name or made-up category) of the 1950s. And their ideas were shown to be wrong, therefore you’re wrong.

I’m not even sure what exactly logical positivism, or scientism, or whatever is (nor do I really care). In fact, I only really hear the term as a sort of knee-jerk reaction by not just LDS believers but also believers in other religious traditions, whenever someone disagrees with them and says that their beliefs might be wrong (because how dare someone call into question ideas such as Muhammad visiting Jerusalem in one night on the back of a flying horse, or what have you) or might not square with reason (and I am not saying that to attack LDS beliefs, but merely as matter of fact). I think it is a cheap tactic to try to lump someone together with some other group of thinkers who supposedly had these anathema ideas.

Right there you have given a perfect example of how your beliefs are incompatible with reason. In modern reason, evidence is shown at great detail for others to verify and test. In modern reason, there is no concept of something being “too sacred” to share, which is why, I’m guessing, you are withholding this supposed evidence of LDS claims.

I’m not saying that you haven’t had such experiences (did you witness a spirit or deity or something?) that to you are solid evidence of the truthfulness of LDS truth claims, but in the language of reason, these would not hold water and I simply don’t have a reason to inform myself about reality based on what you say. It would sound silly in an environment of modern reason to make bold claims about truth and then base them on Clark’s sacred experience which I can’t tell you about, but he had one, just take my word for it. There are so many other other claims of the paranormal, Marian apparitions, visits with dead ancestors, visits by Vishnu in avatar form, etc., which people appear to claim to true on similar grounds to Mormonism, that we couldn’t possibly accommodate these within the discourse of modern reason. All we can do is declare these to be objectively unverifiable and exclude them from the realm of what we can know about nature and history based on reason. Revelation, spiritual experiences, and other culture-exclusive forms of “knowing” things about the cosmos that cannot be verified are simply not the same thing as reason. Reason is not culture-specific knowledge and is not based on culture-specific evidence. Praying in the prescribed Mormon way about something is not a valid form of inquiry in modern reason. It is a culture-specific form of inquiry to obtain culture-specific “knowledge”, or perhaps more correctly termed, gnosis.

I have had many interactions with LDS believers and have repeatedly asked if they have thought and prayed about reincarnation and would be willing to consider the possibility that that is true to the same extent that they believe in LDS truth claims. I have yet to get a straight answer out of people about this. If it is supposedly reasonable to believe in resurrection, then why not reincarnation?

“I think you’re representation of Mormonism is just plain wrong”

Mormonism has always been about someone making truth claims based on authority. It is basically a massive appeal to authority, namely the authority of Joseph Smith. It has never been about reasoned discourse. Joseph Smith said something to be a revelation, therefore it is. You just believe and accept. You don’t question, because that is culturally taboo. I have never heard a believing Mormon claim that some piece of the Doctrine and Covenants was Joseph Smith just making stuff up. But I don’t know, are you willing to question the divine nature of the D&C, for instance? Are you willing to give the idea that it is made-up just as much consideration as the idea that it is divine? Or is the former idea simply too taboo for you?

The basic issue is whether there could be private or semi-private experiences which could ground knowledge in the beliefs you list. You appear a bit inconsistent on this point since you seem to acknowledge some experience like Joseph claimed would ground such beliefs yet also clearly don’t think he actually had those experiences.

As for “why not resign myself” it’s because I think you’re representation of Mormonism is just plain wrong. It’s not what most believers I talk with believe in the least.

Fine. What is the evidence for resurrection? How is it better/stronger than the evidence that people claim to have for reincarnation? Maybe these aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe some resurrect and others reincarnate. Still, you talk about how there is evidence but fail to mention what that evidence is.

“However my testimony and I suspect most here simply isn’t feeling.”

What is it then? I don’t quite get it. It seems like most LDS in fast and testimony meeting talk about strong feeling as the basis for their beliefs.

I’m not trying to make this a discussion about the evidence for resurrection. My point is simply that you are clearly trying hard to reconcile LDS teaching and belief with reason, but it just doesn’t pan out. I solidly believe that the two are irreconcilable and that all attempts to reconcile will fail, so why try? I also think that I don’t bear as much of a burden as showing that religious truth claims and reason are irreconcilable as much as you bear a burden showing that they are. Why not just resign yourself to do what so many other LDS believers do and just appeal to feeling, authority, and faith (in the sense of strong belief without evidence, or at least strong evidence)? So many LDS believers flat out disregard apparent counterevidence to their religious beliefs or other contradicting beliefs (such as reincarnation) and claim to believe just because. They are content in their beliefs, find personal inspiration in them, and don’t care about the naysayers.

Once you can make ideas such as Joseph Smith seeing God accepted and found significant across cultures without having to drastically reshape those cultures and cause them to conform to predominant LDS norms and culture, then we could call those claims reason-based. However, people are only accepting such LDS-specific truth claims because of cultural conditioning by the LDS church and its members. People haven’t had to be culturally conditioned to accept that airplanes can fly or that people built gigantic pyramids in Egypt 4500 years ago.

When you say the evidence is equally lacking you are making a claim about what constitutes evidence. But here’s where your argument is like the positivist argument from the 1940’s. You can’t establish in a non-question begging way your claim about evidence.

My sense is that you recognize this which is why you immediately turn to feeling. However my testimony and I suspect most here simply isn’t feeling. Nor is it for most people I’ve discussed these issues with. I don’t want to deny in the least that there are members who might fall into the epistemological problems you outline. However you move from that into the claim we all do. And ironically without evidence for that claim.