mormonsandscience

Biological reductionism asserts that every human experience is reducible to biological events, inlcuding human consciousness.  While I do not deny that our physical bodies influence conscious experiences in mortality, it is not true that our bodies are the fundamental source of consciousness - our spirits are.  

Before entering mortality we existed as conscious, sentient, learning, and agentic spiritual beings.  None of these spiritual characteristics were taken from us when we entered this life under a veil of forgetfulness.  In this life we still possess a sentient spirit.  Unfortunately, all too often the learning and truth acquiring capabilities of our spirits are brushed aside and often denied by modern-day biological reductionism.

God provided us with 2 major ways for acquire truth; they are both important to our quest for truth and happiness in this life.  They are the empirico-rational approach and the spiritual approach. 

The empirico-rational approach is the domain of science.  We learn by touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing the world around us and by thinking about the world in a logical fashion.  Good science involves observing and thinking about the natural world in a clear and objective manner.

The spiritual approach is outside of the domain of science, but it is no less important in the quest for truth.  According to the spiritual approach, we learn when the Holy Ghost and Light of Christ communicate with our spirits.  Good spiritual learning involves fine tuning our spirits to the frequencies of these two spiritual powers.  

In our material, science-driven world I am concerned that we underestimate the power of spiritual learning.  Here is a little exercise to demonstrate this point.  

Think back to a time when you had a powerful spiritual experience - a time when the Spirit communicated with your spirit by answering prayer, testifying the truth of a gospel principle, bringing peace to your life, or by enlightening your mind.  Ok, now think back to the birthday cake you ate and the presents you opened on your 18th birthday.  Which experience stands out more in your mind?  Which can you remember better?  Both events were meaningful to us, but which left a more lasting impression - the empirical or spiritual?

As time passes, empirical experiences turn to shades of black and white and tend to become clouded with uncertainty.  On the other hand, powerful spiritual experiences live on in vivid color and retain their brightness.  Why is this so?  I do not know all the reasons why, but one thing is clear: Spiritual learning is real, powerful, long lasting, and, more importantly, provides certain knowledge of things that the Lord communicates to us.  

In fact, spiritual knowledge is just as certain and real as empirical knowledge.  Moreover, given that our eyes, ears, and touch can deceive us but the Lord never will, spiritual knowledge is oftentimes more real and certain than everyday empirical knowledge.  I have experienced this in my own life.  On more than one occasion I have known the certainty of some personally important idea or event because it was made known unto me by the Spirit of the Lord.

So as we go about acquiring truth via the empirico-rational model of science, let’s not forget the spiritual model of acquiring truth.  The spiritual model is not solely limited to the religious domain; it can be applied in other areas as well, including science and secular scholarship.  One of the greatest scientific minds of all time was aided by the Spirit of the Lord in discovering a revolutionary scientific truth.  When asked how he discovered the mathematical laws of gravity, Newton replied: “I [kept] the subject constantly before me and wait[ed] ‘till the first dawnings open[ed] slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I have seen enough of the current US administration the last few months to come to a conclusion about where the USA is headed: extreme socialism that would make a Canadian and a Briton cringe.  I grew up in Canada and don’t remember seeing the kind of socialism that Caesar Obama is proposing.

First there was the let’s “spread the wealth around” comment during the 2008 election campaign.  Then there came out the subtle details in his plan to raise taxes on the “rich” and to give that money to the lower socioeconomic classes.  It is contrary to the laws of the gospel to forcibly take money from one group and to give it to another.  Even the laws of tithing and fast offering are rooted in the eternal law of agency – you must choose to give.  If you want to help the poor (and you should), you choose to do so.  Only by exercising your agency to give can you qualify for blessings that come from helping the poor.

Second is the tight regulation and control of businesses that the Obama administration is considering.  The latest legislation being considered is granting the federal government the right to take over businesses that are becoming financially unstable.  Well, a basic tenet of socialist Keynesian economics is that the economy must be controlled at the federal level.  Another tenet of Keynesian economics is that the recession can be remedied through excessive government deficit spending and tax increases – this is exactly the Obama administration’s approach to solving our current recession woes.  (BWT, estimated budget totals for 2008-2010 show federal government public debt rising 63%.  Those sorts of numbers make former president Bush look like a miser by comparison.) 

Ok, up to this point I was willing to give Caesar Obama a break.  Sure his economic policies smack of socialism, but at least they did not sound like measures adopted by Hitler and Stalin, right?  Wrong.  

“ALL HAIL HERR OBAMA’S AMERICORPS!”

That’s right, I said Americorps.  During the 2008 campaign Obama called for the formation of a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, [and] just as well-funded as the military.”  You may want to go back and re-read that quote just to make sure that the impression it left was not your imagination.  

The first thing I thought of after hearing about Americorps was: It sounds too much like the Hitler Youth Corps and the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), aka “brownshirts”.  The SA was an assault detachment that facilitated Hitler’s rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s by bullying and intimidating the opposition.

I can already hear the opposing voices to my views.  “C’mon Dave. You’re crazy to compare Obama’s Americorps to Hitler’s SA!”  Oh, really!?  Then let’s take a look at Dave’s Top Ten List of signs that the Obama administration is speeding toward unmitigated fascistic socialism, shall we?  Last week the Democrat-controlled congress recently approved the following measures regarding Obama’s Americorps: 

#10.  Expand Americorps enrollment from 75,000 to 250,000 people.

#9.   Under the Americorps program, consideration of “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people [in America].”

#8.   Possibly requiring “all individuals in the United States” to perform Americorps service, including elementary age children.

#7.  Consider designing Americorps so that it “combine[s] the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service.”

#6.  Establishing “campuses” that serve as Americorps “operational headquarters,” complete with “superintendents”.

#5.  Elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life.

#4.  Call for creation of “a permanent cadre” in a “National Community Civilian Corps” (Can you say “SS”?).

#3.  Calls for “youth engagement zones” in which “service learning” is “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”  (Can you say 'indoctrination'?)

#2.  Community service learning to be “integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula” at all levels of schooling.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the number 1 sign that the Obama administration is hasting socialism in America . . . !

#1. . . . Consider providing “uniforms” for all Americorps participants!

(Fanfare music playing)

Indeed the Constitution of the United States of America may be hanging from a thread in the near future.

The two pillars of science are empiricism and rationalism.  In the case of empiricism, scientists attempt to observe the natural world in an unbiased and objective manner, and in the case of rationalism, scientists try to think about the natural world in an unbiased and objective manner.  These two pillars, as reliable as they are, are ill-suited for providing us with knowledge about God because knowledge of God is faith-based. 

Faith provides us with spiritual knowledge that transcends the physical and rational.  Faith cannot be manipulated in a randomized controlled trial.  It is not tangible nor can it be measured in any empirical way.  It is even resists operationalization (making intangible things measureable) because its essence is difficult to ascertain.  For instance, shall we measure faith with the number of times someone attends church or the number of prayers said per week?  Or perhaps faith is best measured by how closely we live the 10 commandments.  These operationalizations are a good start, but they hardly capture the essence of faith.   

One thing is clear; faith is not amenable to measurement.

Even if we had the tools to reliably measure faith, understanding faith in a scientific manner would prove elusive because, as the Doctrine and Covenants declares, spiritual matters “can only be perceived by purer eyes” (131:7).  This scripture tells us that spiritual and faith-based knowledge is not discovered through classroom instruction and laboratory research, it is a gift from the Lord.

Faith also escapes the grasp of science because it entails subjective truth.  Subjective truth refers to personal knowledge that is real and meaningful to persons experiencing it.  Given its personal nature, it is not capable of being conveyed to others in an empirical and rational way; therefore it is not capable of being confirmed in a scientific manner.  From a scientific viewpoint, faith in God is an irrational and non-empirical concept.  Explaining faith to a non-believer is a bit like explaining the color red to a blind man – it cannot be done.  Faith and color can only be understood through experience. 

In sum, faith in God is outside the realm of natural, science-based experience; therefore science can neither confirm nor disprove His existence.  Even the late evolutionists and agnostic Stephen Jay Gould conceded this point.  He wrote:

 “Science cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God’s [existence].  We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.  If some of our crowd [e.g., Richard Dawkins] have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find [my third-grade teacher] Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it…. Science can work only with naturalistic explanations.”

Well said, Mr. Gould. 

Imagine, for a moment, living in 1687 when Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (or Pincipia, for short).  After the publication of the book, you would have risen in the morning and gone to work never knowing that the most influential scientific book ever written had just been published.  Those living during that time could not have imagined that Principia would revolutionize the world in which we live.

Are there developments in science today that will greatly impact the world hundreds of years from now?  Will people living 300 years into the future (2308) look back on our time and identify developments in science that brought about major change?  Quite possibly.  I can think of at least one positive example and one negative example.

On the positive side there’s the Human Genome Project, a multi-billion dollar effort to map the human genome that was completed in April, 2003.  Because of this Project, science is pursuing genetics research that has the potential to bring about significant change to the well-being of humanity.  People living 300 years from now may look back on our time and wonder if we realized the significance of the Project.  On the morning the project was completed in 2003, we probably woke up and went about our work as if nothing had changed.

Now for the negative.  There is currently a subtle movement in science that is not recognizable to many, yet it has long-term ramifications.  It is changing the goal of science from discovering absolute truth to discovering relative truth. 

Absolute truth refers to universal, necessary, and certain knowledge about the world.  It is the standard to which scientists aspired for generations.  Relative truth, on the other hand, is the idea that truth is context and culturally dependent.  That is, there are different truths for different folks living in different situations.  Now, to a certain extent I accept relative truth.  Even my doctoral dissertation was in the area of phenomenology, a philosophy which basically asserts that truth exists in people’s subjective interpretations of lived experiences.  But relative truth should not be allowed to replace objective truth as the goal of science.  Efforts to promote this change is putting science on the slippery slope of moral relativism

Moral relativism is the belief that what is right or wrong in a moral sense is dependent on contextual circumstances (i.e., social, historical, cultural, and personal circumstances).  Clearly it is important to make moral judgments based on context; for instance, if someone kills another person, it is important to know if that killing took place on the battlefield or in a bank.  But I would argue that each legitimate moral judgment ultimately ends up in an absolute truth (i.e., the soldier is not guilty of murder whereas the back robber is guilty of murder).  Yet when we take away absolute truth and leave only relative truth, everything goes haywire.  Science is not exempt from the resulting confusion.

Science’s rejection of absolute truth has already had unfortunate consequences, especially in psychology.  The oligarchy of psychology, otherwise known as the American Psychological Society (APA), recently sanctioned (in 2001) immoral practices such as gay marriage and other gender bending practices.  What is particularly irksome is that all this happened in the name of scientific progress!  “Progress by what standards?” you may ask.  Progress by the standard of “If it feels good and doesn’t harm anyone else, then do it.” (a.k.a. moral relativism).  In other words, according to the APA, there are no longer any absolute truths about what comprises healthy sexual relationships.  “Anything goes as long as it makes you feel good and it does not hurt others.”

Relativism was once popular among the Sophists in ancient Greece.  We are thus experiencing a return to the old ways, and it feels like a bad dream.  So how did we get to this point?  The answer is simple.  The scientific community has been infiltrated by secular humanists that reject God.  If there is no God, there can be no absolute truth because absolute truth requires a final arbiter of truth.  In other words, without a final arbiter who conveys truth and knowledge of things as they really are, there can be no absolute truth.  The more secular humanists push their atheistic agenda, the more they are driving the final arbiter of truth out of science.  Moral relativism is gaining popularity today because it is filling the void left by the forced exit of the final arbiter of truth from the sciences.

The only antidote I can think of is bringing God back into science, much like existed during the 17th century Scientific Revolution.  (Note that I am not calling for a return of religious influence into science that existed during the Medieval Dark Ages.)  If secular humanism is allowed to proceed unchecked, relativism will grow and the goal of science will look very different 300 years from now.  

If that happens, people living 300 years from now will say, “Gee, I wonder what it was like to live during 2008 when relativism began to replace absolute truth?”  If we could speak, we might say, “I just woke up in the morning and went to work as if nothing had changed.”  If we fail to challenge the rising tide of secular humanism and pretend as though nothing is happening, history could very well turn out this way.

A blog titled Truth vs. Truth that recently appeared on Mormon Metaphysics gives an interesting interpretation of the “I know the church is true” comment that is commonly spoken in LDS testimony meetings.  The author suggests that rather than construe this statement in a Greek absolutist fashion (where truth is agreement between thought and external facts), we may interpret “true” as reflecting an existential commitment to the church of Christ.  Thus, when someone says, “I know the church is true,” that statement may be interpreted as expressing a commitment to the church in much the same way that a husband is “true” (committed) to his wife.  

This new way of interpreting the “I know the church is true” statement will surely bring comfort to those who criticize by saying: “You can’t say that because you don’t know for sure.”  Yet sometimes it is appropriate for people to say “I know it is true.”  They really do know something to be true.  

Take the statement, “I know that God lives.”  Now, personal knowledge in the existence of God exists on a continuum (excuse the linear analogy).  Every point along that continuum is called faith, except for the endpoint where faith gives way to absolute knowledge.  Absolute knowledge is reached once we receive a physical AND spiritual manifestation that He lives.  The Nephites who touched the nail prints and thrust their hands into His side (physical), AND received a witness from the Holy Ghost that they were looking at the Lord of heaven and earth (spiritual) no longer required faith – they had reached the end point and knew for certain that He lives.  

What about the rest of us who are still going on faith?  Can we say that we know He lives?  Can we find certainty in our faith?  Yes, we can.  Our knowledge can be perfect in the evidence that we have received.  Those of us who “see” evidence of divine design in the world around us and have felt spiritual witnesses from the Holy Ghost have certain knowledge of those things.  In other words, we KNOW that an orderly universe evidences intelligent design and we KNOW that we have felt feelings of love, joy, and peace that come from the Holy Spirit.  The limited knowledge that we have received is certain.  Granted, we have not reached complete knowledge where faith is no longer required, but as any good scientist will attest, you don’t have to have absolute and complete knowledge before you claim to know something is true.   

So when people testify that they know that God lives, are they are justified in making such a claim?  Yes, in cases where their physical and spiritual evidence is sufficient to lead them to believe in a supreme being.  It is important to remember that what is sufficient evidence for some may not be sufficient evidence for others.  Doubting Thomas is a good example.  He was not willing to accept the testimony of others that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and until he saw the savior he could not testify that he knew that Jesus was resurrected.  However, for many people, the testimony of prophets and spiritual witnesses are sufficient for them to say that they know that Jesus lives.  It is possible to know that Jesus lives without having seen and touched the resurrected Lord.

In religious matters we should be careful to not criticize people for failing to meet our personal criteria for establishing truth.  There is great diversity in the power of personal spiritual manifestations and in people's interpretation of the strength of the data.  We should not allow ourselves to become "criticizing Thomases" and criticize others for making religious truth claims based on evidence that does not live up to our standards.   (Mormons and Science 08.08)