mormonsandscience

Quite possibly my favorite verse in all of scripture is Alma 32:27. I love the concept of experimenting upon the word. Even God's word has to be put to the test. Alma recognizes that we may "no more than desire to believe." This is often my starting point.

Our knowledge does not grow in an all or nothing fashion. It grows line upon line.

Alma proposes a "first-person" science, which ultimately is the most firm knowledge (at least according to Descartes).

Thanks for your thoughts.

Of course if you have certain feelings you can be certain that you had those feelings. (Even then, phantom limb cases call that into question.) But so what?! You don't know what, if anything those feelings mean and you SURELY don't know that this experience is supernatural. Alma gives exactly no reason to assume we have a knowledge or certainty with regard to those questions and the problem is that it seems that those unanswered questions are the only ones that matter.

Jeff G: Reducing spiritual experiences to "feelings" is a way of trivializing them. What Alma says we know is not merely a feeling, but a knowledge that the seed grows and "that your understanding doth begin to be enlightened, and your mind doth begin to expand." What we know is not that we merely had a feeling, but that our minds have been enlightened. It is an experience of knowing that one receives knowledge. That is quite different than knowing that one has had an experience of having a feeling. In fact it is a caricature of what Alma addresses -- and of what I know that I have experienced. I of course cannot address your experience.

Blake,

I realize that. I was merely using "feelings" as shorthand for the experience, although I can see why it would seem to be an uncharitable way of doing so.

That said, I don't see how your correction make any difference to the point I'm trying to make, namely that when you have experience X all you can be sure about is that you have had experience X. He gives no reason to believe that you can be sure about your interpretation of X, what you take from X or what you take to be the source of X. The problem is that when it comes to truth/falsity, the very questions that we can't be sure about are the only ones that seem to matter.

Dave,

I wouldn't expect you to divulge the details to something so personal to you. I do think, however, that you are going to have to give a REALLY good reason for how you can be certain that any experience at all is supernatural in nature.

Jeff G.: Experience X isn't just an experience devoid of content. If one has an experience of knowing that one is receiving knowledge, what more could possibly be experienced to know? You position assumes a type of skepticism about experience that is unwarranted (pun intended). We are perfectly justified in taking experiences of knowing that we are being enlightened and receiving knowledge just as we experience them. Any other positions reduces to to the extreme type of skepticism that "I'm not even sure my experience of typing these words is warranted." No one could pragmatically live life given such global skepticism.

Blake,

How can you possibly know that you are receiving knowledge as opposed to either "receiving" less than true information or simply coming up with ideas yourself? I don't see how an agnosticism on this issue reduces to an extreme form of skepticism.

I would argue that there are other highly significant differences between our knowing things in our everyday experience and these religious experiences. Most importantly, the public nature of the former is exactly what lends itself so well to corrective feedback. If I see a unicorn, I can ask the people who I am standing with if they see it too. There doesn't seem to be any kind of corrective feedback mechanism in the case of spiritual experiences which is exactly why I would suggest that we can't place too much confidence in it.

Dave,

But how do you know that it is "light and knowledge" that you are receiving? The only reason you are prone to view your experience as you do is because of the priming you have received from the very source that is in question. Again, I think if one reads Alma's as a pragmatic argument they will be on a lot firmer ground. Indeed, it seems to me that this is exactly what your argument collapses into:

"I do what the BoM tells me and I get very positive feedback in the form of both spiritual experiences and a better life just like it said would happen."

If this argument is used to prove that the BoM is true, then you run square into the fallacy of affirming the consequent. If, however, one is simply arguing that the BoM has proven itself to be a reliable source for positive experience, then I don't see any particular problem.

Jeff G.: As I am sure that you're aware, Bill Alston's book Perceiving God argues (successfully in my view) that your attempted distinction between public verification of your own personal experience and spiritual experiences is faulty as a grounding of knowledge. For one, even if you ask about your experience based on what others experience, you now have to verify the accuracy of their experience plus the veracity of their response. They are all in the same boat as you are with respect to whether their experience is reliable. Moreover, since you can't even verify whether they are referring to similar experiences even if they use the same words and their veracity may be in question, such checks are less reliable, not more.

Moreover, uniquely personal experiences just are not verifiable in the sense you suggest precisely given their personal nature. If you ask another person, "do you experience love for my children like I do," their response is irrelevant. If you ask, "do you experience this thing as yellow too?" then you have now way of verifying that what you experience as yellow is what they experience as yellow even using the same words. More importantly, no one else is in a position to assess your experience as such.

You give me no good reason to doubt my own immediate experience -- you merely point out that it isn't public. So? Even if you could establish that other types of knowledge could be publicly verified, that is irrelevant to what Alma says and it isn't necessary in light of the fact that I am perfectly warranted in taking my own experience of receiving knowledge to be just what I experience it to be -- and the non-public nature of that knowledge doesn't change that fact. So your argument is beside the point.

What you want is public acceptance of your claims to know -- but that just isn't important given the necessarily first-person nature of such experience. The experience is necessarily first-person precisely because it is relational and interpersonal and cannot be shared by another.