To me the golden plates in a scientific context could easily be described as religious. I just don’t see religious experience requiring a concept of the sacred. It’s fine if we use that as a criteria for a particular discussion of course. But then you run up with the problem of things like praying for help finding ones keys. Where’s the sacred in that?

As I use the modifier “religious” I simply mean related to topics traditionally designated as religious. But I don’t think there’s anything inherent to these that necessarily is religious. And that’s even skipping the problem of dealing with traditions outside of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition – Our categories are poor not just for Buddhism or Confucianism but even things like pagan religion in the neoPlatonists of late antiquity.

In saying all this let me note I’m fine with associating the luminous or sacral as part of the phenomenology of religion. This more narrow sense has a long history. I’m just not sure it gets at the topic of experience in epistemological terms.

I don’t think science in the least tells us life is absurd. Again that’s usually philosophers, literary authors or pundits. (Absurdity is a common theme in one vein of existentialism for instance) People are always free to draw conclusions from science but typically the topics are outside of the field of science. Of course individual scientists are free to chime in, but there’s often more diversity of view than is often portrayed.

I’m not sure what you mean by denialism so I can’t comment there.

Regarding telling apart the religious from non-religious. Let us say we found the real gold plates. It becomes a scientific object open to scientific analysis. Let’s say somehow it gets translated and the translation bears reasonable similarity to the Book of Mormon. Is that a religious experience or a scientific one?

I recognize many doubt that could happen because they fundamentally think Mormon claims false. But the issue isn’t whether this would happen but to consider what it means about how we label experiences. All I’m saying is that there are experiences and we label some religious or non-religious not on the basis of some feature of the experience but on the basis of how we categorize the topic the experience is related to. It’s largely arbitrary.

Certainly in terms of topic I’d agree that discussing God, the sacred and so forth are religious topics. I’m not sure what that tells us about whether an experience is religious.

To your final point I more or less agree. A big shift culturally is the very meaning of sin is more or less being lost outside of ever narrowing communities of believers. In its place the ethical and especially an ethics grounded in terms of it harms others tends to get privileged. While this isn’t quite utilitarianism (there are plenty of Kantians out there for instance making similar moves) the shift from religious grounds is huge. First trusting a command from God because it’s believed to come from God simply doesn’t matter anymore. Each demand must be grounded in a public fashion independent of any traditional standards. That is the authority of culture, the authority of scripture and the authority of tradition simply don’t matter. That’s a very big shift.

Given that shift, there will intrinsically be conflicts over any ethical demand in religion that can’t be publicly grounded in this fashion. (The fact that the harm requirement can’t be grounded doesn’t matter since most simply accept it yet don’t treat it as authority) This means many religious dictims such as no sex before marriage, restrictions on various substances, and especially homosexuality all lose their power. Further they don’t merely lose power they become a point of intrinsic conflict that will drive people out of the religion if they don’t already accept the authority of the religion. When it’s the authority of religion in question this means those without strong spiritual experiences are highly incentivized to leave religion.

For most of human history the word “religion” did not exist. And this is because the concept of “religion” did not exist. Religion as a category is a product of literacy, and we have hung ourselves by this construct for centuries now. Dubison makes a great point in his The Western Construction of Religion that the term is so misused in every possible way that the only way to talk intelligently about “religion” is to stop using the term. He prefers “cosmographic formation,” or all the values and suppositions one employs in creating their worldview. Interestingly, one’s worldview is really a sort of cosmology, culturally created or otherwise.

Meanwhile, few people, I believe at least, actually use revelation as an epistemology. Even when revelation is had it is often poured through the sieve of authoritarianism, which is the ultimate of all epistemologies, rational or otherwise. Science has always had the same problem as religion has had with its epistemological fundaments: deferring to the guy in charge (whether the guy is an individual, a committee, a cultural idea, or a zeitgeist) . We like to tell ourselves that it is not so with science; or with variation, religion; but the is not so is exactly so. And so is so.

The few times I have used revelation as an epistemology it has been wondrous indeed. I think it is the best way to live.

JI (5) most contemporary AI techniques involve sufficient complexity we can’t understand why a conclusion was reached. We can just determine if the system is accurate in the area in question. While I don’t think neural nets work like the brain nor other AI techniques like hidden markov models, latent semantic mapping or so forth, I think it does suggest that having to explain every part of the reasoning process isn’t necessary.

Mark (7) again though I’m not speaking of the regular religious believer but as my last paragraph noted whether people with skepticism and an attempt at rigorous inquiry can have religious belief.

To science, my point was that how scientists come up with ideas isn’t necessarily how science as a social phenomena functions. Science is a limited way of knowledge more tied to a community and it’s attempts to replicate within that community.

Certainly whether one is pragmatic depends upon the claim and reasons. I’d never imagine otherwise.

To private evidence, again you’re conflating two issues. A certain communal knowledge and justification with individual knowledge. Of course private experience isn’t persuasive to someone who hasn’t had that without knowing the reliability of the person in question. Testimony witnesses, while obviously invaluable in many settings also seems undeniably weak. But what is weak evidence to the community isn’t necessarily weak evidence to the individual. The individual obviously can know more about that private experience than the person who didn’t have it. And that matters a lot epistemologically.

From what I can tell because you are conflating community knowledge, evidence and reasoning with individual you are missing the main points. Right now you are doing something. I think that whatever that is, you know it with a great deal of certainty. However by your own words that doesn’t count as much for the rest of us. That doesn’t mean truth is in the eye of the beholder in the least. It just means direct evidence is stronger than indirect evidence and repeated evidence stronger than a single example.

So this isn’t doublethink at all but fairly easy to demonstrate features of human knowing quite independent of the topic of religion.

As to testing my beliefs, I think I am quite willing to test them. I’ve done so repeatedly. What survives continual inquiry it is quite hard to disbelieve.

The question is whether these non empirically grounded beliefs have themselves been empirically falsified (not that there’s no evidence for them, but that they’ve been falsified) or whether we’d expect to have found evidence given the parameters (like the Loch Ness monster). And it’s this point that people have conflicting views on in regards to the Church’s claims, but the idea of I only base my life around that which has been demonstrated in a lab means that people haven’t really thought through the implications of what that would look like. We all base things on emotion.

That depends, doesn’t it, on the purpose? Where the goal is saving one person’s soul by convincing and strengthening him or her in matters of faith, for example, another person’s simple testimony with the support of the Holy Spirit can be very powerful and fully efficacious — and entirely valid. However, where the goal is to forcibly change the opinions of others, such as in an academic setting, another kind of evidence is more likely to bring about the desired outcome. Two settings, two approaches, each approach valid for its setting.

Yes. The religious believer is basing belief on a much larger set of unsubstantiated traditional assumptions than the scientist. The religious believer is less willing to question these assumptions than the scientist. If the scientist is a good scientist, then s/he has discovered something that has predictive power. On the whole, scientific thinking has provided much more reliable and predictable explanations of the universe around us than religious thinking.

“I also think one can be fairly empirical or pragmatic as one conducts ones religious inquiry.”

That depends upon what the religious claim is. You could say that the idea that not smoking tobacco will enable a healthier and longer life is a religious idea. In that sense, yes. However, religion is based on lots of truth claims that are objectively unverifiable. Absolutist insistence of the truthfulness of such unverifiable claims does not constitute an empirical or pragmatic approach to knowledge. So many religious claims amount to “x is true because y authority said so” or “x is true because of y private evidence.” Private evidence is weak evidence. A good historian is reluctant to make an assertion about history because of a single private account. Before doing so, they seek as much corroboration as possible, which comes either in the form of another account expressing the same witness or because the account fits identifiable patterns in nature and collective behavior. And even then, a good historian has to be careful. Lots of people claiming to have witnessed the apparition of the virgin Mary in Portugal in 1917 doesn’t make it true. There are lots of other explanations that are more valid as to why thousands of people supposedly thought that they witnessed the virgin Mary. But I don’t know, are you willing to accept that account as true, Clark?

As I read your thoughts, they come off as unconvincing and shot through with doublethink. First, I highly doubt that you would apply the same sort of seemingly lax standard of determining something as being within the realm of possibly true, with which you treat Mormon truth claims, to the truth claims of other religions and religious figures. I can’t imagine that you would think that Christopher Nemelka’s claim to be the reincarnation of Hyrum Smith and to have translated the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon to be possibly true and pragmatic and empirical in the same way that you might regard great thinkers like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein to be. The same goes for James Strang and his claim to have translated the plates of Laban. Second, you pivot in an out of relativism and absolutism whenever convenient. You make bold claims that objectively unverifiable phenomena such as the light of Christ and revelation are true and influence thought. And then you claim that whatever propositions that people make are possibly true and based on pragmatic thought because of private evidence, thus suggesting that you are prone to believing that truth is all in the eye of the beholder. What you’re doing is making excuses to justify a particular set of traditional beliefs that you most likely arrived at at a young age and/or have been deeply socialized in for years. You’re not willing to actually subject these beliefs to serious scrutiny and you do whatever you need to in order to protect them. This is not reflective of general trends in scientific thinking, which is based much more upon questioning and demonstrable evidence. Sure, tribalism and knowledge-by-authority exist in scientific communities too, but not nearly to the extent that they exist in religious communities. You ignore a crucial difference between religious and scientific thinking, which is in the EXTENT that tradition, authority, groupthink, and socialization inform claimed knowledge. Your failure to recognize this distinction does not come off as a sincere articulation, but really a smoke and mirrors denialism.

Hmmmm…. this from an individual who believes BoM civilizations actually existed. Reaching that conclusion absent, let’s face it Clark, evidence, is most certainly “fundamentally different” from how you think about everything else, otherwise you would not function as a normal human being. It is, for instance, physics, not faith, that assures you the jet w/ you & your family in it stays aloft.