Green Oasis

I recently found some rather amusing and unflattering parodies of the Mormon thought process (via Floating in the Milk). I recognize many of those thought patterns in myself and in the discourse of other members of the LDS church. I thought like this once. Here are a few of my favorites, handpicked for their relevance to me, and edited to my personal taste. I tried to make them less parody and more analysis.

Argument from warm fuzzies

1. The Book of Mormon makes vague promises about good feelings which would show me that the words of the Book of Mormon are true.
2. I sometimes have good feelings when I read it and pray about the Book of Mormon.
3. Therefore the church is true.

This is my own contribution to the list. It’s a complete non sequitur. What makes it worse is that as a Mormon I allowed the Book of Mormon to tell me how to determine that the Book of Mormon is God’s word. I trusted it to tell me how to test its own truthfulness.

Argument from Anti-Mormonism

1. Satan wants to destroy the true church.
2. Anti-Mormons have all kinds of evidence that the church is false.
3. This evidence is very destructive to the claims of the church.
4. Anything which might destroy the church comes from Satan.
5. Therefore the church is true.

This circular reasoning really frustrates me. No matter what evidence is brought against the claims of the church, it is all perceived as the work of the devil precisely because of the fact that it contradicts the claims of the church. The evidence is often discounted on that basis alone, prima facie. This line of reasoning makes Mormons immune to all contradictory evidence no matter how valid that evidence may be.

Argument from the round earth

1. People once thought the Earth was flat.
2. The Earth was actually round.
3. Therefore all modern science, including archeology, is probably wrong when it contradicts the teachings of the church.
4. Therefore the church is true.

I used this thought process to assuage many doubts that arose due to scientific evidence which contradicted the claims of Mormonism.

Argument from The Three Nephites

1. There are three immortal white guys called the Three Nephites who have been walking around North America for 2000 years.
2. Some Native American legends talk about “white ghosts”.
3. I bet those stories are about the Three Nephites!
4. Therefore the church is true.

I hear this kind of cherry-picking of historical evidence all the time at church: flood stories, Quetzalcoatl, etc. get used to demonstrate the ancient roots of Mormonism.

The Mormon Cosmological argument

1. Something caused the universe to exist.
2. It wasn’t God, because he is part of a society of Gods.
3. It wasn’t his God, because he is part of a long line of Gods.
4. What was it?
5. It must have been something!
6. Therefore the church is true.

I was always told as a Mormon to avoid delving into the mysteries of godliness. This warning translates into “Don’t ask so many questions (especially ones we don’t have answers for).” Why did I allow myself to be cowed into not asking more questions?

Argument from evil

1. God has a plan for everything.
2. He must allow bad things to happen because we learn and grow from them.
3. Yes, even small children who were chopped up by machetes in Rwanda while their mothers watched.
4. Yes, even the kids who were sent to the ovens in Nazi Germany.
5. Horrible things do happen to innocent people, just as God planned!
6. Therefore the church is true.

This is more of a defense against the problem of evil than a real argument for the truth of Mormonism.

Argument from my testimony

1. You claim to not have a testimony.
2. But the only reason you say that is so you can sin like Hugh Hefner.
3. Deep down, you know the church is true. You’re just in denial.
4. Therefore the church is true.

Even if no one says this out loud, to my face, I know many Mormons believe this about me and will continue to believe it no matter how much I protest.

Argument from numbers

1. There are millions of Mormons.
2. Millions of people believe in Mormonism.
3. Millions of people can’t be wrong.
4. Therefore the church is true.
5. Therefore the Roman Catholic church is false.

There are some interesting trends in the statistics which the church publishes: raw growth, raw number of converts, converts per missionary, and percentage growth are all in long-term downward trends. Judging from the number of people I see at church on Sunday when compared to the list of members, extrapolating recklessly to the entire church, I would expect only about 4 million people bother to show up to church in a given month (the church’s benchmark for religious activity), far fewer than the 12 million names-on-the-church-records number that the church trumpets every General Conference. I actually think 4 million is a rather generous number. Another point: The LDS church is not the fastest growing church in the world.

Argument from obvious falseness—actually used by Nibley!

1. Joseph Smith’s tale is obviously absurd.
2. Joseph Smith wasn’t a complete idiot.
3. If he was going to make stuff up he wouldn’t make it look obviously false.
4. Therefore Joseph Smith wasn’t lying.
5. Therefore the church is true.

Argument from personal incredulity

1. I can’t believe Joseph Smith made the whole thing up. He wasn’t educated enough to come up with all those names and places.
2. Who could do that? Certainly not me.
3. Therefore the church is true.

Also seen in this variant: I personally have no good explanation for the existence of the Book of Mormon therefore the church is true. The lack of a really good explanation doesn’t mean that we must accept any of the equally poor alternatives.

Argument of ancestral sacrifice

1. Your ancestors gave up everything for the church.
2. One would not give up so much for something false.
3. Therefore the church is true.

This assumes that our ancestors had better information than we do. Our Mormon ancestors also believed in men living on the moon and the surface of the sun.

Argument from Joe’s contribution

1. Joseph Smith explained so many things.
2. Nobody has given so many clear explanations (save Jesus).
3. Therefore the church is true.

The explanations are only clear if you are asking the approved questions. Stray too far from that path and questions cease to have satisfactory answers.

Argument from crabs in a basket

1. I am a General Authority pretending to be a special witness for Christ.
2. The other General Authorities seem convinced they really are special witnesses.
3. Sure as hell! I am not going to be the first to admit I am bluffing.
4. Therefore the church is true.

I am positive that many General Authorities are sincere, but once they’re called as General Authorities, they are expected to project an image of certainty. There must be tremendous social pressure to play the part even if they really don’t feel like they’re any better qualified to be a witness for Christ than the average member. I can easily imagine a man being called as an Apostle thinking to himself “But I’ve never had a revelation of Jesus Christ that would justify being called an ‘Apostle’.” The man accepts his calling on the faith that the Lord would qualify whom he calls and waits patiently for something that would justify his calling as a special witness of Christ. Time goes on and he settles into his role and never receives that special witness, but his worries are swallowed up in the busy-ness of his calling.

This is pure speculation I admit, but this follows the pattern in my own life, even when I was called as an Elders Quorum President (which calling I never served in—long story). I’m simply extrapolating to Bishops, Stake Presidents, and (why not?) Apostles.

Argument from disasters

1. The scriptures predict that calamities and wickedness will befall the earth before Christ’s second coming.
2. The world is in the worst shape ever.
3. Therefore the church is true.

This is another argument that I added to the list. The problem with this argument—other than that it is a non sequitur like all of the other arguments—is that it the world is not necessarily in the worst shape ever. It is just as easy to argue that we are all better off than ever. It depends on how you look at the data.

The truth is that I didn’t use these arguments to find out truth, but rather to rationalize my foregone conclusions. I wanted Mormonism to be the truth, so I found intellectually dishonest ways to shore up my beliefs. I’m pretty sure that I knew better, but I went along anyway. My own fears and desires kept me in a church which taught things that I couldn’t believe while being honest with myself.

Are there any other arguments that have been missed?

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law…
Love is the law, love under will
(The Book of the Law 1:40, 57)

I have been doing what was expected of me for most of my life. I was living my life according to the desires of others. Who I was and what I wanted was sacrificed in the quest to become like God. My law was God’s law as it had been taught to me.

I jettisoned that law when I realized that God was a fiction. I discovered that God was only the collective desires of humanity which had changed through the ages as humanity changed. My switch from believing Mormon to strongly atheistic agnostic was the first act of real consequence that I made contrary to expectations. I was doing what I wanted despite others’ desires. My repudiation of God was also a repudiation of the expectations that had been placed on me. The heady power and freedom of that act felt really good. It must be something like the feeling of getting up from your sick bed after months of confinement.

I no longer recognize anyone’s authority to tell me what is morally right and wrong. They have no more standing to pontificate on morality than I do because they don’t have an ersatz God to back them up. There is no absolute standard for behavior. I decide what I will do because I want to do it.

That may sound like a prescription for licentious behavior, especially to those who have listened to too many Sunday School lessons telling them how evil we would be without God. One may imagine that I hope for a life full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Life’s short. Live hard. Die young.

But that’s not what I want. I want to live happily, faithfully with my wife. I want to experience life’s adventures with her. I want to walk alongside my children as they experience the wonderful world that they’re so extraordinarily privileged to be a part of. I want to see who they were born to be unfold. I want to learn everything I can in life’s short day. I want to regain my sense of wonder and see the world with new eyes. I want to help others. I want to make a difference to someone. I want someone to miss me when I’m gone.

I will do what I want, and to hell with anyone who gets in my way.

How could my view of the world change so radically from theism to atheism? More importantly, why was I convinced that I was right in both cases?

I had some doubts as a believer, but I thought I was on the right side of the question. I strongly believed this. Now, as a non-believer, I firmly believe that I am right and that I’ve finally escaped the briar patch that is religion. I could flippantly pass off the change as personal growth, but I think it’s trying to say a lot more than that to me.

My convictions feel different now. They are based much more on my own judgment rather than on received wisdom. They don’t jar against my experience of reality, and if they do, I’ll change them to suit. I am now much less dogmatic in that way. What hasn’t changed is my firm conviction that I am not deceiving myself, that I am not mistaken.

I guess it’s like how most of us think we’re great drivers. We tell ourselves that we’d all be safer if more people had our level of driving skills. I’m pretty sure I’m a good thinker, but the evidence of my history of beliefs contradicts that. This change has introduced a note of skepticism when I consider my own thought process. I’m probably not as smart as I think I am and my thoughts are probably not as clear as they seem to me to be.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, I just found The Problem of Evil: The Top Twelve Excuses for God’s Horrible Behavior (via The Friendly Atheist), an article with a rather self-explanatory title. The same author, August Berkshire, has also written 18 Unconvincing Arguments for God. Both are good cheat sheets of how not to argue for God’s existence.

Several people (no, it’s not just you) within metaphorical earshot of me have tried recently to demonstrate God’s existence through a variation on the theme of Alma 30:44: the world itself demonstrates that there is a God. I’ve diplomatically refused to engage in discussions because I sense that a discussion is not what they really wanted. This is how I imagine a face-to-face discussion would play out:

[two friends are deep in discussion over a pot of tea]

Christy: All things denote that there is a God.

Me: What? I don’t really follow your reasoning.

Christy: Look around us. We live in a world full of wonder and beauty. How did all this get here if there is no God?

Me: I have some ideas, but I don’t know exactly.

Christy: See. It must have been created by God.

Me: Just because we don’t know how something happened isn’t a good reason to jump to the conclusion that God did it. If we always used that kind of reasoning, we would have never cured smallpox or figured out what kept the planets in orbit around the sun. We would be stuck in the dark ages.

Christy: Then how do you explain the world’s existence?

Me: Like I said, I don’t really know how, but from what I’ve seen, I imagine that it has arisen from the operation of natural laws.

Christy: But who created those laws?

Me: Wait, you’re assuming that the laws had to be created by someone. You’re begging the question a bit, don’t you think?

Christy: Okay, so where did the laws come from?

Me: I don’t know that either, but I suppose you’re going to tell me God created them.

Christy: Well, yes.

Me: We seem to be back to where we started. Let me ask a question. Where did God come from?

Christy: God is the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause. He is uncreated by definition.

Me: How is that different than if I said that the natural laws were uncaused? Saying that God is uncreated doesn’t really help explain anything, it’s just an attempt to salvage your belief in God.

Christy: …

[they are joined by a third friend]

Christy: Hey Molly!

Me: Hi Molly. Sit down. Would you like some tea?

Molly: No, thank you. Against my religion and all that.

Me: I know. [smiles] Christy is trying to convince me that God exists, and we were just discussing where he came from. Christy was just going to tell me how God being uncreated is any more reasonable than natural laws being uncreated.

Molly: Well that’s easy. God was created. God was once mortal like we are and progressed to become a God, just like we can.

Me: So he lived like us and had his own God like us and his own savior like Jesus.

Molly: Well, its not official doctrine, but yeah that’s what I’ve always thought.

Me: Have you ever asked where God’s God came from?

Molly: Of course. God’s God became a god through the same process. The same with God’s God’s God, and God’s God’s God’s God before Him.

Me: But where does it stop? How did the first God become a god.

Molly: The line of gods doesn’t stop. It keeps going on forever.

Me: To be honest, it doesn’t sound like any of us have any better idea of how things came to be here. All of us end up waving our hands and saying “It’s been that way forever” whether we’re talking about God, natural laws, or the infinite line of gods. God or Gods don’t help to explain how everything came to be here any better than natural laws. But to believe in supernatural beings requires a lot more imagination.

Christy: What about how beatiful and nourishing the world is. It’s perfectly suited for us. Don’t you see God’s loving hand behind everything?

Me: Not really, no.

Christy: But we live on an Earth that is perfect for our survival. If any detail was different, we couldn’t live here.

Me: That’s true of course, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a God behind the scenes making the Earth perfect for us. It’s not too hard to demonstrate that our species evolved to thrive in the conditions here. I think it was Douglas Adams who said that your argument is like a puddle thanking God that its hole was exactly the right shape for it to fit in.

Christy: Look at all of the barren worlds in our solar system. Life didn’t evolve there. The chance that life would just happen due to random chance must be astronomically small.

Me: That’s an oxymoron isn’t it? [smiles] Even given a very small probability of life occurring on any single planet, if you remember that there is a tremendous number of planets in the universe there is still a good chance that it would happen at least once. And the only place someone would be sitting with their friends talking about it would be on that one planet where it happened. So here we are.

Molly: What about the stars, flowers, newborn babies, mountains, and streams? Doesn’t all this beauty show you that there is a loving God?

Me: Sorry to be a killjoy, but what about the Ebola virus, wars, tsunamis, earthquakes, and child molesters? By your reasoning, don’t they show that there is a wicked, vicious God?

Christy: We create a lot of those evils. God has no control over our free will.

Me: So you’re saying that God is not all-powerful, that the world isn’t under his control?

Christy: No, just that He chose to give us free will so that we could worship Him freely.

Me: Couldn’t he have created us so that we we would want to worship him of our own free will? Why did he give us the desire to do evil?

Christy: We couldn’t have free will without the temptation to do evil. We need a chance to choose between good and evil.

Me: So God couldn’t create us with every opportunity to do evil but without the disposition to do evil?

Christy: That wouldn’t be true free will.

Me: Then God isn’t absolutely omnipotent. Or if he could create us with no disposition to do evil, but he chose not to, then he is evil himself because he caused the evil.

Molly: God couldn’t create us that way because part of us is uncreated and eternal. We always existed as something called an intelligence. God had to work with this preexisting intelligence in order to create our soul. He didn’t create us in the strictest sense of the word.

Me: So God isn’t omnipotent?

Molly: I guess not. He has limits and rules that He has to obey.

Me: So why should we worship him if he’s not all-powerful?

Molly: Because He is morally perfect, omniscient, and our only hope of becoming gods someday.

Me: Without going off on a tangent about the definition of perfection and omniscience, that seems fairly reasonable. What about all the evil in the world that doesn’t come from our own actions? What about disease and natural disasters? What do those things say about God?

Christy: What do you mean?

Me: I mean, why did God put us here in such a miserable position? Innocent children die painful, gruesome, lonely deaths. Tsunamis kill hundreds of thousands of people. The world is full of suffering. All religions admit that this is so. This doesn’t tell me that there is a loving God.

Christy: All of God’s children will receive justice and love in the afterlife.

Me: You’re begging the question again. You can’t use the supposed fact of God’s love as part of an argument that there is a loving God.

Christy: God put us in this world to learn from our experiences of evil. God uses evil to teach us to be good.

Me: So God created evil? He used the Shoah for his own purposes? Child molesters are doing God’s work? Satan is really on God’s payroll? Doesn’t that make God evil?

…

Me: Listen. We could go round and round about this all day, but for the sake of discussion, let’s take that the world must have come about because of some supernatural entity. Why should I believe that your God created it? Nothing that I see tells me that יהוה, one of the gods of the Iron Age Canaanite pantheon, created the universe. The fingerprint of יהוה isn’t all over creation that I can see. Couldn’t we use the same reasoning to justify a belief in any creator-god?

Christy: That’s a whole different topic.

Me: I suppose it is, but you do see why I don’t look at the world and say “Wow! A loving God must have done that.” You see why it’s not an obvious conclusion for me to make. Right?

Christy: I guess so.

Me: I think you’re going out trying to find a reason to justify your preexisting belief in God. You’re looking for evidence to confirm your beliefs but ignoring the evidence that contradicts your beliefs. You see kittens and puppies and butterflies but ignore malaria and cancer and cystic fibrosis. You want to believe in God so you create these elaborate justifications for his existence instead of making natural conclusions. The most obvious conclusion to make based on all of the evidence taken together is that the universe is amoral: neither good nor evil. I see no evidence in the world to believe in your God. This method of trying to prove God is actually pretty weak. I remain unconvinced.

…

Me: Molly, would you like some tea?

Molly: No, thanks. Against my religion.

Me: I know. [smiles]