Do the doctrines of God change?

[JLHPROF]

2 hours ago, Bill “Papa” Lee said:

To answer to the OP, within including every word...

Yes, is the short answer to, “do the doctrines of God change”. They have changed many times, with an on, and off again practice of polygamy. 

It was changed from the Law of Moses, and animal scrafice, to the doctrine of “The Atonement, and repentance via that single sacrifice of “flesh and blood”.  

The role of the “High Priests”, during the pre-moral, and High Priests, in the post mortal, just the name a few.  

You're confusing doctrines with practices.

Truth is eternal.  The laws and ordinances are eternal.

Everything else is based on our level of righteousness.

[Exiled]

4 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

So we've go 16 million delusional church members doing just fine and not getting locked up in the funny farm, and you can't put together a coherent argument without calling people names.

Heavy, dude.

Yes. But the good news is that it's only delusionment in a small area that occupies the primitive part of the brain that houses the fear of death and group pressure to conform. It can be cured. 🤔

[Bernard Gui]

6 hours ago, Exiled said:

As for valid techniques to speak to God, I'm at a loss. I don't think it happens and anyone who claims such is probably delusional. They are always claiming experiences where no one else is around. So, I would say there aren't valid techniques, except maybe ordinary means of communication, perhaps. Maybe using EmodE is a valid way for God to speak to man? It seems to be a thing with some.

What if you are not alone when it happens?

[mfbukowski]

10 hours ago, Exiled said:

Yes. But the good news is that it's only delusionment in a small area that occupies the primitive part of the brain that houses the fear of death and group pressure to conform. It can be cured. 🤔

Ah, the Fear of Knowledge argument. I have posted about that again and again.

But first you have to cure yourself from the positivist delusion that you can know the invisible reality beyond human experience. That was Booghasian's great error. 

All we can know is the world as we experience it.

THAT is the fly in the Cartesian ointment. You can't get around it.

[Nacho2dope]

13 hours ago, Bill “Papa” Lee said:

To answer to the OP, within including every word...

Yes, is the short answer to, “do the doctrines of God change”. They have changed many times, with an on, and off again practice of polygamy. 

It was changed from the Law of Moses, and animal scrafice, to the doctrine of “The Atonement, and repentance via that single sacrifice of “flesh and blood”.  

The role of the “High Priests”, during the pre-moral, and High Priests, in the post mortal, just the name a few.  

My understanding is that they stopped the practice of polygamy but never changed the doctrine. Can you help me understand how the doctrine changed?
Thanks!

[Exiled]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Ah, the Fear of Knowledge argument. I have posted about that again and again.

But first you have to cure yourself from the positivist delusion that you can know the invisible reality beyond human experience. That was Booghasian's great error. 

All we can know is the world as we experience it.

THAT is the fly in the Cartesian ointment. You can't get around it.

This is why missionary work should probably drastically change.  We just don't know, do we, and neither does the church.  The church is the org with the positivist problem.  They are the ones claiming that they can know the invisible reality beyond human experience, when they clearly don't.

[Storm Rider]

11 minutes ago, Exiled said:

This is why missionary work should probably drastically change.  We just don't know, do we, and neither does the church.  The church is the org with the positivist problem.  They are the ones claiming that they can know the invisible reality beyond human experience, when they clearly don't.

LOL - you are the one denying the potential of an invisible reality. Worse, in your personal ignorance you demand that no one can know. It is like the small child that sees the world from two feet declaring that no one can have a different perspective than from two feet. I always find this position strange and completely limiting. You advocate your position; you proselyte to bring others down to your perspective; yet, you are ignorant. Just too strange for words. 

[Kevin Christensen]

50 minutes ago, Exiled said:

This is why missionary work should probably drastically change.  We just don't know, do we, and neither does the church.  The church is the org with the positivist problem.  They are the ones claiming that they can know the invisible reality beyond human experience, when they clearly don't.

It would help if you knew what Positivism is, what its history is, and what its actual critique is, you might have a grasp of who does and who does not peddle positism.  Here is some help.

Quote

During the 1930’s and 1940’s the positivists had taken science as the norm for all meaningful discourse. Religious language was considered neither true nor false, but meaningless. The positivists had declared the famous Verification Principle, which states that, apart from tautologies and definitions, statements are meaningful only if they can be verified by sense data.⁶⁹ Accepting an oversimplified view of science as the prototype for all genuine knowledge, they dismissed religion as “purely emotive.”

During the 1950’s positivism came under increasing attack, but many of its assumptions were perpetuated in the empiricism which came to replace it as the dominant interpretation of science. Among the empiricist claims were the following. (1) Science starts from publicly observable data which can be described in a pure observation-language independent of any theoretical assumptions. (2) Theories can be verified or falsified by comparison with this fixed experimental data. (3) The choice between theories is rational, objective and in accordance with specifiable criteria. Philosophers under the sway of such empiricism continued to say that religion can legitimately make no cognitive claims.⁷⁰

It should be obvious, even to you, that you make these specific claims, that all of your criticisms of the LDS here are based on this world view, and that you use them as an unquestioned orthodoxy, and not as something to test.  However, the notions have been tested at length and found wanting.

Quote

These ideas came under increasing attack in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and three counter-claims were advanced. (1) All data are theory-laden; there is no neutral observation-language. (2) Theories are not verified or falsified; when data conflict with an accepted theory, they are usually set to one side as anomalies, or else auxiliary assumptions are modified. (3) There are no criteria for choice between rival theories of great generality, for the criteria are themselves theory-dependent.

The attack on empiricism was carried a step further in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn held that the thought and action of a scientific community are dominated by its paradigms, defined as ‘standard examples of scientific work which embody a set of conceptual, methodological and metaphysical assumptions’. He maintained that observational data and criteria for assessing theories are paradigm-dependent.⁷¹

Ian Barbour offered Critical Realism as an alternative view that I like and endorse:

Quote

To summarize: the scheme I have outlined accepts the three “subjective” theses that (1) all data are theory-laden, (2) comprehensive theories are highly resistant to falsification, and (3) there are no rules for choice between research programmes. It also preserves Kuhn’s most distinctive contributions concerning paradigms: the importance of exemplars in the transmission of a scientific tradition, and the strategic value of commitment to a research programme. At the same time I have made three assertions which seem to me essential for the objectivity of science: (1) rival theories are not incommensurable, (2) observation exerts some control over theories, and (3) there are criteria of assessment independent of particular research programmes.¹⁰⁸

There is much more, for those who want to understand.

https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/sophic-box-and-mantic-vista-a-review-of-deconstructing-mormonism/

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Exiled said:

This is why missionary work should probably drastically change.  We just don't know, do we, and neither does the church.  The church is the org with the positivist problem.  They are the ones claiming that they can know the invisible reality beyond human experience, when they clearly don't.

No that is precisely where you are wrong.  You have it exactly backwards.  It is the positivist who affirms that reality is NOT human experience as we experience it- there is no such thing as "objective" human experience independent of a human mind!!

Every sill phrase written by a positivist came out of...  a HUMAN MIND!!

Every philosopher since the death of positivism now has to contend with the obvious point that all we can know is human experience and nothing outside- and human experience includes religious experience and conscience.

Do positivists have a social conscience? Why?  Where is the evidence for such a thing?

This is finally the death of positivism because it postulates a position - that all utterances which cannot be supported by evidence- which cannot itself be supported by evidence!

All you THINK you see as "reality" is simply a product of how things appear to humans, manufactured by your brain.  Yes there are causes of those perceptions- read the Rorty quotes below, but all you CAN know is filtered through your senses and is in fact human experience.

And William James showed that human experience includes ethical knowledge and emotion and feeling, and yes prejudices, all mixed into what we "know". And yes that includes "spiritual experience"

You cannot escape seeing what your human brain limits you to seeing.  Every thought you think- perhaps- and that is the great perhaps- is conditioned by your human experience.

You cannot get outside of human experience.

That is one of the mysteries of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle is that we cannot get beyond the observer influencing what is observed!  If one expects to find that light behaves as a wave, it does.  If we expect light to behave as a particle, it does!

But what is light "really" independent of human perception?   No one will ever know because it will still be a human observation, written in a human - composed journal and peer approved by other humans all of whom are limited by human perception!

You cannot get outside human reality to "what really is" as long as you and all of us are humans!!

That that is exactly OK because what we DO observe/feel includes not just objects but intuition, "hunches" and spiritual experiences.

There is no justification for pretending to eliminate these from "human experience" simply because we cannot!!

Let me ask you a question:

How do you act when no one is watching you?

If you were in an Uber and found a wallet, would you keep it?

If you could murder someone and no one would ever be able to solve the crime would you do so?

Why not??

Would you feel something inside that told you that was wrong?  What would that feeling be?   Should you / do you follow that feeling and turn in the wallet or not murder the person?

I will wager that you would do the right thing!

But why?

Listen to the first two and a half minutes of this video by Christopher Hitchens- noted atheist and poster boy for positivisim and empirical evidence- contradict himself mightily by suggesting that we all might have a voice inside of us that we listen to, called our "conscience"

There is no objective data to substantiate that. 

 He is affirming the "still small voice" and thereby totally blows his whole argument, and with it, positivism and atheism with it!

Note that in his explanation of a "daemon" he almost says "spirit" 

I believe that feeling/knowledge/voice we all feel- unless of course we are sociopaths of psychopaths - is the voice of God.  I define "God" to be that voice.

That "voice" /feeling/spirit/ daemon/is what tells you what is right

And even a world famous atheist cannot deny that proposition should I choose to define "God" in terms of that "Other" outside ourselves- as we experience it.

Whatever "it is" - even if those words make sense- I choose to DEFINE as God- and Hitchens nor Rorty nor Nagel nor Boghossian nor any other post-positivist atheist philosopher would deny that definition.

Is that what the church teaches?  Yes I believe that is precisely what the church teaches- using perhaps a different linguistic context.

So I suggest that if you have the courage to answer at all - you answer fully and tell me about why you would turn in that wallet or not murder someone given the opportunity of no possible punishment.

If Hitchins feels this- do you? 

https://youtu.be/bx1yXvcT2kw

Just the first 2 1/2 minutes will suffice- after that it becomes the usual theist/atheist debacle.

 

[Exiled]

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

No that is precisely where you are wrong.  You have it exactly backwards.  It is the positivist who affirms that reality is NOT human experience as we experience it- there is no such thing as "objective" human experience independent of a human mind!!

Every sill phrase written by a positivist came out of...  a HUMAN MIND!!

Every philosopher since the death of positivism now has to contend with the obvious point that all we can know is human experience and nothing outside- and human experience includes religious experience and conscience.

Do positivists have a social conscience? Why?  Where is the evidence for such a thing?

This is finally the death of positivism because it postulates a position - that all utterances which cannot be supported by evidence- which cannot itself be supported by evidence!

All you THINK you see as "reality" is simply a product of how things appear to humans, manufactured by your brain.  Yes there are causes of those perceptions- read the Rorty quotes below, but all you CAN know is filtered through your senses and is in fact human experience.

And William James showed that human experience includes ethical knowledge and emotion and feeling, and yes prejudices, all mixed into what we "know". And yes that includes "spiritual experience"

You cannot escape seeing what your human brain limits you to seeing.  Every thought you think- perhaps- and that is the great perhaps- is conditioned by your human experience.

You cannot get outside of human experience.

That is one of the mysteries of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle is that we cannot get beyond the observer influencing what is observed!  If one expects to find that light behaves as a wave, it does.  If we expect light to behave as a particle, it does!

But what is light "really" independent of human perception?   No one will ever know because it will still be a human observation, written in a human - composed journal and peer approved by other humans all of whom are limited by human perception!

You cannot get outside human reality to "what really is" as long as you and all of us are humans!!

That that is exactly OK because what we DO observe/feel includes not just objects but intuition, "hunches" and spiritual experiences.

There is no justification for pretending to eliminate these from "human experience" simply because we cannot!!

Let me ask you a question:

How do you act when no one is watching you?

If you were in an Uber and found a wallet, would you keep it?

If you could murder someone and no one would ever be able to solve the crime would you do so?

Why not??

Would you feel something inside that told you that was wrong?  What would that feeling be?   Should you / do you follow that feeling and turn in the wallet or not murder the person?

I will wager that you would do the right thing!

But why?

Listen to the first two and a half minutes of this video by Christopher Hitchens- noted atheist and poster boy for positivisim and empirical evidence- contradict himself mightily by suggesting that we all might have a voice inside of us that we listen to, called our "conscience"

There is no objective data to substantiate that. 

 He is affirming the "still small voice" and thereby totally blows his whole argument, and with it, positivism and atheism with it!

Note that in his explanation of a "daemon" he almost says "spirit" 

I believe that feeling/knowledge/voice we all feel- unless of course we are sociopaths of psychopaths - is the voice of God.  I define "God" to be that voice.

That "voice" /feeling/spirit/ daemon/is what tells you what is right

And even a world famous atheist cannot deny that proposition should I choose to define "God" in terms of that "Other" outside ourselves- as we experience it.

Whatever "it is" - even if those words make sense- I choose to DEFINE as God- and Hitchens nor Rorty nor Nagel nor Boghossian nor any other post-positivist atheist philosopher would deny that definition.

Is that what the church teaches?  Yes I believe that is precisely what the church teaches- using perhaps a different linguistic context.

So I suggest that if you have the courage to answer at all - you answer fully and tell me about why you would turn in that wallet or not murder someone given the opportunity of no possible punishment.

If Hitchins feels this- do you? 

https://youtu.be/bx1yXvcT2kw

Just the first 2 1/2 minutes will suffice- after that it becomes the usual theist/atheist debacle.

 

Ok. But how is the history of the mormon church not fraudulent, or not delusional? I will freely admit that I am not well versed in philosophy and I tend to side with science and reason since these have given society a lot of advances and have helped to detect a lot of "magic" fraudsters have perpetrated. Why should I believe you? Perhaps philosophy has gone away from experimentation and positivism. However, it seems the more subjective one gets, the more one doesn't trust the senses, the more one is opened up to fraud, to gaslighting, to silly stories that try to justify "god" speaking to man through inanimate objects.

I think you are trying to justify an unjustifiable belief simply because you feel the need to find any reason to do so and not many understand philosophy, so magic ensues.

Does God speak through rocks?  I think the best answer is no. It looks like a magician's prop and then there is DNA that has no reasonable answer to why it isn't there, and so on.

Let me know when there are some answers without the gaslighting.  Fyi, people dont like being told something isn't there when it clearly is.

[Kevin Christensen]

One of the things that philosophers and perceptive historians have noticed is that the term "magic" typically shows up as a way of diminishing the religious claims of another party.  Joseph Smith never claimed to have "magic" rocks.  You provide that language, which tells us more about you than his experience with the seer stones.

Consider this example, in light of the testability of Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage.

Quote

Let’s see how scientists work in physics, the most objective of the hard sciences:

A classic instance was the beta-decay of the nucleus, in which experimental data seemed clearly to violate the law of conservation of energy. Rather than abandon this law, physicists postulated an unobservable particle, the neutrino, to account for the discrepancy. Only at a considerably later point was there any independent evidence for the existence of the neutrino.⁹⁹

Until the existence of neutrinos was confirmed, Vogel would have to claim, in order to maintain the consistency of his own concept of science, that these scientists were “explaining away evidence” and resorting to an ad hoc hypothesis in the manner of New Age Religion. The evidence for neutrinos was eventually confirmed by scientists who were looking for them. As the technology and tools became available, they designed experiments and apparatus specifically to find them, and the effort was based on faith in the eventual successful outcome.

https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1458&index=14

Sagan's argument with the invisible dragon in the garage has to do with testability, implying that there is no way to test for the invisible dragon.  That is straight ahead positivism, and the experience of scientists and hypothesis and later discovery of the neutrino illustrates the problem.   What if you just haven't thought of a legitimate test, or if your paradigm discourages you from evening imagining a test, or don't yet have the tools?   It happens that what Joseph Smith provides with the Book of Mormon is eminently testable.  Nibley pointed this out in New Approaches to Book of Mormon Study

Quote

One of the best-established disciplines in the world is the critical examination of written texts to detect what in them is spurious and what is genuine. … [T]he rules given by Blass are all obvious enough on experience and reflection, but every one of them is a stumbling block to the superficial critic, and [Page 86]they have all been scrupulously avoided by those attacking the Book of Mormon.

To begin with, says Blass, “We have the document, and the name of its author; we must begin our examination by assuming the author indicated really wrote it.” You always begin by assuming the text is genuine. What critic of the Book of Mormon has ever done that?

…Thus while we can never prove absolutely that the Book is what it claims to be, we are justified at the outset in assuming that is it what it claims to be. If one assumes that it is true, its features at least become testable.

Of course, the testing is complicated due to the fact that “a network of theories and observations is always tested together. Any particular hypothesis can be maintained by rejecting or adjusting other auxiliary hypotheses.” (Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms, 99). 

However, if a person is explicit about the assumptions they are making, those assumptions become subject to critical analysis and assessment and testing in ways that hidden assumptions and unspoken ideologies do not.   Those assuming that the Book of Mormon ought to account for all native populations, rather than one small influx test differently.  Those assuming that hill of considerable size in New York is the site of the final battles test differently than those who try to puzzle together the textual descriptions of a narrow strip of wilderness extending from the east sea to the west sea, volcanos, written language, cities of cement to the North, and the course of the Sidon and the experience of Limhi's explorers, and the relation of Desolation and the Narrow neck to Hermounts.

https://www.fairmormon.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2008-Larry-Poulsen.pdf

So the Book of Mormon makes a huge number of explicit and testable claims, and has been tested at length in a countless ways that Joseph Smith could not have anticipated or imagined.  Hand waving dismissals and sneers and inappropriate testing by means of metaphors about invisible dragons that just happen to have beam-shaped neutrinos in their eyes do not constitute foolproof tests.  Kuhn says it makes sense to ask which explanation is better,  if you make sure that you weigh "better" in terms a genuine comparison of testability, accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, simplicity and aesthetics, fruitfulness, and future promise.  I recently reviewed Ann Taves' approach to the Book of Mormon, observing that her explanation attempts only to account for the bulk of the text, but not any of the detailed predictions about Jerusalem around 600 BCE, the physical details and cultures of the journey to Bountiful, and the details and culture of the new world. There are literally hundreds of books and studies by LDS scholars, and several impressive pieces by non LDS scholars, such as Barker, Charlesworth, and Stendahl.  I can easily test whether the invisible dragon hypothesis is an apt metaphor by doing actual research.  If I use the invisible dragon metaphor as a magical amulet to make all of that work disappear without any serious examination or explanation, I am actually telling observers far more about myself than about the plausibility of Joseph Smith's claims and the scholarship produced by believers.

https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1436&index=8

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by Kevin Christensen

[Bill “Papa” Lee]

On 4/22/2019 at 12:51 AM, JLHPROF said:

You're confusing doctrines with practices.

Truth is eternal.  The laws and ordinances are eternal.

Everything else is based on our level of righteousness.

I was only  listing changes to doctrine and practices, not giving weight to one or the other, the right or wrong of the matter.  

[Wade Englund]

On 4/22/2019 at 9:06 PM, Exiled said:

 I will freely admit that I am not well versed in philosophy and I tend to side with science and reason since these have given society a lot of advances and have helped to detect a lot of "magic" fraudsters have perpetrated.

I note with interest that you didn't mention a reliance on art, if not religion. This suggests to me that you either only use half your brain, or you are unaware of just how much you rely on both hemispheres of the brain. I am not referring here to the old left (reason)/right (emotion) brain myth, but the new science on the matter:

 

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Exiled]

8 hours ago, Wade Englund said:

I note with interest that you didn't mention a reliance on art, if not religion. This suggests to me that you either only use half your brain, or you are unaware of just how much you rely on both hemispheres of the brain. I am not referring here to the old left (reason)/right (emotion) brain myth, but the new science on the matter:

 

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Wade, I think the argument goes like this:

1.  Religious leader makes claims he has had an experience with the divine.

2.  Only religious leader was a witness and in the case of mormonism, selected persons with a believing disposition are allowed to be witnesses too in one of the events but not the others. 

3.  We must rely on the leader and our feelings about the leader after prayer.

4.  No other proof is given, except feelings after prayer.

5.  Questioner is then ridiculed because he demands proof and attempts are made to gaslight the questioner into believing that he just isn't viewing the narrative in the correct way.  If only the questioner could view the clouds like the believer does, all would be well.

6.  And don't forget the threats of eternal punishment or eternally being less than if one doesn't obey without question.

 

It is no sin to ask questions or demand proof independent of feelings.  The supposed existence of the plates and having witnesses to the plates in the first place was a tepid attempt to satisfy the questioners.  Joseph Smith's rock in the hat performances were more of the same.  It's just that more proof is required to take the whole enterprise out of the realm of fraud.  Yet "God" in his infinite wisdom doesn't allow this, apparently.  He expects us to simply trust his leaders who have these supposed "experiences" behind closed doors.

Let me know when there is more proof and I will look at it.

[mfbukowski]

On 4/23/2019 at 8:58 AM, Kevin Christensen said:

If I use the invisible dragon metaphor as a magical amulet to make all of that work disappear without any serious examination or explanation, I am actually telling observers far more about myself than about the plausibility of Joseph Smith's claims and the scholarship produced by believers.

Triple rep points for this if I could give them.

On 4/22/2019 at 8:06 PM, Exiled said:

I will freely admit that I am not well versed in philosophy and I tend to side with science and reason since these have given society a lot of advances...

But your empiricism is incomplete and does not include the fact that all you can know is what humans can know including our own (your own) prejudices.

Quote

 

Radical empiricism is a postulate, a statement of fact and a conclusion, says James in The Meaning of Truth. The postulate is that "the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience". The fact is that our experience contains disconnected entities as well as various types of connections, it is full of meaning and values. The conclusion is that our worldview does not need "extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism

You are ignoring half of what it is to be a human, observing.  You ignore the observer.

And so there is really nothing more for me to say to those who are not willing to learn.

Edited April 24, 2019 by mfbukowski

[Exiled]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

And so there is really nothing more for me to say to those who are not willing to learn.

Please stop with the nonsense that you are some guru or teacher.  You have a B.S. in philosophy and act as though it is something amazing.  You oversell and under-deliver.  You are the one mired in magical thinking and have to use these tactics to gaslight because there is no proof to what you believe.  The philosophers you seemingly worship would probably laugh at the tenets of mormonism or at least politely refuse to believe it at best.  Let me know when there is some proof to this.  I am sure you would jump on the proof bandwagon if there were any and would put your gaslighting paradigms aside if suddenly Nephite civilization were found or at least some semitic DNA from 600 B.C. were found among the natives.  Suddenly, a convert to science would arise from the dust of post-modern deflationary thought if proof were found.

[mfbukowski]

21 minutes ago, Exiled said:

Please stop with the nonsense that you are some guru or teacher.  You have a B.S. in philosophy and act as though it is something amazing.  You oversell and under-deliver.  You are the one mired in magical thinking and have to use these tactics to gaslight because there is no proof to what you believe.  The philosophers you seemingly worship would probably laugh at the tenets of mormonism or at least politely refuse to believe it at best.  Let me know when there is some proof to this.  I am sure you would jump on the proof bandwagon if there were any and would put your gaslighting paradigms aside if suddenly Nephite civilization were found or at least some semitic DNA from 600 B.C. were found among the natives.  Suddenly, a convert to science would arise from the dust of post-modern deflationary thought if proof were found.

And so there is really nothing more for me to say to those who are not willing to learn.  So I will let others educate you should you change and choose to learn something

Rorty's wife was LDS and he defended the position repeatedly.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/

Quote

 

1. History of Deflationism

The deflationary theory has been one of the most popular approaches to truth in the twentieth century, having received explicit defense by Frege, Ramsey, Ayer, and Quine, as well as sympathetic treatment from many others. (According to Dummett 1959, the view originates with Frege.) The following passages all contain recognizable versions of the doctrine, though they differ on points of detail.

 

Since I am now a "guru" let me educate you without watering it down.

Quote

 

2. The Equivalence Schema

Perhaps because of the widespread interest in deflationism, the theory has received many different formulations. The result is that there is not so much a deflationary theory of truth as many. In recent times, however, the deflationary theory has most often been presented with the help of a schema, which is sometimes called the equivalence schema:

(ES) <p> is true if and only if p.

In this schema angle brackets indicate an appropriate name-forming device, e.g. quotation marks or ‘the proposition that …’, and occurrences of ‘p’ are replaced with sentences to yield instances of the schema. With the help of (ES), we can formulate deflationism as the view, roughly, that the instances of this schema capture everything significant that can be said about truth. Theories which depart from deflationism deny that the equivalence schema tells us the whole truth about truth. Since such theories add to the equivalence schema, they are often called inflationary theories of truth. (The equivalence schema is associated with Alfred Tarski (1944, 1958), but it is far from obvious that Tarski was any sort of deflationist. We will largely set Tarski aside here.)

Formulated in this way, deflationism does not give an explicit definition of truth, for (ES) is not a definition of anything. Indeed, some deflationists (most notably Horwich 1998b) do not provide an explicit definition of truth at all. Instead, they provide an explicit definition of having the concept of truth. To be more precise, the suggestion is that someone has the concept of truth just in case he or she is disposed to accept all (noncontroversial) instances of the equivalence schema, i.e., every sentence of the form ‘<p> is true if and only if p’ that is not paradoxical or in some other way deviant. Of course, such deflationists may think that, in saying something about what it is to have the concept of truth, they have told us what the concept of truth is. But the latter is a by-product of the former; for this reason, we can say that these deflationists are proposing an implicit definition of the concept of truth.

Are there versions of deflationism, or positions allied to deflationism, which do not employ the equivalence schema or some similar device? Yes, but we shall mention them here only to set them aside. One such view — which may be called expressivism — is the analogue of emotivism in ethics. (This view of truth is often associated with Strawson 1950, though the attribution is a difficult one.) According to emotivism, at least in one of its most traditional forms, utterances of the form ‘torture is wrong’ do not, despite appearances, predicate ‘is wrong’ of torture; rather utterances of ‘torture is wrong’ merely indicate a negative attitude on the part of the speaker toward torture. Expressivism is the parallel position about truth. According to expressivism, utterances of the form ‘S is true’ do not, despite appearances, predicate ‘is true’ of S; rather ‘S is true’ merely indicates preparedness on the part of the speaker to assert S.

Another such view is the prosentential theory of truth advanced by Dorothy Grover (see Grover, Camp and Belnap 1973, and Grover 1992) . According to this theory, sentences formed with the predicate ‘is true’ are prosentences, where a prosentence is a device for achieving anaphoric cross-reference to sentences uttered previously in a conversation, just as pronouns are devices for achieving anaphoric cross-reference to names uttered previously in a conversation. According to the prosentential theory, for example, just as in

(1) Mary wanted to buy a car, but she could only afford a motorbike.

we interpret ‘she’ as a pronoun anaphorically dependent on ‘Mary’, so too in

(2) Snow is white. That is true, but it rarely looks white in Pittsburgh.

we interpret ‘That is true’ as a prosentence anaphorically dependent on ‘Snow is white’.

Expressivism and the prosentential theory are close cousins of deflationism, and, in some uses of the term, might reasonably be called deflationary. However, they are also sufficiently different from those versions of deflationism that utilize the equivalence schema to be set aside here. The important difference between expressivism and the prosentential theory on the one hand, and deflationism as we are understanding it on the other, concerns the logical structure of sentences such as ‘S is true’. For the deflationist, the structure of such sentences is very straightforward: ‘S is true’ predicates the property expressed by ‘is true’ of the thing denoted by ‘S’. We might express this by saying that, according to deflationism, ‘S is true’ says of S that it is true, just as ‘apples are red’ says, of apples, that they are red or ‘John sleeps’ says, of John, that he sleeps. Both expressivism and the prosentential theory deny this, though for different reasons. According to expressivism, ‘S is true’ is properly interpreted not even of subject-predicate form; rather it has the structure ‘Hooray to S’. Obviously, therefore, it does not say, ofS, that it is true. According to prosententialism, by contrast, while ‘S is true’ has a subject-predicate structure, it would still be mistaken to interpret it as being about S. For consider: according to the prosentential theory, ‘S is true’ is a prosentence which stands in for the sentence denoted by S just as ‘she’ in (1) is a pronoun which stands in for the name ‘Mary’. But we do not say that ‘she’ in (1) is about the name ‘Mary’; similarly, according to the prosentential theory, we should not say that ‘S is true’ is about S. To suppose otherwise would be to misconstrue the nature of anaphora.

 

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by mfbukowski

[pogi]

On 4/21/2019 at 10:51 PM, JLHPROF said:

You're confusing doctrines with practices.

Truth is eternal.  The laws and ordinances are eternal.

Everything else is based on our level of righteousness.

Are you confusing eternal truths with doctrines?

The way I see it, current doctrines are simply what we covenant to obey at this particular place in time - and that can and does change over time.  For example, would you consider the Word of Wisdom to be doctrine?  I would.  Boy has that changed!

Laws can and do change in the church based, as you say, on our level of righteousness and what we are willing to covenant to.  They can be temporarily applied to aid in the progressive nature and levels of truth.  Lower laws are temporarily applied to aid in advancing to higher laws.   For example - the LAW of tithing; is that "law' doctrine?  I would say yes.  Will that doctrine be done away in time as it previously was?  What about the LAW of Moses?  Since it was a "law" and not simply a "practice", does that make it eternal truth and doctrine that we are obligated to obey?   A person cannot simultaneously be expected to live the law of tithing AND the law of consecration.  They cannot co-exist in application for an individual.  Therefore, the laws of God are relative, they are progressive.  They can, do, and will change for us in the church as we progress. 

The current doctrines are relative to us in this period of time only.

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by pogi

[Wade Englund]

2 hours ago, Exiled said:

Wade, I think the argument goes like this:

1.  Religious leader makes claims he has had an experience with the divine.

2.  Only religious leader was a witness and in the case of mormonism, selected persons with a believing disposition are allowed to be witnesses too in one of the events but not the others. 

3.  We must rely on the leader and our feelings about the leader after prayer.

4.  No other proof is given, except feelings after prayer.

5.  Questioner is then ridiculed because he demands proof and attempts are made to gaslight the questioner into believing that he just isn't viewing the narrative in the correct way.  If only the questioner could view the clouds like the believer does, all would be well.

6.  And don't forget the threats of eternal punishment or eternally being less than if one doesn't obey without question.

For the most part, that is a straw man.  It mistakenly assumes that faith is binary state resulting from an event,  rather than a growth process. It considers the starting point of Moroni 10, but neglects the ongoing workings of Alma 32. Most importantly, it demonstrates a lack of awareness or familiarity with the intent of the Gospel--which, by the way isn't "truth," since "truth" is but a means to the intended end.

Quote

It is no sin to ask questions or demand proof independent of feelings.  The supposed existence of the plates and having witnesses to the plates in the first place was a tepid attempt to satisfy the questioners.  Joseph Smith's rock in the hat performances were more of the same.  It's just that more proof is required to take the whole enterprise out of the realm of fraud.  Yet "God" in his infinite wisdom doesn't allow this, apparently.  He expects us to simply trust his leaders who have these supposed "experiences" behind closed doors.

Let me know when there is more proof and I will look at it.

It is difficult, if not impossible to help people see things they are unaware of when their eyes are willfully closed. The sin isn't in questioning or asking for more proof. The sin is in materialistic pride and trusting solely in the astonishing limited and fallible mind of men--or rather just that hemisphere of the brain relegated to the "known."

Thanks, -Wade Englund- 

Edited April 24, 2019 by Wade Englund

[Storm Rider]

1 hour ago, Exiled said:

Please stop with the nonsense that you are some guru or teacher.  You have a B.S. in philosophy and act as though it is something amazing.  You oversell and under-deliver.  You are the one mired in magical thinking and have to use these tactics to gaslight because there is no proof to what you believe.  The philosophers you seemingly worship would probably laugh at the tenets of mormonism or at least politely refuse to believe it at best.  Let me know when there is some proof to this.  I am sure you would jump on the proof bandwagon if there were any and would put your gaslighting paradigms aside if suddenly Nephite civilization were found or at least some semitic DNA from 600 B.C. were found among the natives.  Suddenly, a convert to science would arise from the dust of post-modern deflationary thought if proof were found.

Hmm, avoiding interaction with Kevin. I wonder why that is?  It makes me think of the old joke about the little frog that had an alligator mouth, but a tadpole backside.

[USU78]

On 4/23/2019 at 9:58 AM, Kevin Christensen said:

One of the things that philosophers and perceptive historians have noticed is that the term "magic" typically shows up as a way of diminishing the religious claims of another party.  Joseph Smith never claimed to have "magic" rocks.  You provide that language, which tells us more about you than his experience with the seer stones.

Consider this example, in light of the testability of Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage.

https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1458&index=14

Sagan's argument with the invisible dragon in the garage has to do with testability, implying that there is no way to test for the invisible dragon.  That is straight ahead positivism, and the experience of scientists and hypothesis and later discovery of the neutrino illustrates the problem.   What if you just haven't thought of a legitimate test, or if your paradigm discourages you from evening imagining a test, or don't yet have the tools?   It happens that what Joseph Smith provides with the Book of Mormon is eminently testable.  Nibley pointed this out in New Approaches to Book of Mormon Study

Of course, the testing is complicated due to the fact that “a network of theories and observations is always tested together. Any particular hypothesis can be maintained by rejecting or adjusting other auxiliary hypotheses.” (Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms, 99). 

However, if a person is explicit about the assumptions they are making, those assumptions become subject to critical analysis and assessment and testing in ways that hidden assumptions and unspoken ideologies do not.   Those assuming that the Book of Mormon ought to account for all native populations, rather than one small influx test differently.  Those assuming that hill of considerable size in New York is the site of the final battles test differently than those who try to puzzle together the textual descriptions of a narrow strip of wilderness extending from the east sea to the west sea, volcanos, written language, cities of cement to the North, and the course of the Sidon and the experience of Limhi's explorers, and the relation of Desolation and the Narrow neck to Hermounts.

https://www.fairmormon.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2008-Larry-Poulsen.pdf

So the Book of Mormon makes a huge number of explicit and testable claims, and has been tested at length in a countless ways that Joseph Smith could not have anticipated or imagined.  Hand waving dismissals and sneers and inappropriate testing by means of metaphors about invisible dragons that just happen to have beam-shaped neutrinos in their eyes do not constitute foolproof tests.  Kuhn says it makes sense to ask which explanation is better,  if you make sure that you weigh "better" in terms a genuine comparison of testability, accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, simplicity and aesthetics, fruitfulness, and future promise.  I recently reviewed Ann Taves' approach to the Book of Mormon, observing that her explanation attempts only to account for the bulk of the text, but not any of the detailed predictions about Jerusalem around 600 BCE, the physical details and cultures of the journey to Bountiful, and the details and culture of the new world. There are literally hundreds of books and studies by LDS scholars, and several impressive pieces by non LDS scholars, such as Barker, Charlesworth, and Stendahl.  I can easily test whether the invisible dragon hypothesis is an apt metaphor by doing actual research.  If I use the invisible dragon metaphor as a magical amulet to make all of that work disappear without any serious examination or explanation, I am actually telling observers far more about myself than about the plausibility of Joseph Smith's claims and the scholarship produced by believers.

https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1436&index=8

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

 

An observation: after reading the follow-up posts, the following pun jumped into my mind -- radical imperiousness (in lieu of radical materialism), a good approximation, I think, of the cocksureness of the immovable and unteachable radical materialist.

Edited April 24, 2019 by USU78

[Calm]

1 hour ago, pogi said:

Are you confusing eternal truths with doctrines?

The way I see it, current doctrines are simply what we covenant to obey at this particular place in time - and that can and does change over time.  For example, would you consider the Word of Wisdom to be doctrine?  I would.  Boy has that changed!

I see doctrine as how men who are prophets understand and teach eternal truths.

They also teach practices and the principles behind them that may or may not tie directly to eternal truths, but are how they understand the world/life’s purpose, imperfect mirroring of God’s reality that it will be.

God may understand them/everything perfectly, but mortal man does not have that capacity so doctrines will change over time as capacity changes.

Capacity can change in multiple ways, so change may be evidence of progress or loss or simply a neutral readjustment to cultural understanding or even all of the above, given how complex human behaviour is.

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by Calm

[Exiled]

1 hour ago, Storm Rider said:

Hmm, avoiding interaction with Kevin. I wonder why that is?  It makes me think of the old joke about the little frog that had an alligator mouth, but a tadpole backside.

I only have so much time during the day. I'll get to what Kevin wrote next as I am not going to engage the "philosopher" for a bit. Anyway, as you might guess, I want some proof and excuses for a lack thereof through paradigm shifting or various techniques to squint the eyes and such are viewed as simple gaslighting to me. Perhaps these have an alligator mouth .....

 

[Exiled]

1 hour ago, Wade Englund said:

For the most part, that is a straw man.  It mistakenly assumes that faith is binary state resulting from an event,  rather than a growth process. It considers the starting point of Moroni 10, but neglects the ongoing workings of Alma 32. Most importantly, it demonstrates a lack of awareness or familiarity with the intent of the Gospel--which, by the way isn't "truth," since "truth" is but a means to the intended end.

It is difficult, if not impossible to help people see things they are unaware of when their eyes are willfully closed. The sin isn't in questioning or asking for more proof. The sin is in materialistic pride and trusting solely in the astonishing limited and fallible mind of men--or rather just that hemisphere of the brain relegated to the "known."

Thanks, -Wade Englund- 

I could be the most humble, teachable person in the world but won't get credit for such until I believe as you do. Seems pretty convenient to me. I think the problem is that God didn't give you and your cohorts much to work with. The world is happy with science and the benefits it brings. God, the creator, the master of science supposedly doesn't want his ways to be found out through proof? It seems made up. Fraudsters and hucksters use the same methods of attacking questioners and demanding obedience without proof.

[Storm Rider]

1 minute ago, Exiled said:

I only have so much time during the day. I'll get to what Kevin wrote next as I am not going to engage the "philosopher" for a bit. Anyway, as you might guess, I want some proof and excuses for a lack thereof through paradigm shifting or various techniques to squint the eyes and such are viewed as simple gaslighting to me. Perhaps these have an alligator mouth .....

 

Dear Friend, I was only joshing you. I respect your position; you can be a little strident though. I acknowledge that your being strident is not a unique position. You speak from a position of absolute knowledge and I will often respond too harshly when that happens. 

Honestly, I don't know Kevin's background; however, I am a fan of his comments on this Board. If you interest is actually finding and knowing truth, I recommend you interact with him. It is not a bad thing to learn from an individual with answers. 

My position is from a seeker of truth. I don't really care where it is found. If I debate issues relative to Christianity, it is from this position.  I am just as apt to quote Catholic theologians as I am to use LDS doctrine. I will even occasionally quote J. Kenneth Grider, and the Zohar.