OGHoosier

I mean, I can't determine what is true using that method, as long as the requirements for "determine" are sufficiently stringent. I once read a book by a philosopher named Philip Wiebe, who is one of my favorite philosophers (though he unfortunately passed away a few years ago) and a significant influence in my own thought. The book was entitled Intuitive Knowing as Spiritual Experience. The thrust of the book is Wiebe's discussion of his own conversion to Christianity after several decades as an atheist philosopher (of epistemology, the study of what constitutes knowledge, no less), in conversation with a database maintained by the University of Wales containing 45 first-hand accounts of people having experiences which cause them to "know things they have no right to know." Wiebe goes into the question of reliability and finds similarly to what you have - the reliability of "intuitive knowing" as method is not readily demonstrable - but maintains that belief in the output of individual spiritual experiences or "intuitive knowing" is still justifiable because "spiritual experience" is a remarkably fuzzy category and is not really suitable for classification as a "method." I mean, we're fundamentally talking about a set of sensations here - it's really hard to rigorously categorize! I can't say that I consider anybody else's spiritual experiences as existing in the same category as mine because there's no way to really compare the phenomena - we both felt the experience was special in some way but that's basically the only boundary on the umbrella of "spiritual experience", which is way too wide to do serious comparisons. This leads me to the belief that each experience is (as Blake Ostler also argues) sui generis, and needs to be taken individually. If you want to run with spiritual experiences as method a little more, though... Almost any method can be impugned if you define it without clearly addressing its inputs, because virtually all methods of thought have produced erroneous outcomes, but we also accept beliefs from methods which produce contradictory results across society. For instance, take political and philosophical reasoning. There is a wide diversity of views which are not simply subjective - our faculties of reasoning, when applied to politics and philosophy, are oriented towards the truth, but diversity in conclusions remains! We confront these differences by disputing the inputs of the method - our data - but even that doesn't produce uniformity. Are we justified in holding those beliefs which we arrive at using our philosophical reasoning? How rigorous does an epistemological method have to be, how exclusive of error, before we hold beliefs based on it? In other words, I'd like to push on the bolded: Lessening one's confidence may be appropriate. But total dismissal seems a bridge too far to me. I don't think we have a very good account of the inputs of spiritual experience. It seems to be a very dynamic, even chaotic phenomenon that takes inputs from both the divine and human side. So long as that is the case, it's hard to pinpoint where the mistakes lie, if mistakes they in fact are. However, I don't think we should discount the phenomenon of spiritual experience because it misfires every now and again - all epistemologies are vulnerable to that to some degree. It really, honestly, depends on your tolerance for error and how worried you are about Type I errors (incorrectly believing something false) vs. Type II errors (incorrectly dismissing something true).

As I said: I suggest that the convergence you perceive is an artifact of your search methods. You will likely agree with Benjamin McGuire's assessment that chiasmus in the Book of Mormon cannot be regarded as particularly compelling evidence for an ancient origin because the literary form is not unique to ancient Hebrew - that same form pops up in later European writings but is called by other names, like "ring form." LDS scholars, familiar with biblical Hebrew but not as familiar with Middle High German, fixed on the appearance of the literary form and flagged it as something they were familiar with from Hebrew without considering that the phenomenon might occur elsewhere under other names. I believe you have done something similar, and passed over many examples of the cited epistemic virtues because they were not explicitly described in Pinker's terms, or found among the reading materials to which you regularly refer. No, I am not saying that. I am saying that the four features you describe are tools, they do not equally fit all inquiries, and must be applied correctly in order to work - and in my experience the major areas where I and others have disagreed with those thinkers you cited concern precisely the considerations of fit, proper application, and metaphysics which govern whether or not a prediction actually follows from a theory. As I said right after the section you quote: Prediction and falsification become more difficult to apply the further you get away from physics. I don't know how you could even apply them to a priori reasoning like Godel's ontological argument or Russell's mathematics. You could apply them to biblical studies but only in a sort of post facto way - with the exception of yet-to-be-found inscriptions from relevant periods (of which there are not likely to be many) the body of observable data is pretty much fixed, thus you can't make predictions about new discoveries, so you're stuck making predictions about new theories. The making of predictions thus collapses into the alternative criterion of "explanatory power" since all you're predicting is the emergence of explanations. So it makes sense for you to group the physicists together, no objection there, but then you tack on Russell and Bokovoy and Ehrman and I'm left wondering what the actual unifying criterion is since the application of prediction + falsifiability to their fields is so different. It seems to be something along the lines of a very general "they look at the world, observe that it doesn't match what they think follows from theistic beliefs, and thus came to belief in naturalism" - that seems to be what they have in common. Which is why I said: After all, I don't see you mentioning the atheist Thomas Nagel, who affirmatively hopes that there is no God and yet finds himself incapable of accepting materialist reductionism and neo-Darwinism in particular. His case is a striking counterexample to your theory of general convergence on materialism - an anomaly if not a disproof. However, at this point it seems that tossing further counterexamples out there would just be repetition. If you want to agree with Carroll, Ehrman, et al, go ahead - they make reasonable cases though I'm not ultimately convinced. But you can't make a convergence argument based on a common methodology if the methodology in question is so highly abstracted. If you make that methodological tent too big you'll invite people into it who undermine your argument, and I believe you have substantially done so. To lay out some of my own epistemological commitments - I think the idea of a unitary "method of rationality" is absurd, and frankly a lot of my beef would dissolve if you would drop Pinker's pompous appropriation of the term "rationality" for what is in reality a cognitive science-flavored falsificationism. A priori reasoning and deduction, for instance, have nothing to do with the four tools mentioned above, and yet are indispensable to any rational endeavour (indeed, they underlie all reasoning.) My own beliefs are more in line with Norton, Paul Feyerabend, and the general school of American pragmatism: there is no universal method of induction or methodology of reasoning which has a handle on all truth. That would be spooky in itself, is not to be expected from such a complicated universe, and for good measure Godel killed the very possibility of a comprehensive axiomatic system. "The method of rationality" would better be described as a toolbox in which some methods work on some problems but none work on all. "Science" is what scientists do and further demarcation is mere politics. We believe in what works, and what is consistent with what works. An interesting corollary is that this complicates the common account of "bias." Heuristics are less elaborated tools, but functional and even optimal in some contexts, therefore bias is not automatically imprecatory. Its epistemic harms can only be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, and accusations of bias have to be viewed with heightened scrutiny since they often function as a method of dismissing foundational value differences. I have a hard time explaining Thomas Nagel's, or Iain McGilchrist's, or Larry Sangers', or Don Bradley's journeys as examples of "bias" without feeling that I have been remarkably intellectually uncharitable, and thus I do not do so. The field of cognitive science of religion has generally handled this well imo, internet discussions and popsci books somewhat less so.

Bradley discussed it as part of his 2023 FAIR Conference talk.

Mostly intuited. Joseph did specifically ask for his dad to hold him as an alternative to the liquor but other that I don't know of anything he said about it.

@Analytics, I have to chuckle when you say: When you yourself described the common belief they come to as: I might not be as smart as Steven Pinker but I can count the occurrences of the word "no" in a sentence. Your definition of naturalism is entirely negative and therefore cannot be a positive conclusion. This puts me in mind of the old Michael Scott "I declare bankruptcy!" gag from The Office. "I have come to the positive conclusion that there is no evidence for the supernatural!" "But that's still a negation!" "But no, I phrased it POSITIVELY!" Except the examples you choose to demonstrate the consistent results of your methodology don't have a corner on epistemic virtue! In what way was Bertrand Russell somehow more in tune with predictive risk, falsification, and bias correction than Kurt Godel, who blew up the Russellian dream of a complete and consistent mathematics? I've learned a lot from Sean Carroll, but I don't see him as particularly better at these epistemic virtues than Iain McGilchrist, Ed Feser, or Larry Sanger, all of whom have updated and changed their minds based on exposure to evidence and argumentation while coming to dramatically different conclusions about the nature of the universe. I suppose you must consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali circa 2006 superior to Ayaan Hirsi Ali circa 2025, though her style of argumentation doesn't seem to have changed much. Bart Ehrman is an good scholar, but I also get surprising and remarkable insights from others, among them Jonathan Bernier, T.C. Schmidt, and James Ware, who come to different conclusions with imo better cases. You claim much for your cited examples based on a common methodology which you attribute to them, but as far as I can tell, the evidence for both the presence of this methodology and the success of its application is that they came to similar conclusions as you regarding naturalism. Furthermore, a problem in giving the above as the sine qua non of "rationality" is that the application of these tools depends on the landscape of the questions you ask, the definitions you use, and even your metaphors. That's where the major points of dispute are in the first place. You've got yourself a methodology for arriving at very secure beliefs regarding a subset of questions which (a) rely on readily manipulated experimental conditions or (b) give rise to very straightforward predictions, but this is not the whole picture - the formulation of definitions and predictions is the hard part and necessarily depends on epistemic virtues entirely prior to prediction and falsification! What Pinker calls "rationality" you might as easily call "positivism"; given the scope of his work it's forgiveable that he doesn't dive into the philosophical debates but to treat his work as the summum of rational thought is ridiculous. In so doing you elide vast sweeps of human inquiry and endeavour motivated by the love of truth and spirit of genuine inquiry. This would not be Texas sharpshooting if you could give demonstrate that nobody has ever come to an opposite conclusion based entirely on their application of your four tools, or that your four tools really are the only game in town, but I don't see you doing that work. Much cleaner to handwave those who come to different conclusions as slaves to bias. For my part I recommend the material theory of induction, the idea that theories of induction are always situational and fact-dependent and there are no universal rules for them. I recommend John Norton's very accessible seminal 2010 paper on the topic: https://philpapers.org/rec/NORTAN. This does not invalidate the utility of any of the principles Pinker describes but it does situate them as what they are: useful epistemic tools, the utility of which depends on the research question and the facts. Not "rationality" iself. @SeekingUnderstanding, this one's for you too: Superdeterminist and many-worlds interpretations of wave-function collapse are not "in the same neighborhood." They imply radically different and contradictory views of the ontology of the cosmos. If superdeterminism is true, that entails that even quantum indeterminacy is itself determined and totally undermines both the concept of locality and even the possibiliity of falsifiability. If many-worlds is true, than the appearance of quantum indeterminacy is maintained but the universe (and every universe) splits with every wave-function collapse. These are vastly different worldstates. Superdeterminism and many-worlds are farther apart in their implications than the vast majority of Christian sects, but apparently one is "the neighborhood" and the other is not. People come to accept conclusions other than materialist naturalism for all sorts of reasons. Some see it as philosophically incoherent or observationally inferior to other options. (Godel, Feser, McGilchrist, Thomas Nagel) Some inherit their belief and don't reflect on it much (the modal Sunday School teacher that your critiques seem tailored for.) Others are convinced by historical argumentation. (the McGrews, Don Bradley) Others by radical empiricism, what you might call religious experience. (Blake Ostler, Philip Wiebe, to name a couple) Please correct me if I'm wrong, but behind your references to the "many false ideas" is the implied (but never stated) idea that all of these approaches are to be grouped together in one franken-epistemology that can be charged with, and discredited by, the diversity of the world's religions. I don't think combining all these approaches into one convenient classification makes a lot of sense. It especially doesn't make sense when, in the same breath, you praise the "room for debate" of a group of people who theoretically should be relying on the same methodology yet come to radically different beliefs about the foundational nature of the cosmos!

Analytics's own description of the inevitable outcome of proper methodology was "a naturalistic view of the world: no credible evidence for the supernatural, no surviving 'god hypothesis.'" Any opposition to that absolute premise is in the same camp as regards this proposition - that's the nature of absolutes. In passing, I note that Sabine Hossenfelder and Sean Carroll take different sides on the question of superdeterminism. Should we toss the consistency of the atheists out the window too? I find it somewhat surprising that you would offer this critique since all of the examples I linked rejected the above position in favor of Christianity (though it could be argued that Godel was simply a personalist theist.) Though, since you posted about 8 minutes after I did, and Larry Sanger's argument alone is a 15 minute read, I don't have very good evidence to believe that you referred to them all.

What methodology do these people share? After all, they don't really share research methodologies, areas of expertise, or even common trajectories (have you looked up what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been up to lately?) I see some physicists, some philosophers, some biblical scholars by training and methodology - wildly different fields. Their careers do not accomodate ready comparison - except, of course, in the conclusions they reject. Rather odd for you to hold these disparate individuals up as methodological examples. One could be forgiven for thinking that you selected them principally based on the conclusions they came to, which conclusions form the measure of "methodological empiricism tested against our known cognitive blind spots." After all, biases are heuristics, the validity of which can only be decided once the facts are. Rather circular. I find it unfortunate that, though many others in relevant fields have come to different conclusions, you say nothing about them.

I disagree that the idea is new. In the New Testament you've got the Doubting Thomas pericope where Jesus praises belief without proof. See also Hebrews 11, the "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" sermon. Closer to home you've got Alma 32:16-21. The idea that uncompelled belief is privileged over compelled belief definitely pre-exists the examples you cite. The essential logic of the argument has been around for a very long time.

There's no conflict between John the Baptist being baptized as a child and needing to be baptized by Jesus if you acknowledge that John believed in the two baptisms, the baptism of water and the baptism of fire. Which he clearly did according to Matthew 3:11 and John 1:33.

John the Baptist himself differentiates between the baptism of water, which he gives to Jesus, and the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost which Jesus can give but he could not. See Matthew 3:11 and John 1:33. Furthermore, Christ's own reported usage of "baptized" is too broad to support this criticism. See, for instance, Luke 12:50, where Christ uses the term "baptism" to describe the ordeal of the Atonement, or the baptism of fire referred to by the Savior in Acts 1:5.

I can try to channel him, lol. There's a long philosophical back and forth on the nature of knowledge, internalist v. externalist justificiations of knowledge, etc. It was thought for a long time that "knowledge" could be said to be "justified true belief" but then a guy named Edmund Gettier showed up in 1963 and vaporized that by posing what has come to be known as a "Gettier problem." You know you've made it in philosophy when people name a problem after you. Say you are looking at a distant roof and you see a splotch of gray which looks to you like a pigeon. From this, you form the belief that there is a pigeon standing on the roof. Your eyes are functioning well and are not giving you false data. It would not be unusual, after all, for a pigeon to be standing on a roof. As it happens, that gray pigeon-resembling splotch is just a piece of canvas or something which, by remarkable circumstance, resembles a pigeon so closely that anybody at your distance would be fooled. Unbeknowndst to you, you're not looking at an actual pigeon. HOWEVER...on the other side of the roof, beyond your view, there is in fact a pigeon standing on the roof! Therefore, you do have a Belief (there is a pigeon on the roof) which is Justified (your eyes, which are not malfunctioning, tell you that there is a pigeon on the roof) and which is True! (there is in fact a pigeon on the roof) However, could you really be said to know that there is a pigeon on the roof? It doesn't seem so to me. But if knowledge is not justified true belief, then what is it? Whole forests have gone to pulp over this. Others, the pragmatists, like Rorty whom Mark cites, say that the imprecision of language means we will never get a handle on it, and encourage a sort of "we know what it means when we see it" that isn't too put out by the specificities of definitions. Analytic philosophers everywhere recoil in horror, normal people are mostly unaffected. I've tended to read Korihor's self-description as a) coming from an unreliable narrator (Alma says so right there), and b) coming from a society with a broader conception of the supernatural than we have. If a supernatural being appears to you and says there's no God, that being could be some kind of spirit or something, not necessarily a God. So Korihor, already wanting to do away with God, believed what the entity had to say, preached it, and in so doing reified that belief within himself while holding some doubts that suddenly presented themselves when Alma struck him dumb. We've all met that person who said "I knew it!" when something goes wrong even though they obviously didn't. Such a one was Korihor.

Joseph B. Merrill? I've changed my mind on a few things but frankly it's for the good, as I can move at more ease through the world. I was a missionary when we went to an exhibit of artifacts from King Tutankhamen's tomb on a P-day, and there was a sign with the ages of the Pyramids, and I had a shocker as I realized that my rough timeline of world history that I put together as a curious and zealous youth would mean they were standing during Noah's Flood. Well obviously this couldn't be so, and I went round and around in circles, and now I generally don't find anything to bother me. I suppose it helps that I'm not the type to experience moral indignation all that often so as a rule I'm less alienated. I tend to be pretty suspicious of "righteous indignation" actually. I've shed some Primary-era theological understandings and picked up others, all of which I am confident are quite compatible with Latter-day Saint thought and doctrine, such as it is. It works.

I'd say this board has weakened my belief in some things, but also exposed me to arguments that I had not considered in others. I've benefited a lot from being able to learn from people like Robert F. Smith, Stanford Carmack, Benjamin McGuire, and Kevin Christensen in something close to real time.

This is a fantastic point that I think has been sublimated by the ways we talk about the prophets and apostles, and have since the 1950s. The presiding high priest (the title given to the President of the Church in D&C 107:65-66) is to the church as the bishop is to the ward, and is no more or less human, but it seems like the expectations for the two offices are very different. Matthew Bowman wrote a fantastic piece for Wayfare on the conjunction of the roles of prophet and priest and the consequences of our weighting the "prophet" side over the "priest" side: https://www.wayfaremagazine.org/p/the-prophet-and-the-priest?utm_source=publication-search

How do you know they are? The D&C contains instructions for excommunicating the President of the Church, for heaven's sake. I don't think the prophets are in the habit of inventing revelations but if we don't believe in prophetic infallibility (and we don't!) then that must extend not only to the contents of a revelation but also the source of the revelation. I'm thinking specifically of confusing one's strong personal convictions with the Spirit of the Lord and thus getting a "false positive," an error I have personally made and which I suspect Brigham Young made at least once (race and the priesthood). In this case, President Taylor didn't even try to go through the proper channel for getting these things recognized, so as far as I'm concerned its a null result.