Faith and Epistemology

 In my previous post, I outlined a way of knowing when my beliefs are wrong or need correction/amendment. I talked a little about the tautology of "it's faith if the thing you believe is true" but as I've thought about how I came to my beliefs, I realize that there's more to be written about the role of faith in epistemology.

In 2010, Dallin H. Oaks addressed Harvard Law School, and that address was then excerpted for the January 2011 Ensign (a monthly church publication). Because he was addressing the academy, his language was careful, and he states, "My first fundamental premise of our faith is that God is real and so are eternal truths and values not provable by current scientific methods" (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2011/01/fundamental-to-our-faith?lang=eng Emphasis mine). Because these truths are not currently provable or unprovable, people do not arrive at their conclusions about them by proof.

Later in the same address, then-Elder Oaks states, "We seek after knowledge, but we do so in a special way because we believe there are two dimensions of knowledge: material and spiritual. We seek knowledge in the material dimension by scientific inquiry and in the spiritual dimension by revelation." In Doctrine and Covenants 109:7 and 88:118, the church was given the admonition "And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning even by study and also by faith;" and although we're inclined to truncate the verse and set "study and faith" in binary opposition, I don't feel that that is what was meant. The verse begins "and as all have not faith," meaning this admonition is to supplement or increase faith. Seeking the "best books" likely means studying books of scripture, which will, according to this pattern, open the reader to personal revelation which can be an opportunity to increase faith. And yet, except for a few extremists, the church encourages personal study in a wide variety of topics and from a wide variety of sources.

Nevertheless, and although faith has no place in science (which relies on consistent skepticism), faith is an essential component of spiritual knowledge. For someone striving for spiritual truth, then, it's very, very important to understand those limits. We must understand that faith exists only in the unknown and unknowable. Therefore, we must strive for spiritual truth that extends beyond the currently knowable. Even if we find ourselves there frequently, we must not rest in or be satisfied with agnosticism.

This dissatisfaction runs contrary to some currents of my intellectual training. Literary studies encourages students to become familiar with their own discomfort and to use it to identify loci of complexity. Although explaining these uncomfortable moments as nodes of access to new information is part of the pedagogy, for undergraduate students we often don't have the time to help students move further into the process than recognizing this as fruitful ground. This lack of time can leave students stranded in a place where they are forced to live with their dissatisfaction indefinitely, rather than learn how to grow something from inside it: how to make it productive for them. They can learn to be satisfied with "We'll never know" (or "I'll ask Jesus after I die" in the religious equivalent) instead of pushing against our collective ignorance even a little.

Part of this intellectual complacence always comes from apathy. Perhaps we simply don't care enough about this particular avenue of knowledge to put energy into untangling things. That's a matter of personal taste.

When missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teach about faith, they inevitably turn to Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon, which provides a nice metaphor to understand the role of faith in learning about spiritual things.

The chapter begins by describing a city whose wealthy inhabitants got everything they wanted from religion by speaking a public prayer once a week. The poor people wanted that spiritual satisfaction, but weren't allowed into the synagogues, and so Alma took that as an opportunity to teach them how to gain access to something even better: personal worship.

Alma begins by criticizing agnosticism - the need for proof before belief. He implies the need for faith, but then falls back on the idea (or jumps forward) to the idea that knowledge = responsibility to obey, and that even if we have knowledge, our capacity for obedience is still in development (v. 19-20). We can fill in the blanks and infer that if we grow by faith towards knowledge instead of waiting for knowledge, then our capacity for obedience will grow proportionally to the demand.

Verse 21 is the one I paraphrased (but didn't cite: sorry) in my previous post: "Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true." Verse 23 establishes that ALL people (men, women, and children) can take this personal faith journey. It transcends biases of age and gender. So there.

Verse 27 invites Alma's listeners (or readers) to "awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words." This is the language of the intellect, and an invitation to be engaged, rather than passive and apathetic.

Whew! Now to the actual metaphor. In the New Testament, Jesus compared faith to a grain of mustard seed. Here (verse 28), Alma compares "the word unto a seed" and faith will be the thing that might grow. The ground is our own sentience. I'm having trouble describing what Alma calls "heart" because in the middle east, the heart was sometimes considered the center of rational intelligence, rather than emotion as it is considered today. But even that concept doesn't describe all the senses involved in gathering data from an experiment on the spiritual. Those senses are better described in my previous post, and they include memory, hope, emotion, empiricism, rationality, and probably a few more things besides. Which is why I like the metaphor: I'm lazy.

In verse 28, Alma also establishes the parameters of the experiment. Plant the seed. If it doesn't grow, either 1) the word is bad, or 2) the soil is barren (well, he doesn't suggest that anybody's soil is barren until verse 39, only that we might eject the seed before it can do anything). But if it does grow, then you can decide if the plant is 1) a volunteer, or 2) a weed. The metaphor is particularly useful here, because we can recognize the feeling of growth inside ourselves more easily than we might understand a jargon-heavy explanation of faith. If we feel enlarged, bettered, or with greater knowledge than before, and if we enjoy those sensations, then we can keep watering the seed and see what comes.

And yet. . . a thing is not true merely because we enjoy the sensation of it. If faith is real, then it must feel different than mere pleasure - mere gratification. 

Alma is, of course, hoping that these people will believe what he's saying. But can't this experiment work with other faith claims? Again: it's only faith if there is no proof - believing things contrary to solid evidence is different than believing things for which there is no empirical or rational evidence yet. But I will readily admit that I am careful about what kinds of seeds I plant in my own heart. I gatekeep. My mind is not so open as many people might wish. I do not think it is wise to treat all ideas as equal.

I have tasted ideas contrary to my own. I have experimented with the idea that Joseph Smith was fraudulent or delusional. But that seed brought no enlightenment, and did not bear good fruit. I don't mean to say that I personally found it unpleasant (of course I would find contrary ideas unpleasant; that's how human brains work), but that I found it closed down too many sources of revelation and spiritual growth. It would kill too many other fruitful trees in my truth orchard. If it were true, I must be prepared to sacrifice, to burn down any trees of falsehood. But if I were to raze my whole orchard for one hateful tree. . .

I am not prepared to do that. Perhaps I am intellectually weak. I cannot prove that I am not. But I can offer you some of the fruit from the trees that I have grown.

PumpkinSky, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons