The last 24 hours have seen a fascinating melange of opinions, with no sequential argument.
Let me start with the Mormon question. I have no desire to flame the beliefs of Mormons (except in one instance), and I see the point quite clearly.
Let’s see. Non-theists see a world in which nothing that might be classed supernatural or miraculous occurs. Events of very pleasing impact do occur, but they are subject, if one cares to pursue it, to rational, “natural” explanation.
Theists in general believe that strange events that could be considered supernatural or miraculous occurred at specific times and places within the context of historically known civilizations. One can see the mosque where Mohammed declared the new qiblah, one can visit the Bo Tree, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has regular services, and I suspect it is possible to find and visit the border post where Li Erh composed the Tao Te Ching – though going there would probably be something of a futility for a devoted Taoist.
The Mormons allege that a civilization based more or less on pre-Exilic Jewish culture was founded and flourished for several hundred years across North America, and that such strange events also occurred in that civilization.
Herewith, you pays your money and you takes your cherce. I belong to category 2 because I did in fact have a conversion experience that convinces me that a God does exist, and is concerned for humanity. Armed with this information, I can accept the reports that strange events did occur in first century Palestine. I personally make no claims vis-a-vis the other major faiths. I suspect strongly that just as Paul was moved by the Living God and devoted his life to mediating, through his own learning and experience, a knowledge of that God that was colored by his own persona, so Siddhartha of the Sakyamunis and Mohammed had similar experiences and did the same mediation with the same coloration. I suspect that, in the absence of the ethnic rancor of the past few decades, any good Jew and any good Moslem would see that their faiths are closely cognate, being centered on one’s right relationship to the One God. The Buddha (Gautama, as distinguished from a choice from the Mahayana shopping list of past, present, and future buddhas) saw the same cleansing from worldly desire that Jesus speaks of, but in the context of escape from the Great Mandela of life, with repeated reincarnations to improve one’s karmic balance, and so on. Each colored the revelation given to him with the cultural accretions of his time and ethnicity. And we won’t even get into the Hindu theology – multiplicities of gods who participate in one Brahman – making explication of the Holy Trinity under skeptical analysis look simple by comparison.
Further, one notes that most people are honest, within their cultural framework and worldview, but that there are some who are honest but self-deluded and some who are fraudulent. And these categories overlap with the non-theist/theist spectrum.
Now, the difference between most major faiths and Mormonism is that the former can point to specific places and times when the data claimed for their beliefs transpired. Aside from the later developments of Joseph Smith’s angelophany and later theophany on Hill Cumorah and the consequent texts, together with the evidence of the golden plates and the supposed originals of the Pearl of Great Price, which is not available for skeptical inquiry, none of the data sites for Mormonism can be proven to have existed. There is strikingly little evidence, if any, for this supposed Jewish-American civilization.
Further, the doctrines of Mormonism, including in particular Eternal Progression and the multi-layered heaven, do not jibe well with traditional Judaism and Christianity and their understandings of God’s nature, call, and promises.
For these reasons, I find the evidence for Joseph Smith’s revelations to be so highly suspect as to reject it outright. As between his being another person vouchsafed a revelation and coloring it with his own culture and worldview, his being self-deluded (along with Oliver Cowdery et al.), and his being a fraud, I proclaim no conclusions. I have my own opinions on this, but it would insult devout Mormons whom I respect to post them. I do not feel that the analysis of Mormon claims above does so; it is no worse than what a skeptic would do to my own claims as regards the Gospels.
To insert two brief notes, first, John Corrado is busy in the Pit these days, but asserted personal acquaintance of an atheist who in fact shared a foxhole with him while they were in the service together, and second, to Joel, the Church to which I belong preserves the apostolic succession and authority, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the sacramental doctrine, the focus on God’s grace, the use of Scripture, tradition, and reason together, and found itself not in communion with the Roman Pontiff as a result of his own action in 1570. To identify it as non-Catholic is probably your privilege, but it sounds to me that doing so is a great deal like the man who had killed both his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
Now, the question of the miraculous or supernatural remains to be addressed. In my humble opinion, no such thing exists. This is, however, not to say that I reject every account of miracle story and in particular the reported works of Jesus. First, they are reported with relative naivete by men of their time. But while people do not as a rule walk on water today, people are in fact raised from the dead on a daily basis by EMTs and emergency-room physicians. Ernest and Julio Gallo have made a career of changing water into wine – with the help of grapevines and the appropriate yeasts.
Singularities abound in nature…radical changes not predictable from the measured data on either side of them. I can describe the characteristics of ice or steel at any given temperature, and they form a smooth curve that does not predict the abrupt phase change when the H2O or Fe melts, nor the second one when it boils. What happens is subject to repetitive experiment and analysis, but I would submit that a parallel might be drawn with Biblical miracles. If, as the anthropic principle would suggest, the world is so structured as to enable humans to exist in it, and if there is in fact a God who structured it in that way, with natural laws having a teleological purport, then we do not have data (outside the scriptural reports not considered valid evidence in science) what happens when God the Son, incarnate, requires a given result from some element of the world around him.
In essence, what I am saying is that the laws of nature allow for the “miraculous” – which, rather than violating them, are special cases allowed for in them. Just as the known physics of 1860 did not permit the transformation of matter into energy and did not adequately describe the behavior of particles at relativistic velocities, and hence were replaced by Einsteinian physics which does in fact account for these phenomena, so the known natural laws of today are adequate for daily use but are special cases (as Newtonian physics is of Einsteinian) of the actual natural laws that do allow for the apparently miraculous. “And greater things than these will you do if you believe.”
Of course, the Biblical stories are colored by, first, the naivete noted above, and second, by what I have referred to as the Jacob Brown effect, after the “famous” general of the war of 1812 who is fairly poorly known outside my home county, where he lived, which gives the story told as it affects the Jewish people and the early followers of Christ. We don’t know what the typical Assyrian or Egyptian (Reformed or not) thought of the Davidic Kingdom of Israel, nor what St. Matthias did after being chosen to replace Jesus (aside from the occasional non-scriptural legend). The stories are, quite obviously, slanted to what interested the tellers and their hearers…their own ancestors and their doings. What God may have done in 1000 BC is specified in the David story, but what else he may have done in Queensland, Korea, or Peru is of course not discussed. The closest the Bible ever gets to this sort of thing is in recognizing Cyrus as a mashiakh, one chosen by God as a major instrument of his will (in Isaiah).
The same sort of reasoning goes to refute Gaudere’s sardonic raising of the evidence for unicorns, fairies, and other folklorish elements. People are deluded, people are fraudulent, and people do fixate on things that they misinterpret. And I admit quite fully that such an explanation does at first seem valid for my own experiences and for the Gospel accounts. However, I do see a difference, in that they stand better under analytically valid techniques – if one allows for the sake of argument the initial hypothesis of an objectively real God intervening in human history, they result in what seems a fully acceptable and functional lifestyle with a decent ethics, and they produce a coherent worldview that produces valid results. God does act in the lives of his believers – on his own time and for his own purposes; the “Glitch effect” must be kept in mind – and objective observation can detect such results. Granted that thorough skepticism may allow extreme hypotheses to explain them away, this is also true of almost any data set. One need only assume that aliens interfered with the Michelson-Morley experiment to refute it. William of Ockham would not approve, but UFO believers would. A belief in fairies or unicorns does not produce the sorts of results that Christianity often does. And I’ll accept that there are oddballs on the fringe of Christianity; I’m generalizing. Nor am I refuting the goodness of many devout Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, and so on; I’m speaking specifically of my own faith, not faulting another’s. And I find equating the acceptance of some reasonable interpretation of the Gospels that allows for the intervention of a real God in the world to the hypotheses of imaginary beasts and creatures to be somewhat akin to the idea that atheists have no ethics – a broad-brush slam founded on lack of empathic perception of another’s stance on an issue. There is a very clear dividing line in my mind between suppositions regarding an omnipotent/omniscient creator god and suppositions regarding hypothetical beasties and faerie spirits. And I think this is a reasonable one, regardless of your answer on the existence of either. Scylla’s Fred the evolved god of the multiverse can be rationally discussed with mutual assumptions over what his capabilities are. I would find it very difficult to see a similarly intelligent discussion on the topics of Puck or wyverns.
At rock bottom, what I suppose I am saying is that I have evidence sufficient for me to found my faith on Jesus and him crucified. I have made choices to believe as I do, to reject the Nephites and their friends and relations, to throw out the Divine Weasel as a suitable characterization of a real god, and to stake my life on God’s goodness. I’m perfectly willing to look at honest analytical questions about things ranging from the dating and authorship of scripture to the implications of some alleged dogma, and to attempt to reason from these. “Here I stand; I can do no other.”
Kidding, kidding.
