Physics Guy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 13, 2020 4:22 pm
To give my own answer, I think that a genuine big picture ought to be big and it ought to be a picture.
By being big I mean that the same big picture should fit well as a context around a lot of different specific cases. There might be a few ugly or iffy trees in the forest, but there should be a lot of fine healthy trees that fit into your picture of the forest as typical specimens.
They shouldn't be cherry trees, either—that is, you shouldn't have to rely on cherry-picked examples fetched from all over a wide range of circumstances in order to gather a decent-looking number of individual cases to which your big-picture set of assumptions applies well. Instead you should be surrounded with loads of cases that fit into your big picture as typical examples—enough cases that you can well afford to just let anybody else select them for you at random, without constantly having to argue away awkward cases. There may be apparent exceptions and puzzles but these will really be few compared to the typical cases, even when people who don't agree with you a priori pick the cases at random.
And then by saying that a big picture should be a picture I mean that it should be something reasonably simple and coherent, and not just a huge cobbled-together collection of arbitrary ad-hoc rules.
The big picture should be something that, if you show it to people first of all before getting into specific cases, then it dramatically reduces the amount of effort you have to spend describing each individual case. It does this first of all because it does accurately tell you a lot of things that are common to most of the individual cases, so you can say it once for all of them and then not have to repeat it for each of them. That's the "big" part. And then secondly the big picture saves effort in describing individual cases because the big picture is dramatically briefer than simply listing all the individual cases. It's a short executive summary of common themes, not a six-hunded-page book that is simply billed as a summary. That's the "picture" part.
So for instance the idea that Joseph Smith was a con man is a viable big picture for Mormonism by my standards. You can articulate the idea of Smith being a con man quite briefly, and then you find that it makes a ton of details about early Mormonism fall into place and make sense naturally. So many things that Smith said and did make immediate sense if you think of him as a fraud.
The idea that Smith was a genuine prophet does not work nearly so well as a big picture for Mormonism, it seems to me, because the concept of prophethood that is easy to communicate to most people keeps jarringly failing to fit lots of details about early Mormonism. If you want to maintain that Smith was nonetheless a true prophet, I think you have to keep revising what you mean by "prophet" in increasingly convoluted ways. You have to keep saying, "Well he wasn't
that kind of prophet," and refining your definition of the unfamiliar kind of prophet that he was, until your notion of Smith as a prophet is nothing more than attaching the arbitrary label of "prophet" to the full account of every particular thing that Joseph Smith said or did. So Smith as prophet either fails to be big or it fails to be a picture.
And there are lots of "big picture" ways one can look at Mormonism. At the other board I've been discussing my issues with the big picture of LDS epistemology and have personally found the conversation quite beneficial.
One of my replies which sums up my position:
"So I had just said that the Book of Mormon lacks self-awareness, clarifying that it makes many claims without providing sufficient evidence. I really like what you say here in the bolded, and I think it says even more clearly part of what I was trying to convey. The Book of Mormon presents opinions as fact.
Then, through Moroni’s challenge, it goes further and presents an opinion-forming process as a fact-checking process.
"I think they only fall apart when opinion alone is presented as fact." (Originally said by the other poster in the conversation.)
The Book of Mormon does this over and over again implicitly, and then formalizes this habit explicitly in Moroni’s challenge.
We can see this behavior repeated in the early church, adopted into Mormonism, and continuing to this day.
“I know the church is true” is a common example of this habit.
And this behavior is more than just an innocent diversion, it has real-world impact beyond personal belief.
Going back to what I said earlier,
I would say that the sermon on faith would be quite complete with a fuller, clearer appreciation of science and reason. On the other hand, Moroni's promise tends to a very lopsided reliance on feelings, which of course can be extremely faulty, much moreso than science and reasoned study of all kinds.
And so, although an affirmative physical evidence would not be enough (since it obviously cannot confirm claims of a supernatural nature), it is still integral to good belief. You may not need science to believe in an afterlife, but I am going to assume you use science to great benefit, including in your attempts to live a life that would be closer to the Giver of Eternal Life. Is that assumption wrong?
Adding to that, I would also contemplate the ramifications of institutionalised, dogmatised habit described above. What happens when opinions are formalized as fact? What happens when those opinions are finally untenable and must be abandoned?
I think it causes divisions and strife and delays, not to mention the harm itself of the bad information.
What happens spiritually, when one is taught to think of opinions as fact? How does that impact relationships? In my opinion, this is a danger that humanity has suffered under repeatedly, but we advance when we learn to manage our opinions better. Using the terms of therapy, it is like the difference between enmeshment and differentiation where differentiation is healthier, but in the realm of intellect, philosophy, scholarship, and spirituality."
https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/73 ... 1209987503