Philo Sofee wrote: ↑Tue Sep 26, 2023 4:54 am
The emphasis on faith instead of knowledge or evidence is always weird to me now. What is it about faith that is so emphasized when it is faith that keeps Catholics Catholic, Keeps Jews as Jews, Baptists and Baptists, ALL of whom Mormons will not allow in their own temples and actually believe they have lesser authority and truth than they themselves, yet it is based on the same lame premise, faith? This demonstrates faith is the entire wrong emphasis, but those on the inside, of whatever religion, just cannot see it.
Faith never has changed the probability of something being true or not. Only actual evidence can do so. Faith can never take the place of evidence or lack of it. It is a mere place holder it appears to me.
I mostly agree, especially that faith can never replace actual evidence. However, I think there is still a role for faith. I think one of those places is precisely lack of evidence. I realize this is shaky ground, so let me explore and please ask questions. We set our alarms for the morning on faith there will be a tomorrow even though there is no actual evidence there will be a tomorrow, at least for us. Okay, maybe that's too banal. Let's try something like this:
You have a close friend that tells you a story about themselves that strains credibility but without crossing the line into actually being incredible. There's no evidence the story is true. Unless we're in the habit of forming close friendships with the likes of Eddie Haskell, chances are we are going to believe the story (or at least that
something like the story) is true based on faith on our friend.
How far can we take this? Joseph's story about the plates certainly crosses the line into the incredible and there is not one shred of evidence the peoples described in the Book of Mormon actually existed. Given the evidence (or lack thereof), believing in Book of Mormon historicity would certainly not be a justified belief. But usually when we speak of faith, we are talking about something that goes beyond mere belief. Sure, there is no evidence the Nephites existed, but who knows? Maybe someday someone will dig up Zarahemla, however unlikely that possibility is. So can faith (as opposed to mere belief) in a historical Book of Mormon still be rational?
Although addressing biblical inerrancy, I think a relevant piece to look at is J. P. Moreland's
"The Rationality of Belief in Inerrancy". Replace biblical inerrancy with Book of Mormon historicity and you'll probably wind up with much the same essay. Of particular note is Moreland's discussion of the depth of ingression of a belief in a person's noetic structure. Scroll down past page 81 to point 3. To summarize and probably oversimplify, the more deeply ingrained a belief is in your noetic structure, the more overwhelming the evidence needs to be before giving up that belief. If 2+2 really does equal five, most of us would simply change our belief that 2+2=4 and go on with our lives while hardly skipping a beat. But giving up something like biblical inerrancy or Book of Mormon historicity will in turn require a major restructuring of someone's entire worldview.
This certainly fits my own experience. Once I accepted belief in biblical inerrancy, it became so ingrained that it was extremely difficult to dislodge. This is because giving up my belief in inerrancy also entailed a major rethinking about the nature of God, prophets, and divine inspiration, just to name a few things. So I fought tooth-and-nail before giving up the belief. Thirty years on, I still haven't gotten all the implications fully worked out.
Think back to your days as an apologist for the Book of Abraham. At your height, you were offering arguments that on its face, were pretty outrageous. This testifies to how deeply ingrained the belief that Abraham really wrote the eponymous book in The Pearl of Great Price was to you. I would imagine you fought tooth-and-nail before giving up that belief as well.
I first read Moreland's essay after giving up biblical inerrancy. At the time and to a certain extent I still think it was a major failing that Moreland did not explore where the evidence reaches such a breaking point that one should give up a deeply ingrained belief, no matter the effect on one's noetic structure. I think there is a point where the evidence becomes so overwhelming that one crosses the line into irrationality if they continue to hold on to it. OTOH, I'll be damned if I can come up with a universally applicable rule where that point should be.
