Doubting your doubts

Just now, I read a Mormon Times article by Orson Scott Card, called Guessing leads to knowing. I actually liked most of the article, which surprised me since I don't generally think much of OSC. He's correct that almost all human progress comes from someone who had a hunch or a guess or a crazy idea that they decided to try out. Guessing is indeed a good thing.

However, his reasoning is flawed because his proposed "tests" (praying for confirmation, following church commandments) are not really experiments in a scientific sense. People can believe they feel the Holy Spirit confirming wildly different ideas. How do you know which is correct? Science measures hypotheses against objective reality. OSC proposes testing hypotheses against subjective experience. At best, the experiments may prove which ideas resonate with you personally. If that's all you're after, that's a fine result. But you can't then extrapolate your findings as objective truth.

My father-in-law told me to "doubt my doubts" when he first found out about my disaffection with the LDS church. It didn't make much sense to me at the time. But now I think I understand the premise behind the phrase: that your "doubts" are really just new beliefs. As such, they should be subject to scrutiny just as your original beliefs were. If I accepted the premise that doubts are just new beliefs, I would certainly accept the conclusion that you should "doubt your doubts".

However, there is a fundamental difference between belief and doubt. A belief is a positive assertion that something is true. A doubt is a neutral assertion that I don't know whether something is true. For example, I might say that I doubt the Book of Mormon is a historical record. That statement by itself does not imply that I believe it is not a historical record. It simply means I don't know. I make no assertion in either direction.

Now, one can certainly examine the evidence and come to a tentative conclusion with a reasonable degree of certainty. Would I say the Book of Mormon is more likely to be historical than not? No, based on the evidence I have encountered I would say I believe it's more likely to be biblical fan fiction. However, this statement is not a statement of doubt. It is a statement of belief based on evidence. Do I doubt this belief? Of course! I am willing to change my assessment based on new evidence. And you can believe that's true because I have done so already.

If this is what is meant by "doubting your doubts", then I suppose I already do. But do I doubt the mechanism of doubt itself? Should I boomerang back to my original beliefs before disappearing in a puff of logic? That would be silly. As Orson Scott Card said himself, doubt is the vehicle of progress. To doubt the act of doubting would be like using the Internet to spread the message that all technology is evil. It would be inconsistent, and achieve nothing but a smug self-satisfaction in a castle built on semantics.

So doubt your beliefs. Doubt all your beliefs. If they are worth believing, they are worth doubting. But don't test your beliefs against your feelings. Test them against evidence. And is it worth the self-inconsistency of trying to "doubt your doubts"? I doubt it.

We each have our reasons for staying or leaving

(Cross-posted at Main Street Plaza.)

I posted this elsewhere not too long ago, and it seemed to get positive feedback, so I thought I would share this experience here and get your thoughts about it.

During a conversation with my wife in the car after meeting some fantastic believing/disaffected couples for dinner last week, I realized something that has somehow completely eluded me until now. My wife and I approach the church very differently because it has fulfilled completely different needs for each of us.

I joined the church as an adult convert ten years ago. Previous to that, I had many deeply spiritual experiences as a Christian, but not in the LDS church. I did not join the LDS church because I felt anything special, or because I felt it met any particular spiritual or emotional need I had. If anything, I found the LDS style of worship definitely lacking in the profound spiritual feelings department.

Instead, I joined the LDS church because, based on my investigation, I believed it was true. Many of the beliefs made a lot of sense to me, and as I read much of the material that has been written about the LDS church, both pro and con, I believed I had found something that fulfilled prophecy and had the true gospel. Or at least something as close to such a thing as I was likely to find.

Consequently, as I have reexamined my assumptions and my beliefs over the past few years, I found it easy to disconnect from the church emotionally once I no longer believed in it intellectually. After all, I did not join for the emotional, spiritual, or social aspects of the church. I joined the LDS church because it made sense. Once it no longer made sense, I had no reason to hold onto it, and I let go almost immediately.

My wife, on the other hand, still enjoys being a part of the community and enjoys the good feelings she experiences when she goes to church. As she has learned more about the historical or doctrinal problems in the church, I have sometimes been confused as to why many things don’t seem to bother her as much as they bother me.

But last week I realized that she did not join or stay in the church primarily for intellectual reasons. It doesn’t matter as much to her whether everything makes sense in a rational way, or whether there are problems with the history or doctrine. Those are not her reasons for being there. She feels spiritually connected in the LDS church, in the same way I felt as a Christian before I joined it. That’s why I look back on those times with fondness, and that’s why she stays in the LDS church today. Whether it’s true or not has little bearing on that.

I think a lot of us disaffected folks approach the church in the same way I’ve described my own approach. We see it as failing the test of truth, and therefore try to distance ourselves from it. That’s certainly a valid way of dealing with it. But I realized that there are other reasons people might reasonably choose to stay despite the problems, and I think that’s fine too. After all, I think just about everyone needs something spiritually fulfilling (note I did not say religious or supernatural). While I personally do not find that in the LDS church, and I never have, some people do. And that’s why my wife probably will never have the same problems with the church that I do, and that’s okay.

Now if only we could get the warm fuzzies without the authoritarianism, life would be golden!