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Introduction Paradigms and Premises: Starting Off on the Wrong Foot
the keyhole is a dummy keyhole. The ornamental bar next to it conceals the real keyhole and the location of the true lock.
Our worldview is a collective set of assumptions we carry with us that condition every question we ask. These “paradigms” make it possible to guide inquiry, but they can also limit and impede our inquiry.
Our assumptions, like the ocean in which a fish swims, are the invisible background to our thinking, waking existence.
Flat earths, witchcraft, and the cosmic ether are no longer part of our intellectual universe. We now see them for the erroneous frameworks they were.
It is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.
wrong assumptions can provide invisible deterrents to a life of religious devotion.
she asked God (1) to show her hell and purgatory and (2) to explain the nature of sin.
Twenty years it took for her to escape the confines of her preconceptions and realize the answers were delayed
because her questions were wrong.
Hell was not a fixed place of retribution, but the experience of our own alienation from God. In other words, hell is the condition of suffering that results from sin.
“sin is behovely,” or necessary.2 God’s mercy and Christ’s Atonement can make sin an occasion for “profytable” learning rather than “dyspeyer.”
“Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Two considerations soften the command: First, the wording in 3 Nephi 12:48 is different—and in an important way. “I would that ye should be perfect,”
Joseph Smith loved Luther’s translation of the Bible, in which the word usually rendered perfect (teleioi) is rendered as vollkommen, that is, complete, whole, entire. The Atonement is not a backup plan in case we happen to fall short in the process; it is the ordained means whereby we gradually become complete and whole, in a sin-strewn process of sanctification through which our Father patiently guides us.
clarity and enlightenment often require that we first relinquish our paradigms, no matter how dearly held.
“How [are we] to explain the immense diversity of Indian languages, if all are supposed to be relatively recent descendants of Lamanite origin?”
how, in the space of a mere thousand years or so, could the Hebrew of Lehi’s tribe have fragmented and morphed into every one of the hundreds of Indian languages of the Western Hemisphere, from Inuit to Iroquois to Shoshone to Patagonian. Languages just don’t mutate and multiply that quickly.
Roberts never found an answer to that question, and it troubled him the rest of his life. But here is the lesson to be learned from this story. Roberts’s dilemma was born of a particular view he held about the occupants of the New World. He believed that Lehi arrived on an empty continent, and that his descendants and his descendants alone eventually overran the hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Magellan. If that had been the case, then the language problem—along with a good many others—is indeed insoluble.
the actual text of the Book of Mormon does not require that we read Lehi as entering upon an uninhabited continent. In fact, the record itself contains the materials to read a very different context behind the Lehite settlement. As early as Jacob 7, that record keeper mentions one Sherem “who came among the people of Nephi.” And this stranger, apparently unexpectedly, “had a perfect knowledge of the language of the people.”
Sherem came from an indigenous people or a different group of settlers than the Nephites.
2007, the Church changed the wording to “the Lamanites are among the ancestors . . .” In other words, more recent critical thinking about the Book of Mormon has resulted in the recognition that its geographical scope may be much narrower and its cast of characters much broader than most Mormons were accustomed to believe.
Roberts couldn’t figure out how Inuit and Patagonian languages derived from Hebrew for a simple reason: they probably didn’t.
no necessity to try to make that square peg fit into that round hole. It was like trying to make the tumblers turn in the James Mossman door. The faulty question itself had no answer any more than Mossman’s dummy keyhole had a key.
“Philosophy . . . is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If a devout visionary and an ordained Seventy can ask the wrong questions, it is likely that many of us do as well.
Joseph Smith learned, some people “will fly to pieces like glass as soon as anything comes that is contrary to their traditions.”
the search for truth becomes all search and no truth, where we find ourselves “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”13 To be open to truth, we must invest in the effort to free ourselves from our own conditioning and expectations.
Hans Georg Gadamer calls the “genuine question.” And that is a question that involves openness and risk. As he explains, “our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk.”
The genuine question yields results we could seldom anticipate—if we can but find a vantage point
where the spiritual chambers of our soul are sufficiently still and the mental terrain is adequately clear.
Chapter 1 Of Method and Maps: The Use and Abuse of Reason
O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul’s invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art. Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread. Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
—George Santayana
Then beneath the color there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and the canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her
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We know more than we think. And we know in more ways than we sometimes realize
The Greeks sensed that the best art does not take us away from reality into the dreamy realms of fantasy—though some may do that. On the contrary, the best art penetrates the hard shell of habit to reimmerse us in the depths of experience,
Like Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in the passage above,
art becomes a vehicle not just for describing life but for interpreting life,
Do we not have a sense, in the presence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Michelangelo’s David, or Van Gogh’s Starry Night, that we have arrived at something that is neither instrument nor pastime but an end perfect in itself?
love reveals truth. It does not create the impression of truth; love does not merely endow something with a subjective truth—love is the only position or emotional disposition from which we become fully aware of the already present reality of the other person as more than a mere object
But my mind revolts at the notion that to other drivers, as to the earth’s teeming billions, I am a thing, a nuisance, a paltry digit in an almost infinite sequence of numbers, an “it” rather than an “I.”
One form that love takes is a grateful heart. Gratitude itself is a conduit to the True. “Thanking,” wrote Julian of Norwich, “is a true inward knowing.”
The error of believing that science represents the highest, or purest, or only reliable guide to truth is the error of scientism. Philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty have pointed out that the problem is not science itself, one of the greatest and most fruitful of all human enterprises. The healthy stance is not “to question the validity of physical laws or the veracity of mathematical equations, but rather . . . to break the dictatorship and absolutism of scientific thought over all other forms of human thinking.”
Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most esteemed theoretical physicists, explains, “Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental spiritual universe that transcends the material universe.”
In explaining why two reasonable people can so seldom cross the divide of religious or political or intellectual difference, he provided this unsettling but profoundly powerful insight: “As reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.”15 Hume made of this insight a principle that seems most unphilosophical: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
as moral agents, immersed in a world of human relationships and human values, we most appropriately choose and judge and act as human beings whose desires and motivations and bases for action are deeper than and prior to logic.
The point in all these examples is this: the human impulse toward the sublime and the artist’s revelation of the beautiful; love’s power to unlock the full splendor of the other, its blinding revelation of the infinite worth of the individual; and conscience, with its unwavering response to moral imperatives, its piercing protest against evil and gentle enticement to recognize the good—all these are living proofs that different ways of knowing exist. We employ them, we rely upon them, and we trust in them. As well we should.
dark matter. Apparently, the majority of the physical universe consists of material that science has not yet been able to detect. The large majority. As Martin Rees admits, “it’s embarrassing that more than ninety per cent of the universe remains unaccounted for. Even worse,” he continues, when we realize that the source of this undetectable bulk of our universe may reside in entities that are subatomic, or bodies millions of times more massive than our sun. The portion we can see and measure is miniscule: “The atoms that comprise our bodies and that make all visible stars and galaxies are
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Chapter 2 On Provocation and Peace: Of Life’s Fundamental Incompleteness
we know more than we think; it is at the same time true that we know less than we want. People have a horror of loose ends. We crave closure and certainty, wholeness and equilibrium. We will watch a bad movie to its pitiful end rather than leave ourselves in suspense as to its conclusion.
