I saw a great little blurb today about scientific thinking. I think I was born a scientific thinker - even when I started studying the church history more, I was always asking myself this question.

Here is the link and some of the text from the article. I can't wait to try and use some of this logic in my next discussion with a TBM. I'm sure they will say that they have no desire to disprove anything about the gospel, but maybe it will cause a hair-line crack.

http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html

"In a democratic and demotic society like ours, the biggest challenge to scientific thinking is the tendency to embrace views on the basis of faith or of ideology. A majority of Americans doubt evolution because it goes against their religious teachings; and at least a sizeable minority are skeptical about global warming — or more precisely, the human contributions to global change — because efforts to counter climate change would tamper with the 'free market'."

"If American citizens, or, for that matter, citizens anywhere were motivated to decribe the conditions under which they would relinquish their beliefs, they would begin to think scientifically. And if they admitted that empirical evidence would not change their minds, then at least they'd have indicated that their views have a religious or an ideological, rather than a scientific basis."

I like the question!

That reminds me that Steven Hassan suggested asking a similar question when dealing with cult exit counseling. He would ASK cult members what it would take to convince them to leave their cult.

Basically, they were telling him the info they needed to feel good about leaving.


But beyond the religion question, I really like the idea of people challenging their strongly held opinions. I think there is something really cool about dispelling my own misconceptions.

Years ago when I would debate Mormons on chat, I regularly asked a similar question. I often got the response that there is no such evidence. My comment to that was that the person is only pretending to have a conversation, then. When I was asked what it would take for me to rejoin the church, they didn't like my list :-)

At first I thought this was an across-the-board question. If it were, then 'scientific thinking' wouldn't be privileged either. What is empirical evidence? If it is material and sensory, then the apparatus for registering it is also material and sensory...and that is an obvious bias.

What would it take to disprove one's biased sensory-based viewpoint about empirical evidence? And would this still be called scientific thinking? (NB, theoretical/quantum physics has already challenged all the commonplace everyday world assumptions about the nature of reality, but that doesn't keep most people from being naive materialists when they speak of "the real world."

As for what would it take for to change my viewpoint on Mormonism - that'd be easy.

If there were any developments that showed deep flaws in carbon dating of artifacts, I would reconsider the BoA origin story.

If there was evidence developed that the language of the BoA scrolls wasn't a fairly recent development from the time of Christ, but had existed several thousand years earlier, when the BoA was supposedly written, I would reconsider the BoA story.

If a journal were found dating to 1821, that recounted the First Vision story essentially identical to the now promulgated 1838 version, I would reconsider my opinion of the first vision, which is that it is a "just so" story made up in 1838 because Smith needed a good founding story, since he had stumbled into founding a religion, which was not what he had initially set out to do.

If evidence of Middle Eastern DNA were found in the First Nations of the Americas, I'd reconsider my opinion of the BoM as bad fiction.

If any First Nations language showed Semitic origins in the recent past (2,500 years), I'd be very impressed with the BoM story.

If evidence of Middle Eastern grains and insects mentioned in the BoA were found, I would reconsider my opinion of the BoM.

I would reconsider my opinion of the Jaredite barge story if a scientist could demonstrate a roomful of livestock and people could be flipped upside down without killing everybody in the room.


I could go on for a long time, but you get the picture. Except for the Jaredite barge story, which is just goofy, and of which I could never be convinced it happened, all the other developments that would make me reassess the Mormon founding myths could actually happen.

There is nothing supernatural about finding linguistic evidence, or DNA evidence, or new developments on the reliability of carbon dating. That would be plain, ordinary science.

Not only isn't there the hint of new developments on the horizon for all those threads of scientific evidence, there isn't any hint of new developments that call existing evidence of Mormon claims into question for ANY of them.

The job of any credible scientist is to disprove a hypothesis. If you can never disprove the hypothesis, it's validity increases. If the hypothesis can be dis-proven for any reason, it is invalid.

That is not a desire driven by first embracing the virtue of faith, whether faith comes out derived from our cultural identity or adopted willingly by religious 'choice' as adults.