Mormons, antiquity, and plausibility
Here I am again responding to the NYT Magazine. In a long article on Mitt Romney and Mormonism, Noah Feldman writes,
Even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith’s revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.
But this only makes sense under the assumption that the only reason people disbelieve Mormonism is its recency. It seems not to occur to Feldman to ask whether all propositions of all religions are equally plausible or implausible. Is “antiquity” really the only factor at work here? If only a handful were attracted to the teachings of David Koresh, is the recency of those teachings a sufficient explanation? Such an assumption is simplistic at best. Let me be clear: I do not mean to say that Mormon beliefs are anything like the crackpot tenets of Koresh; I am just claiming that if you want to understand why certain beliefs are not widely respected or admired, you might want to know something besides how old they are. You might want to inquire into the actual content of those beliefs.
Moreover, if the Average Joe takes Judaism more seriously than Mormonism — a proposition that may or may not be true — “antiquity” isn’t the reason. If that were the case, then the Average Joe would find the worship of Ashteroth, Baal, and Isis and Osiris as plausible as that of Yahweh. Insofar as people-in-general concede respect to Judaism, that’s not because of Judaism’s “antiquity” but because of its continuity. If we ever have Mormons who have been saying the same prayers to the same God for three thousand years or so, then those Mormons will almost certainly get a hell of a lot more respect than today’s Latter-Day Saints do.
N.B.: This post is not about the truth or falsehood of any religious beliefs, but about what fancy-pants academics call “plausibility structures.” Okay?
Good points.
Now that I have a bit of a handle on what I believe to be true, making fun of my religion and everyone else’s wherever I can find humor is a great pleasure. I skimmed LarkNews.com this a.m. According to Christianity Today, they’re like The Wittenburg Door in its glory days.
— Joules · Jan 7, 11:43 PM · #
Perhaps what he meant by antiquity is a particular religion’s cultural context. We find Judaism inherently more plausible than, say, the cult of Isis because it conforms to a recognizable monotheistic structure that happens to be closely related to the Christian beliefs of most Americans. Mormonism, on the other hand, departs substantially from that same monotheistic tradition, which probably makes it seem intuitively less plausible to most Americans.
— Will · Jan 8, 03:10 AM · #
Still, how many times have you been in a setting where people are discussing religious beliefs and someone discounts Christianity because it’s antiquated? It happens all the time! I was at a friend’s art show last year where one guy I met told me how bogus any information in the Bible was because it was ancient and in the next breath he was singing the praises of medical information he learned from his ancient Chinese medicine studies. I asked him if he’d ever compared some of the dietary and health advice given in the Bible to things he was learning in his studies and he said he wasn’t interested.
— Joules · Jan 8, 08:03 PM · #
Ah yes, Joules, selective antiquity.
Will: I think your speculation is a good one, but note that it’s just what I recommend (and what Feldman does not): looking beyond the age of ideas and considering their actual content.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 8, 08:27 PM · #
Feldman says a great deal more than that Mormonism is suspect because it lacks antiquity; he cites the historical tendency of Mormonism toward secrecy and esotericism, the explicit teachings re. the establishment of a theocracy, and a tendency to endorse violence in the propagation of its beliefs—among other things. Also, to be fair to him, I think he is indicating that the popular disparagement of recent prophetic utterances in favor of antiquity is logically indefensible, and so Alan has less of a fight than he thinks he does.
Nevertheless, even taking up that narrow question of antiquity and construing it in the way that Alan does, I’m not sure it’s the case that the “content” of belief can be separated and analyzed quite so obviously and readily from the context in which it occurs. To take the case of Christianity, for instance, many Christians in antiquity freely admitted the implausibility of their beliefs…and saw it as a badge of honor. As do some Christians today. At least these beliefs are considered implausible for those outside the fold, so to speak. The case for the plausibility of a particular belief rests at least as much on its familiarity—a result of time—as it does on an inherent internal structure. Some studies of evangelism have indicated that people who convert to Christianity have heard the basic story as many as forty or fifty times on average before the moment of their conversion. I doubt the moment of conversion comes because of the inherent logic of Christian stories. Rather, the assimilation of stories—their possibilities for and attachments to the shape of the rest of one’s life—takes a great deal of time. Antiquity in miniature, we might say.
— Pete Powers · Jan 18, 02:02 AM · #