This is a letter I wrote to a (non-LDS) friend who, because he is intrigued by religion generally, asked me why I no longer counted myself

as a "Mormon".

 

Hi [name of friend],

So, as promised, I'll fill in a few details about my religious journey over the last few years, and hope you find it interesting.

I was quite committed to the Mormon Church all the time I was growing up and into my 20's. And while this is the story of how I became un-committed, it's important to understand the nature of this commitment before I can adequately explain my paradigm shift.

Every religion has its own version of "conversion", and despite not having studied other religions very much at all, I sense that the Mormon approach to conversion is somehow different to most others, perhaps even unique. Whether you grow up in the Church, or whether you investigate it from without, you are encouraged to obtain a thing called a "testimony"... What, then, is a testimony?  According to Mormons, it is a spiritual confirmation that certain basic tenets of the gospel are true. By "spiritual confirmation", they mean that it is actually God sending you, personally, an unmistakable message in some form or other, and which, when you receive it, you know without doubt that it comes from God. This is a bold claim. The idea is that God, who always keeps his word, will ALWAYS answer the prayer of an honest, humble seeker of truth with a testimony, and that EVERYBODY is entitled to it.

Once received, this testimony is supposed to be less fallible than your senses. In fact, Mormons often think of it in terms of a "sixth, spiritual sense", which everybody is born with, and which connects us all to the Holy Ghost (who, of course, is the appointed messenger in all of this God-to-human communication that's going on). People who claim to have testimonies are fond of saying that even seeing God with their own eyes would not make them any more confident that he exists.

As I said, it is a bold claim, but right or wrong, it is one whose survival is assured. Notice that the nature of "testimony" is such that it has the capacity to dismiss any contrary evidence. By elevating it above the status of the other, "physical", senses, these latter are rendered completely ineffective whenever they imply that other, "spiritual" truths might not be as infallible as we are led to believe.

But enough about what Mormons in general believe. Now I must explain to you how all of this affected me.

Growing up, I was very sensitive to the encouragements of my Church leaders to acquire a testimony for myself. It was a source of concern to me that I had not yet received what so many others around me apparently had, so I persevered in my praying and my studying of scripture and my church-going in the hope that one day God would see fit to bestow upon me this priceless gift of knowledge that I so much desired. When I was about 14, I had my first "spiritual" experience. I was reading the Book of Mormon on the bus on the way to school, and I came to a passage where Jesus was speaking to someone from heaven. I remember having a strange, subtle feeling that those words were meant for me, no, that they were being SPOKEN to me even as I read them. The corollary, of, course, was that Jesus was real, and I interpreted the experience to mean just that.  I recognised that the feeling wasn't, in fact, very strong, but I took pride in the fact that at least I now had what I thought of as "the beginnings of a testimony".

As you can imagine, over the years, these sorts of experiences accumulated, and all these "little confirmations" synergised into a strong, vibrant testimony that I was proud to bear. However, this isn't a complete description of my worldview at the time. I also had another side...

...which is what I call a scientific worldview. Pure science, by itself, doesn't make any argument for or against the existence of God and of spiritual things, and so I liked to think of science (which greatly appealed to my highly analytical mind) as something that complemented my religious worldview, rather than something that challenged it. I very much enjoyed synthesising the two, especially when it came to all those apparent contradictions that became controversial from time to time, like the Big Bang theory, or Evolution. I always found that by being very careful about my belief structure, there was always enough wiggle room to allow for both points of view without having to compromise either one of them.

As much fun as it was to solve all these apparent contradictions (even if only to my own satisfaction), what I found even more interesting was thinking about other, less obvious philosophical consequences of trying to marry a physical universe with a metaphysical one. Take miracles, for instance. They are extremely interesting because they occur at the crossover between the physical and metaphysical phenomena. How do we explain them? It turns out we have a few options, and that these options correspond to differing worldviews. (In the following discussion, keep in mind that Mormons believe that God, whilst omniscient and omnipotent, is not omnipresent: that he has a physical body which occupies physical space, and that he is subject to laws that govern his capabilities just as we are.)

In thinking about the nature of miracles, I concluded that any interpretation of them necessarily fell into one of two broad categories. A miracle occurs either as a consequence of the physical laws of nature, or as a circumvention of them. At risk of committing the fallacy of excluded middle, I posit that no alternative exists. Even the idea that God is working under some kind of "higher" physical law seems to me to fall squarely in the "circumvention" category, IF we limit "physical laws of nature" to its simplest scientific sense. There's plenty of room in this dichotomy to allow for many interpretations of God's role in the miracle-making process either as intervenor or as intelligent designer, just as there's plenty of room to account for our inability to explain them, either because they are the manifestation of laws we don't yet understand, or because there IS no physical explanation for them. There is a cute definition of miracles that I was rather fond of at one stage: that a miracle is, by definition, ANY phenomenon we don't understand. Of course, this point of view leads to viewing almost EVERYTHING as a miracle, and quickly becomes uninteresting when you realise that it's impossible to make any philosophical progress on that basis.

For me, these two ways of thinking about miracles (either as consequence or circumvention of the laws of nature) represented two respective categories of worldviews. In a nutshell, either one believes only in physical phenomena, or one believes also in metaphysical phenomena. In other words, either one believes that EVERYTHING (including God, the universe, etc.) exists within the "physical" realm, OR that there are SOME things that exist without it. There really can be no alternative this time, since one is just the negation of the other. Before I go on, I need to explain more fully what I mean by "physical". Without trying to cut my way through the dense jungle that is the axiomatic basis of science, let me summarise by saying that I define the "physical" universe as everything I can use my "physical" senses to see, touch, hear, measure, etc.

So, having prepared the playing field, I felt ready to tackle all these so-called miracles (both historic ones as well as "personal" ones), and decide if I ever needed to fall back on metaphysical explanations to account for them. My purpose was not to weaken my faith, but to strengthen it. Because I recognised the perpendicularity of my religious and scientific points of view, I was unafraid to seek out my ideal worldview: a complete synthesis of both, where EVERY phenomenon has both a physical explanation (cf. efficient cause) AND a spiritual one (cf.  final cause).

Separating out explanations in this way was very liberating. I found it helped me consider explanations that I would never have considered before. For instance, you are probably familiar with the account of "The First Vision" in which a young Joseph Smith claims to have been visited by God and Jesus, who stood in the air and spoke to him in a blaze of light and glory. Most Mormons take this very literally, as if to say that someone who happened to wander on to the scene by accident would have seen God, Jesus, the light and the glory just as Joseph did. Of course, all of this is very hard to swallow from a scientific point of view. But suddenly the possibility occurred to me that maybe the whole thing happened in his mind, and that our would-be intruder would only have seen a boy lying in a semi-coma with no light or glory around anywhere. Because I had separated out my physical explanations from my spiritual explanations, I could happily subscribe to this rather less glamourous (but much easier to swallow) view of events without jeopardising my faith. That he was hallucinating is no reason to believe that his hallucinations weren't divine in origin. Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily believed this particular explanation; I'm just saying that I was willing to consider it, and many like it, in my attempt to understand this and other religious claims.

I hope you can appreciate just how strong my philosophical position had become. I had reached a place where all physical evidence only added to my understanding of the mechanical side of my worldview, and where all spiritual interpretations (which were mine for the choosing) only supported my faith. It was an upward spiral that converted ALL evidence into POSITIVE evidence. And yes, I admit, I felt quite smug.

I want to point out two things. The first is to emphasise how important it was to keep the spiritual and physical explanations distinct. Without this assumption, I would have to concede that there are things that CANNOT (as a matter of principle, not just practice) be "understood" in the scientific sense of the word. This, more deeply than anything else, bucks against my intuition. While there have been many, many things I have seen or experienced in my life that I have not understood, I have NEVER seen anything that leads me to believe that there are things that CANNOT be understood in this way. I might even go so far as to say that this really is the bottom line of my worldview.

The second thing I want to point out is I knew, even then, how arbitrary my faith was. That my Mormonism was a consequence of the cultural and social factors of my upbringing, I had no question. This realisation, normally, might lead the ordinary person to question the validity of his or her faith, but as I have explained, my neat separation trick guaranteed that I could interpret all of this as God's Will, if I so chose. And I did choose. Even though I no longer saw God as the efficient cause of all my "spiritual experiences" (which in my mind were now demoted to the status of "intuition" and "epiphany"--very common phenomena that I expect will turn out to have ordinary, scientific explanations in terms of neurons and brain structures), I chose to see God, and more particularly the Mormon God, as the final cause of these experiences. And why not? It's much nicer and easier to believe that the course of my life was in accordance with God's Will rather than contrary to it. What's more, I was good at being Mormon, having had a lot of practise, and there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to do anything else. Therefore I believed with all my heart that the Mormon interpretation I had given to my "spiritual" experiences and, in fact, to my whole life, was completely valid, and this belief was the basis of the (by now very strong) testimony that I took with my into the mission field.

And then, in April 2007, not four months after arriving in Taiwan as a fully qualified preacher of the Gospel, I heard a statement that was to rock my carefully-constructed worldview to the core. The statement, ironically, was delivered over the pulpit in a General Conference broadcast from the leaders of the Church to the general membership. In fact, there was nothing glamourous about the statement, or the delivery of it, and it was really only a restatement of a piece of Mormon doctrine that could have been heard in any Sunday school class around the world. But for some reason, the statement's impact on my belief structure was only realised then, as I listened with millions of others to this poor, unsuspecting church leader who could not possibly have known the devastation he would cause to my coherent world-picture.

The statement was (and I paraphrase) that in order for God's gift of testimony to us to be infallible, it has to admit of no other explanation. Said another way, our "spiritual sixth sense" necessarily cannot be explained in terms of the other senses. That's more or less what he said. What I heard was: "There DO exist mechanisms that lie beyond the power of science to explain them, and the faculty we all possess to hear and understand God's word through the Holy Ghost is an example of one."

Suddenly, I realised that the admission of supernatural phenomena was an integral part of Mormon doctrine. There was no way I could escape it. I could not maintain my intellectual integrity and claim to be a Mormon any longer. My worldview, which I realised had bent over backwards to accommodate Mormonism, could not survive once I realised that Mormonism did not accommodate my worldview. I had to amputate it.

Easier said than done. I was in the thick of it, out there in Taiwan, with all these other missionaries around me, yet so alone. I knew intuitively my faith was doomed, but never being one to rock the boat, I decided to keep the jury at bay until something came along to convince me that changing my lifestyle was going to be worth it. And thus I spent the next year or so, acting out a charade, playing the missionary part, my only confidante being [my brother], who had by an entirely different route come to the same conclusion with regards to the Church and its teachings.

After said year, a variety of factors contributed to the decision to leave the church once I got home. Part of this ... was the fact that I'm gay, and that there wasn't really any point putting myself through the hardship of pretending to be straight all my life. But mostly it was the realisation that all the personal growth I had experienced growing up in the church weren't BECAUSE of the church, and that I had as much right to live a fulfilling, productive, and moral life outside the confines of religion as inside them. I realised, in short, that I didn't NEED the church to function as a worthwhile person, and that leaving the religious life behind was the surest way I knew to "live deliberately,...live deep and suck out all the marrow of life".

...

 

 

 

As a postscript, I want to clarify my current position. I call myself agnostic, but with definite atheistic tendencies. Whether or not something's "out there" is, I maintain, impossible to determine. However, I find it highly unlikely, if there is something after this life, that it remotely resembles anything I could possibly imagine.

 

I also feel quite lucky. I wasn't completely alone in my journey. My brother had gone down the more-often-trod Church History road to apostasy a few years prior, and though I could only email him once a week (while I was still on the mission), his support was invaluable.

 

I'd be interested to know if there are many other people like who stopped believing in Church without having to wade through years of research into its origins and its history. I feel like I managed to shortcut the process and jump right to the heart of the matter. The journey was still long and hard, mainly for social reasons, but the moments of epiphany were infinitesimal. Here's hoping that more people who aren't afraid to think will be able to find their own philosophical shortcuts to intellectual freedom.