Author: Nathaniel Givens

Further Thoughts on Sin

Last week I wrote about the conflict between a basic axiom of human behavior (we tend to see ourselves as heroes in our own stories and rationalize our behavior accordingly) and the requirement that sinful actions be in some sense deliberate in order to be sinful. I did this primarily by suggesting that, while the original commission of a sinful act often occurs under duress of some sort (thus mitigating against it’s nature as a deliberate choice), we frequently compound that sin by subsequently trying to rationalize it. I’d like to conclude (for now, anyway) my posts on this subject by looking the other direction: backwards in time. One response to my original argument may simply be to deny the premise that people don’t view their sinful actions as sinful at the time that they commit them. In one sense, this must be true. We aren’t held responsible for violations of moral laws we are really and truly ignorant of. But it’s a mistake to see this issue in terms of stark binary opposites, as though the only options available are “know” and “not know.” Let me suggest two realistic descriptions of the frame of mind of a person at the time that they commit a sin: They simply are not deliberating at all. This describes the mental states of, say, someone with an extremely quick fuse. Such a person can go from passive to enraged (in the right situation) without ever…

Some Thoughts on Sin

The textbook definition of sin is doing something that you know to be wrong. And yet, as has been frequently noted in fiction, villains (almost) never think to themselves, “Gee, I’m doing something wrong now.” We each live out narratives in which we star as the protagonist. We are the heroes of our own stories. How can we reconcile these two notions: first, that sin requires a knowledge that what we are doing is wrong and second, that no one really believes what they are doing is wrong at the time that they do it? I’m going to rely once again on Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing. (As I’ve written about before, his work has had quite an impact on me.) The primary thesis of his work is that human beings have a strong aversion towards killing other human beings, and that as a result most combat soldiers will not willingly take the life of their enemy even when their lives and their comrades lives depend on it. Clearly the army that figures out how to overcome this inhibition will have a tremendous advantage over foes that have not. (Grossman suggests that several smaller wars in the 20th century reflected this imbalance, including the Falklands War.) Modern militaries have stumbled onto psychological practices such as operant conditioning to create automatic reflexes that will override the innate inhibition and render combat forces frighteningly effective. Soldiers trained in such techniques still require a host…

Faithful Obedience or Malicious Compliance?

Malicious compliance is the idea of using the letter of the law to intentionally violate the spirit of the law. It is perfect obedience. It is also sabotage. Since so much trouble seems to arise from the gap between the letter and spirit of the law, we might reasonably ask: why not close the gap? Why not just write down the spirit of the law in the first place? I think the answer is at least in part that whatever is written down and then read and interpreted by a human being is necessarily going to fall short of the spirit. If by “the spirit” we mean the ultimate truth upon which some particular edict of God rests, then “the spirit” is like the actual, true laws of physics that govern the universe and the letter is like whatever the current best interpretation of those rules might be. If this analogy holds, then right off the bat we should be deeply suspicious of the finality of any revealed law. Anyone who accepted Aristotle’s model of physics as final would have missed out on Newton, and anyone who thought Newton had the last word would have subsequently been left behind by Einstein. In other words, if laws are imperfect translations of perfect principles into our particular place and time we should not only be prepared to accept changes in God’s law as they arrive, we should expect them. Contrast the assumption that revealed…

Faith Crisis in a Secular Age: We’re All Thomas Now

The principle behind Mathew 10:34 (“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword”) is not that Jesus came to foster contention (see, e.g., 3 Nehi 11:29), but that the presence of the Savior forces people to make decisions. C. S. Lewis’s trilemma is an example of what I have in mind: we must accept that Jesus was mad, that he was evil, or that he was divine. That he was a nice guy who taught good principles but was not divine is not compatible with the textual description of his words and actions. The easy path is ruled out. If we take seriously the millennial aspects of Mormonism–that there is a day of Christ’s returning and that it is drawing closer–then it would make sense to apply Matthew 10 to the world at large. That’s what occurred to me, in any case, when I read David Brooks’ “book report” on Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age”. Christ is drawing near. Decisions must be made. As Brooks summarizes: Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people…

Free Will, Existence, and the Uncreated

I’ve written about theology before for Times And Seasons, but I haven’t actually done very much theology here or elsewhere in public. I have two reasons for finally taking the plunge. The first is selfish: I don’t think my ideas are going to get any better closeted in my own head. No one who creates really likes criticism, but ultimately its necessary if you want to get any better. The second is perhaps a bit more altruistic. I’ve written that theology is a kind of worship, and I’d like to illustrate what I mean by that. Mormons believe that this mortal existence is a phase in much longer life story. We have histories and identities that predate our mortal birth, and the arc of our destinies lies beyond the horizon of the grave. The purpose of this life is to test us, but not so much as a process of evaluation as one of deciding and creating. The ultimate goal is, of course, unreachable. We are commanded to be perfect, but each of us sins and falls short. Only the unearned grace of Christ is sufficient for salvation. But the command is still in effect, and so Christ’s grace saves us from sin, but doesn’t preclude our futile efforts to resist and rise above. The same holds true for theology. As Mormons, we believe that all truths can be circumscribed into one eternal whole. We believe that whatever we learn of…

Mormonism and Embodiment: Learning from Killing

This week I finished reading On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War in Society, but I knew I would be writing about the book on Times And Seasons long before I finished it. Despite the seemingly narrow focus of the title, On Killing has broad and sweeping implications for understanding human nature, and it has particular if unexpected relevance to Mormon theology. I  must start with the central thesis of the book, however, which is that humans have an incredibly strong inhibition against killing other human beings. The first quantified research in this field came from the work of S. L. A. Marshall who, in post-action surveys during World War II, found that only 15% – 20% of infantry rifleman in close quarters combat fired their weapons at the enemy. This result seems shockingly counter-intuitive, but Grossman draws on a wide range of data from other wars–everything from the campaigns of Alexander the Great to the American Civil War–to show that Marshall’s findings are not an anomaly. They are the norm. Grossman goes on to explain how the reluctance to kill factors into the complex nature of combat stress with more shocking historical data. He writes that “Prior to World War II, psychologists and military theoreticians… predicted that mass bombing of cities would create the same degree of psychological trauma see on the battlefield in World War I.” First Britain and later Germany endured precisely such massive…

Reconciling Modesty with Feminism

Some folks enjoy poking a hornet’s nest, but just writing that title has me quoting Shakespeare in my head: “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.” I’m going to go ahead, however, because even though I may be about as welcome in most feminist circles as Feminists for Life (or as my friends at Secular Pro-Life when they showed up at the American Atheist Convention) the reality is that as long as women face staggering rates of sexual assault and systematic discrimination–things I’ve witnessed second hand through friends and family–I will consider myself a feminist. So tough luck all around; it looks like we’re stuck with each other. The most recent modesty/feminism Internet brouhaha was kicked off by former Power Ranger and current swimwear designer Jessica Rey. In a video for Q (apparently the Christian equivalent of TED), Rey cited a Princeton study to argue that bikinis disempower women via objectification. The video was applauded by religious social conservatives, but quickly drew fire from religious social liberals like To Everyone That Believeth (Mormon) and Liz Boltz Ranfeld (Commonway Church) who approve of modesty (in theory), but not of Rey. The main argument from Rey’s critics is straightforward: you can’t ask women not to wear a bikini just to protect men’s fragile sexual equilibria. First of all: because it doesn’t really have any impact. Haters gonna hate, and sexual objectifiers gonna objectify, seems to be the slogan. Secondly: because women should be modest…

The Great Expectations of Mormonism

I’m going to wander a little farther from familiar territory in this post. I hope you’ll willingly entertain some speculation and tentative analysis about the institutional nature of the Church in a changing society and indulge my focus primarily on American culture. I’m interested to see what others make of these ideas. First, only institutions that develop successful methods for continuously bringing in new members can survive over the long term. Since the Church has survived and thrived in the centuries since its founding, it stands to reason that the Church must have developed reasonably effective recruitment practices. Of course the Church’s missionary practices are well-known, but in this post I’m interested in how the Church contributes to the education and socialization of Mormon children. Second, I think that Mormon adults who are married and have children are relatively secure in their Church membership relative to younger, single Mormons. Young parents are already heavily invested in the Church as a place where their kids are socialized and cared for with other children and–in any case–often don’t have the energy to consider a seismic change like leaving the Church they have known their whole lives. Parents of older children may have  more latitude, but by this time they are even more deeply enmeshed in the Church. If this is true, then it would make sense for the Church to focus a great deal of time and energy on shepherding young Mormons…

Zion Theatre Company’s Kickstarter Campaign

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed Mahonri Stewart’s two plays The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun. I liked them both. I’m also reading the anthology of plays that he compiled and edited Saints on Stage. So far it’s been fantastic just for the historical overview of Mormon drama from the Restoration until today, and I’m just getting into Robert Elliot’s Fires of the Mind. So, when I learned that his theater company (Zion Theatre Company) was putting on a Kickstarter campaign, I jumped at the chance to back it. Zion Theatre Company is currently in its third year, and you can check out reviews of past productions on their website. They do plays by Mahonri Stewart as well as other talented Mormon playwrights, and even though I haven’t been able to see a production in person yet (they are in Provo, after all, and I’m in Virginia) I was happy to see that the $25 backer level comes with digital downloads of two of their past productions. The Kickstarter campaign is for their fourth year (2014) and they already have 4 plays slated for production: Huebener by Thomas F. Rogers Manifest by Mahonri Stewart Identity Crisis by James Arrington Servers by Mahonri Stewart and Nathaniel Drew Since ZTC has been successful so far, the purpose of the campaign is to support faster growth. If you would like to see one of their plays in 2014, or just want to support a growing…

Don’t Debate the Trinity

Against my better judgment, and to the detriment of my workday, I allowed myself to be temporarily pulled into a Facebook debate on Friday about Mormonism and orthodox Christianity. This went about as well as could be expected, of course. The word “cult” was used in earnest, the Tanners were quoted, and all in all it was a horrifying flashback to my high school days as an Internet messageboard crusader. (Thank goodness those days are over!) I eventually came to my senses and retreated like Luke Skywalker fleeing the Mos Eisley Cantina. I did, however, gain some insight into the futility of arguing about the Trinity. The problem is that when Mormons and mainstream Christians argue about the Trinity, the real conflict has almost nothing to do with the subject at hand. This was underscored when a non-Mormon friend of mine posted the following YouTube video on Facebook along with the comment: “For the record, St. Patrick does rightly define the Trinity in the beginning: 3 people who are 1 God. Then it all just goes down hill.” Now, if by “Trinitarian” one simply means accepting “3 people who are 1 God,” then Mormons are pretty unambiguously Trinitarian. In fact, I can’t think of a more clear statement of Momon belief, if we are to take Alma 11:27-28 seriously: 28 Now Zeezrom said: Is there more than one God? 29 And he [Amulek] answered, No. In my own experience, most…

Review: The Fading Flower & Swallow the Sun

Mahonri Stewart recently released two of his plays–The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun–together in a single volume. I found both of them to be so compelling, that I’m truly sad that no productions have been put on or are scheduled within 1,000 miles of where I live on the East Coast. More than just enjoyable, however, I found that they presented a strong and compellingly Mormon artistic perspective. While there is no doubt that the subject matter of both plays is Mormon, what really struck me was less the viewed and more the viewpoint. The Fading Flower centers around the faith struggles of Joseph Smith’s youngest son David, who was born after his father’s death. As he grows older, he is  caught between the rival factions of the RLDS Church (with whom he was raised and with his brother serving as President) and the Brighamites (the objects of his missionary endeavors). So the setting is clearly Mormon, but what is really Mormon is David’s tortured journey to pursue the truth about his father’s practice of polygamy. Anyone can write about the subject of Mormon polygamy (just ask HBO), but looking at the issue through the lens of David becomes a powerful and uniquely Mormon reflection on the peril and promise of living in such close proximity to our historical legends. Of course with such a controversial and painful topic at the heart of the play, Stewart could easily have…

Another Post about Mormons and Science Fiction

The topic of Mormons and science fiction seems to crop up with decent regularity every couple of years, and with the recent release of the film adaptation of The Host and the impending release (finally!) of the film adaptation of Ender’s Game, we’re probably about due for another round. This is a topic that I particularly love because it involves two of my greatest passions. I’ve read lots of really good ideas about what it is that makes so many Mormons write science fiction, why Mormons ought to write “fairy-tales”, and of course the caveat that Mormons might not actually write that much science fiction: they might just be really visible when they do. The empirical question of whether or not Mormons are actually over represented in sci-fi will have to wait for someone feeling more ambitious than I am at the moment, but even if they are not it might still be interesting. As Scott Parkins said: If you look at the sciences, Mormons are disproportionately represented as scientists, but what’s more intriguing is that more successful scientists are LDS proportionate to the total than other representatives of religion that are active in their faith. I think that carries through here. In other words: if there are no more Mormons writing than any other denomination, but the Mormons who do write sci-fi view their work or themselves in a religious light more than other authors, well that itself is interesting. I did…

An Ensign Is Not A Roadmap

Goal-setting is a perennial, and for some perennially frustrating, part of Mormonism. I count myself among the frustrated. I have been setting weekly goals for myself since I was a teenager, and I don’t think I’ve ever achieved them all for a single week. I’m getting closer, however. Although I believe that goals are positive and necessary, the costs–especially if expectations are misaligned–can be high. Something to keep in mind is that Church leaders of our generation are selected from a group of very high-achieving professionals. Add to this the willing Mormon tendency towards hagiography, and it’s easy to see how, despite their protestation that goals ought to be realistic, there’s a tendency for members to overreach. Goal-setting is not just a common theme in counsel from the leaders, however, it is also embedded in our institutions. The entire church program seems designed around shuttling children (especially boys) from baptism to a temple marriage through a series of regular milestones: Deacon; Teacher; Priest; Elder; Missionary; Husband. And then… what? After a lifetime spent working to achieve one concrete objective after another, the sudden absence of predetermined goals is disorienting to say the least. I think this is why so many of Mormon guy friends–young marrieds in the 20s and 30s–are casting about desperately for some kind of external achievement. They start companies, start PhD programs, start books, and start climbing the corporate ladder. I’ve done all four, and I’ve felt…

Sifting the Sacred from the Mundane

Of all the deaths in Harry Potter, Dobby’s strikes many people the hardest. It did me. There was absolutely no way I could have kept my eyes dry. If John Locke is right, if actions are the best interpreters of mens thoughts, does this mean that my grief was, in the moment, real? Did I believe, at some level, that Dobby had really lived, and then really died? Did I believe the events of the book were true? Obviously I’m not confused about whether house elves do in fact exist, let alone whether or not Harry Potter is fact or fiction, but there’s good reason to believe that our beliefs are not always as tightly under our rational control as we think they are. Consider a mind-bending experiment reported at Nature.com in which participants were easily duped into employing their rational faculties into the defense of a positions that were diametrically opposed to their real views. The experimental setup was tricky, so I’ll quote at length: The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one…

Giving Up On The Feminine Divine

Not long ago I wrote a piece about mommy blogs, feminism, and the publishing industry. My basic thesis was that if you believe in the reality of historical oppression of women, you ought to be deeply skeptical of the current trend to define gender equality as equal representation of men and women in institutions which are inextricably connected to the historical oppression. To the extent that women have to conform to the expectations of those institutions, our haste to create a better world for women may in some cases be doing the exact opposite. I realize that part of the argument is often that the institutions need to change, but in practice the benchmark one hears is simply “how many women CEOs are there?” and not “how successfully have we reformed corporate culture to be accepting of women?” The benchmarks don’t matter if they aren’t measuring the right thing. It turns out that there’s some solid research to back the theory that looking for equal representation in all institutions may actually be anti-feminist. In a paper for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers conducting a cross-cultural study of 55 nations found that: Overall, higher levels of human development–including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth–were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. The researchers proposed that this “unintuitive result” could be explained by “personality traits of men and women…

Theology, Worship, and Children’s Games

I believe in theology as a kind of worship. To spend time and effort in the attempt to reason out the philosophical context for and implications of Mormon doctrine is an affirmation of the authenticity with which we embrace that doctrine. Intellectually wrestling with the angels is thus properly seen as an individual responsibility rather than an institutional prerogative. Theology can never take the place of other forms of worship–from music to service–but it can and should exist alongside them. One of the important things to note about this conception of theology is that, in this as in all endeavors, we are ultimately unprofitable servants. One small disagreement I have with Adam Miller’s Rube Goldberg Machines is that I don’t believe theology to be uniquely pointless. In all that we attempt in this mortal life, we are little children in the truest sense of the phrase. Our attempt to reason out the true nature of God is no more prone to ultimate success than a four year old trying to get to the moon on a rocket ship made out of pillows, blankets, and cardboard. However, our attempts at theology are no less vital and imperative to our spiritual development than the games that children play as they seek to become like their earthly parents. My point, in democratizing the notion of theology, is that whenever we respond to our doctrine with the question “Why?” or “How?” then we stand at…

What the Church Is Not For

The hardest time of my mission, and one of the hardest time of my life, was serving as an office elder. The job was incredibly stressful. I had days that started at 4 AM and did not end until after 10 PM. The worst part of the job, however, was that there was no teaching. Neither the office elders nor the AP’s had had a teaching pool in the memory of anyone in the mission. In the 6 months that I served in the office, I had time to go tracting exactly once. I vividly remember getting on my knees one Saturday evening, and telling God that if he did not find someone for me to teach, that I would not make it. I went to sleep confident that there would be an investigator for me to start teaching at church the next day. There was. Teaching that family became the most important part of my life. I did not have a regular companion and so sometimes I took an AP and other times I took an office elder. Even though it was only one discussion per week, it kept me sane. It was the most sacred experience of my mission. During this time a general authority came to visit the mission. He held a leadership meeting in the mission home. I think my mission president felt sorry for me (he had promised to make me a trainer, and it never happened) so he invited me to attend even though I had never…

Mormonism and Secularism: Fiery Trials and Surprises

Over the last two posts I’ve outlined a view that a religion is a system of beliefs and institutions that serves to help people find meaning and make sense of the world, and that in modernity a secular religion has emerged. (I used the “scientism”, but Alvin Plantinga uses “naturalism”, that’s probably better.) I also argued that all religions come in essentially two varieties. Authentic religion emphasizes the struggle to respond to life’s questions. Inauthentic religion promises relief from the struggle with easily attained answers. It effectively outsources our existential struggle: to an inerrant Bible, to an inerrant Church hierarchy, or to an inerrant march of scientific progress. The two are related, but not because scientism (or any secular philosophy) must necessarily be inauthentic. That’s not the case. What is true, however, is that the very denial that scientism could be functionally equivalent to a religion makes it particularly susceptible to the tendency towards inauthenticity. What is additionally true is that when it comes to inauthentic religions, scientism has everyone else beat by a mile. The more credible inauthentic religion is, the easier it is to accept. For people who grow up in a specific religious tradition (Mormon, Catholic, whatever) that becomes the fabric of their reality and it natural to accept until it is challenged by an external alternative. These days, religions do not tend to offer a whole lot of substantiation for their own claims when contrasted with…

Authentic Religion, Authentic Science

My previous post centered on the special place religious institutions have historically held in human society. I argued that since religions couldn’t reliably provide public, objectively observable miracles or verify any of their claims about an afterlife, the only plausible explanation for their social capital was their ability to bridge the gap between deeply rooted human longing for meaning and the world’s absurdity. Suppose we fix that as our definition of religion. Any belief system (with accompanying formal and informal social institutions) that attempts to aid us in our quest for meaning is a religion. The interesting thing about such a definition is that it has very little to do with what we might otherwise typically associate with religion, including God, faith, miracles, and the supernatural. According to this definition, otherwise ostensibly secular belief systems could in fact be viewed as religions. Whether or not this is a correct view hinges on definitions, but I think it’s an undoubtedly useful way of looking at the world. Consider noted astrophysicist, committed atheist, and pop-culture icon Neil deGrasse Tyson. On the one hand when it comes to religion, he has said: “I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.” On the other hand, when answers Reddit AMAs (of which he has 3 of the top 10 most popular)…

Mormonism and the New Religion of Secularism

Secularism is a new religion that threatens to overwhelm traditional faiths in much the same way that Christianity and Manichaeism swept away traditional local cults almost two thousand years ago. Mormonism is far from immune to this process, but it is particularly well-suited (theologically) to adapt (culturally) and remain relevant and vibrant. If changes are made. The ship must be turned to face the wave head-on. Since secularism is defined in opposition to religion, either I don’t understand what religion is or the secularists that I have in mind don’t understand what religion is. I’ll argue why it is the latter. First, however, I want to specify that it is not secularism per se with which I have a bone to pick, but a specific subgroup: the New Atheists or New Skeptics (the term “scientism” also applies). I don’t think anyone can read Camus’ The Plague (just as a personal example) and think that atheism, broadly construed, is unreasonable or unlovely. I believe that there are good reasons to disbelieve and good reasons to believe, and also that atheists and theists can be unified on every fundamental value. Matters of fact do not divide true friends. What provokes a reaction from me is not that some people do not believe that God exists or believe that God does not exist, but rather that some people claim that it is unreasonable for anyone to believe. It is that claim which draws my…

Why I Listen to Screamo

So here’s a piece about multidimensional optimization algorithms, a genre of music named after and including a lot of primal screaming, and my mission. Several examples of said musical genre, screamo, are included so I hope you have a broad audial palette. I’ll start with a short story from my Mormon youth. On one particular day I remember being in the backseat of a minivan full of my fellow teenage Mormons as we drove to or from some weekday church activity. We were listening to the radio when Bullet with Buttefly Wings by The Smashing Pumpkins came on and I started to sing along.  This song is sonically tame compared to what we’ll be sampling shortly, but my enthusiasm was met by unanimous horror from the rest of the van. This, it seemed, was not what good Mormons listened to. While someone gave me a mini-lecture on musical standards, the radio dial was hastily changed from alternative rock  to top-40. My own misgivings–was I bringing the devil into this vehicle?–were laid to rest as Christina Aguilera instructed us all on how to rub her the right way in order to convince her to “give it away”. I was pretty sure that, next to that, Billy Corgan singing  “And I still believe that I cannot be saved,” wasn’t any worse. As my mission approached, I partook of a great deal of the kind of folklore we have built around them. First there was…

The Opposite of Epistemic Humility

[This is Part 4 of a 4-part series. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.] In my first three pieces I’ve spent an awful lot of time talking about epistemic humility. Now I’m going to talk about what I consider to be the antithesis of epistemic humility: extremism. My definition of the term is non-standard, but I believe it both fits as the antithesis of epistemic humility and matches our intuition that there’s something to extremism that is more than merely being far removed from the mainstream. After all, if you live in a society where child sacrifice is the norm and you consider it an abomination you are an extremist in a technical sense, but that lacks the pejorative connotations that we typically bundle in with the term. People believe things for a lot of reasons, but the very last reason is that they have gone through some kind of rational evaluation of the evidence and logic and concluded that the belief in question is likely to be true. It is my experience that, almost without exception, our explanation of our positions (political, religious, aesthetic, etc.) are not explanations, but post hoc rationalizations. I initially came to this conclusion as an undergraduate philosophy major (and promptly switched my major to math), but the really exciting work is coming out of behavioral economics where, as Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people are understood to have preferences over beliefs. Simply…

On Learning from False Models

[This is Part 3 of a 4-part series. Part 1. Part 2. Part 4] In this post I want to present a secular example of epistemic humility. As with the religious example, I hope that this one will also provide some intrinsically interesting ideas. I also plan on reusing these ideas in the next couple of posts. Like my first example, the second highlights the fertility that arises from knowingly maintaining contradictory views. In this case the conflict is between the highly stylized model of human behavior used by economists (homo economicus or the rational agent) and real, live human beings. It was John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith who put homo economicus through an early beta stage, but it was the generation of economists writing in the early 20th century who created version 1.0 of this model by rendering it mathematically precise. They did this because economics was suffering at the time, and perhaps suffers acutely to this day, from physics envy. The core assumption of the model held that individuals are constantly optimizing a mathematically tractable utility function that converts things like the amount of goods consumed (good) or the amount of hours worked (bad) given constraints (income) into a nebulous concept known as “utility”. Predicting behavior (and thus doing useful things like solving for market-clearing prices) was therefore a matter of applying optimization techniques from physics to the economic models. In short: take derivative, set equal to 0. (There…

Faith is a Work in Progress

[This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. Part 1. Part 3. Part 4] I appreciate the kind welcome to T&S and all the good comments and questions. I know I haven’t responded to some of them yet, and I’ll try to rectify that soon, but I wanted to make sure I had this post ready to go. My goal is to live up to my promise to walk through a religious example of epistemic humility in action. At the end of the last post, I suggested that one of the dangers we face when our beliefs conflict with each other is that we will fictionalize one of those beliefs by compartmentalizing it. At the other extreme, we can so privilege certain beliefs that anything which contradicts them is dismissed out of hand. Both of these approaches spare us from the anxiety and frustration of cognitive dissonance, and both of them also cut us off from further growth. The alternative, and this is where my example begins, is to frankly admit that we are confused. When I was a teenager, Nephi’s description of the “great and abominable church” provided me with just such an opportunity for confusion. The problem arises with Nephi’s claim that there are only two churches (one of the Lamb of God and the other of the devil). This cheerful disregard for what appear to be the most fundamental elements of social reality (formal institutions) created a mild but uncomfortable…

The Wise Man Doubts Often, And Changes His Mind

[This is Part 1 of a 4-part series. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4] I’m happy to have a chance to do a guest stint here at Times and Seasons, and over the next two weeks I want to use my borrowed soap box to talk about epistemic humility. Epistemic humility is an awareness of the limits of our ability to know. It is an admission that we are ignorant of things that are true and that we accept as true things which are not. Hence the title, which comes from a longer saying of Akhenaten: “The wise man doubts often, and changes his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubts not; he knows all things but his own ignorance.” In this piece I hope to explain why epistemic humility is a serious concern, and in subsequent pieces I’ll shift the focus to implications and responses. Although it has become something of a buzzword recently, the philosophical history of epistemic humility is long and rich, with Plato’s Socrates serving as the original model.  In his Meditations, Descartes outlined a radical doubt that cast everything we perceive through our senses into question. Hume forcefully argued that induction is irrational. Box famously said “all models are wrong”, and there’s no reason to except our cognitive models. And of course we have Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns: Because our ignorance is by definition unbounded, nothing that we currently take as fact is safe from…