None of the following statements make something untrue.
“Cannot be confirmed to my satisfaction”
“Does not reflect my personal experience”
“Does not reflect the experience of people around me”
“Does not meet my personal standard for validity”
“Is not something I can wrap my mind around”
“Doesn’t seem fair to me”
“Is not the way I wish for God to operate”
“Is not rational”
“Is contested by intelligent and capable experts”
“Isn’t what I imagined”
“Is believed by people who also believe some other things that are demonstrably false”
“Is believed by an awful person”
“Doesn’t fit my paradigm”
“Is a source of frustration for me”
“Is something I experience discomfort with”
“Cannot be verified using tools and data available to scientists”
“Is the product of a specific cultural context”
“Is not the way I understood it”
“Isn’t what most people think”
“Is something that many people consider harmful”
“Is experienced differently by different people”
“Is not possible to defend to everyone’s satisfaction against counterarguments”
“Represents a shift in understanding”
“Goes against a consensus of scholars”
“Contradicts the mental model that I’ve used all my life”
So if those things don’t make something untrue, then can we have confidence in anything? Here we explore some concepts in Latter-day Saint epistemology: how we know what we know, and why we believe things we believe.
Epistemology is a set of important choices that we make in a life of faith, and the better we understand the choices available to us, the more mature and defensible our belief system will be.
Slides for viewing and download:
YouTube Narration:
More resources:
Latter-day Saint Witness Testimony
What do we know and how? A look at Latter-day Saint Epistemology
4 thoughts on “Latter-day Saint Epistemology”