In May 2007, a new museum and family discovery center was opened. It covers 49 acres and cost an estimated $27 million to build. It has a state-of-the-art planetarium, a 200-seat special effects theater with vibrating seats and mist, and Animatronic dinosaurs. There are displays designed by people who worked at Universal Studios. By its 3rd anniversary, it had reportedly had over one million visitors.
There are several unique things about this museum. It displays dinosaurs side-by-side with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It has a model of Noah’s ark under construction and explains how the 15,000 feet of sediment and fossils in the Grand Canyon were laid down in the Great Flood. Its staff of 160 people explain how the earth was created in 6 literal days approximately 6000 years ago, and that the earth is certainly no more that 7000 years old. To arrange a visit, you can visit the website for the Creation Museum.
When discussing science and religion, I define the Creation Museum as an example of an an “Inside Out” framework for thinking about the world. According to this paradigm, the following steps occur:
1) Religious texts are read, often with a certain amount of literalism
2) Concepts from the texts are internalized
3) The outside world is examined for look for support for the internal concept
– If there is outside support, it is seen as proof of the concept
– If there is contradictory outside information, it is radically reinterpreted or else discarded
This “Inside Out” approach to science and religion has been used for millennia. Ancient man attributed unexplained observations of the world around them to gods. Nature gods needed to be appeased through sacrifices and rituals. The sun was a fire drawn across the sky by a god in a chariot. Some cultures had a plurality of gods to answer all of these questions. Some had multiple gods as facets of one god. The monotheistic religions rejected this. But still, as they wrote things down, they intermingled their then-current knowledge about the world with revealed truths about God. Given a lack of other sources and the emphasis on literalism, these became the guiding texts in all things to many people. Hence, a number of teachings, of which just a few examples are given:
– Geocentrism: This was a viewpoint commonly held in Greek times. But it is reflected in the Bible as well. Joshua 10:12-13 states:
Other scriptures supporting this include Habakkuk 3:11, Psalms 19:4-6, Ecclesiastes 1:5, 1 Chronicles 16:30, 1 Samuel 2:8, etc. The Bible talks about the earth being flat, of having edges, of being set upon pillars, etc. Are these revealed truths from God, or are these merely Hebraic customs incorporated into scripture?
While there were many other circumstances intermingled with the situation, one aspect of the Galileo vs Church conflict involved a literal reading of these scriptures, or an “Inside Out” paradigm. Scientists came up with increasingly complex mechanisms to keep the earth at the center of the solar system yet still account for variations in the orbits of the planets from perfect circles. It was hard for them to let go of their attempt to impose their understanding of scripture on the world around them.
– Number of bones: In Islam, it is known that there are 360 bones/joints in the human body, as taught by Mohammed. As an orthopedic surgeon, I was taught that there are that there are 206. In Islamic circles, however, there are various unique ways of counting where it can be shown that there are exactly 360 bones/joints. Again, an example of “Inside Out” thinking where scientific evidence is interpreted in light of a religious teaching, because the religious teaching cannot be wrong.
– Modern versions: In the Book of Mormon, we learn that people’s skin changes color based on their righteousness. This continued into modern times where prophets taught that the amount of melanin in someone’s skin reflected their premortal valor, or that if Lamanites were raised in white LDS households that the melanin would decrease and their skin would become whiter. Modern prophets have discounted evolution as a tool of Satan because it doesn’t fit their religious point-of-view. And even more recently, there was a firestorm created with Packer’s comments which reflected an “Inside Out” framework for thinking about homosexuality.
There are advantages and disadvantages of the “Inside Out” paradigm. Advantages might include the faith-promoting aspect that is necessarily a part of this. In this viewpoint, we “follow the prophets” no matter what they may say, as reemphasized in the repeating of Benson’s 14 points in the last General Conference, twice. In this approach, we accept all of the scriptures literally. We avoid the danger of trying to decide which things our leaders are saying are true and which are perhaps just their opinion. For many people, there is a very real peace that comes from knowing that “God is in control”, that our leaders will tell us what to do, and that questioning can lead away from the path back to God.
There are disadvantages, however. There are times when science runs up against religious teachings, and the question is what to do. The Catholic church clung to the geocentric teaching for a while, but eventually had to change. Did anyone lose their “testimony” of the Catholic church over that? Wording in the Book of Mormon was changed from a “white and delightsome” people to a “pure and delightsome” people. The wording on the title page was also changed regarding the relationship between the Lamanites and the American Indians. Prophets and apostles admitted that they were wrong about some of the things they taught as truths over the years.
So, is an “Inside Out” paradigm the best way to approach religion and science? I would argue that it is not, and that there are very real dangers to this approach. Any potential upside is small compared to the potential downside. There are numerous people who have left the Church over this conflict. There are whole books written whose premise is that because prophets and apostles have been wrong about some of these issues, that the whole thing is a fraud and we are all deceived (ie. Farewell to Eden, etc). While there may be a comforting aspect to having a leader who can speak about anything, there is much more potential for harm.
“Inside Out” is a dangerous way of approaching these issues. In the next post (#6), I am going to talk about an “Outside In” paradigm that is ultimatelly more robust, though not without its detractors. It’s actually the approach that I’ll use for the rest of the series. Then in post #7, “In the beginning…”, we move past the background and get on with the fun.
- What do we make of the verses in the Bible that talk about the Sun moving around the earth or any of dozens of other examples? Are these literal, figurative, representative of the thinking at the time it was written, etc? And if not literal, how do we determine which things we ARE going to take literally and which things we are NOT?
- How about the Book of Mormon. Do you consider this more literal than the Bible, or are there things in there that are perhaps as figurative as some of the things in the Bible?
- Without being too personal, has any cognitive dissonance caused by breaking of an “inside out” paradigm affected your testimony or that of someone you know?
- The Creation Museum is based on a literal interpretation of an English translation of the Greek Septuagint from the 4th century AD. The oldest version of Genesis are fragments on the Dead Sea scrolls from around the time of Christ. We otherwise don’t know how they got from Moses’ time (around 1200-1300 BC) to then. What do you make of that? Could there be enough translation and transmission problems that basing a world-view on that might be problematic, or did God preserve that process so that what we read today is exact?
- For bonus points: Has anyone ever actually been to the Creation Museum? What are your impressions?
(NOTE: This post is mostly about tools for resolving literalism, an “inside out” paradigm, etc. Feel free to discuss what you will. However, know that we are going to have individual posts that specifically discuss creation, evolution, the flood, Tower of Babel, migration of mankind, giants in the land, dietary laws, homosexuality, behavioral patterns, marriage customs, etc. over the next months. Also note: Despite the picture of a biography of the band written by Nick Mason, there is no association between Pink Floyd and the contents of this post. They are my favorite band and have been for decades.)
Wheat & Tares 
Interesting that this post coincides with the one on memory and confabulation. 🙂
When one considers how how even the most honest and willing witness can be totally oblivious to the reality of what he or she witnessed, never mind the deliberate and wilful modifications and redactions that have been applied to scriptural writings over time, I find it difficult to sustain a word for word literal interpretation.
So, the sun standing still? Well, I will allow that such a thing is possible – one can imagine a localized time warp or something – but unlikely.
Then, as a counter example, there is the story of Troy. Everyone believed that it was a legend, and then it turned out that it was a real city.
What do I take away from that? While my automatic tendency is to reject an Inside-Out process, I think that one can become too dogmatic going the other way, too, rejecting data without fairly evaluating it.
The BoM cautions people against having kings, with a rather good justification: If kings would always be perfectly righteous, it would be okay, but since they’re not, it’s best not to have them.
In a similar vein, my opinion is that, if prophets ALWAYS could be trusted to be right about questions where they claim to speak for God, then it would be good to follow them. Since they demonstrably aren’t, it’s always best to think things through for yourself.
And by “claim to speak for God,” I’m referring to explicit claims as well as implicit ones
prometheus:
You state these as “counter-examples”, but they are actually both the same and are examples of “Outside In” thinking which we will cover in more detail in the next post.
For the sun example: You think the sun standing still is unlikely, but are willing to accept that if there were some evidence that it happened. It is the same with the Greeks. They also believed that the sun revolved around the stationary earth, but did it because of observations. The didn’t appreciate parallax in the stars based on the level of observation. They also thought that if the earth rotated, it would create tremendous winds and the birds would fall from the skies. So they based a geocentric model on things they saw around them.
Contrast this with the Catholic church. They based a geocentric model on their interpretation of the Bible, even to the point of ignoring and/or suppressing the evidence around them. It is an “Inside Out” way of coming to the same conclusion.
As long as the “Inside Out” and “Outside In” models both pointed to a geocentric model, things were find. But when they started to diverge, problems arose.
With your Troy example, it is the same. No one made any absolute pronouncements as to the existence or non-existence of Troy based on some writings – merely the thought that it was likely legendary. When it was found to be a real city, it was easy to change that.
A similar example more along the lines of this site is elephants existing and being used as work animals in the Americans. In Ether 9 it states: “And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants…”
Two approaches to this:
Outside-In: There is no evidence that elephants lived anywhere in the Americas during the last 4000 or so years (ie. since the time of Jaredites). This is likely a “figurative” part of the Book of Mormon, much like many of the non-literal parts of the Bible. Why JS has it there is unknown. Perhaps, like Troy, we will someday find anything suggesting this is true, but for now, it is very unlikely.
Inside-Out: Because it specifically says elephants in the Book of Mormon, and because the Book of Mormon is absolutely literal, the Jaredites DID co-exist with elephants and they DID find them useful. The current scientific theories are limited only by the fact that we haven’t found evidence of the elephants yet.
These are both ways of approaching the issue of elephants in the Americas. One defines what we should find scientifically based on an interpretation of a religious text. The other interprets a religious text in light of what we might find scientifically.
They can both create problems. To a “true-believer”, accepting that there might NOT have been elephants and that JS’s translation might have been anything other than literal could create cognitive dissonance. To others, an insistence on many things stated in the Book of Mormon but never found in the Americas could lead to a loss of faith in the Book of Mormon (ie. Stan Larson’s book on the “Quest for the Gold Plates”).
Goldarn:
You state: In a similar vein, my opinion is that, if prophets ALWAYS could be trusted to be right about questions where they claim to speak for God, then it would be good to follow them.
I agree with this. Based on the recent “14 points”, I would certainly give a prophet the right to speak on ANY subject, including scientific things like the earth and the moon , etc. However, given their collective track record in some areas, such as BY talking about what the inhabitants of the moon look like or Joseph Fielding Smith saying that we will NEVER send a man to the moon, I do think we do need to think things through for ourselves as well as you mention.
The difficulty then arises: which things from prophets do we take absolutely at face value on faith, and which things might we question? How do we tell the difference?
Awesome post. I think prometheus’ point is a good one though. Based on Teleb’s Black Swans idea, I think we are foolish to become so rigid in a particular way of informing our worldview that we discount other possibilities entirely.
Certainly I favor the “Outside In” approach, though I clearly favored the “Inside Out” approach for years.
There are two interesting points that I think are important which you haven’t addressed:
1. How on earth do we know which approach we are using. It’s not that easy to tell, witnessed by many reasonable Mormons who inform their worldview with many different things, but, in my experience, still cling to some strange ideas that don’t jibe with a scientific worldview.
2. As a corollary to #1, I suspect we all use both approaches in our everyday thinking. Many Mormons have no problem interpreting some parts of the BoM or Bible literally, and other parts metaphorically. This clearly changes with culture, time, and current scientific knowledge. We would all laugh if Monson told us we would never step foot on Mars because it’s a celestial sphere. But many will have no problem believing homosexuality is a choice. This then goes back to #1 where we don’t really know which approach we’re taking. Or rather, we may believe that a certain topic is outside the realm of science, and can therefore be informed by a prophet.
jmb275:
It is hard to tell which approach we are using for a couple of reasons:
1) It is hard to observe your own mind and be objective. (As an aside, there are some great meditation techniques to help learn how to observe your own thought process, but I digress)
2) There is obviously overlap and we use parts of both, as you mentioned.
I think a great indicator of of our tendencies is what we do with “conflict”. When science and religion coincide, it doesn’t really matter which approach you use. But what if they’re different?
I think your examples actually state volumes. I am sure that there are many people in the Church who would believe President Monson if he said that man would never set foot on Mars, merely because of his office. We see this with many, many things.
I also think that someone’s general thought process also showed up in their interpretation of BKP’s talk, whether they can . An “Inside Out” thinker likely accepted it at face value based on his role as President of the Quorum of the Twelve. They likely looked at scientific research as biased. They will look at the evidence around them in this context.
An “Outside In” style-of-thinker probably interpreted the same words completely differently. They would point to the “evidence” around them and be more inclined to look at BKP’s talk as “opinion” rather than absolute truth.
The “Outside-In” paradigm has a long history among even some of those who are considered the more theologically conservative Christians, like St. Augustine.
He argued, basically, that although the Book of Genesis is the Word of God, it’s possible that we might not understand perfectly which sense the words are being used in, and so we ought not to commit to particular literal interpretations, lest science come along later and make us look like idiots:
He expands on this:
(Examined at length at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1988/PSCF3-88Young.html)
Again, back to Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria. When religion steps outside its magesterium, it usually gets pummelled.
typo — “magisterium.”
Thomas: Great quote. Much more eloquent than anything I could say. Thanks.
The idea of separate, nonoverlapping magisteria is soundly rejected by the LDS tradition, starting with Joseph Smith. Only recently (post-Correlation, from the mid-1960s) has the idea of revealed cosmology been ‘deemphasized’ in LDS discourse.
Re Thomas
Love the NOMA ideas. Certainly not as simple as it would seem, but that’s how I like to think about the two.
Thanks for the clarification, Mike. 🙂
Yes, NOMA is a interesting notion, and in other discussions, it actually would be applicable. But in the LDS church that I grew up in, the BoM is the “most correct of any book on earth”. One could argue back and forth the validity of this being a literal statement, but I think the evidence and actions of history deemed this a literal interpretation, a literal “most correct”, not metaphorical.
So then comes the problems, Elephants and Chariots being the least of them. We are seeing even the sharpest minds in our own church shrink away from conventional thought rubbed raw by DNA evidence, and the cold hard reality of the scientific investigation. We are now thinking of a limited geographic model, a two Cumorah possibility, and other mental gymnastics to salvage the “inside out paradigm” of the BoM(I do like this jingle).
It seems a job opportunity with a bright future would be LDS Apologist and reality broker. For when it comes to Joseph’s polygamy, Book of Abraham’s facsimile, and God’s sanctioned denial of saving ordinances to the racially challenged, the inside out paradigm approach that we insist on taking will require great efforts of stride lengthening explaination.
Too bad really, if you think about it. The truth is to be had regardless of heavenly favor, or even the reality of our existence. Countless are the many wonderful truths worth knowing. It mattereth not if I’ve lost the propensity to believe the divinity of Joseph Smith and this church, even the existence of God. One truth, I had turkey for lunch. Another truth, the truth that lies in the impossibility of certainty that the play Hamlet taught us. Both are true.
Inside out thinking often negates both.
I do think that there is a difficulty in being an LDS apologist when it comes to science that perhaps doesn’t exist outside the church. This largely comes from the explanation of how things came about. We are told that when JS translated the BofM, that he “couldn’t go on” unless the scribe had written down the words exactly. And these words were given to him directly in English with no other translation.
Because of this, when the Bible talks about the tower of Babel, there can be a discussion about how literal the account is, what it represents, etc. There is room to reconcile things with archeolinguistics, etc. In the story of Ether, there is much less “wiggle-room”. We are given facts, and have to accept them for what they are.
This carries over into many other areas. When people quote a 6000-year history from Adam to now, there is also some “wiggle-room” as this came from one man adding up ages in the Old Testament, which are translations of transcribed documents where the prophets’ ages are also up for interpretation. Contrast this with D&C 77:6 & 10: concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence and the signs of the “end” to be accomplished in the sixth thousand years
There are ways to talk about these that we will consider in the future, but it is more difficult when they are words given in English, directly.
All of us start out assigning our own experience the highest weight in designing our narrative (to use Hawkgrrrl’s terminology, as Prometheus noted in comment 1). A six-month old has little other choice.
So the phenomena discussed in this post are more general than religion versus science. Conflicting experience leads us to “mental gymnastics” to adjust favored hypotheses only as much as necessary to reduce the data conflict to a level where we can move on to some other problem of greater interest to us. Look at the mental gymnastics we go through on this blog to maintain the narrative of our political positions (which, this conservative notes, is another reason why relying on the wisdom of a King, even a righteous one, might not be such a good thing).
This isn’t dishonest, it’s human. The amount of mental gymnastics one can perform might represent the depth of the conflict, or it might just represent one’s mental agility. At the time, due to experimental uncertainties, there were geocentric models of epicycles that explained things better than elliptical heliocentric models.
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion that led the way to Newtonian gravity were adopted because there were SIMPLER, not because they were more experimentally accurate.