Have you every read something you know a lot about in the newspaper, or on the internet, and realize the author has absolutely no idea what they are talking about, that in fact the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backwards, reversing cause and effect.
But then you turn the page, and read the rest of the newspaper, and believe everything you read on the Hamas/Israeli conflict. You turn the page and forget what you know. This is called Gell-Mann Amnesia. The name was coined by Michael Crichton after discussing this effect with his physicist friend named Murry Gell-Mann. Crichton pointed out that this does not operate in other parts of our life, like if somebody constantly exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In fact in court this is a legal doctrine called falsua in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to media, we believe it is worth our time to read something, even when previously we read flat out lies in the same publication.
I see this selective amnesia at work in the Church sometimes. I have heard that at BYU, professors in the Linguistics Dept do not believe the Tower of Babel story in the Bible, yet the professors in the religion dept do believe. Same can be said of the biology dept and their belief in evolution, or the geology department and their non-belief in a global flood in Noah’s time, or the age of the earth. They are experts in their field, and see the errors in the literal belief in the bible in their area of expertise.
Yet one can assume that since they are BYU professors, they have a belief in the LDS church, and can pass a Temple Recommend interview. In their area of expertise, they can reject the teaching of their church (flood, tower of Babel, young earth) [1], yet they “turn the page” and they accept heavenly messengers and golden plates. It would be a really interesting survey to ask the linguist if they believe in Noah’s flood, or ask the geologists if they believe in the tower of Babel. Maybe once you decide one part of the bible is myth, the rest is also suspect? But then where do you stop? Old Testament myth, new Testament true (except the crazy stuff in Revelation, and some of Paul’s stuff?)
What is your experience with the so called “Gell-Mann Amnesia”? Have you seen it in your own life? Do you think there is something like this working with BYU professors, and others with specific expertise in particular fields? Does this apply to members who disregarded Pres Nelson’s call to get COVID-19 vaccination, yet turn the page and follow his “think Celestial” admonition, or am I mixing apples and oranges with this?
[1] you could argue that the flood and tower are not core beliefs of the LDS church. But to discount them then undermines the Book Of Mormon and its reliance of the flood and tower in its narrative.
Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay
Wheat & Tares 
Speaking for myself, for decades I was thoroughly true believing. Occasionally something would come up that give me a spark of unease/disagreement. But like the well-trained follower I was, I would re-indoctrinate myself by remembering that we don’t understand everything yet and many things are yet to be revealed – in other words, we don’t understand this point fully. I would then just move on and forget about it. Maybe I’m just slow, but it took until my 50s for those little things to start accumulating and registering in my mind to the point they became a problem. The internet has unleashed all the secrets (not really – things still come out that floor me) and as my sister and I often tell each other: “once you see it, you can’t unsee it”. I find it amusing that when the internet was first publicly available, I distinctly remember a talk teaching us that not only was the internet first created in heaven, but it’s purpose was to further genealogy and family history work. Oh, the irony. People’s shelves are breaking at a seemingly greater rate than ever before. Many can morally no longer employ “Gell Mann amnesia”. From my readings on different social media platforms, for some this means they have to leave the group. For others, they wish to stay and find ways to coexist within the group. Despite being taught (and even teaching this myself) that the gospel isn’t a cafeteria buffet and you must partake of (accept) everything, I think the majority do pick and choose, either from cognitive dissonance or just a more relaxed view of their membership. But overall, for those still fully in – I would suspect that most unknowingly are full participants of Gell Mann Amnesia. They just haven’t seen it yet.
I think this can be seen in just about all aspects of life. Some would call it cognitive dissonance, some would call it faith, some would call it hope. Here are a few examples:
Someone who is a conservative, didn’t care for Trump but voted for him anyways because the alternative was not a conservative.
Someone who plays the lottery, a slot machine, or bets on a horse with complete or nearly complete belief and confidence that they will not win.
Someone who goes to a restaurant that they dislike because it’s where spouse, friends or coworkers want to go, with the intention of ordering the least bad (to themselves) thing on the menu.
The difference with religion is that those beliefs and what a person embraces or sets aside have life-shaping impacts. A lottery ticket or meal that a person is indifferent to are much more transactional.
Bishop Bill,
As far as the newspaper, it’s a very concerning problem that we no longer all start with the same set of facts. Mostly we are looking at different sources of news these days in general.
Just because one article is wrong doesn’t mean the whole paper is wrong, or right. It’s an error to automatically believe either way, even after reading the article. Different articles have different authors. Today there’s always another source of information to check if you have time.
As far as the church, there’s no need to believe in the whole thing or not. A person can believe in God and Jesus Christ but still believe the Bible is a group of stories written at different times in different places for different reasons by different people, and still have value in some of it’s teachings (as well as conflicts internally with different parts).
A person can enjoy and feel inspired by reading the BoM and still see it’s historicity as unsure.
A person can appreciate the efforts President Nelson has put in to improve the church in many ways and still strongly disagree with his Think Celestial talk. I can show you places in the D&C that support my point of view about Think Celestial if you want to debate that. As I said church teachings aren’t true or false. They have to be evaluated individually.
For that matter, I can agree with my husband on one thing and disagree on another. The same goes for any book I read or listen to.
I have my own opinions and personal authority. I haven’t ever taken anything as an all or nothing, because in reality no part of life works that way, at least from where I stand.
The problem I see with your analysis is that to some extent all of us are unreliable narrators and we accept and expect that that is likely true of others. So we expect that a person may reliably report some things because of first hand experience and yet in other things with less direct experience they may misinterpret and misunderstand what others are doing and their motives.
I also think your example of a news source is not quite the same because we all recognize that there are different reporters reporting on different stories and that different institutions have different biases and interests. I might trust a newspaper to report on one conflict without bias, but not another, just because of institutional ties. (I expect US papers to be biased in favor of US allies, but not all conflicts are between US allies and US enemies.) I would never expect the Desert News to accurately report on a story that involves the LDS church behaving in a questionable manner, but I would probably trust it to accurately report a local flooding disaster or winter storm or high school basketball game.
In terms of the BYU professors, I don’t really know, but I have certainly met many non-BYU academics in the LDS church who have a lot of nuance in some areas but not in others. My sense is that there can be great heterogeneity in where any of us apply nuance and skepticism. If there is a reason for us to do so, our default is usually not to do so.
I also suspect most LDS academics recognize that individual stories in the Old testament to New testament are written by different groups/authors from different time periods. So it’s easy to maybe not believe in a six day creation, but maybe still believe in the Exodus, or the walls of Jericho etc because they really are distinct separate stories told by different authors for different purposes.
Another thing is that most of us absorb many of our core beliefs in our childhood and probably can’t really say where they actually come from. So even if someone turns out to be an unreliable narrator in one thing, we might not recognize that they are the source of a core belief for other things as well. And let’s face it, it’s hard to question everything in your life, so if some belief seems to be working or to be reasonable, you’re less likely to want to parse it all out even if you think that the church might be the source of false beliefs in other things.
I guess my takeaway from much of what Richard Rohr writes about in terms of first half vs second half of life is that it usually takes quite a bit to break the vessel we built in the first half of life. Even with those breaks, I think most of us would prefer to try to keep what remains of the vessel as intact as possible.
This is so interesting and something I’d been trying to wrap my head around in both my personal life and the church. In my personal life, I recently read a book about world religions and noticed a couple small errors in the part about our church, but never questioned the rest. A good lesson for my brain as I consider what I learned.
To put my different words to the same idea regarding the church, I’ve written in my journal about having the tools or ability to disprove something. Meaning, if someone tells me 10 things but I only have the tools to disprove one, I won’t question the other 9 in the context of what you’re talking about. In this case, the “person” is a prophet” and the “things” are principles or doctrines. We now have the tools to prove/disprove some of these things. Slowly, we’ve admitted that modern (and ancient) prophets are wrong about a lot of things they’ve taught us, but so many of us never allow ourselves to question the rest.
One of the simplest ways I’ve found to follow this idea to the crux is to ask whether they were wrong about the Holy Ghost. Prophets were the ones who first taught us that the feelings we call the spirit are the influence of an all-knowing being outside ourselves. If they were wrong about that and those feelings are just our own, it’s easy to see how far the ripples reach because of how much of our beliefs we base on those feelings.
But it’s also easier to see why, at least from my perspective, we let ourselves turn the page and forget. We’ve built our lives, our worldviews, and in some cases our identities on these sources of truth and information. If the sources could be wrong about everything, that’s terrifying enough that I wonder if we’ve learned to compartmentalize these mistakes simply to cope and not have to face such a massive threat to so much of who we are and how we think.
Whoever downvoted lws329 deserves the strongest possible condemnation. For lws329 is absolutely correct.
Life is not a zero sum game in which things are either 100% good or 100% bad. All organizations made up of human beings will have some good and some bad aspects to them. The key is to seek out those organizations that contain the most good and the least bad.
The same goes for people themselves. We can seek to spend time with those who feed our souls, or we can seek to spend time with those who are generally angry and contentious. Life is too short to spend in frivolous fashions.
This discussion has reminded me of a question that I have about active Church members: what do you really believe? See, I left the Church in 2021 for one very basic principled reason: I no longer believe the Church’s truth claims. Meanwhile, I have many friends and acquaintances who have left the Church recently, and many who have not. But as far as I can tell, the ones who stay don’t necessarily believe everything that is taught at Church. They just kind of dismiss (aka amnesia) certain teachings.
A typical TBM would say that I have made a huge mistake by leaving the Church. After all, I made sacred covenants. And this same TBM would say that their fellow members who stay in the boat (especially those with doubts) have more integrity for staying. But I really reject that. If a person doesn’t believe something, isn’t it principled to leave the organization making the claim? And if a person doesn’t believe every truth claim, isn’t it a little phony to pretend otherwise? I have a close friend who is very active in the Church who has told me that he does not believe there were Gold Plates nor does he believe the temple ordinances were revealed (he knows all about Masonry). But he loves the Book of Mormon anyways and loves attending the temple and stays in the Church.
To me a member like this has to have a certain kind of selective amnesia. He has to try to forget that he doesn’t really believe what the Church teaches about our most sacred scripture and our most sacred rituals and ordinances. I find that kind of bizarre. I’m the apostate because I follow the truth as I see it but he is the faithful and spiritual one because he sticks with the program even though he doesn’t believe in certain key truth claims.
Josh, I am going to disagree with your idea that a person can stay active and temple going and not believe, but it isn’t worth down voting your post, because I think you are right that a person who leaves is doing it out of integrity. It depends on the person’s reasons for staying whether it is a move of integrity or not. A person who loves the community, and feels close to God in the temple can stay because the good is worth more than any possible harm. That is still integrity. The person who stays because he is a politician and thinks he can get more votes, or say a dentist and thinks he will get more business, they lack integrity. So, motive matters to overall integrity.
That goes right back to lws329’s comment about things are never 100% good&true or bad&false. Things are always a mixture. I stayed a long time in the church because I loved the community, loved the people, married a TBM and loved him, thought it was a good place to raise children, and was a good place to worship Christ. And, some things it taught are true while others are false. But as the church changed over time to not have some of the good things about the community, and I started to see how the church had harmed me, the bad started to outweigh the good, and untruth outweighed truth, then I decided to leave. The bad and untrue started to be more important than the good and true.
What I don’t understand is people who are first to admit that Trump lies, but they still believe everything he says. I had a friend who did that and eventually I couldn’t stand the lack of ability to apply “Trump lies” to what Trump says and wonder if this particular statement was a lie. I mean, I understand people who think he is the orange savior, and while I think they are purposely blind, they at least are consistent.
This is an interesting topic, and I didn’t know there was a name for this kind of ignoring stuff.
I don’t know that I want everyone in the Church to believe the same things. I think that some variety is good and necessary. I, for example, look at some things differently now than I did years ago. That doesn’t mean that I am right now and was wrong then, or vice versa. Individuals grow, and they can believe different things at different times in their lives, and that doesn’t mean that they were ever wrong.
Some things are perhaps more basic and fundamental, but I don’t want to make an exhaustive list of what one MUST believe to be considered faithful. There’s the temple recommend questions, but what does it mean to pay a full tithe? Opinions differ, and that’s OK. While there may be wrong answers on tithing, I think that correct answers may fall within a range. What is important is whether one is faithful to his conception of tithing. What does it mean to sustain the leaders of the Church? Again, some interpret this as blind obedience to infallible leaders. I interpret it differently. There are some “mormon” beliefs that I utterly reject. I reject, for example, that the Father impregnated the virgin Mary by having human sex, penis & vagina, with her. Matthew and Luke say that the Holy Spirit would move upon her and she would be with child. I am fine with the scriptures on this one, and I reject the opinions of some Latter-day Saints with good pedigree on this matter. Some people want to see six 24-hour creative periods. I am fine with each creative period lasting months, decades, or millenia, and with long gaps of time between each of the six creative period. Some things in scripture I interpret literally, and others figuratively. If I was told that I my continued membership in the Church depended on my signing a certificate of belief in the mortal impregnation of Mary, or six 23-hour cerative periods immediately adjacent with no gaps, then I might have to leave. If I had to swear fidelty to Skousen’s ideas, I might be in trouble, but I believe that I can be faithful without subscribing to anyone’s views on lots of topics. On most topics, in fact.
I am not sure that believing one way on some things, but another way on other things is selective amnesia. I may have felt one way about the Sabbath Day at one point in my life, and my view wasn’t wrong then; I may feel differently today. Why can’t both views be correct for me, being at different levels of development and understanding? There may be some absolute wrongs, and there may be some absolute rights, but I prefer to teach the principle of the Sabbath Day and let people figure out the details for themselves.
I know a lot of people who get selective amnesia between the first and second clauses of the Second Amendment. By the time they get to “right to bear arms shall not be infringed,” the have already forgotten about the “well regulated militia” part.
For awhile – before I let all that stuff go -I had to work really hard to forget about all those official “gospel art” pictures I had seen of JS literally looking at the physically present plates and reading the words through the urim and thummin.
I had a lot of seasonal jobs over the years and I always had to forget how much I loathed working for my employer by necessity, because by the time the new season came around I was desperate for work.
The point is, as almost everyone has pointed out, this Gell-Mann Amnesia phenomenon is something we all do every day of our lives. If you insist that you don’t do it, you’re doing right now.
I’m still waiting for a divine message that will make me want to get back in the boat. There is a reason that RMN wants to isolate the doubters from each other.
Speaking of which, as 2024 approaches, I would appreciate any book suggestions on biblical history, mythology, etc.
God love JCS. I smiled so wide.
I imagine this applies to reading books or watching a movie. It’s been interesting to discuss media with other people and discover that what they got from it (or didn’t) is completely different than my take. That’s what’s so great about it.
Even as an author, when I was interviewed by Dialogue, the interviewer observed that he was surprised at how political the book was. He didn’t mean it was about politics, but that it was about interpersonal dynamics and hierarchy–those types of politics. It hadn’t occurred to me when I wrote it that I was writing about that, but I always think in those terms in social situations. We even joke about which kid is ranked highest at a given moment.
This is why I think book clubs are the best human interactions. When church is like a book club, it’s operating at its best. Unfortunately, most of the people don’t read the book, only a rote set of answers are acceptable vs. actual discussion, and the “books” are just threadbare talks by self-important men.
I am in awkward position in regards to this post. I believe there was a Noah’s Ark OR that the story has an interpretation not accepted by fundamentalist thinkers. I just don’t readily accept what some church leaders have said about Noah’s Ark or what is traditionally believed about it. It seems the entire account is metaphorical. It was intended for an ancient audience, and we are often clueless.
I guess my point is that there can be a broad middle ground that the post does not deal with.
I consider myself to be 100% orthodox with respect to the foundational claims of the church. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a bit of wiggle room for how some of those claims might be interpreted. I remember listening to an interview with Chauncey Riddle–he spoke of an experience he had when he was asked to serve on committee that was organized for the purpose of determining what an education in Zion might look like (for lack of a better way of putting it). He said that the committee was disbanded after a few months for the simple reason that none of the participants could agree on what the gospel was–and I’m assuming that it would’ve been nonsensical for them to try to define Zion when they weren’t of one mind on the foundational principles upon which it is built.
At any rate, I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps orthodoxy is reflected more in what we do as Latter-day Saints than in how we interpret the meaning of the doctrine. No doubt everyone on Chauncey’s committee believed that baptism was essential–receiving the ordinance, that is. But what does it mean? That’s a question that even the most orthodox can haggle over until the cows come home. It’s a fun dichotomy that reflects the apparent difference between the circle and the square. And we needn’t suppose that because one is more abstract than the other that the two are at odds with each other. They are both essential.
There are things you have to believe in the church to be in good standing. You have to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that Jesus Christ is a savior whose death paid for our sins, that there is a God, that people’s souls continue to exist after they die, that priesthood exists and is a power, and a number of other things. If I say that Jesus might not exist and that most of what is written about him is probably fictitious since it was written down decades after the fact, that really doesn’t square with what one is supposed to say and believe in the church. To say that Jesus or God doesn’t exist undermines all other church beliefs.
The four words, “there is no God,” is a simple and quick rejection of pretty much all central Mormon truth claims, as well as many of the central truth of several other religions. It logically proceeds that there are no prophetic powers, the Book of Mormon is completely fictional, the priesthood is a pretend power, etc. Then there is grey area. This includes the extent of Noah’s flood, the Tower of Babel, how exactly the Book of Mormon is historical and the extent to which it is. Here there is wiggle room, and my impression is that most BYU professors who promote biological evolution, linguistic evolution, human history before 6,000 years ago, and a host of other somewhat somewhat controversial beliefs in Mormonism that not many leaders and members are willing to accept, let alone promote, are able to find a justification as a believer. And that these justifications are accepted by other members and leaders.
Old Man,
“It was intended for an ancient audience, and we are often clueless.”
I have strong reason to believe that ancient audiences saw a lot of things quite literally. We live in an age of science and reason where we have all kinds of tools at our disposal to critically analyze information, and still vast swaths of people take traditional teachings very literally. On that basis, I don’t doubt that many ancient Greeks saw their pantheon of gods and stories about them as real, and those of many other ancient religions saw what was described in tradition as very real. At the same time, however, many ancients saw traditional texts and stories about miracles, god and gods, and other religious phenomena as metaphorical. A case in point is many of the Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander, Plato, and others, who justified some aspects of religious belief as to be taken literally but tended more metaphorical on many other aspects of Homer and Hesiod. The debate over what is to be understood as literal and what is to be understood as metaphorical in religious texts and tradition has been going on a long time.
Chet
May I suggest, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins
by Jacob L. Wright
Bishop Bill’s post strikes a chord. I feel like I’m a hardcore amnesiac living a Severance-like dual life. Most of the time I’m in head mode, where the Church’s truth claims seem completely implausible. But in certain environments, I go into heart mode where suddenly my views are emotionally-based, and I can accept Church doctrines as long as I’m careful to not think about them.
To josh’s point regarding integrity, I acknowledge that there is no integrity in my relationship to Mormonism. I’m dishonest with others and with myself. But I’m in a situation where my current approach is the best I can do for the time being.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. I honestly think I could write a whole book. Maybe someday I will.
JCS – You are awesome.
Without doxing myself too much (hopefully), I’ll just say that I taught at BYU for a long time, and that I was in a department closely aligned with one of the subjects mentioned above.
To the degree that I was able to have authentic discussions with members of that department (I had several close friends there), I would agree that those faculty members were in fact extremely “nuanced” on one of the topics mentioned above. But at the end of the day, they held to the “core” beliefs of the church.
So why the “selective amnesia”? My admittedly cynical answer is that it’s the same answer here as it elsewhere: “follow the money”. As Upton Sinclair said “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
It’s interesting how “nuanced” my former colleagues become — even on “core” teachings of the church — once they aren’t dependent on a paycheck that is related to their overall level of “orthodoxy”.
Anyone who wants to get into a scientific fistfight by pitting a literal interpretation of scriptures against modern academia is going to lose pretty badly…doesn’t matter what holy text you choose. But we don’t necessarily have to view things that way – to paraphrase Richard Bushman, religious study can be more about identity than authority.
I think we have a few choices in our modern world:
(1) Pick a side
(2) We opt for selective amnesia, and compartmentalize our belief systems. (e.g. evolution at school, creationism at church)
(3) We hold a nuanced view and let them coexist – accept the rigors of science while gleaning identity and values from religion.
As polarization creeps into every facet of life, many people demand that we take the first option – pick a side and swing your fists. Many others pick the second option and compartmentalize. I prefer the third option, trying to let them coexist (even though they don’t always agree) and let each fulfill different needs. I will say that option 3 can be very difficult, especially in Mormonism.
IMO, what matters in religion is how we relate to it. I talked about this a bit in my post about what Jesus looked like (https://wheatandtares.org/2023/05/20/what-did-jesus-actually-look-like-and-why-its-ok-if-we-get-it-wrong/). There’s no way he looked anything like 99% of the depictions we see today (tall, blue eyes, long silky brunette hair, long flowy robes). The historical facts about how he looked just aren’t the point – the idea of a savior with whom we identify matters more than perfect historical accuracy. That’s why we have a long tradition of depicting Jesus in whatever way is the most relatable to the target audience.
Mormonism can be odd sometimes. We claim Catholic-style authority and symbolism (at least in the temple) and then cling to Evangelical-style literalism and ascetic (i.e. boring) Sunday service. IMO this makes option 3 above doable but also often frowned upon.
Anyone who wants to get into a scientific fistfight by pitting a literal interpretation of scriptures against modern academia is going to lose pretty badly…doesn’t matter what holy text you choose. But we don’t necessarily have to view things that way – to paraphrase Richard Bushman, religious study can be more about identity than authority.
I think we have a few choices in our modern world:
(1) Pick a side
(2) We opt for selective amnesia, and compartmentalize our belief systems. (e.g. evolution at school, creationism at church)
(3) We hold a nuanced view and let them coexist – accept the rigors of science while gleaning identity and values from religion.
As polarization creeps into every facet of life, many people demand that we take the first option – pick a side and swing your fists. Many others pick the second option and compartmentalize. I prefer the third option, trying to let them coexist (even though they don’t always agree) and let each fulfill different needs. I will say that option 3 can be very difficult, especially in Mormonism.
IMO, what matters in religion is how we relate to it. I talked about this a bit in my guest post back in May about what Jesus really looked like. There’s no way he looked anything like 99% of the depictions we see today (tall, blue eyes, long silky brunette hair, long flowy robes). The historical facts about how he looked just aren’t the point – the idea of a savior with whom we identify matters more than perfect historical accuracy. That’s why we have a long tradition of depicting Jesus in whatever way is the most relatable to the target audience.
Mormonism can be odd sometimes. We claim Catholic-style authority and symbolism (at least in the temple) and then cling to Evangelical-style literalism and ascetic (i.e. boring) Sunday service. IMO this makes option 3 above doable but also often frowned upon.
This phenomenon exists outside Mormonism. I have a friend who is an evangelical Christian and a professor of engineering at a major research university. He believes in a literal flood and 6000 year old earth. I found that surprising, but it’s also not his area of expertise, so he uncritically accepts what his church teaches, just like so many Mormons do.