The Critique of Spiritual Reason

Introduction

Growing up Mormon, I often heard people talk about spiritual experiences. There is a near-endless variety of these experiences, from the classic example of Joseph Smith’s First Vision to strange dreams of angels, to exorbitant narratives of Mormon garments deflecting bullets in a warzone, to small simple feelings in church, to tingly sensations, to more abstract and conceptual sense of confirmation. For Mormons (LDS people), these experiences are created by the Holy Ghost, and are evidence of God’s presence on Earth. I found these stories fascinating to listen to (although there were many that seemed trite and cliched). Even after leaving the church, I’ve been intrigued by fringe experiences in the human condition: transformative experiences, moments of inspiration, paradigm-breaking realizations, imaginings, visions, dreams, and beyond. Like William James, I’m amazed at the varieties of religious and spiritual experience, and I want to participate in the monumental project of exploring, documenting, and explaining them. What are they? How do they happen? What do they mean, and how can we interpret them? What can they tell us?

I have had many powerful experiences that challenged my understanding of reality, inspired me, and left me reeling to understand. In my own internal language, they are window-shattering moments. For me, these experiences create aporia: an impasse, a quandary one cannot resolve, a state of puzzlement, a doubting and bewilderment, a being-at-a-loss, a dazzling of the mind by the intricacy of existence. (I discuss aporia and similar topics in depth in Why Literature Matters: The Aporetic Approach). At first, because I had spent hundreds of hours in Mormon Sunday schools and seminaries, and I was indoctrinated into this religious tradition, I couldn’t help but interpret these experiences in the only way I knew how – in a way that reinforced the LDS belief system.

However, I started to realize there are serious problems with the way LDS people, and perhaps religious people in general, understand, talk about, and make inferences from these spiritual experiences. As an ever-skeptical and philosophical kid, I couldn’t take the experiences for granted and just naively subsume them into the LDS worldview. Further, I had a few experiences that broke the mold that Mormonism sets. I cannot hope to describe them in detail, but their context explains a lot. Many of them occurred in India. One was at a Hindu ceremony on the bank of the river Ganges, one was reading the Bhagavad Gita & Fight Club during a 17-hour train ride from New Delhi to Varanasi, and one was practicing the salah (Muslim form of prayer) and reading the Qu’ran. Later on, I had several episodes of bipolar mania that felt like a continuous chain of all-consuming, overwhelming, and beautiful spiritual experiences chained together for days or weeks at a time. These experiences were much more intense and undeniable than the relatively mild experiences I felt in a Mormon context.

This gave me many questions. If, as I was told, spiritual emotions while reading the Book of Mormon meant that the LDS Church was true, then does that mean that Islam or Hinduism are true because of these experiences? How can this be the case, when these religious have clearly contradictory beliefs, prescriptions, and interpretations of the world? How am I supposed to distinguish between “true” or “valid” spiritual experiences and episodes of mental illness, when they feel extremely similar, and the manias are often even more acute, prolonged, and even more structured and sensible? Since these experiences don’t have a clear, obvious, reflexive, or undeniable interpretation, and don’t merely ‘explain themselves’ or stand on their own, they must be interpreted somehow. What inferences should we make from them? What beliefs should we hold or what actions should we take based on them? What do they justify and support? What information do they give us or fail to give us?

I began to ask these questions. But my teachers, mentors, and even trained LDS religious scholars did not truly understand or engage with my objections. Instead of seriously and closely listening, reflecting on my questions, and giving me genuine and thoughtful responses, they often denied my experience or told me I should not even ask the questions. They often told me I was thinking too much, should “just have faith,” or should avoid reading any non-Mormon scholarly literature or thoughts. This just made me more skeptical and interested in digging into the questions. The more I thought, the more it seemed clear that the Church was wrong about spiritual experience, and that people were making far too many and resting far too many. Their faith was on a fundamentally shaky foundation, and instead of investigating the foundations they simply ignored them. Take out the crucial load-bearing keystone of their interpretation of spiritual experiences, and the entire belief system collapsed. Ultimately, this was the primary reason I decided to leave Mormonism at 15, although there are many other reasons to reject the religion’s claims. Here, almost a decade later, I will try to dig into these questions and explain the problems.

Ostler on Faith

One of the few people to engage with the questions of spiritual experiences in detail and in good faith is Blake Ostler, a prominent LDS theologian. Faith, Reason, & Spiritual Experience, he gives an argument for why spiritual experiences provide justification for faith. Ostler is not at his best as a philosopher here though. He fails to state his premises and assumptions in detail, show most of his logical work, or address the obvious objections to his arguments. I wish that LDS people and apologists understood their doubters more and engaged with them more directly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, dialogue on Mormonism is often more like ships passing in the night.

Still, it is refreshing to see Mormon theology addressed in a more rigorous philosophical way, including how these ideas interface with common problems in epistemology. Ostler begins with the foundational framing that “no argument can prove spiritual experiences, because the direct encounter with the divine will always be more basic and grounded —and frankly more compelling—than any other evidence or argument.” This is difficult to respond to. How can you know if you are having a genuine ‘encounter with the divine’? How can you know what to take from this encounter? Many people claim (and I accept they have truly had) these kinds of experiences, and they take radically different conclusions from them. Further, why do these experiences take epistemic priority? Why are they the most basic form of knowledge?

Ostler is making a massive claim here without any elaboration or sufficient justification. In philosophy, debates on what form of knowledge is most fundamental have taken up thousands of years and millions of pages, and he cannot simply bypass any of these questions by stating his claim without justification to an accepting audience. Further, in a talk that is supposed to show how spiritual experiences support faith, he seems to be skipping to the end, begging the question, undermining his own case, and making a circular argument. If his initial premise is that spiritual experiences are unprovable but override all other forms of argument or evidence, then what is the point of continuing to make the argument that spiritual experiences justify faith in Mormonism?

I appreciate that Ostler describes the epistemic structure of a Mormon spiritual experience with 6 characteristics – (1) cognitive and affective, (2) non-volitional, (3) familiarity, (4) presence of a loving being, (5) indescribable positive emotion (joy/peace/sweetness), (6) re-orienting all other experience. What constitutes a spiritual experience is rarely described in detail and is usually extremely vague (often intentionally, so that anything can be classed as a spiritual experience that supports the Church’s truth-claims). Part of the reason I appreciate his detailed description is that it makes it easier to understand and address the epistemic problems with this view of spiritual experiences. See below:

In Mormon epistemic practice, the experience of the spiritual knowledge often is described as including some or all of the following facets:

1. The experience cannot be reduced to a mere emotion or feeling. It involves a cognitive component essentially. Doctrine & Covenants 9:7-8 suggests that a precursor to such experiences requires studying out the questions at issue: “Behold, you have not understood; you supposed that I would give it [the answer to your questions] unto you, when you took no thought save it were to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you that you must study it out in your mind. . .” In addition, one must “ask me if it be right.” The scripture then predicts the form that the spiritual response will take: “. . . if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn with you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong” (9:8-9). The experience is both cognitive and affective; both head and heart. As Doctrine & Covenants 8:2 clarifies: “I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.” The burning in the bosom, or heart, or very center of the human soul, is affective and involves feelings, but it also involves a sense of pure knowledge and enlightenment. Most often the experience of sensing the truthfulness of the message comes in the midst of such a search. The answers often come in conjunction with sincere study, searching and thoughtful pondering.

2. The spiritual experience cannot be produced at will but is experienced as coming as a grace in the midst an honest search for the truth.

​3. It involves a sense of having always known – it is deeply familiar.

4. It involves more than just cognitive or discursive knowledge (sapere); it also involves interpersonal knowledge or conoscere and associated with a sense of the presence of a loving and personal being and being accepted in a relationship. This “knowing God as an interpersonal presence in one’s own life and being” is, at least theologically, the most important spiritual aspect of the experience because to “know God” in this sense is life eternal. Indeed, to know that we are accepted into relationship with God and to invite God to reside in our hearts is a moment of justification by grace through faith and the beginning of the life of sanctification in which the spirit enters into us and Christ takes up abode in us in the process of Christification, or being conformed to the image of Christ, and culminating in deification.

5. The feeling of a “burning” in the heart includes a feeling of indescribable joy, peace and sweetness.

6. The experience re-orients all other experience. Everything is seen in a new light through the lens of the experiential knowledge.

— Blake Ostler, Faith, Reason, & Spiritual Experience – Vol 5

There are many problems with this framework.

First, Ostler isn’t clear whether these criteria are necessary, sufficient, and/or both for constituting a spiritual experience. Must genuine spiritual experiences have all six, some of them, or just one? It is not perfectly clear exactly what he is claiming.

Second, many of the spiritual experiences I’ve heard described in an LDS context don’t meet these criteria. Things often talked about in testimony meetings, like finding your keys after praying and feeling relieved, feeling a vague sense of calmness or peace while reading the BoM, or feeling intense joy after carrying a handcart up a hill – these aren’t enough, and aren’t really valid or complete spiritual experiences for Ostler. Many people in the church have *never* had a spiritual experience that sufficiently meets these criteria, which under Ostler’s own framework would mean they don’t have a sufficient basis for faith in the church. Yet I doubt he would tell these people that they should not have faith, which seems to bare an inconsistency in his worldview.

Third, these criteria are far too permissive to support faith in the LDS church specifically. People often have experiences that match these criteria, in an innumerable variety of contexts. Billions of people have spiritual experiences that they then interpret very differently, supporting their faith in radically different worldviews. Ostler must not only show how spiritual experiences can justify faith in general. He also must show that spiritual experiences can justify faith in Mormonism specifically and solely and exclude faith in other contradictory or competitive religious or faith systems. Of course, he fails to do this — likely because it is not possible.

Additionally, many kinds of experiences—episodes of mental illness, psychedelic experiences, responses to art and music, and even feelings in survival circumstances or under intense physical exertion (like runner’s highs) — could fulfill these criteria. Certain chemical substances and drugs, especially the classical psychedelics like LSD, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocybin, can reliably (almost always) induce experiences that fulfill Ostler’s criteria to a remarkable degree (Barrett & Griffiths 2017). They can do so far more reliably than LDS-related practices like prayer, Church worship, scripture reading, and the temple. Does this mean that psychonauts are justified in having faith in the conclusions they take from their often-strange and reality-bending experiences, or that bipolar people in manic episodes are justified in having faith in the content of their manias? Since Ostler’s criteria fail to exclude these types of experience, he is logically implicated in defending these claims. He has to accept that they are equally justified in their faith based upon spiritual experience as LDS people are in theirs. Further, if one’s degree of faith should be proportional to the intensity of the experience or the degree to which it fulfills the criteria, he may have to accept that these people are even more justified in their faith.

In the end, Ostler fails to make a satisfying or complete case. He concludes with an argument that there is “no way to distinguish between the phenomenal nature of experiences directly caused by God and knowledge based on memory or sensory experience.” I was surprised to see this statement, because it clearly undermines Ostler’s entire case. If there is no way to distinguish between God-caused experiences and normal sensory experiences, then there is no way to know if an experience is a genuine religious inspiration or not. The true promptings from the Holy Ghost, the true messages from God, are indistinguishable from meaningless sensory impressions and thoughts, like pebbles of gold lost in the fast-moving, endless stream of sensory and mental experiences. Thus, it is impossible to know what to have faith in. Trying to build a foundation of faith on this slippery, shifting, swirling surface is unworkable.

Ostler then describes how faith is fundamentally subjective and internal to the individual, because it is (1) passionate, (2) has a unique subjective interpretative stance, (3) is a choice, (4) is a matter of the heart, and (5) is a non-willed gift from God. This roughly matches Kierkegaard’s conception of faith, which will discuss and critique shortly. However, here Ostler sets himself up for failure. Faith is meant to be something that can support decisions, providing a basis for a life-path and a belief system. It is also supposed to allow many people to arrive at the same conclusions independently (e.g. that the LDS Church is true). But if it is this radically subjective, emotional, intense form of knowing, one which is chosen in a kind of arbitrary leap, it seems extremely doubtful that faith can fulfill these desiderata.

Further Questions

I have only touched on the surface of these questions and addressed one of the more popular defenses of spiritual experiences in Mormonism. Here are a few more questions that I find crucially important and that are often ignored or misunderstood:

Faith as a choice or leap

Let’s say faith is a choice. This is a common claim in religion, an oft-repeated phrase in Mormonism, and a key premise in Ostler’s argument. But there many things that one could choose to have faith in. Many of these things are contradictory or competitive, and you cannot have faith in all of them at the same time. Thus, one must choose between them. On what basis do you make that choice?

Even Kierkegaard, the most prominent philosopher of faith and one of my favorite thinkers, fails to give an adequate analysis of what to have faith in. He claims that we cannot have faith by virtue of reason and must suspend our reason to believe in something higher than reason (SEP). This is a form of fideism, the epistemological position that faith is independent of reason. (Though Kierkegaard is characteristically contradictory here, as he uses reason to justify his claim that we cannot have faith in in virtue of reason). Faith is simply a leap into the unknown and unknowable, a radical decision made in response to the absurdity and ambiguity of the human condition. He sees faith as an unexplainable miracle, where eternal truth enters time in an instant and witnesses of God.

But where should one leap? In what direction? How does one tell between the eternal truths worth leaping for, and the contingent or potentially false ideas and beliefs that should be avoided or more tentatively walked into? He seems to take it as a foregone conclusion that if one has faith, it would be in Christianity. Why, if not just his upbringing and cultural biases? Why not take a leap of faith into Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, new-age spiritualism, fascism, Marxism, scientism, or any other system of belief? Is the choice just arbitrary, random, and unfounded?

Further, why leap into any culturally created system of belief at all, rather than just having faith in disconnected ideas or principles? After all, the “will to a system is a lack of integrity” (Nietzsche). Once you decide to embrace a complete system, the experiences, evidence, and ideas that do not fit into your system will be rejected, ignored, or forced to fit into the system. You are no longer an authentic and serious investigator, seeking to interpret reality, understand experiences for their own sake, and make an inquiry into life and the world in a pursuit of truth. You are now attached to a rigid, preexisting belief system and set of concepts. When this system becomes ingrained in your mind by decades of acceptance and practice, it defines your social relations, and it shapes how you live your life every day, it becomes a herculean task to leave it. The cognitive dissonance becomes too powerful. There is a very real sense in which your brain will not let you escape the system. Further, the social and personal costs of leaving a system you have built your life around can be too much to bear. This is why Nietzsche urges us to avoid systems, to always be open to new evidence and experience, and to be able to hold contradictions in your mind without forcing them to resolve into one side or the other to fit some static framework.

It is telling that Kierkegaard’s paradigm example of a leap of faith (a phrase he does not actually use in his corpus) is the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Isaac. He does this precisely because it is such a radical decision (killing your child), made entirely on the basis of Abraham’s faith and his spiritual experience of God speaking to him. He uses this story to show that the religious sphere of existence transcends or exceeds rationality and morality. But what if instead of Abraham, it was Osama bin Laden, who believed on the basis of his Islamic faith and his spiritual experiences that he should orchestrate the 9/11 attacks? This case differs from Abraham in degree, and in its cultural associations, but it does not seem fundamentally different in kind. There are an infinite number of actions that one could take on the basis of one’s faith or spiritual experiences, where many of these actions any reasonable person would consider completely unacceptable, but a faith-based person would see as potentially acceptable or even essential. Why take one specific faith-inspired action over any other? Further, a constitutive component of faith for Kierkegaard is that it is totally embraced, without doubt or rational criticism. Abraham does not stop to ask how he knows that God is speaking to him, to think that perhaps he is hallucinating or mishearing, or to wonder if he is misinterpreting what God’s intentions are. These would be unfaithful questions. Instead, he just acts. Thus, the idea of a leap of faith leaves us open to amoral, irrational actions that can result in atrocities and catastrophes. Personally, I would hate to live in a world where people acted on this idea.

Perhaps Kierkegaard’s view of faith is more understandable when you understand his idea of truth. See below:

“An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual…The truth is precisely the venture which chooses an objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.  I contemplate the order of nature in the hope of finding God, and I see omnipotence and wisdom; but I also see much else that disturbs my mind and excites anxiety.  The sum of all this is an objective uncertainty.  But it is for this very reason that the inwardness becomes as intense as it is, for it embraces this objective uncertainty with the entire passion of the infinite …Without risk there is no faith.  Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty.”

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 182.

This is an extremely complex passage that only explains Kierkegaard’s view in part. But in short, he sees life as objectively uncertain: the world is ambiguous, hard to interpret, and there is not an entirely objective or verifiable system that can tell us exactly what the truth is and what we should believe and do. However, any existing, living person must still take actions and have beliefs. We cannot simply sit back in a passive, agnostic, unmoving state of purgatory and suspension, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Not only is that a life-negating and depressing outcome (a resignation to the deathworld), the passivity and agnosticism is also itself a kind of action that implies certain beliefs (e.g. that no action is worth taking). Taking no actions whatsoever, holding no beliefs at all, is impossible for human beings. Therefore, we must make choices and hold beliefs despite our uncertainties. Kierkegaard’s solution is faith. We must choose some uncertainty to hold fast with a passionate conviction. We make our choices based on this conviction, acting and believing despite the risk.

This is a compelling and profound description of the human condition, and I mostly agree with it. However, Kierkegaard runs into the same problem again here: faith provides no decision criterion, or a way to choose between beliefs. It only provides a way to hold an already-decided-upon belief. Faith cannot stand on its own. By itself, it is only a teetering, aimless toddler, without direction or foundation. As the case of Abraham and Osama above shows, it matters which uncertain beliefs and ideas that we decide to appropriate into our being and hold with the most passionate inwardness. We cannot just seize upon any old uncertainty and develop an intense faith in it – or at least we should not. So how do we choose? Whatever we choose, there will be an implicit criterion or framework at play, something that determines how we evaluate our options and decide amongst them.

What evaluative framework should we use to choose what to have faith in, what to believe? This is an enormous question, the fundamental question of epistemology, and I cannot answer it here. But I would argue that some of the best frameworks include logic and reason, the evidence of experience, and authentic love for others. The answer is certainly not faith, because that would just leave us where we started again. It is circular and arbitrary to choose what to have faith in on the basis of faith. Conclusively, faith is just a thin cover for other systems. Once you peel back the cover and see behind the curtains, it turns out faith is empty. It is a group of other systems in a trench coat. Upon investigation and reflection, faith dissolves into nothingness or devolves into other things, providing no real guidance. While faith may be necessary for practical action, and it is important for living a meaningful and coherent life, it does not itself provide us with any reasons to choose. It is the conclusion of the decision process, the step that must be taken once you have already decided what uncertainties to believe in.

Faith in the good

Should we have faith in ‘what is good’? Let’s say a paradigm religious or LDS person, call her Sophie, wants to have faith because she believes what she has faith in is “good” or morally valuable. But how does she know that what she has faith in is good, and how does she know what constitutes the Good itself? In other words, where does Sophie get her normative and moral beliefs? By saying that she has faith in what is good, she is applying her pre-existing moral framework (her understanding of what is good). This assumes that she already has a sufficient basis for that moral framework, and that it can stand independently from her faith. But I think the answer is that Sophie, the typical religious person, gets most or all of her moral beliefs from faith as well – from her religion or her spiritual experiences. Thus, she is using the moral beliefs she got from faith to assess her faith. This is circular logic. She is using the system of faith to evaluate itself. A faith based upon the good is an illusory solution that swallows its own tail.

A common phrase in Mormonism is “what is good is of God” (call this Alma’s formula). This comes from Alma 5:40 in the Book of Mormon, where the prophet Alma declares: “For I say unto you that whatsoever is good cometh from God, and whatsoever is evil cometh from the devil.” Countless times, when I asked about faith, or questioned how we can know if something is a genuine spiritual experience or a real inspiration from God, this was the answer I was given. However, this is a vacuous non-answer. After all, it presumes that we already know what is good and what is evil or bad. In philosophical terms, it assumes that we have reliable normative knowledge. But we don’t. Morality and decision-making are complex and is often unclear what is good, or even what it means for something to be good. People have conflicting moral intuitions, beliefs, and reasoning processes, and it is not obvious who is right (see the disagreement on trolley problem dilemmas). In other words, this logic of faith bypasses an entire field of philosophy (metaethics) and ignores an enormous and vital area of human thought, brushing it aside without reflection.

What is good may be of God, but how do we know what is good? Does God tell us somehow? If so, then how do we know if the things we think are God’s guidance are truly of God? Perhaps we can be mistaken about what is good, and what is of God. For instance, I think most people would agree that Osama bin Laden was mistaken that he was guided by God, and that the papal legate Arnaud Amalric was mistaken when he ordered all the heretics of Béziers to be slaughtered, saying “Kill them all. God will know his own.” (See The Ideology of Anti-Heretical Crusade in the 1838 Mormon War). The problem of figuring out what is good is not trivial and cannot be bypassed, and it is a matter of life or death what answers we choose. Alma naively ignores this problem.

Additionally, the formula “what is good is of God” reveals how empty or useless faith and spiritual experience are as decision criteria. In most cases where people are seeking answers from God (or whatever spiritual/religious entity they believe in), they are asking precisely because they are unsure what to do, and don’t know what the good option or right choice is. They are in a state of aporia or uncertainty with respect to the good. If they knew what was good already, they wouldn’t be asking God. For instance, perhaps someone is unsure about what college or job would be right for them. How does “what is good of God” help there? This creates a dilemma with two sharp horns, a catch-22. In any serious and difficult case where a decision must be made, faith and spiritual experience are completely unhelpful. Since you don’t know what is good, Alma’s formula is an almost insultingly pointless. Trying to determine what experiences might be genuinely spiritual (“of God”) is impossible, since you can only tell what is of God if you already know what is good. On the other hand, in the easier, more trivial and obvious cases where it is already clear what the good option is, you don’t need to resort to faith or call upon spiritual experiences at all. You can avoid consulting them entirely and leave them by the wayside, like blind guides at a crossroads that cannot help any lost traveler. Therefore, faith is either useless or irrelevant for decision-making.

Conclusion

These are a sample of some of my most important recurring thoughts on faith and spiritual experiences. I’ve been thinking many of these things since I was 13 or 14, but this is the first place I have written them down in detail. I hope this helps explain why I find faith and spiritual experiences utterly unsatisfying, and why I am frustrated and disappointed by most discussions on them. For the things that serve as the foundations for many people’s entire lives, that shape every decision they make, it is shocking how rarely these people reflect deeply and thoroughly on faith and spirituality. If they did, I think they would reach the same conclusions I have. Faith is important, and spiritual experiences are a powerful and beautiful dimension of human life. They are both valuable in many ways. However, they cannot serve as the foundations of a belief system or as a criterion for decisions and actions. Spiritual experiences alone do not justify faith, and faith alone does not provide a way to make choices and hold beliefs in an uncertain world.