The Sunstone Chronicles: Day 3

Well, the sun has set on the final day of the Sunstone Symposium, and it's time for some closing reflections. I had the tremendous good fortune yesterday of meeting several persons whose work I admire, including Dan Vogel, Sandra Tanner, and H. Michael Marquardt. I also continued to spend time with Ron Huggins and Don Bradley. I have to admit that I expected Ron to be strident and at least somewhat intolerant. This has been my unfortunate experience of evangelical critics of Mormonism. But that isn't Ron at all. Aside from Don Bradley and Matt Bowman, I think Ron was one of my favorite people at the Symposium. He's a very friendly and bright fellow, with nary a shred of intolerance to speak of. Dan Vogel also rather defied my expectations. I expected a thin, hawkish, and somewhat introverted character hiding behind thick glasses. But that's not Dan at all. In fact, he is very normal-looking and very gregarious. I had a lot of fun talking with him and Sandra at lunch. I didn't get to talk with H. Michael Marquardt for very long, so about him I can only say that he is the quintessential scholar. He's a tall, thin, elderly, smiling fellow with virtually encyclopedic knowledge. As a side note, he was telling me that Ed Ashment is no longer part of Brent Metcalfe's Kirtland Egyptian Papers project, and that he doesn't know if the volume will ever actually reach the publication stage. It sounds like they're still a ways out from that, yet.

In the morning I attended a talk titled "The New God Argument," put on by the Mormon Transhumanist Association. They essentially argued that if we assume that humanity will become an "advanced civiliation" before becoming extinct, we must conclude that there are many far more advanced civilizations out there than we, that our world may in fact be a simulation created by one of those civilizations, and that any such civilization would necessarily be far more benevolent than we. Such a civilization, from our perspective, would be godlike. They suggested that such a civilization would not necessary communicate through the channels we're used to, and that what we know as religious experience might in fact be communication from them.

I didn’t buy the argument, especially insofar as it was framed as an argument for the truth claims of the LDS Church. During the question and answer session, I asked why a civilization as advanced as the one they posit would be unable to communicate in a less ambiguous way than through dreams and visions that can so easily be confused with natural phenomena. I also asked why a civilization as benevolent as the one they posit would refrain from doing so. Presumably, such beings would not be exempt from morality. Their failure to offer material aid in the alleviation of gratuitous suffering, then, evinces bemused paternalism more than benevolence. One of the presenters mentioned World of Warcraft and Second Life-- video games that simulate reality-- and suggested that our universe could be such a simulation, only orders of magnitude beyond the ones mentioned. I suspect that any "advanced civilization" that communicates with its "simulated" children through seer stones and disappearing golden plates must take its creation no more seriously than the makers of Second Life do theirs. Said civilization is merely toying with us as with a video game: playing a cruel, cosmic joke and watching to see how we will react. Such a civilization hardly deserves our respect, let alone our religious worship. I am skeptical, in any case, that there could be sufficient computing power in any universe to simulate one like ours. The MTA seems to be assuming that advancement is without limit. That is an unrealistic assumption, in my opinion.

Next I attended John-Charles Duffy's talk on Book of Mormon historicity. John-Charles clearly missed the point of the whole “Mapping Mormon Issues” concept. He used the session as an opportunity to pontificate about why the issue he’d been assigned to map doesn’t, in fact, need mapping. His argument was that nobody decides to believe or disbelieve Book of Mormon historicity because of arguments or intellectual concerns. Rather, it’s all a social thing. How we view the Book of Mormon depends upon the social circles with which we choose to associate. As we renegotiate social relationships, our views change in order to gain approval or prestige from those groups with which we affiliate. I think Duffy’s approach is hopelessly reductionistic and entirely apologetically-motivated. I hope they boot him out of the project and assign that issue to someone else.

Speaking of Mapping Mormon Issues, I should highlight a thought from Don Bradley's Thursday talk on Book of Mormon translation that I found really interesting. Don argued, among other things, that the evidence points overwhelmingly to a visual method of translation. The much cited instruction to Oliver Cowdery– that he should work it out in his mind and then ask the Spirit for confirmation or disconfirmation– is a binary process consistent with his “gift of working with the rod”. This was much different from Joseph’s gift, which (as implied by the terms “seer stone” and “spectacles”) was visual in nature.

Anyway, back to Saturday. In the afternoon I gave my own talk, titled "Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis". The audience was sparse, probably partly because it was late and a lot of people had left, partly because I had to compete with Paul Toscano's talk during the same time slot, and partly because I used the word "hermeneutical" in the title. A lot of folks asked me what that meant, which suggests to me that I should have gone with something a bit less pretentious. Anyway, the reaction to the talk was very positive. Many thanks to the folks who turned out to support me, and to Kevin Barney for responding and Matt Bowman for chairing the session. I hope to eventually beef the paper up for submission to a journal somewhere.

I'll probably be back next year. See you all there!

Related Posts:

Part 1
Part 2