Author Archives: Bruce Nielson

Morally Demanding of Others That Which We Will Not Give

Posted on by

I wrote a post once encouraging people to think carefully before they use deception as a way of dealing with the potential problems that arise from having reinterpreted one’s faith in the LDS Church. I gave several examples of the types of deceptions that I’ve seen. I, myself, have been personally hurt by such deceptions. For example:

  • Technically, they believe the Book of Mormon is “inspired” because “inspired” means something more nuanced than what most believers mean [e.g. “inspired just means it teaches good things.”]
  • Technically they believe Joseph Smith is a prophet, because a prophet is something more broad than most believers understand [e.g. “prophet” is what we call the leader of our Church. Or maybe a “prophet” is someone that teaches at least some good moral principles..]
  • Technically they believe the church is “true” in the sense that… [e.g. The church is “true” because all religions that teach good ethics are “true” because religion is really just about teaching ethics. There isn’t really a God.] Continue reading →

How Did People in the 19th Century Perceive Younger Wives?

Posted on by

Joseph SmithIn yesterday’s discussion on Meg’s first post I started to write a comment that (as sometimes happens) became a tangent that then became a whole post.

I’m not even sure what comment originally prompted this. But I was thinking about Joseph Smith’s younger wives, particularly Helen Mar Kimball. Meg and I also got talking and she pointed to Nancy Winchester as being about the same age when they ‘married’ Joseph Smith.

The evidence is currently against either having consummated their marriages to Joseph. Continue reading →

How We Gain Knowledge

Posted on by

Popper and KuhnBefore I disappeared from blogging, I had finished up reposting my Wheat and Tares posts on epistemology (i.e. theory of how we gain knowledge. Good summary of my posts found here. Full series found here, in reverse order of course.) But the truth is that throughout my series, I never really had a single post that attempted to explain what epistemology really is.

Conjecture and Refutation

To summarize how epistemology works, the basic idea is that scientific progress is made through a process of conjecture, criticism, and then refutation. Essentially we see something in the world that we wish to have explained or (even more likely) a problem that we can solve if we can explain it. Continue reading →

Introducing Meg Stout! Our Newest Millennial Star Blogger!

Posted on by

Finding a New Blogger… The Hard Way

I came across Meg Stout while reading her Amazon review of Brian C. Hale’s three volume series, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy. Her reviews were thorough and humorous. I made contact with her and we began to talk about her own studies of Joseph Smith’s polygamy and her personal views. She surprised me when she mentioned that her studies had suggested to her the possibility that Joseph Smith rarely consummated his plural marriages — with even a chance that maybe he consummated none of them.

Now of course this view easily falls into the “too good to be true” category, so I politely asked her a few more questions out of curiosity but also to gently challenge her.

She promptly proceeded to bury me. Continue reading →

Kuhn’s Insight – John Polkinghorne and The Value of Value

Posted on by

In my last post, I declared victory for Scientific Realism over Positivism on the grounds that even if Positivism is right, it’s first “prediction” must always be that we ignore it as “truth” – at least to some degree – and be committed to our theories a “the truth” or else we can’t make scientific progress.

I therefore declared that on the point that Kuhn and Popper disagree, that Popper wins by default.

However, Kuhn had many insights that Popper missed or downplayed that help fill in the explanation gaps in Popper’s own theories. One of these is the fact that “refutation” really only happens between two (or more) competing theories. While Popper does not deny this, he really didn’t make it as clear as Kuhn either. We will eventually see that this insight is a key point in understanding the value of Theology.

Another explanation gap that Kuhn fills for Popper is explained in this quote:

Fortunately, there is also another sort of consideration that can lead scientists to reject an old paradigm in favor of a new. These are the arguments, rarely made entirely explicit, that appeal to the individual’s sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic – the new theory is staid to be “neater,” “more suitable,” or “simpler” than the old. (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 155) Continue reading →