John Henry Newman and Mormons (again)

Once again, a Mormon law professor is making me think about John Henry Newman.  The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog has an exchange between one of their bloggers, Michael Ruse, director of the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, and Nate Oman, law professor at William & Mary Law School.   Oman, a Mormon, is responding to an earlier post by Michael Ruse, in which he explains why he would have a hard time voting for a Mormon.   This is how Oman characterizatizes Ruse’s argument; it strikes me as pretty fair:

“While I can tolerate the religious beliefs of others and in some cases may even be able to sympathize with them, I find Mormon beliefs and Mormon history so strange that I believe the mere fact of belief on the part of a Latter-day Saint reveals some basic character flaw or intellectual disability, a failing that legitimately would count as a reason for voting against someone for public office.”

Oman's response is fascinating.  It reminds me of the final chapter of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, in which Newman responds to the general accusation against the Catholic faith current in England of the time – that it is not a rational belief system, but rather a set of superstitious beliefs imposed upon people of weak will and intellect by a clergy with no respect for truth.  A person who accepts claim that she cannot question certain teachings by the Church is susceptible to being misled on any matter about which the Church chooses to profess an opinion.  Such a person has forfeited the right to be considered a rational person who thinks for himself.  The last chapter of the Apologia consists of Newman's attempt to demonstrate why it is rational for a person to accept the authority of the Church on certain matters.

            Oman’s post is just the same sort of endeavor.  Some teasers:

.  . . .  if you are using belief in Mormonism as a proxy for a lack of critical or analytic abilities, fanatical mendacity, or the like, then you do not have to rely on the proxy. You can simply try to observe the primary phenomenon that you are interested in. What you will find is that there are many Latter-day Saints who in fact engage with the world critically and are not pursuing brutal or illiberal theocratic political agendas. To be sure, you will find some Mormons who are stupid, dogmatic, ignorant, and politically reactionary. You may even find that the distribution between the two groups in the Mormon population is different than the population as a whole, but so long as the primary phenomenon is itself observable, there is no need to rely on the proxy of belief in Mormonism to determine whether any particular Latter-day Saint suffers from critical or moral deficits.

This doesn’t imply, of course, that one cannot regard Mormonism as false and Mormon believers as mistaken. On the other hand, the mere fact of holding false beliefs is generally not taken as evidence of intellectual or moral failure. Lots of smart, thoughtful, critical, and morally decent people hold mistaken beliefs. Indeed, I suspect that they all do. The question then remains as to whether the mistaken belief represented by Mormonism is somehow different. It could be different in one of two ways. First, it might be that the mistake represented by Mormonism is qualitatively different in some way such that it really does provide some important piece of information about a person’s critical and moral apparatus. Second, it may be that given that one can identify believing Mormons who nevertheless display critical and moral competence, the persistence of their belief in Mormonism is itself sufficiently surprising—considering the “weirdness” of Mormon beliefs—to be a phenomenon demanding an explanation.

The post is really worth reading in its entirety.