Question: Is the Latter-day Saint way of understanding spiritual experience guilty of circular reasoning?

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Question: Is claiming to receive a revelation from the Spirit of the truthfulness of the Gospel an example of circular reasoning?

This is what is known as the "The Veridicality Objection" to Latter-day Saint philosophers

Some have claimed that it is circular knowledge to believe that one has received the Spirit to testify that the Book of Mormon is true. The Latter-day Saint claim to truth takes the following form:

P1) The Book of Mormon presents a way to know that it is true--by receiving revelation from the Holy Ghost that it is true. The Book of Mormon and the Bible present a few ways to know that it is true

P2)I have prayed about the Book of Mormon and received what it and the scriptures describe as the Holy Ghost

C) Therefore, the Book of Mormon is true.

This argument is not inherently circular since we have independent verification of the proposition. But this argument goes a little further. It is claimed that we cannot know that the witness is actually from God or not. The argument would follow something like

P1) I believe that God has revealed the truth of the Book of Mormon because...

C) I have felt God's spirit testify to me that it is true.

This argument is circular since we have part of the conclusion in the premise. "How can we prove that the witness actually comes from an outside influence such as God?" is the only question we need to answer. Latter-day Saints can offer some pushback on this supposed circularity since we have some answers to the questions of justification for this part of our epistemology. See here for a list of links that respond to questions/arguments against the proposition of claiming the Holy Ghost as witnessing to the individual.

Approached differently, Latter-day Saint theologian and philosopher Blake Ostler has suggested that the noumenal/phenomenal distinction disappears in Mormonism. His argument is that the fundamental hinge of Latter-day Saint epistemic praxis is already knowing the truth of something in one's heart prior to experiencing one's self and confirming the truth of it. This follows scriptures such as D&C 9:7-9 where we are asked to study something out in our mind and making sure it makes sense before praying about it. Thus, in his terms, if we are experiencing our self then this is a valid form of epistemology since we already know something in our heart prior to receiving the other experience. The argument is best explained by him. Interested persons should hear/read his material. It can be found here.

There are weaknesses to both approaches. For the first, while we can answer objections to Latter-day Saint epistmeology, it still cannot prove that the witness comes from God. For the second, it isn't entirely fleshed out how we can experience ourselves yet still receive "top-down" revelation

Not having a perfect answer to this question may be a good thing.

In the premortal counsel, our heavenly father wanted us to have the supernal gift of agency (Moses 4:1-3). This agency gave us the ability to choose eternal life according to the power of the Christ or captivity according to the power of the Devil (2 Nephi 2:27-28). If we were to have a pristine epistemological nexus to the divine, would this not violate our gift of agency, rendering inviolate our need choose to have faith in God and Christ and thus our salvation? This is, essentially, the last inch where "[every] man eventually is backed up to the wall of faith, and there he must make his stand.". This is the space between mortality and the divine where we make our choice to stand with God. After such great evidence of his divine providence has been shown in our lives both materially and spiritually, should we deny the hand that fed us?

But couldn't this also be an evidence of God's providence? That he allows us to answer all other objections to epistemology yet leaves us this perfect space that correlates with his plan? This should be considered as well when addressing this question.

Perhaps it is even wise to consider that "knowing" for the ancients who wrote scripture and invited us to seek a witness of its truthfulness was very different than the way that philosophers might conceptualize "knowing".

Blake T. Ostler:

There is a vast difference between the way the Hebrews felt we come to knowledge of truth and the way the Greeks thought of it. Whereas the Hebrews and early Christian writers of scripture constantly refer to the heart as an instrument of knowledge and choice, the philosophers rarely, if ever, do. The Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament regard the heart as the source of knowledge and authentic being. For the Greeks, the head is the place of knowing everything we know.

[. . .]

The head is a piece of complex flesh that knows only a beginning and ending. By "head" I mean that complex system that includes our brain and central nervous system, which translates sense experience and gives rise to the categories of logic, language, and thought. It knows only what can be learned through the sense of our bodies and categories of reason. The head is the source of the ego—or the categories by which we judge ourselves and create or self image.

In contrast, the heart is the home of our eternal identity. It can be opened or shut, hard or soft...The heart must be "penetrated" (D&C 1:2), "pricked" (Acts 2:37), "melted" (Josh. 2:11), or "softened" (D&C 121:4) so that truth is known, pretense is given up and humility in God's presence can be manifested.

Perhaps our understanding of knowledge should be closer to the Hebrew understanding of knowledge instead of the Greeks. Perhaps the fact that the Book of Mormon reflects this understanding of the ancient Hebrews and early Christians can be an evidence of its truthfulness and satiate the Greek mind which seeks to understand everything with the head. And lastly, perhaps we can focus on maintaining the understanding of knowledge provided by the Hebrews and early Christians while preparing a defense for those that think like the Greeks. That seems to be the message of many scriptures (1 Peter 3:15; Jude 1:3; D&C 71; D&C 88:118).

Potential Evidence For the Validity of Latter-day Saint Epistemology?

It is true that we can’t prove that the Spirit actually comes from God or that the Latter-day Saint way of understanding and interpreting spiritual experience is the correct way to understand and interpret. But we can provide some evidence of its validity. This is what we do every fast and testimony meeting—we provide evidence of God’s hand in our lives:

1. Top-down revelation.Two of the most extraordinary aspects of Latter-day Saint epistemology are the ability to receive a "no" to a question that the questioner wanted to receive a "yes" to in prayer and the ability to receive miraculous knowledge through miraculous experience including everything mentioned as gifts of the Spirit, warnings about eminent danger, revelation about specific people given during priesthood blessings, and other phenomena. These events can properly be described as "top-down" revelation in Latter-day Saint epistemology as this is God correcting the mental framework of the person occupying it and giving us specific knowledge. This is distinguished from "bottom up" revelation where the subject has to correct their own state of mind before seeking revelation (D&C 9:7-9). Requirements for this include that Latter-day Saints and other individuals interested in receiving revelation become worthy of the Spirit's influence including trusting in God enough so that they believe that he will answer (Mosiah 2:37; Alma 7:21; D&C 97:17; D&C 6:36; Mormon 9:27; Matthew 14:21), that they study something out in their mind (Moroni 10:3; D&C 9:7-9), and that they then ask God for inspiration. Top-down revelation is what we testify to every fast and testimony meeting. We are providing evidence for the reality of the Spirit's influence as people live worthy of it and seek its whisperings.
2. Ancient evidence for modern revelation. There is a lot of evidence for both ancient and modern revelation. If we can demonstrate evidence of the authenticity of the revelations themselves, then we can provide evidence for the framework through which we understand and interpret spiritual experience.
3. The fact that a spiritual experience feels like it comes from God may be good reason to believe that it did indeed come from him.

Blake Ostler has stated:

I suggest that there would be no possibility of new experiences that break out of the framework of existing paradigms and world-views or our prior interpretations if all experience were necessarily limited to our pre-interpretive framework of interpretation. Yet that is precisely what a conversion experience is–it reorients one’s entire view of the world and changes and alters the interpretive framework. Thus, it must be in some sense logically and experientially prior to interpretive experience.

You can turn the overhead projector off now, people are much more interested in that then they are in me. {laughter} Oh, maybe we ought to see “rabbit/duck,” just because anybody who has studied Ludwig Wittgenstein has to see this. You probably already have, actually. In a large way, the way that we see the world is up to us. What do you see? Do you see a duck? How many see a duck? How many see a rabbit? Okay, who is right? In fact, you can change at will, once you have learned how to see it, you can change at will the way you see this figure. And in a large way, the way that we can choose to see our experience is precisely like this. We can choose to organize our experience to see it in different ways. I suggest that in the experiencing of religious experience, this is often what is happening; we’re choosing to see different things and experience different things because of our pre-interpretive framework.

But I’m suggesting that that’s not all there is to experience, there’s more to experience than mere interpretation, and this argument isn’t any good unless all of our experience is simply interpretation. As I said, the spiritual experience must in some sense be logically and experientially prior to our interpretive experience because it reorients our experience. It gives us a new way of seeing. Moreover, if the experience rearranges and replaces the framework so that it is the framework or categories, then it is not interpreted experience, but interpretive, and the bases for all further experience as such.

Now this argument also assumes that the entirety of what is experienced is interpretive. But there is more than interpretation that gives content to our experience, and the experience of the burning in the heart and the inspiration as coming from God is, in fact, good reason to believe that it does in fact, come from God; because that’s how we experience it.

If all we ever did were to regurgitate our prior categories of thought or fixed framework of beliefs, then there could never be anything novel or creatively new things. No new scientific theories could emerge, new inventions would be impossible and new revelations could never happen because all we would do is regurgitate what we already know. But that’s not the way human life is, so I suggest that the argument isn’t valid.

Thus, with evidence for our belief, we can provide some hope for people that wish to experience and believe in the reality of the Spirit's influence in their lives.

Notes