“There may not be anything out there (of that nature) I haven’t read,” said Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge, a General Authority Seventy, during a BYU devotional address last month. Elder Corbridge needed to read through a great deal of material antagonistic to the Church, the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon in his new assignment. But he’s totally fine with the issues he studied, so you should be, too. That my friend, is an appeal to authority logical fallacy.

Appeal to authority is a form of defeasible argument in which a claimed authority’s support is used as evidence for an argument’s conclusion. “I’m an expert, you can trust me.” This logical fallacy is tried and true: it works. A doctor published a study saying vaccines cause autism and people believed him. He was wrong. Millions of children have since been studied and dozens of studies have now conclusively determined that he was wrong. He has since retracted his study and admitted he was wrong, and knew he was wrong at the time of publication. But at the time of his study, he was an expert. He’d gone to medical school, passed his boards, and studied and researched vaccines. So there’s no way that he could misrepresent his work, use scientifically insignificant sample sizes in his methods, be free from bias, personally benefit from publishing false information, or be capable of lying, right?

Just because someone is an “expert” doesn’t mean you can implicitly trust them. You don’t know what their intentions are. You don’t know if their methods of reaching their conclusion are sound. You don’t know what they know, and you don’t know what they don’t know. Sure, it’s great to give people the benefit of the doubt. But one must realize that just saying something doesn’t make it so.

He says that “Most people act based on their beliefs. Sometimes, though, their beliefs are wrong.” Some people believe that the earth is flat. Saying it is doesn’t make it so. Anyone who doubts their claims can fly in an airplane and see the curvature of the earth and easily prove them wrong.

“Knowledge is crucial to avoid deception and discern between truth and error,” Elder Corbridge stated, moments before encouraging his attendees to discount information that makes them feel gloomy.

Most Mormons are taught and believe that good feelings are the Holy Ghost and bad feelings are the devil, or the withdrawal of the spirit due to evil. So if they’re reading something that confirms their current belief and they feel good, the information is solid and true. But if they feel gloomy like Elder Corbridge, the information is not true, and it is of the devil; meant to draw them away from their beliefs. That is how I was taught the spirit works. And he reaffirms that teaching later in his talk when he says “the gloom I experienced as I listened to the dark choir of voices raised against the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ … is the absence of the Spirit of God.”

When one receives information that contradicts their current understanding or belief in something, they can experience cognitive dissonance. The new challenging information is put up against the current belief system in a boxing match in the mind. They can’t both be true if they contradict each other. The mind begins to try to resolve the conflict as this feeling of uncertainty can cause stress, anxiety, uncomfortableness, or cause one to feel “gloomy”. Are there partial truths in both sets of information or beliefs? Is one true and the other false? Are they both false? Are there other truths that are not known that must be known to make a decision about these two?

To resolve the conflict, one must make a determination in what is to be believed. In Mormonism, if one feels gloomy, that’s the devil, so choose the one that reaffirms the belief and feels comfortable and good. But if that doesn’t work for some stubborn Mormons who are left feeling deceived and angry after reading something troubling like Mary Rollins Lightner’s account of Joseph Smith telling her as a 12 year old that she would be his wife, Elder Corbridge offers another approach. From the church news:

“Elder Corbridge explained there are primary and secondary questions when it comes to the Church. The primary questions must be answered first, as they are the most important. They include:

• Is there a God who is our Father?
• Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Savior of the world?
• Was Joseph Smith a prophet?
• Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the kingdom of God on the earth?

In contrast, the secondary questions are unending. They include questions about Church history, polygamy, blacks and the priesthood, women and the priesthood, how the Book of Mormon was translated, DNA and the Book of Mormon, gay marriage, different accounts of the First Vision and so on.

“If you answer the primary questions, the secondary questions get answered too or they pale in significance and you can deal with things you understand and things you don’t understand, things you agree with and things you don’t agree with without jumping ship altogether,” Elder Corbridge said.”

Elder Corbridge’s last statement is an affirming the disjunct logical fallacy – concluding that one disjunct of a logical disjunction must be false because the other disjunct is true; A or B; A, therefore not B. If you answer the primary questions then it doesn’t matter what the answers are to secondary questions, so you no longer have to worry. Conflict resolved. Trust me, I’m an expert.

In his assertion that only the primary questions matter to know the truth, Elder Corbridge is using the the fallacy of composition – when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Rather than having answers from both primary and secondary questions to have a better understanding of the church truthfulness, he asserts that the church is true as long as you have primary answers because those are true. The rest doesn’t matter, even if it proves falsehoods.

It’s ironic then that he stated earlier that “Knowledge is crucial to avoid deception and discern between truth and error”, because he’s saying a portion of knowledge of the church’s history is sufficient as long as it answers the primary questions. More knowledge can easily be obtained by delving further into the ample amounts of history that the church’s own scholars have produced that reveal troubling aspects of its truth claims, but they aren’t important. More knowledge should better help avoid deception and discern between truth and error, but somehow that’s a bad thing?

A greater portion of knowledge is understanding the answers to secondary questions. In fact, knowledge about the secondary questions could help answer the primary ones. Is Joseph Smith a prophet if he secretly married other women, including married women, without his wife’s consent or knowledge? Is the church the Kingdom of God on Earth if Joseph isn’t a prophet?

To regain credibility after making these illogical claims, he talks about the scientific method and using it to prove or disprove a hypothesis. But then he detours into the supernatural. From the article:

“There are three major methods of learning — scientific, analytical and academic — but the divine method of learning incorporates elements of the other methodologies and “ultimately trumps everything else by tapping into the powers of heaven,” Elder Corbridge said. All four methods are necessary to know truth...

The divine method of learning incorporates the other three methods and taps into the powers of heaven. “Ultimately the things of God are made known by the Spirit of God which is usually a still, small voice,” Elder Corbridge said.”

How does one know they have tapped into the powers of heaven? Through feelings? Through beliefs? But Elder Corbridge previously said that sometimes people believe things that are wrong. So is he saying that no matter what scientific, analytical, or academic methods prove, ultimately you should trust how you feel about something to know if it’s true or false?

But you can trust that is the right method, he’s a General Authority and an expert.

I say these things in the name of understanding.

Brother Ghost