Everyone gets the same witness
Believers in mutually incompatible religions report the same kind of inner confirmation, so the experience cannot be evidence for any one of them.
What the Church claims
The witness of the Holy Ghost uniquely confirms that the Book of Mormon and the LDS Church are true.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Untenable. Decisive against the witness as discriminating evidence, and no further: the premise is conceded by FAIR and by Packer, and the conclusion follows. It does not show that God does not exist.
The record
- A widely circulated c. 13-minute YouTube compilation, 'Spiritual Witnesses', strings together members of many religions describing their confirmation in language indistinguishable from LDS testimony; LDS Discussions summarizes it as including Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Peoples Temple members and polygamist offshoots.
- Packer acknowledged that emotional impulses and adversarial counterfeits can be mistaken for the Spirit.
- The University of Utah fMRI study (n=19 devout Latter-day Saints) found that self-reported 'feeling the Spirit' tracked activation of the nucleus accumbens and reward/attention networks, with activation preceding peak feeling by 1-3 s. The senior author said such experience activates reward circuits 'in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music' and that 'We don't yet know if believers of other religions would respond the same way'.
- FAIR's reply to the other-religions point is that early Christians reported the same burning (Luke 24:32; Justin Martyr; Hermas) - which concedes that the phenomenon is not unique to the Restoration.
The moving target
- 1982-06-25: Spiritual and emotional impulses are closely linked and can be confused.
The exchange
common LDS response; cf. FAIR
God loves all his children and gives light to all; people in other faiths can feel the Spirit confirm the truths their religion does contain. Only the fulness is in the restored Church.
The answer: This rescues the experience at the cost of the test. If the Spirit confirms partial truth in Catholicism, Islam and the FLDS, then a Latter-day Saint's witness is equally compatible with the LDS Church being one more partly-true religion. The other believers do not report 'this is partly true'; they report what Latter-day Saints report - that this is God's true path - and some act on it in ways Latter-day Saints regard as gravely wrong.
What they get right: It is a theologically generous position and better than claiming all other witnesses are satanic.
standard reply (also made by the study's authors)
Brain scans show only that spiritual experience has neural correlates, which everyone expected; they cannot tell us whether God is the cause.
The answer: Correct, and critics who say the fMRI study 'proves it is just dopamine' overreach; the study had 19 subjects, no non-LDS comparison group, and its authors disclaim metaphysical conclusions. What it does show is that the feeling can be elicited on cue by Church media and quotations in a scanner, and is processed by the same reward systems as music and love - which is what the natural explanation predicts and which removes any presumption that the feeling is sui generis.
What they get right: The apologists are right about the limits of this study.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
The argument needs no neuroscience. If method M (pray, feel a confirming peace or burning) yields 'my church is God's true church' for Latter-day Saints, FLDS members, Catholics, Muslims and members of Peoples Temple alike, then M's hit rate is at best one in many, and no user of M can tell from the inside whether she is the exception. The LDS response that others feel the Spirit about partial truths abandons the claim that the witness discriminates. Packer's concession that emotion and even the adversary can imitate the Spirit means the Church itself teaches that false positives occur, without supplying a way to detect them other than agreement with Church teaching.
The apologetic case
Similar phenomenology does not entail identical cause; counterfeit money does not show there is no real money. The LDS claim is not that outsiders feel nothing but that the Spirit leads people progressively toward more truth, and that the restored gospel is where that path ends. The fMRI study shows only correlates and its authors say so.
What would change this
Comparative studies showing LDS spiritual experiences differ in kind (not just in content) from those in other religions, or that they carry verifiable information.
Closely related
Sources
- Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons
- Spiritual Witnesses (YouTube)
- Overview of Testimonies and Spiritual Witnesses in Mormonism
- The Candle of the Lord
- Burning in the bosom (FAIR)
- This Is Your Brain on God (University of Utah Health press release)
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