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Just curious—what was the (personal, it seems) evidence that was compelling to you?
So, what I was taught is that the way to verify the truth of things is to pray about them and wait for a spiritual confirmation. This did indeed happen for me, but I considered it far more likely to be placebo--either a normal thing the brain does if you expect it to do so, or me interpreting an unrelated sensation as a spiritual confirmation because that's what I was looking for.
Since then I have become convinced that praying is indeed a good method to determine the truth, but quite a few unlikely events had to transpire in the meantime to convince me of this. I can give a few examples.
The aforementioned condition was quite stubborn and did not respond to a series of 5-6 different medications over the course of around 8 months. The last one I tried was supposed to work within 6 weeks IIRC but still was not working after 12. Finally it calmed down and I was able to function again. I mentioned this a few days later (when I was more sure it was not a fluke--I had never been healthy for a few days before) to my parents and they told me that my extended family had done a fast for me the day I recovered. This was significant to me because I did not know about the fast, so I could not blame it on placebo, and due to the longevity of the condition it was somewhat unlikely for me to have been healed like that with that precise timing.
A few weeks after my first girlfriend broke up with me, back when I had basically zero self-esteem or self-awareness, I was desperate to just see her again. We went to the same college and I was walking back from a college-wide seminar there (consisting of maybe 20,000 people) when this feeling of loneliness hit me quite hard. I prayed as hard as I could to just be able to see her. I got a strong spiritual impression that it would be a bad idea, and would not make me feel better or increase the odds of us getting back together at all, and I basically fired back mentally that I wanted to see her regardless. A few seconds later she did show up, we exchanged very awkward greetings, and she hurried past me.
Similar thing here with the timing--one time I was on a 50-miler and my 14 year-old brother got separated from the rest of the group. We all made it to the campsite, a ~15 mile hike through the jungle from the last one, and realized thirty minutes later that he still had not shown up, and nobody had seen him in ages. I went back down the path looking for him, becoming more and more worried as time went by and the sun sank below the mountains. Finally I said a very strong prayer. that he would be safe and I would find him. Less than a second after the prayer was finished--basically as soon as I opened my eyes--he showed up on the path in front of me. Turns out he had been eating cake with some other group camped a few miles away the whole time.
One time after listening to 5ish hours of screechy broken broadcasts, I interrupted the congregation to suggest we say a prayer that the broadcast would be fixed. We said a prayer and it was indeed fixed very shortly thereafter.
I was quite worried about anything which could possibly be placebo, or due to overly generous interpretations of events, such as praying for things that would normally happen (or at least are not too unlikely) and then praising God with amazement when they do end up happening. I was very paranoid about being born into this religion. I think God knew that and so gave me quite a few miracles which were somewhat more difficult to explain away as a result of my own desire for the church I had been born into to be true. The miracles which I shared are particularly significant to me due to the timing aspect. If I had prayed and then my brother had showed up 10 seconds later, this would be about 1/100th as significant to me as him showing up immediately. It's obviously not something that gives me proof positive that the church is true, but combined with many other similar events it gives me enough evidence for me to feel justified giving the spiritual evidence some weight. I've had quite a few experiences similar to the ones listed above, plus another 2 much much more significant experiences which I don't really feel comfortable sharing.
Thanks, that's definitely helpful.
I guess I don't know the rate at which that's occurring—how often you pray hard. Or whether there are any hidden things making it a little more likely.
What do you make of non-Mormons having similarly strong anecdotes?
Yeah same. I feel like I've done my due diligence but, given how confident everyone is in their own beliefs, I remain somewhat doubtful that it's possible to totally eliminate the possibility of bias. At this point I think [working to live my ideals well] is much more important, more helpful to people, and more likely to lead me to the truth, than [studying which ideals are optimal]. Of course doing both is best, but the former should receive the bulk of my time and effort at this point after so long studying the latter.
Mormonism teaches, and my intuition/spirit agrees, that as one becomes morally better, God guides them towards the truth. Good philosophies are inherently self-correcting, in the sense that if you live them consistently you will either continue to grow, or eventually run into their contradictions, at which point you know that they're false. Morality is objective, contradictions in it are self-evident (from a practical if not a theoretical point of view, i.e. you'll know contradictions when you see them) and so the best way to determine which philosophy is correct seems to be to live a good philosophy as well as you can. Resident Contrarian has a pretty good piece which mentions this:
You can look at morality as explore vs. exploit as far as doing the most good. Trying to live a good, virtuous life with a bad philosophy is possible but difficult. I think better moral systems--those closer to the objective truth--make it easier for one to be virtuous and help those around them. So the right strategy seems to be to explore for a while, exploit the best system you've discovered, then maybe once you've learned more about exploiting, continue to explore for a better system. Hope I'm making sense here.
It's important to note that none of my anecdotes are really specific to Mormonism at all. To me they are evidence that God exists and cares about us, and prayer works, but not really much further than that. I also believe that God loves his other children too, not just the ones who happen to have the most correct ideas about his nature, so it's not like he's going to only bestow miracles upon any one religion. My testimony of Mormonism in particular--above other Christian churches--has a lot more to do with spiritual experiences and my love for the doctrine than it does with the physical miracles I've seen.
Besides that though, if you trust all [Christian accounts of miracles] but distrust all [Hindu accounts of miracles] then clearly your belief about which religion is correct was never based on those miracles at all. This is why I mention that my testimony is much more based on spiritual experiences and my own understanding of the doctrine. The physical miracles only "opened the door" so to speak and forced me to stop dismissing such experiences as placebo.
I'm curious—I'm not very familiar with Mormonism. What things do you love about its doctrine?
I could go on... I'll list a few things in no particular order.
Eternal families--I like families and they don't seem like a temporary mortality-specific thing to me.
Faith and justice--I mentioned this a bit earlier, but the idea is that God reveals light and knowledge to his children as they become better people. This goes hand in hand with the idea that justice is related to accountability. Someone with less understanding of a situation is less at fault for making the wrong decision. This is a big part of why people disagree about morality (rather than it being immediately and obviously self-evident to everyone). If morality were extremely obvious, most people would still not be very moral, and so they would be under greater condemnation. Instead we are given about as much knowledge as we can handle, and then once we successfully deal with our current struggles we get more knowledge and guidance on what to work on next.
Physical reality and truth exist, and God did not invent and create everything ex nihilo--I've done my best in this thread to justify why I think it's theoretically possible that God could create evil, but the idea that God created evil is not an LDS belief. If God truly did exist independent of everything--independent of truth itself--then he could surely invent a universe where evil did not exist.
Modern guidance. I think that people, including myself, are often bad critical thinkers. God sends all sorts of prophets, writings, and personal spiritual impressions to send us in the right direction, but personal spiritual impressions can be ignored/misinterpreted. Writings can be corrupted over time. There's quite a lot that goes into a "successful" (effective at promoting moral growth) religion, and not all of it is personal. Institutional design and cultural values matter quite a lot too. It can be helpful to have hard lines in the sand, from both a cultural and a personal perspective, that prevent people from going too far off track. The Word of Wisdom is one example, forbidding members of the LDS church from taking hard drugs (among other things). Of course the higher law matters much more than the lower law, but sometimes the lower law is the one that's harder to justify away, and the one more likely to make a cultural impression, further protecting people.
Of course its most profound benefits have to do with knowing that Christ is our savior. Hard to say more without some understanding of what belief to contrast it with. On a personal level, it has benefitted my life by giving me comfort, purpose, direction, and some good safety rails.
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If you have a habit to pray and wait for it to work, it's not implausible that a few times in your life you actually notice it to appear to work. Do you count the times when you pray and do not get instant results delivered?
Event 2 in particular sounds like "you were returning from an event in the same college that she goes to, you were looking for her so you saw her, duh". I suppose I don't have handy explanations for the rest of them other than "stuff happens sometimes, that doesn't mean there's got to be a superintelligence out there looking out for you".
"Spiritual confirmations" you described also look like, well, literally just internal monologue to me. There was a book I heard about - something something "Bicameral Mind"? - that basically theorized that the ancient man conceptualized internal monologue not as his own voice of reason, but as Athena or the equivalent bestowing wisdom upon him in his time of need.
I understand that, which is why as I said the timing of these events is the most significant aspect of them to me. Praying and having something happen immediately is very different from praying and having it happen a few days later. I understand that the events that I listed are generally like 1/100 to 1/10,000 coincidences, which isn't that much if I have said a lot of prayers, so all I can say is that the success rate seems to be much higher than it would be by chance.
I essentially disregarded the results of minor prayers, both positive and negative, since they are numerous enough to be impossible to track. Major prayers (where I am sticking my neck out by saying a prayer, or praying very desperately) are different and as far as I can recall and have recorded they have been answered to my satisfaction 100% of the time. I would put all but #1 in that category, plus all of those were answered immediately.
I did back when I was less sure in my faith. I would pray for something, then if it didn't happen revise my Overall Estimate downwards, and if it did, I would estimate the odds of that thing happening by chance within that timeframe and adjust my Overall Estimate accordingly. I also chose hypotheses which were firmly based in the teachings of my religion, tested them, evaluated whether the results were "good", and then adjusted based on how likely a good result would be if the church weren't true. So I would pray for guidance on something, get a prompting regarding what to do, then conduct the above actions on that prompting i.e. evaluating how likely it was that the prompting was actually the Spirit vs just my own opinion regarding what to do, then follow through and judge the results likewise.
While I saw very strong results, I grew worried about my own ability to be an objective interpreter of the events happening in my life. It didn't really seem like the more scientific approach actually removed any bias from my search for the truth, and it was very time-consuming. So much of the results depended on my own estimation of the odds of events happening beforehand, an estimation which is just rife with inaccuracy since a) if I want the church to be true, I'll adjust all estimates downwards, and b) I just have no idea what the odds are of most random events happening. I attempted to play prediction markets for a while in order to train my own intuition of odds, and won a lot of money which somewhat assuaged my worries, but still the overall approach was just painfully inaccurate and I could not think of a better one. Prediction markets are flawed anyways because [skill at evaluating the odds of some political thing happening] really doesn't have much to do with [skill at evaluating the odds of some mundane thing happening] but it was the best I could do.
Still, the "test hypotheses" approach had extremely strong results, and a weaker version of that forms some of the basis of my testimony today. I have a journal containing most of my notes from that approach somewhere in the house--will look around for it when I get the chance. I also have a Google Sheets from 6 years ago containing (I believe the first) 5 days of the approach--I can DM it to you if you'd like.
Yeah, I've heard that as well (Scott Alexander had a great piece on it which I think we're both talking about), and for a long time was very concerned that that was what was happening. As I mentioned this is a concern I have had since childhood. The human brain seems capable of manufacturing virtually any sensation from nothing under certain circumstances, and I found it much more likely for any spiritual sensations I felt to be a result of that than of actual divine intervention. That's part of why I wasn't willing to give the spiritual experiences any value until I had seen a lot of physical evidence.
Besides evidence of any sort (physical or spiritual) I find the doctrine which my church teaches to be highly logical. It's hard to explain in-depth on a random comment board, but the philosophy and approach behind it make sense in a way nothing else does. Alma 32:28-43 basically describes what I consider the religious form of the scientific method. Test out the doctrine and you'll see both spiritual growth and external results. It's definitely what I've seen in my own life.
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