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Human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

—Francis Bacon, Novum Organon

You are wrong. You are profoundly and disturbingly wrong about a spectacularly large number of things. You accept facts that are not facts, values that are incompatible with each other, and a fair number of truly dumb ideas about how to change the world. If you ever really understood the extent of your wrongness, you would never trust another word you said.

No need to feel ashamed about this. I am wrong too. I am probably wrong more often than you are. And I probably think I am righter. Given the number of things that all of us believe (or do not believe) to be facts, the number of things that we consider (or do not consider) valuable, and the number of policies that we think (or do not think) will work, there is no possible way that anybody is going to be right about everything—or even most things. You already accept this about 99.9999% of the human population. You know perfectly well that everybody else is wrong about a lot of things. And if you really think about it, you will realize that you are probably not the only person in the world who is always right

We all understand this in the abstract. We even understand it retroactively and can remember any number of things that we got wrong in the past. I am willing to bet, however, that you can’t think of a single thing that you are wrong about right now. None of us can. The minute we realize that something is wrong, we immediately revise our beliefs to be right again. This is just how human cognition works; we can’t imagine ourselves being wrong.

Unless we can. Unless we can manage to work against our evolutionary programming and entertain, as a very real possibility, that we are wrong about important things. And I mean really important things. The sorts of things that we build our lives around and use to make our existence meaningful.

For people of faith, this includes questions like, “Does God exist?” “Does God speak through any particular set of texts or people?” “Is there a life after this one?” and “Am I doing what God wants me to do?”

I believe things about all of these questions. But I know that I am probably wrong, and maybe spectacularly so. I know that I’m not supposed to be. If I were faithful (so I have been told), I would have a rock solid testimony of these things based in a kind of knowledge that transcends science or reason. But I don’t. And even if I did, I do not have any grounds to stand on to say that this way of knowing things is superior to others. Of course, I could certainly be wrong about that.

Which leads me to what I referred to in the title as “the Crisis of the Church.” By “the Church here, I mean something broader than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I mean the whole Body of Christ in all of its Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Protestant, and Restoration organs. We are all having a crisis, or a situation that requires us to make decisions before circumstances make them for us. And the Crisis has to do with members of the Body who, for whatever reason, do not match our ideas of what this life, or an afterlife, should be like.

This has always been the challenge of the Church, though it has come in different forms. In our era, the crisis usually concerns issues of sexuality and gender expression–human beings with dignity and unique gifts who need to be embraced by the Body of Christ but whose very existence challenges ideas about gender and sexuality that we believe to be either natural or eternal.

One argument that I have heard a lot recently goes something like this: “God wants everybody to be happy, and living a sinful life will make people unhappy/condemn them to damnation/make them ineligible for the Celestial Kingdom/ or some such thing. Therefore, the way to REALLY show love for people is to condemn their lifestyle/excommunicate them/pass laws against them/& etc.

I would suggest that the greatest need for epistemic humility arises when we attempt to balance the apparent, this-worldly needs of a human being against their supposed metaphysical needs in a world to come. Because, if we happen to be wrong about the metaphysical stuff, we end up hurting an actual person for no good reason. And we end up failing to exercise charity–a duty that we know we have in this world–in order to fulfill some injunction that we think we have in the next.



And, before you ask, yes, I am very willing to admit that I could be wrong too. I am willing to accept that risk. I am willing to stand before God and defend myself for accepting people on their own terms and treating them with kindness and compassion, even when scriptures and prophets and anything else suggested that I should condemn them and vote against their rights. I am willing to accept the moral consequences of being wrong.



Are you?