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Would you trust this guy? (Source)

My mother went to the doctor with a stomachache. It was an admittedly vague symptom, and for months she received similarly vague diagnoses and remedies—could be ulcers, maybe gastric reflux; take some antacids and lose some weight. Finally, a visiting specialist ran a test and discovered that she had a cancer that had progressed to stage four. Thanks to this diagnosis and the care my mother subsequently received, she beat the odds for over a decade, each day a blessing.

The author of an article in this month’s issue of the Ensign entitled The Book of Abraham, Revelation and You had a similar experience. At around the same time my mother’s body was being overtaken by cancer unbeknownst to the medical profession, he too was struggling with a medical mystery:

something in my knee started to cause me horrible pain. Deep within that knee I could feel a small particle grinding against other tissues. The doctors […] could not feel the lump themselves, so they took various kinds of X-rays and MRIs. Nothing showed up. As a result, none of the doctors believed there was anything inside my knee; they thought it must be some other problem, such as nerve damage. Some even tried to treat me for these other imagined problems. Because I kept insisting that there really was something inside my knee, I was finally referred to the head of orthopedic medicine. He was willing to make an incision in my knee and see if he could find anything. Through this incision, he found a piece of cartilage that had been chipped off and had started to gouge the surrounding tissues. Its removal completely cured me.

In both cases, doctors were initially content to ration the use of diagnostic tools at their disposal. I suppose this is understandable. Experience probably shows that most overweight senior citizens complaining of stomach pain are not having their organs ravaged by cancer. Likewise, most able-bodied graduate students probably don’t have major problems with their joints that non-invasive diagnostic techniques cannot reveal. Nevertheless, the sensations of pain were real and both patients were right to continue to insist that the doctors keep looking. Moreover, the information available to both the patients and medical professionals was ultimately derived from physical processes that are well understood. Finally, in each case a doctor eventually made the correct diagnosis based on that information.

Where the accounts differ is in the conclusions the patients drew from their experiences. My mother was simply grateful that someone finally looked beyond her BMI reading and took her pain seriously. The author of the Ensign article, on the other hand, believes his experience has wider significance:

According to the best practices and technology available, there was nothing in my knee. Because most of the doctors would trust only what they themselves could feel or see or what technology told them, they did not believe there was an actual, physical object causing me pain. Yet, using senses available only to me, I could feel there was indeed something inside my knee. It was both real and powerful. In the end, my senses (which were not available to their empirical processes) were right. Thus it is with revelation. I know from revelation that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God who translated the book of Abraham by inspiration.

In my view, his conclusion is a bridge too far.

Not least, the author is wrong to assert that “According to the best practices and technology available, there was nothing in my knee.” In fact, a very straightforward medical procedure—an incision—revealed what was wrong with the knee. Doctors who said there was nothing wrong with the joint without actually using all available technology were jumping to conclusions, but this doesn’t mean that non-empirical approaches necessarily trump, say, neural pathways or arthroscopy as a superior source of knowledge.

Which brings me to my second point: The author speaks of “senses available only to me” as a counterpoint to the “empirical processes” of the medical professionals, a way of knowing that is likened unto revelation. By the author’s own account, however, the source of the pain sensation was “an actual, physical object.” It is difficult to imagine prophecy and inspiration having a physical antecedent analogous to a broken piece of cartilage. If this medical case is to have any bearing on revelation, inspiration and the book of Abraham, what would be the actual physical source of Joseph Smith’s prophetic mission and inspired translation? No one knows that Joseph Smith was a prophet the same way that you know your knee hurts, even if those sensations are equally unavailable to others. It doesn’t make sense to speak of prophecy and revelation as being like pain just because the former are as inscrutable to an outsider as the latter.

It goes without saying that another person cannot actually experience your pain, so one lesson from these experiences could be that sometimes we are too quick to dismiss that which we cannot feel for ourselves. But in the end, doctors didn’t totally write off the “real and powerful” sensations experienced by my mother and this author and discovered, if belatedly, the underlying problems. To characterize the empirical professions as the domain of automatons who simply consult their scopes and discount anything that does not appear on their screens is to do them a disservice. Some doctors may be lazy, incompetent, overworked or suffer from tunnel vision, but the inability to quickly make correct diagnoses is hardly a function of empirical methods per se; rather, it seems to me that individual characteristics such as skill and imagination or access to resources like time and equipment played the only important roles in each case.

With that said, you will not be surprised to learn that I do not share the author’s view that his experience reveals anything meaningful about Joseph Smith or the book of Abraham. Nor do I follow from this example the author’s conclusion that “we must learn that revelation is the most trustworthy and valid source of knowledge” that he “recommend[s] as a model in everything we do” (emphasis mine).

It may be the case that revelation is superior to empirical processes in everything we do, but I cannot see where the author’s medical diagnosis depended on revelation at any step of the way. Maybe he is arguing that any idea or prompting, such as to run a blood test or make an incision, is revelation. I can live with that, though such a broad definition creates a daunting challenge of how to separate the revelatory wheat from the chaff of the fevered excursions of the mind.

What the experiences of both my mother and this author definitely show is that individuals can do worse than to question the ill-informed views of even recognized authorities—whatever the source of that authority and no matter the gulf between their respective areas of expertise—when the source of the individual’s knowledge is sure yet unavailable to outsiders. This isn’t to suggest that recognized authorities should be assumed to be ill-informed as a matter of course or that feelings should always trump expertise and experience. But when it becomes apparent that an authority is operating on the basis of incorrect or incomplete information, well, heed them at your own peril!

This is easier said than done, of course. For a host of reasons we are conditioned to defer to authority, not least in matters of life and death. What experiences have you had in trusting in your own wisdom?