Maxwell Institute Podcast #162: Do We Believe to Explore or to Exploit? Featuring Ryan Davis

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast, where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship. I'm Rosalynde Welch, Associate Director at the Institute. This season we're exploring the questions we should be asking. Thanks for joining us.

My mother tells a story about me standing at the pulpit of our chapel when I was two or three years old, and reciting the Articles of Faith in testimony meeting. Even a toddler can learn to say, “We believe in God,” fewer manage the word “paradisiacal”. One of the things that binds us together as Latter-day Saints is our shared beliefs. But sometimes those beliefs can divide us too.

Today on the podcast, I talk with Ryan Davis, Associate Professor of political science at BYU. Dr. Davis is a philosopher, a quick and humorous conversationalist, and a great storyteller. He suggested that there might be another way to approach belief. What if we get curious--not only about the content of the specific beliefs that we hold- but also about how we hold them? What if we attend to our ways of believing as much as to our articles of belief? Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said, “The size of your faith, or the degree of your knowledge is not the issue. It is the integrity you demonstrate toward the faith you do have, and the truth you already know.” Christ commanded us to “be not afraid, only believe.” Can believing, when undertaken with integrity and courage, be a kind of exploration? Ryan and I swapped stories bonded over our love of ice cream, and even shared a few riddles. I had a lot of fun interviewing Ryan, and I hope you enjoy listening in.

Hi, Ryan Davis. Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. Today, you and I are going to be talking about belief, about the ways that our beliefs and our habits of believing influence our imagination, how they affect our ability to search for new possibilities in our lives and our spiritual lives. The way that our beliefs make mental and spiritual connections across different contexts. So, you shared with me an article, which I loved. The title of it was “Exploring by Believing” and the author was Sarah Aronowitz. I love this article! I especially loved the title. The title might be what I loved most about it. “Exploring by Believing”... it's full of great examples, really good ideas. It's plain spoken and engaging. So Aronowitz has a really interesting approach to the question of belief. She isn't super concerned about the specifics of particular beliefs. But she's really interested in different ways of believing, different ways that we might hold beliefs. She doesn't specifically address religious beliefs in the article, but some of her argument might be relevant to the way that we go about believing in religious or spiritual contexts. So, tell me a little bit more about Aronowitz’s argument. Why does it interest you? What do you like about it? What themes speak most strongly to you? In your own life, your own religious life?

Ryan Davis: Yeah, thank you. And thanks for having me. I'm happy to get a chance to talk about this paper. Thanks for reading it. So, the paper is “Believing by Exploring.” And it starts out with this totally ordinary thought, which is in our practical lives, so with our actions, it makes sense sometimes to explore new options, even if that means not taking options that we already know are valuable. But it makes sense to do that just in a totally ordinary way, that if we don't try new things, we might be leaving value on the table. We might be sort of… foregoing the chance to appreciate something that we would have really loved if we tried. But the insight of the article is that not only does this apply in our practical lives, in our actions, where we should sometimes explore rather than exploit values, it can also apply in our beliefs. That we can adopt beliefs where by adopting that belief, we can come into contact with new evidence, and so, improve our beliefs down the road. And so, it shows that there's this connection between our epistemic lives between the way that we govern our beliefs and the way that we govern our actions. There's this connection between practical and epistemic rationality that you might not have already noticed. And seeing that insight was really something to me.

Welch: So, she said… she has this great example which very much resonated with me because it's about ice cream. So, she talks about going to an ice cream store and you see all the flavors in front of you. You think you know what you like and this rings so true to me. I love ice cream. I got the chance to spend a couple of weeks in Italy a few years ago, and every night my friends and I would go out for gelato. And I would go out, and every night I would look at those beautiful, colorful flavors of gelato. And I believe that I like fruit flavors. That's the belief that I would hold, or that I should like fruit flavors. So every night I would order a lemon sorbet or a strawberry or something delicious, and it was good. But about halfway through the ice cream, the gelato, I would look over at my friends who were eating like the chocolate or the pistachio. And I'm thinking, No, I really wanted the chocolate, I should have gotten the chocolate. But then the next night, I go back, and I start the cycle over again and say no, I really like fruit flavors. I'm a fruit flavor type person. So, I was committed to a belief that I thought was real. And I was trying to exploit that belief every night by ordering a fruit flavor. But I should have been more exploratory. I should have said, You know what, maybe I'm not a person who likes fruit, maybe I really am a person who likes chocolate. Or maybe I like fruit some night and chocolate some night. And then I would have been freed up to try the chocolate, to try the pistachio rather than missing out on those opportunities. So, she's talking about these ways of holding beliefs. And tell me if I'm right about this, you can hold a belief very rigidly and strongly that's given you good results in the past, right? And because it's given you some good results in the past, you want to capitalize on that, or exploit it. So that's what she means by “exploiting a belief,” that you're holding to it strongly. But there's this trade off. Because if you held a belief a bit more flexibly, maybe or a bit more loosely, you might be willing to explore, and you might find something else– that a new possibility might open up that hadn't occurred to you before. So am I right in associating exploiting belief and exploring belief with a kind of a rigidly held belief and a more flexibly held belief?

Davis: Right. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I also love ice cream. And so it's like, it's just exactly that same dilemma, where it's like, the big tension is always, when I'm buying ice cream, it's always the getting my very favorite or trying the new one. And the trying the new one is like the flexible belief. It's the thing that's gonna give you more information about…that you might exploit later.

Welch: Yeah, right. And this is important, right? That we can move between, we can toggle between these different modes of believing, these different ways of believing. And we'll talk about this a little bit later, but both are good. It's not that one is bad, and one is good, both are good. But at different points, we might want to try one or the other. So we've talked about ice cream and ice cream is not unrelated to a spiritual life. But, can you help us to think about this trade off between exploring and exploiting our beliefs in a more personal or maybe even religious context? I have this story that I tell about myself. And I think it's true or it's been true. It's a belief that I hold about myself. And it's about the way that I feel the Spirit. And I have, you know, from the time that we're little in church, we go to lessons and we're told that the Spirit speaks to everybody in different ways. And so, you need to figure out how the Spirit speaks to you. And so I've tried to do that over my life. How does the Spirit speak to me? I've sort of believed that, for me, personally, the Spirit doesn't typically give me formed, distinct and directive thoughts, right? Doesn't tell me to go do this, that, or the other. Instead, the Spirit makes me feel at home, it makes me feel deeply connected to people. It shows me individuals with whom I'm supposed to have a special kind of relationship. But it doesn't really give me sort of directive commands, right? I'm not a Nephi. But last summer, I had an experience that could not be more textbook out of a church manual, where I had a thought come to my mind. It was a very clear and insistent thought, and it was directing me to do a very specific thing. And it came back to me again and again, right, it sounds just like the General Conference stories about how the Spirit speaks to you. And Ryan, I did it. And it turned out to lead me into a beautiful experience, something that I value, almost more than anything else that I've been able to do in my adult life, which is to work with a friend who was at the end of her life to finish and complete her life's work, the book that she had wanted to write, and the book that she was meant to write. And so, I was working under this one set of beliefs about how the Spirit speaks to me. And it turns out that actually, that belief was, I was holding it too strongly. It is true that the Spirit does speak to me in those less directive, more diffuse ways. And by hanging on to that belief, I was making sure that I recognized the Spirit and all those contexts. But it turned out that if I could relax that particular story about my spiritual life, then I could countenance and entertain the idea that maybe the Spirit really does speak to me in these other ways, as well. And I'm so grateful that I was able in that moment to be responsive. And it has kind of allowed me to explore and to think, well, actually, maybe the Spirit can speak to me in those other more direct, more deliberate ways. Maybe I'm not just the kind of person who doesn't receive inspiration that way. Does that seem like it's an example of what Aronowitz is getting at?

Davis: I love that story. Do you mind if I asked you a question about that?

Welch: Yeah.

Davis: Do you feel like if you had not received that impression in such a determinate way that it would not have worked out as it did? Was there something about the determinacy that was important to the valuable experience that you had?

Welch: That's a good question. I think there may have been. This person, we had a good relationship. But I will tell you, Ryan, that it felt awkward, it felt awkward to approach her with the offer to help, because I felt like it was acknowledging that her life was growing short. And that felt like it would be a painful thing to bring up to her. And it was painful for me to bring up. And had I not received that prompting from the Spirit in such an insistent, repetitive and specific way, I might have been deterred by an avoidance tendency, right? I can be an avoidant person, and I want to avoid awkward or painful conversations. And I think I probably would have avoided bringing it up with her for fear of hurting her or reminding her of something painful. I think it did make a difference. We can't know the counterfactual, maybe I would have reached out anyway.

Davis: Yeah. I love that. Like I said, I love that story. And the interesting thing to me was that you were able to do something that was really meaningful. And it sounded like, if I heard you correctly, that you also learned something about yourself, where you sort of changed your identity as a recipient of spiritual impressions. Is that right as well?

Welch: Yeah, I think it at least opened up my beliefs. I think my experience since that time has been that in general, the Spirit still continues to speak to me in the ways that I'm most accustomed to, but I am less quick to sort of state categorically that I don't receive very specific indirect promptings. And I think I'm more open to interpreting thoughts that might come to me as well, perhaps this is a prompting of the Spirit.

Davis: I don't mean to make light of the case at all, it’s a lovely story, but it is kind of like the ice cream case in that you had an identity of yourself, I'm the fruit ice cream person, then the exploration can help us sort of like modify the identity. And it was kind of like that, where you sort of like, had a certain self conception, but that self conception was also amenable to modification in the light of new evidence about it. And then once you have the new self conception, then that could bring you into contact with kinds of evidence or reasons or experiences that you might not otherwise have had.

Welch: That's right. Do you have any examples from your life, when you've seen this dynamic play out?

Davis: This is a much less serious example, I'm going to ask you a pardon going in. I come from one of these sort of like “old-style ways of giving lessons families.” And so my parents love object lessons. And I was thinking about this, because you sent me an email with this question. An example I thought of was just when I was a little kid, when I was in primary, my mom was the primary president. She really loves going all out on the object lessons. So she decided that she was going to have a sharing time with the old-style of primary, she was going to bring in Book of Mormon prophets from the past. And she was going to do it with a time machine, which she constructed out of a cardboard box for a refrigerator. So like a giant cardboard box, and she did all the things. So she sort of painted the box, and there was like, the door on the front. And she got dry ice so that it was sort of like wafting out steam, and she had members of our ward come out of the... And it was sort of like, you know, this sliding accordion curtains. And so it's like set up against one of those. So it was just like a magic trick or like, oh, there was it here, right? Dry ice wafts out. And that was kind of like the accordion sort of like, opens and closes behind it. And a prophetic figure from the Book of Mormon comes out and sort of like shares a message with the primary. And at the end of it, you know, of course, everyone comes and shares their messages, and they leave again through the refrigerator box. And she says to the primary, this is her testimony part. And she's like, “Wouldn't it be great?” So she is sort of speaking in the subjunctive tense and the subjunctive mood “If it were the case that we could go back and visit the prophets, wouldn't it be great if we could go and see them?” And of course, then her point was like, well, there's prophets still today. That was the intended turn. But she gets as far as her subjunctive question about the counterfactual. And then there's just a little kid, of course, in the… in the front row of the primary. And of course, his mind works differently. Because he doesn't have the subjunctive yet in his head as the way things could be. Well, we discovered that he's totally believed that this is a real functional time machine in the refrigerator box, and he's like, “I'm ready. Let's go right now.” And so he starts cheering, he's like, “Let's go, like, let me into the box.” And my mom's like, “We're out of dry ice for the refrigerator today” or whatever, I still remember this lesson, because forming that belief really got him excited about the prospect of learning from the prophets. And if there's things like that, I still think about that, because when I’m thinking about my students, our students minds are grown up in a way that you know, they're like our minds now, but there are still object lessons that can trick them. No, that's not my that's not my point. But my thought is if we could have some beliefs like that, you know, sort of front row primary kids belief. If I could get some beliefs like that, that really got you excited about exploring, then I would be in my spiritual life the same way that the scientist that Aronowitz was interested in. Like, if you really are committed to some hypothesis, then you start noticing all the kinds of evidence that bear on the truth or falsity of that hypothesis. And you can only do it by really believing. You've got to be like that kid. You've got to really believe in order to get yourself up and out in the morning, finding the new evidence. And so that's my tribute to my mom's object lesson.

Welch: Ryan, we need to have… dead air is anathema on a podcast, but we really should have a moment of silence here in tribute to your amazing mother and the old school Latter-day Saint primary president who was painting cardboard and getting dry ice and creating incredible learning experiences for her students. What an amazing story! And I think it's totally relevant. So this little sunbeam on the front row, for a moment, he held an incorrect belief, right? He believed that this refrigerator box was really a time machine. But in the end, that was okay. He didn't hold that belief for a long time. But it created in him an orientation toward believing that prophets speak the word of God, a teachable orientation toward prophets. So it was his readiness to believe, it was his willingness to believe, that in the end was more important than the fact that for a short time, he held an incorrect belief.

Davis: Absolutely.

Welch: That is a wonderful story. So Aronowitz, as she's kind of working through these ideas, she suggests that belief plays a special role in imagination, and that imagination is important for any kind of mental or spiritual exploration. So, tell us a little bit about what she means by imagination.

Davis: Yeah, so the way she describes imagination is as a mental process that's aimed at uncovering new possibilities. And that sounds a bit abstract, but it's easy to sort of like, find sort of totally everyday examples of this. So, I'm one of those people who I lose my keys every time I set them down. It's like, I can't find my glasses. And so I have to adopt this regimen of whenever something is lost, to sort of like to go through, and you have to sort of like vividly imagine to yourself like, well, what jacket was I wearing? Like, where did I go? And sort of like think sometimes you can't even remember, right? I don't know if you have this problem as badly as I do.

Welch: I do not, I rarely lose my keys, just saying.

Davis: I do not know how your brain works. But I am jealous of it. But for me, it's like, I sometimes can't even remember what past Ryan did. It's just kind of like, who knows what that guy was up to. But I have to then sort of like create a model of myself in my mind where I'd be like, Well, I came back into this apartment, where would I have gone? Might I have sort of like gone to the refrigerator, did I put the keys up there? What the imagining does is it sort of like, it sort of like reconstructs for you a model in your mind, that points out to you some possibilities, like well, maybe they're in the jacket, maybe they're in the pants, maybe they're on the refrigerator. And so that's the first thing is this sort of like imagination plays this function of turning up some new possibilities. And the thing that she thinks is that…the insight in the piece is that “imagination is constrained by our beliefs.” And that's something you might not have thought, because there's plenty of stuff that we can imagine that's contrary to our beliefs. So I can imagine looking out my window right now, and sort of like flying… like a Cooper's hawk I saw fly across the building this morning. And that's, obviously I don't believe I can do that. But I imagine that I can. But there's another sense in which she thinks that our imaginations are constrained like that our beliefs like set side constraints on what we can imagine. And that once you notice that, that's going to give us a reason to think that we have to really believe things in order to come up with new evidence that just sort of supposing the thing or kind of conjecturing the thing or accepting for the present purposes that belief, that's not… that's not going to do it, you have to really believe it, because our imagination is constrained by our beliefs.

Welch: Yeah, that's how I read her as well. And I think it's so interesting, I've had a conflicted relationship to the idea of belief, but Aronowitz, which convinces me that it's important. And yeah, just as you say, she shows how these kind of background beliefs that we hold, that maybe we aren't even fully conscious of all the time, but they populate the parameters of any scenario that we might be imagining. So, you know, I think about when I go onto a web page, and I'm filling out a form there, right, and my browser knows my history, I just hover over the first box, and it automatically populates my name, my address, my phone number, it has all that information. And it fills that in automatically. In the same way, our beliefs kind of do that when we're imagining a new scenario. All the side parameters, you know, how does gravity work? What is a relationship, right? How does something taste? Or how does it feel to be cold? We have beliefs about this. And so our beliefs automatically fill in all those side variables and anything that we are trying to imagine. So, on the one hand, that's incredibly valuable, because then we can focus on maybe one particular thing, where did I leave my keys? And all the rest of these side parameters are filled in but on the other hand, it might constrain what we're able to imagine, right? If those beliefs are held in a very rigid and kind of exploitive model, like she was saying, then it shapes the way that we're able to imagine. And imagination is what allows us to search for new possibilities. That's why imagination can be crucial to a spiritual life, as we're seeking to find new possibilities for connection to God and new possibilities to feel the Spirit in the world. So, one of the conclusions that Aronowitz comes to is that an exploratory way of believing is especially fruitful at the beginning of an inquiry, right? When you're, when you're just launching a new search for possibilities, it's especially useful at that point, to switch over, toggle over to an exploratory mode of belief, when you would be open to new evidence, reshaping and providing you with new beliefs. Whereas, when you come closer to the end of an inquiry, and you've already gathered quite a lot of data, it's better to focus in on that more exploiting mode of belief, where you're taking the value from the beliefs that you hold, because they've worked for you and you found that they are right. Am I understanding Aronowitz’s reasoning there?

Davis: Yeah, no, I think that's right, you're meant to be just parallel, like think to the practical case. Where it's like, if you're in the ice cream situation, and it's like your first night in the place with the…Where were you?

Welch: We were in Assisi, Italy, yes, in a beautiful little gelato shop on one of these tiny, steep cobblestone streets. So there you go, I've set the scene for you.

Davis: Oh, perfect. So your first few nights there, it makes sense to like to try one of the new flavors of ice cream, because then if you try it and you like it, then you can sort of like have that one again. And that's kind of you can really maximize the value. But if it's your last night at the ice cream place, I just assumed that everyone goes to the ice cream every night.

Welch: Yes, of course, of course.

Davis: You want to go in for your favorite at that point. Because it's like, that'll be the thing that maximizes because you're not going to get as many returns from the discovery. If you're at the end. It's the same with your beliefs. If you're sort of like just starting an experiment that's like…like, well, you know, you might sort of flexibly go in for some hypothesis or other, like help you sort of explore different options where you're getting new evidence. But if it's like coming to the end, then you're like, well, I might as well align my belief with the evidence as much as I can right now. So your beliefs are doing as good as they can by the evidence you've already collected.

Welch: So if we try to apply these insights to a Latter-day Saint frame, right, into a religious context, it raises a very interesting question, which is for us, we believe in eternal progression, right? We believe that there really is no end to our search for further light and knowledge. So how do we then think about the timeframe for when it's more useful or more productive to hold the exploratory versus the exploiting mode of belief?

Davis: Yeah, this is such a good question. This is not yet going to be an answer to it. But it'll be a start of an answer. Which is…when I read your question first, it made me think that one consequence is that I should have more grace and more patience for people who are at other life stages, than the stage that I'm in. If you're a young person you're starting in life, then it might make sense to have some more exploratory beliefs. And you know, how we sometimes will make fun of the old sort of like high priest who's like, really dogmatic for the latter part of their life, but then it might, you know, that might be rational for this stage that they're in. But like, you know, now it makes sense to sort of like really go in on the stuff that you're confident about. Those both might be compatible, because when we think about the full arc of your life, maybe it makes sense to sort of be more exploratory early on in your beliefs and more emphasizing the evidence that you've collected at the end. And so as a first pass, I thought, well, maybe a lesson in this is to sort of like not feel like like, oh, that person is doing it wrong, but to have more grace toward people who are at those different points of view. 

Welch: I love that. Yeah, no, I love anything that allows me to go to church and to feel greater love and connection, especially with those ward members who are different than me. And you've just given me a way to do that, right? To say somebody who holds beliefs in a different way than I do. And maybe it's the very same belief, right? Maybe we believe the same thing. But they just hold that belief in a different way than I do. Rather than feeling alienated from them feeling like I'm doing it right, they're doing it wrong, you've given me a way to say at: different times in our lives, different strategies of belief are more effective and are more fruitful, and this person has a different stage of their life. And so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say, they're holding their belief in that very particular way, because it serves them. It serves them spiritually at this point in time. And of course, it's not all about chronological age as well, right? I think our experiences can give us very intensive learning courses, like you know, upper division courses, in particular areas of the gospel. And so somebody who looks young may nevertheless hold a rather–what may seem like a more dogmatic belief, and that may make perfect sense for them, given their spiritual journey, what they experienced and how they've learned. So you've given them a way to be more charitable and more flexible in the face of those kinds of differences.

Davis: You're instantiating that very charity in your response to my answer, but I took it though, that there was another thought maybe in your question, which is something like well, if we have a theology about progression happening eternally? Could you then think of yourself as at the beginning stages of an inquiry at any point? And so, if you had such a theology, would you then have a different orientation toward more inquiry directed beliefs than if you had a theology that was different in some way?

Welch: Right? Yeah. For us, there's no close. There's no end to the inquiry, right? There's no end to the project of learning and growing. So you could say, well, according to Aronowitz’s model, then we should never transition over to the more firm exploiting way of believing, we should always stay in exploratory mode, because we're always just at the very beginning of our inquiry. There's something kind of exciting about that. I'm not persuaded by my own wager there. I think that as we were talking about, I think that life leads us through various episodes, right? We have episodes of intensive learning in one area or another. And I'm reminded of Alma 32, where search for faith that leads into a knowledge that's perfected by faith is kind of episodic, right? We sort of learn one thing at a time, and then pick up our faith and we relaunch another search for truth, right, a different kind of search for truth. And probably, we have to come back to that first one at some point in our life. So I do think that there are these more discreet episodes of learning that we pass through in our journey of discipleship along the way. So that it would be appropriate to say, you know, I'm sort of at the beginning of this particular search. Now, I'm coming to the end of this particular search.

Davis: Do you think then, having a theology of progression, including progression of knowledge, would affect how often you would be at the beginning stages? I guess my question is something like, are you a little bit persuaded by your first point? Or are you is this is a synthesis kind of resolution? Or is that it turns out, that was a wrong path.

Welch: I think I'm a little bit persuaded, I think our theology of eternal progression and of continuing revelation, right, eternal progression plus continuing revelation should keep our minds open. As Latter-day Saints, I think we have to be, we're trained to be somewhat more flexible in our beliefs, simply because we don't believe in a closed canon, right. We don't believe that God has spoken everything that he's going to speak as Elder Uchtdorf taught us, we believe in an ongoing restoration, and that God will yet reveal many great and important things. So I think that trains us in a particular habit of belief, that I think would edge more toward the exploratory side. Nevertheless, as I said, I'm persuaded by Aronowitz that there are times when it is also useful to hold certain beliefs and say, you know, I figured this out for now, right? I figured out something that's working for me for now.

Davis: Yeah, there are so many opponents of the prophets in the Book of Mormon who are sort of given voice in the text. Who have in mind this idea of belief is just backward like, like, oh, it's not reasonable to believe in a Christ like the Sherems or the Korihors, and so on without like, you know, you just don't have good evidence for this thing that you're going in for so far. Yet, I do think that it's interesting to then say like, one way that's kind of consonant with what you just suggested about ongoing revelation, to sort of interpret those exchanges is to say, well, there's a sense in which that question didn't exhaust everything. There was the question about whether you have decisive evidence for what you're going in for, so far. And then there's a question about whether what you're going in for in beliefs is going to be informative in the progression of your beliefs down the road. And so it's kind of like that the bias and the questions was in sort of like selecting on one rational criteria below or something.

Welch: Yeah. And whether we're working to interpret the past or whether we are looking towards the future, whether we're launching a future oriented search for new possibilities, I think makes a difference there as well, on the toggle switch.

I hope you're enjoying this conversation with Dr. Ryan Davis. We've been talking about two different ways of believing: an exploratory way, and an exploitive way, though, we don't use the word exploitive in a negative sense. Both ways of believing are useful in the search for new possibilities, and we find ourselves toggling between them at times. As I talked with Ryan, I found myself more and more convinced that real believing matters, we can't force it, and we shouldn't fake it. But we should seek it. A believing disposition allows us to imagine and to explore. It's the starting point for encountering God.

By the way, I shared a story about a spiritual prompting that led me to collaborate with a friend on her final life project, an experience that I deeply value. I wanted to share that the friend was Kate Holbrook, an historian of Latter-day Saint women's history, who passed away in 2022. We at the Maxwell Institute, love and honor Kate, we miss her terribly, and we're honored to be publishing her final book titled, Both Things Are True later this year. We anticipate that it will be released in August or September of 2023. So keep your eye out for it if you're interested.

Let's return to the rest of my interview with Ryan Davis. We talk about one of my favorite passages in the New Testament, Mark 9 and what it might teach us about believing versus belief. And make sure you listen all the way to the end for the riddles!

Ryan, this gives me the perfect opportunity to bring up with you a scripture story that I love and that I think our readers will know well. It's in Mark chapter nine. And it's the story of a father who brings his son who is suffering from convulsions to Christ, and he is at his wit's end, the son has suffered his whole life like this. He's in a place of desperation, where it seems as though the son's life may be in danger, he brings his son to Christ and says, “Teacher, will you help us if you can?” and Jesus says, “If I can, all things are possible to those that believe.” And then the father responds with these timeless words that I think just speak to the soul of every Christian disciple. And he says, “Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.” And there's something about that, that kind of puts me in mind of that toggle that we've been talking about, right? Sort of simultaneously holding two different things at the same time. But I actually have a different read of this now after having read the Aronowitz article. And here's what I think typically, I've just thought this man is in a place where he wants to believe, he has a little bit of belief in Christ. But he knows he doesn't have maybe a full belief in Christ. So he's acknowledging that and he's saying, “My belief isn't quite there yet, but I have some. Will you please make up the difference?” And maybe that's one good way to read it. But I wonder if there might be another way to read it. And it strikes me that he says, “Lord, I believe.” So, in the first clause, he's talking about what he's doing, right? He's talking about the orientation of his heart, the activity of believing or the state of believing. And then the second clause, he says, “Help thou mine unbelief.” So here, he's talking about the actual beliefs, or in this case, the unbelief that he holds. Maybe we could read him as saying, “I have a believing heart, I believe in a full and worshipful way. And yet, the actual content of my belief, isn't there yet.” Maybe he is drawing a distinction between the sort of substantive beliefs that we may hold at any given moment, and ways that we believe, and maybe he's kind of acknowledging that “I'm believing in the best way that I know how,” as we've been talking about, “I'm not fully able to determine what those beliefs are. So help me. Give me right belief, and I will give you a believing heart.”

Davis: You know, I love this. Because I also have read the passage in the past. And when you point it out to me, as a kind of default the idea that what was going on was that this was a kind of case where either there was just a conflict in his beliefs, like he's like, like, oh, yeah, some pro beliefs, some, some skepticism, there's just a conflict. Or it's the case that like, over time, there's like one of those cases where it's like you find yourself believing, but then you find yourself doubting, you're trying to push yourself back to believing. And so there's a kind of incoherence temporally. But I think it that your interpretation, if I'm hearing you correctly, is well, maybe there's actually no contradiction, because maybe it's the case that you can engage in this activity, like, like, Oh, I am believing like, I am a believer, but it's the case that I've got these unbeliefs that are still clunking around in my head. Those are just both true. They're both sort of like true in the moment, as it were. That I'm believing and I've got the unbeliefs that are still up there in my psychology. And there's not really an incompatibility there. That's just you just saying true things about him.

Welch: He's kind of observing that there's a difference between a belief in itself and the way that we believe right? It might be possible to read that into this response here. And if that's the case, it's certainly one that I can relate to, right? I want to be a believer, and I do believe, yet some beliefs are hard for me to hold, right. And I don't feel a contradiction there, right? And so, and I can turn to the Lord and say, I will give you a believing heart, I need you to help me with the belief part.

Davis: I like that a lot.

Welch: Ryan, as we're coming up on the end of our interview here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any other insights from this article, from these ideas that we've been talking about, that listeners might be able to use in their own religious lives, in their families, maybe in their callings or their communities.

Davis: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I'll say one thing, just sort of like in the abstract, then I'll give you a case of it or two. Let’s see how I do in answering the question if that's okay. Here's a sort of tempting thought: the insight of the article is aimed to rebut. It might be tempting to think, well, I don't really have to believe. Like, you might think if you're that father in Mark 9, you might be like, like, well, you know, I don't really believe but I'll accept it for the sake of the argument. That'll be enough. Or I’ll act as if I believe. And to me, the thing I really took from this is that there is something helpful in really believing, because if you really believe it will constrain your imagining in such a way as to sort of like direct you to the evidence in the future. Whereas if you only sort of suppose to be true, or you kind of accept for the sake of the argument, you won't get the benefits that you got out of really believing it. So, it offers a kind of redemptive case for beliefs that are exploratory for future discovery of evidence, even if sort of like not decisively shown so far by the evidence. You can't do it without belief. Can't make it halfway. Just with other mental states. This story is about my favorite talk that I've heard when I was in Provo, like a lot of young married couples, one such person giving this talk. And the talk was about receiving a spiritual experience that was like the one that you shared earlier, and that it was very determinant in its contents. Where the person was directed, like, oh, you need to go check on your friend at the laser tag place, as it happens, essentially forms the belief that like there's something wrong or impending wrong with her friend at the laser tag place. So she goes there very seriously, checks on if nothing is wrong with the friend is totally fine. And moreover, the friend is not in any jeopardy, if anything wrong happened to them, there's no misfortune that's lurking in the future. And so the talk is about how the speaker could have formed a false belief through a genuine spiritual impression, which I think is a great puzzle. And what the talk comes to is it comes to the idea that that belief was an important belief to have to sort of in the unfolding of the story, not just in the sense that like, made her life go better made something practically good happen for the speaker, but that it also brought the speaker into contact with some important truths, that then were valuable in their life going forward. And so basically, it's a story about being inspired to explore with her beliefs. And then the exploration got the return in believing more important things down the road. And so, was about that same thing, except in the case of her personal religious life.

Welch: There's something that I love, part of the Latter-day Saint experience that I love is the fact that we teach each other in sacrament meeting on Sundays. We don't hear from seminary trained clergy, we hear from our brothers and sisters, and they speak from their hearts. But as you say, sometimes truly profound spiritual insights can come from what they share there at the pulpit. And it's one of the aspects of Latter-day Saint experience that I treasure most. So, thank you for sharing that, Ryan. Before we go. I promised you an opportunity to talk about riddles. So take us out here by telling us Aronowitz and her riddles.

Davis: So she goes through these riddles. And what they reveal is that you might think that you can just suspend your disbelief by accepting something for the sake of the argument, but you really can't. That you're sort of like your mind doesn't want you to do it. Do you mind if I just read you these and play this game? Here's the first riddle: The accountant says “That attorney is my brother.” And it's true. They really do have the same parents, yet the attorney denies having any brothers. And that's also true. And the question is, how is that possible? The answer is…

Welch: I happened to get this one on my first read because I had read a similar riddle before but the answer is that the accountant is a woman.

Davis: The idea is that like it trades on people will get it wrong in the psychology experiment they have these stereotypical beliefs about accountants that are limited. Alright, so here's the next one. An individual bus ride costs $1. A card for the bus that's good for five rides, costs $5. A first time passenger boards the bus alone, and hands the driver $5 without saying a word yet, the driver immediately realizes for sure that the passenger wants the card rather than the single ride and change. How is that possible?

Welch: So this one, I puzzled and puzzled over it, and I couldn't figure it out. And I didn't have access to the answer. So I'm on the edge of my seat, you have to alleviate my suspense.

Davis: This is what I always wanted in the classroom. Is someone who just cares about my thought experiment. So you're very kind. The answer is that the person hands the bus driver five $1 bills rather than a $5 bill. Because if it's a $5 bill, you don't know if you want the card, do you want the ride and change? But if you handed them five $1 bills, you wouldn't do that if you only wanted the one ride. Only if you wanted the card without saying anything.

Welch: Ah, yes, only if you wanted the whole card.

Davis: So here's the interesting thing. If I were to just ask you, if I were to say, “Don't bring any of your background beliefs to this riddle,” you might be like, “All right, I hereby renounce the sake of the story, all of my background beliefs.” There's this thought, which is an appealing thought, which is that like, if someone really believes they spent, they're going to figure it out in a way that just sort of like acting, if you believe doesn't help you figure it out? That's an intuitive thought, right? You know, if the scientist really believes the theory, then they're more likely to figure out, you know, to get the evidence. Or if you sort of like really believe in your spiritual experiences, then you're more likely to like really act on it, rather than if you just act as if you believe. The philosophical question is, well, why is acting as if you believe or pretending to believe or supposing or assuming or accepting, why is that not good enough? And what this kind of thing shows is that we just don't have enough control over the contents of our own psychologies to suppose or accept or pretend in a complicated enough way to collect all of the benefits that we would have collected by believing. So here's the moral of the story: you can only explore the epistemic world, you can only explore what's true in the world by really going in for stuff, by really believing. Not just by doing the halfway stuff. Pretending or supposing or assuming.

Welch: It has given me a new way to think about belief. It's given me a new openness to belief as very important access of religious experience, and I'm grateful for our conversation today, Ryan.

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