Overfitting the Gospel
How our experiences do, or don't, match up with the way we think about the gospel
You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.
Welcome back to the only LDS-influenced essay/podcast series that’s continually treating the same thematically-united topics, is written by a single author, and is also named after a high-atmosphere phenomenon! You won’t find anything like that elsewhere on the internet, much less at your HOA or even a Wegman’s.
Today we’re going to start tying together the various threads that we’ve seen in the past three weeks: the idea of externalized revelatory instruments, affordances in our environment, and the possibility of extended minds. I’ve made a few comments here and there noting some connections, but we’d like to make more of them, and we’ll make them more explicit.
The point of doing all this work and making all these connections is to give us a way to contextualize ERIs—things like seer stones and other objects that appear to play a role in revelation—within the way human minds are already working. We don’t just want to acknowledge that these things exist; we’d like, if possible, to explain why they exist. And even more than that, we don’t just want our answer to be “Joseph Smith’s culture!” or something like that. The culture is part of it, and we know from previous discussions of the principle of context that culture is very important in determining what revelation can be received and what it can be like.
But there is more going on, and by contenting ourselves with culture in every case, we risk running into a certain problem in our thinking about the gospel. I’d like to talk about that problem in some detail today. Next week we’ll get back into objects and revelation.
Overfitting: plants
I call this problem “overfitting” the gospel. It’s worth taking a bit of time on here because I don’t think this problem is very widely understood, much less its consequences appreciated. But I think it’s really important and represents a mistake that is very easy to make in our thinking about the way the gospel works.
