A Letter to an Apostle

What most Mormons call belief is often merely deference to authority or referential influence and the unquestioning acceptance of an oft-repeated normative plot or narrative. 

The philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls these cognitive errors’ credences’ – things that we feel we SHOULD accept. In short, many religious narratives are accepted without being altogether understood. 

The sociologist Alan Wolfe observes that “evangelical believers are sometimes hard-pressed to explain exactly what, doctrinally speaking, their faith is.” He goes on to note that “These are people who believe, often passionately, in God, even if they cannot tell others all that much about the God in which they believe.” I think the same can be said about Mormons.

This phenomenon is not unique to religion. Researchers have studied those with strong opinions about political issues and found that they often literally don’t know what they are talking about.

Many people who take positions on ‘Cap and Trade’, for instance, have no idea what Cap and Trade is. Often those who take strident positions on global climate change have never researched whether it is real and caused mainly by human activity or is just a gross exaggeration. Similarly, some people firmly believe that Covid-19 vaccines will destroy their children’s brains. These political and social positions are also ‘credences’, and often those who hold them are just like those who insist that the Ten Commandments should be the bedrock of our Constitution but can’t list more than three or four of those commandments.

Many religious views are not the product of common-sense ways of seeing the world – the story of Adam and Eve, the Noah and the great flood, or Muhammad ascending to heaven on a winged horse. These narratives were absorbed from the testimony of others – parents or peers or Sunday school teachers or general authorities. Accepting them requires a leap of faith, but not a theological leap of faith; instead, a leap in the ordinary sense that we trust other people who are testifying to their truth.

What is Critical Thinking?

The word ‘critical’ can mean different things in different contexts.

However, the word critical as we use it in the context of critical thinking does not merely involve looking for the essential aspects of something or criticizing something per se. The two crucial things to remember is that:

1. Critical thinking is about not accepting what you read, see or hear at face value. Thinking and knowing are two different things. A healthy dose of skepticism can be beneficial. Critical thinkers are willing to question what they are told, by the media, authority figures, and other people in their lives whom they respect. 

2. Critical thinking is the ability to decide rationally what to do and what to believe. Critical thinking is analyzing and solving problems systematically, making decisions based on logic and reason rather than on impulse or emotion. 

There are numerous definitions of critical thinking and its elements, but there is general agreement that it is:

The ability to acknowledge but question; and test previously held assumptions. We can add to that the capacity to recognize ambiguity, interpret, evaluate, reason, and make informed judgments and decisions.

Perhaps the most complete yet concise formal operational definition is that offered by Michael Scriven and Richard Paul:

“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”  

But to me, the essence of critical thinking is simply not taking things at face value and not allowing yourself to be sidetracked by emotion.

What I am attempting here to provide you with a new expanded set of skills that will enable you, after we are done,to understand the relationships that exist between ideas and more accurately determine their relevance and importance. To detect inconsistencies, faulty reasoning, and logical fallacies. To better evaluate and appraise arguments and to approach problem-solving coherently and systematically. And to come to recognize the existence and influence of your own biases.

Have you ever found yourself watching a television program, maybe something like ‘Ancient Aliens,’ only to discover halfway through that the producer has it wrong? Or that they seem to have strong biases, so you decide that it would be best to switch to another channel? If so, then, at the risk of sounding like Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a critical thinker.

William James pointed out that many people believe that they are critically thinking when all they’re doing is moving about their prejudices. They base their views on emotion without evidence to support them. He suggests that we need to become more aware of our own biases and work to overcome them and strive to embrace more objective and open-minded, critical thinking skills. 

Critical thinking doesn’t come naturally. We shouldn’t assume that people instinctively know how to think critically; let me ask you a question.

Let me ask you a question. 

Take a minute to consider your answer. If you are like most people, you probably think the ball costs 10 cents. If that were true, the bat would cost $1.10 because the problem stated that the bat cost $1.00 more than the ball. 

However, this would mean that the total cost of the bat and ball would be $1.20. The correct answer is that the ball costs 5 cents, and the bat costs $1.05, adding up to a total of $1.10.

The math here is not very difficult, so why do most of us get the answer wrong?

The reason is that to solve the problem quickly; the brain replaces a more difficult problem with an easier one. We chose to take this question at face value.

The math problem stated that the bat cost $1.00 more than the ball, but to make things simple, the brain has mistakenly substituted that information with the idea that the bat cost $1.00, which leads us to a quick, but mistaken conclusion that the ball cost 10 cents. This is a prime example of how our instinct to find a quick and easy answer can lead us astray.

Critical thinking skills are often described as ‘higher order’ skills – that is, skills requiring ways of thinking that demonstrate higher levels of insight, sophistication, and complexity than the conventional thinking that we might use to, say, drive a car, brush our teeth or cook a meal. 

To think critically calls for more than merely the ability to recall information or follow a routine.

Critical thinking involves drawing inferences and forming relevant conclusions. For most people, most of the time, they’re thinking is in auto mode to help them navigate the complex decision-packed world in which they function.

They, rely on their mind to fill in the gaps. 

Our minds have an incredible context and pattern recognition ability. If you read a letter filled with all kinds of typos and spelling errors, your mind will sort it out with little difficulty. This suggests that we switch off our brains and go into autopilot mode to some extent.

Doing so allows us to perform many tasks reasonably well, without thinking much about them. 

Let me give you 15 to 20 seconds to read the following paragraph, and as you do so, count the number of ‘Fs’ in the passage.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

How many Fs did you count? Three, four? There are actually six Fs. If you didn’t count them all, it is because you typically missed the Fs in the word ‘of” which appear three times. 

This illustrates how our minds skip over details when operating in auto mode. 

Often, this tendency will result in our unconsciously distorting information or missing significant anomalies.

Automatic thinking enables us to make quick decisions and function more efficiently in life. 

Much of our thinking is automatic. It helps us deal with our experiences and surroundings without focusing our total concentration on every little thing individually. Something that would be exhausting, even overwhelming.

Automatic thinking allows our minds to simultaneously focus on other things, perhaps more important things – thinking about your daily schedule, mulling over the conversation you just had with your spouse, or trying to remember if you turned the stove off. 

Going into auto mode makes many tasks simpler by freeing up attentional resources so that we don’t become overwhelmed by the simplest of tasks. 

Driving and walking are examples of actions that have become automatic. When you sit down behind the wheel of your car in the morning, you don’t have to think to yourself, ‘Okay, I’m first going to put the car in reverse, next I’ll check in the rear-view mirror, okay, next I will press down on the accelerator and back out of the driveway.’

Likewise, when you walk, you don’t consciously think about every movement or remind yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The behavior is so overlearned and practiced that it is simply second nature.

But as you will see, auto mode can also make people more prone to mistakes.  

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman suggests that our tendency to favor automatic noncritical thinking is hardwired. It’s part of our nature and largely adaptive. He indicates that throughout our history as a species, our survival depended upon it. 

When a hungry sabre-tooth tiger is chasing you, you don’t have time to ponder and evaluate your best escape options.

You just run as fast as you can and climb the first tree that you come to. You don’t have time to stop, scour the landscape, identify the tallest tree, or the one with a suitable array of branches that would facilitate climbing. In short, you don’t analyze anything. You just react.  

Yes, manual or reasoned thinking can be slow and sometimes it too can be faulty, biased and susceptible to false conclusions. Still, since it’s not primarily based on the primitive reactive part of our brain, it can help us overcome the deficiencies that automatic thinking can produce.

When others repeatedly attack or blame us, the primitive part of our brain prompts us to defend yourself or strike back, but that is wrong. We need to think more rationally than that.

Critical or reasoned thinking engages a different part of our brain and requires more deliberate, conscious mental effort. In short, it takes more work.

Our brains consume more energy than any other of our organs – nearly twenty percent, even though the brain accounts for roughly only two percent of our total body mass. 

We naturally try to conserve energy whenever we can, therefore we tend to rely on old familiar patterns when it comes to making decisions or forming judgements. 

We’re talking about here is the Gestalt principle of closure, which indicates that our minds can derive meaning from pictures or objects that are not fully formed. For example, can you read the sentence below? I’m sure you can’t, even though 25% of the letters are missing:

I-m s-re th-t y-u w-ll be a-le to und-rst-nd th-s s-nt-nce

Here’s another example. Can you see the inverted triangle below even though it really isn’t there? Just some black marks. 

However, gestalt closure has some troubling aspects. For example, in high-demand religions, it can be used to guide the investigator to a snapped psychological state by bringing closure to a carefully scripted predetermined conclusion. That conclusion conditioned through the presupposition can cause the person investigating the high demand religion or cult to ‘snap’ to an irrational decision. Coming to believe or accept what the cult or religious leader(s) says they should accept or believe.

This is an error in cognition. There are times then when unconsciously we will distort information or miss significant anomalies or, even worse, fall victim to cunning ploys. 

Critical thinking can help us in these types of situations because critical thinking is manual, not automatic thinking. Critical thinking is the opposite of automatic thinking. It’s conscious and purposeful. It’s mindful. For example, one is told that:

“If you will read the Book of Mormon with an open heart and open mind, then I’m sure that you too will see – as we do – that an inspired book like this, revealed to an ignorant, uneducated farm boy, could have ONLY come from God!”

So, the investigator goes off and starts sloughing through the Book of Mormon only to be suddenly struck with the new “realization” that no ignorant, uneducated ploughboy could write this inspirational book – it could have ONLY come from God!

This despite the fact that others who have just read the book without any preparation or conditioning find it poorly written, absurd and boring, ‘Chloroform in print,’ as Mark Twain famously said.

Charles Sanders Peirce, a 19th-century American philosopher and logician, identified three kinds of thinkers:

Sticklers

These individuals cling tightly to their beliefs regardless of new or mounting evidence that may assail or refute them.

Sticklers are only interested in information, data or opinions that can support their existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss outright ideas or facts that stand in opposition to them. 

We will be talking about confirmation bias later in this book, but briefly, this logical fallacy results from the direct influence of desire on belief. When someone has such a strong desire that a particular idea, belief or concept is valid, they will inevitably end up believing that it is in fact true, despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  

While they will not admit it and often don’t see it, they are motivated by wishful thinking. This error causes the individual to stop gathering or honestly evaluating information that does not confirm their beliefs or prejudices. Once they have formed their belief, they embrace only that information that confirms it while ignoring or rejecting anything (and often anyone) that casts doubt upon it. Human beings don’t believe what they see; they see what they believe!

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it.”

Francis Bacon, 1620

Followers

These thinkers happily base their beliefs on what authority figures tell them. Absent an authority, they will go along with what they think most people agree upon. 

They rarely question the wisdom of experts or the consensus, accepting those opinions blindly as being true. Followers are unlikely to generate original ideas and thoughts and can be easily persuaded to join a dangerous leader.

System Builders

These thinkers are willing to accept new information providing it fits within the general understanding and framework that they have already established. 

Nevertheless, some System Builders can overcome their reluctance and embrace new information that can even shakes their world. Clearly, of the three, these thinkers respond best to rational argumentation.

It is worth mentioning that we may vacillate between these three thinking styles at different times and in different contexts and environments. As I’ve mentioned, for much of my life, I successfully compartmentalized my work life and my religious life. 

We can gain additional insight into critical thinking by examining the characteristics of distinctly accomplished thinkers such as Stephen Hawking, 

Thomas Edison, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, or Sigmund Freud.… a handful of the thinkers who have shaped our modern world.

But what, if anything, do they have in common?

I would suggest the following five characteristics seem to appear most often when we examine critical thinkers: 

1. Curiosity

2. Introspection

3. Creative Thinking

4. Analytical Thinking

5. Empathy and Humility

Critical thinkers are typically curious and reflective people. They look below

the surface, often leading to novel insights.

In a Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Why Curiosity Matters,” Gino writes, “The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute.” She adds, “When our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more creative solutions.”

Gino, Francesca
The Business Case for Curiosity“
September 2018 issue,Harvard Business Review (pp.48–57).

Albert Einstein once humble declared:

“I have no special talent.

I am only passionately curious.”

I can’t say the Mormon church altogether opposes critical thinking, but I would say it values unquestioning obedience over curiosity. This view is well illustrated in the following excerpt from an editorial that appeared in the Church News reporting the Church Conference of April 7th, 1895, where, in the face of what he saw needless questioning by the Saints, then President Wilford Woodruff stood up and said with annoyance.

“Cease troubling yourselves about who God is, who Adam is, who Christ is, who Jehovah is, for heaven’s sake, let these things alone.”

I mention these statements to emphasize that as critical thinkers we shouldn’t take everything at face value, regardless of the source. We need to be curious. We need to askWHY.

In a talk Elder Russell Nelson gave to students at BYU in 1984, which he entitled “Begin with the End in Mind,” he said:

“To the charge that the Church is “anti-intellectual,” you are the greatest evidence to refute such an erroneous statement. Individually, you have been encouraged to learn and to seek knowledge from any dependable source. In the Church, we embrace all truth, whether it comes from the scientific laboratory or from the revealed word of the Lord. We accept all truth as being part of the gospel. One truth does not contradict another…”

Did you catch this phrase, which negated every he said before:

“… from any dependable source.”

Critical thinking is also introspective and reflective. Introspection is the art of being aware of our thought processes. The quality of our thoughts reflects the quality of our actions. Thinking about our ideas not only affects our behavior, it predicts our success. It is the ability to examine our innermost drives, motivations and feelings, providing insight into our emotional and mental state.

The first dimension of emotional intelligence is self-awareness.

Abraham Lincoln was once asked how long it took him to write the Gettysburg Address. He replied, “All my life.”

Lincoln was an introspective man; I don’t doubt he could not have been able to write the Gettysburg Address without looking inside himself first. 

Introspection is an essential feature of critical thinking. But as I have already indicated, it is a luxury that many Mormons don’t have time for.

Capable critical thinkers are also commonly creative thinkers. They reject standardized formats for problem-solving – choosing instead to think outside the box. 

Furthermore, they often demonstrate a wide range of interests. Polymaths.

I think Joseph Smith was an ambidextrous thinker – both a creative thinker as well as a critical thinker, perhaps the former more than the latter. 

There is ample evidence of his creativity. His mother raved about how he   could keep the family spellbound as a boy telling delicious stories of the history of the Indians, as even he referred to them at that time.

There was never a skeleton or artifact that he came across that he failed to weave some tale around—the Book of Abraham papyrus, Zelph, the Kinderhook plates, Greek salter to mention a few. 

But I think he was also a critical thinker; that is why he made so many revisions and rewrites to his writings and revelations. He never stopped thinking about how to reconstruct or improve his gospel.

The difference between critical thinking and creative thinking is that creative thinking is related to the generation of ideas, whereas critical thinking is associated with the analysis and evaluation of those ideas.

Creative thinking is focused on possibilities, whereas critical thinking is focused on probabilities.

The best critical thinkers are analytical thinkers and vice versa. The ability to analyze data is essential.

Analyzing information means deconstructing that information into its parts and evaluating how well those parts function separately as well as together. 

The fifth feature of the critical thinker is humility. While on the surface, having humility, empathy, and compassion may seem almost deleterious to critical thinking. After all, emotion or sentimentality can skew our perception of a given situation. 

But without humility and the desire to put ourselves in the shoes of others, we might view all information and situations from the viewpoint of cold, heartless scientific facts and data. Good critical thinkers take into account the human element. Not everything is about data, information, and outcomes — it’s also about people.

Critical thinkers are humble while searching for truth, enabling them to learn new things without their egos fighting against them. Those with humility are aware of their flaws as well as their strengths, an essential element in critical thinking as it demonstrates a willingness to stretch and open one’s mind. 

Emotional intelligence is one of the most important constructs to impact the American industry that came along during my career as a management consultant, and one of the essential building blocks of EQ is self-awareness.

For decades I used Johari’s Window at leadership development seminars as a tool for illustrating the importance of self-awareness and for improving communication and team-building.Johari’s Window was devised by American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955 at the University of California Los Angeles. The name Johari comes from a combination of the two creator’s names – Joe and Harry.

In a nutshell, the four Johari Windows are called ‘regions’ or ‘quadrants.’ Each of these quadrants representing the feelings, motivations and behaviors – known or unknown by oneself, and the same things known or unknown by other people. The four quadrants in the model are outlined in diagram below:

Quadrant number one is the public you. This is the you that everyone knows and loves. It is the behavior that is, reflective of your inner, feelings, drives and emotions, but it is not the only you.

We all wear a mask for many reasons, Mormons more than most. Our authenticity can, to some degree, be sacrificed on the altar of being a good example, a good husband or wife, a good son or daughter, a good friend. As Mormons, we are under an obligation to be a good example. So, others will join the Church. This results in our faking happiness, faking righteousness, faking competency, faking joy and faking a happy marriage and family life. 

Joseph Smith said,

“Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” 

If I am not happy, then I am not living all the commandments, or am not virtuous or faithful, let alone holy.

Is it any wonder antidepressant use is so high in Utah?

Quadrant Two is made up of those things known to us but not known by others. I am not just talking about the skeletons in our closets, and there may be some of those, but all of us have things that we will never share with anyone. I don’t care how intimate the­­­ relationship you’re in with another person; they will never know you as well as you know you.

The larger the gap between the private and public self, the less authentic you are. Too large a chasm between our public and private selves is not just just stressful but its unhealthy.

Think of the example of a secretly masturbating missionary (or bishop, or stake president), wracked with guilt and self-loathing. Unable to control this practice but also unable to face the humiliation and repercussions of confessing it. 

Quadrant three is made up of those things known to other people but not known to us. None of us see ourselves exactly as others see us. 

Robbie Burns the great bard said, “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us; To see oursels as ithers see us! .” None of us do. Some of us are closer to reality than others. Some of us are really out in left field.

Sadly, the higher up the hierarchy one rises in the LDS church, the less likely one will be given constructive feedback from those below. Elder Oaks even codified it, “It’s wrong to criticize leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true.”

I have seen so many examples of this failure of leadership as a consultant.

Alfred Lord Tennyson expressed greater wisdom than Oaks when he said, “He is all fault who has no fault at all.”

Quadrant Four is made up of those things that are neither known by us nor are they known by other people, yet they exist and influence our behaviors in profound ways. This is the subconscious and beyond the scope of this discussion or my training and capabilities.

However, I know a little something about effective advertising through an appeal to the collective unconscious. What in everyday parlance we call propaganda.

When we think of propaganda, most of us think of Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. But the real father of this dubious art was Edward Louis Bernays (1891 – 1995) an American pioneer in the field of public relations and a nephew of Sigmund Freud. In fact, Goebbels relied on Bernays’ book Crystallizing Public Opinion to formulate his vile campaign against the Jews.

Bernays was the first to focus on manipulating public opinion through the use of the subconscious.

He called his technique of opinion-moulding the ‘engineering of consent,’ and it was employed in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson in the Committee on Public Information to drum up support for World War I. Indeed, in one form or another, it has been utilized to promote every foreign war the United States has engaged in since that time.

Not only did Bernays help convince Americans to support WWI, but he also convinced women to smoke tobacco, He also persuaded Americans to use disposable Dixie Cups and drink fluoridated water. 

His philosophy is reflected in his following Orwellian statement, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”

I think secretly Bernays didn’t think there were any limits.

Bernays liked to consider himself a kind of “psychoanalyst to troubled corporations.” 

Are there examples of Bernays techniques being employed by the Brethren? In the words of the darling Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “… let me count the ways,”

When we self-disclose, the public self becomes larger, and the private self becomes smaller.

Why is critical thinking important? Well, for one thing, self-defense. An example, you come home late one evening, you’re alone, it’s dark. As you use your key to open the door to your house, you find its open; it’s unlocked and ajar. You think to yourself, ‘that’s strange. I’m sure I locked the door.’ 

As you step into the foyer, you notice many things are askew. Pictures are on the floor; drawers are open. It suddenly strikes you that you have been burglarized. At that same moment, you’re grabbed from behind by some hulk of a man.

If you’re trained in self-defense techniques, would it increase or improve your chances of survival in a situation such as this? Of course, it would. Self-defense opens up a source of freedom for women and for men in a world where not everyone is kind and honest or has your best interests at heart. The same is true when it comes to critical thinking. And while the antagonist in this arena may not want to do you physical harm, they want you to believe what they believe, value, what they value, and do, as they would have you to do. 

Who are these people?

Pretty much everyone, you have had or will have a relationship with. Parents have an interest in exerting influence over their children – even their grown children. Friends seek to influence you as does your spouse, boss, co-workers, and even subordinates.

But where I think the self-defense analogy fits best is in our interactions with the large and powerful social institutions – political parties, the media, advertisers, and most importantly large and powerful organized religions. Bodies whose job it is to get you to think as they think, and do as they do, and who have enormous resources and expertise at their disposal to accomplish the task.

The goal in politics is to acquire enough support to gain and maintain power. In the case of advertising, the goal is to sell products or services.

But in the case of high-demand religious organizations of the corporate ilk (Mormonism and Scientology being the two best examples), the stated goal may be to save souls, change hearts and minds and encourage good works, etc., but the real purpose in the organizational, bureaucratic sense is to recruit and maintain members (followers) so as to acquire their time, their talents and their fortunes.

I am not suggesting that there are not good people in politics, business, advertising or religion who sincerely want to serve the needs of others.

The point is however, that these institutions often care little about what matters to their constituencies – what they value or see as most meaningful is what fulfills them, and helps maintain their viability. These powerful organizations have a logic and a dynamic all their own.

But here’s the rub. By knowing which buttons to push, these manipulative gods of influence can effectively get us to believe something or do something that is at times not only in opposition to our best interests but altogether irrational and illogical.

This is the primary reason why we need to enhance our critical thinking skills – self-preservation. 

And their primary tool is emotion.

Human beings are emotional creatures as well as thinking ones. The Greek philosophers realized that the force of feeling and emotion alone can be harnessed to persuade people to do what you want them to do. This approach is called pathos.

We are guided and controlled by our emotions, as exemplified by the ‘fight-or-flight’ response that we are all aware of. We feel physical sensations, both positive and negative, because of certain chemicals and hormones being released into our bloodstream due to an external stimulus.  

 Our everyday habits, routines, rituals, attitudes, and perceptions are all influenced by our emotions. So much so that we don’t realize to what degree they can program us.

When we become overwhelmed by an emotion, it seems to take over our perception and awareness of life at that moment. The present moment’s experience is seen through the lens of that emotion. If we are overwhelmed by joy, happiness, sadness, fear, love, lust or any other emotion, we are hard-pressed to think or feel anything else.

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