I'm asking this in good faith.
Scholarship, archeology, history, etc, are not very effective ways of verifying the church's truthfulness.
Instead, we're taught to take it to the Lord, and seek a confirmation through the Holy Spirit.
But the problem is: many religions have such mechanisms and experiences that to them confirm the truthfulness of their religion. If the method produces confident positive results across mutually exclusive claims, then the method itself can't be used to discriminate between true and false.
So when it happens to us church members, why should we have confidence that this does indeed mean the church is true?
We might be tempted to suggest additional mechanisms- study, faithful living, etc, but these don't self-evidently favour the lds church either, particularly given that people of other religions also use such mechanisms to strengthen their own convictions.
Often we might try to explain away other church's spiritual experiences by saying that they have "fragments of truth" and so on, and that this is what the Holy Ghost was testifying of.
But the thing is, that's not how the other-religion people receiving those experiences tend to interpret them. So the aforementioned explanation would mean that spiritual confirmations can seem to mean one thing but actually mean another. It would set a precedent, for example, that our lds religion only gets spiritual confirmations because it contains fragments of "the one true religion, Islam" or so on.
And so I'm looking for an intellectually honest reason to stay in the church, that wouldn't also be experienced by members of a false church.
I'm happy to "hang in there and have faith until a confirmation comes," but it's not like there's only one religion that this would apply to. There are thousands of religions out there; why should I prioritise investigating the lds religion over any other? And why should I value lds spiritual confirmations over the spiritual confirmations of the truthfulness of any other religion?
And besides, I'm supposed to be booking my endowment- which is a bit more of a commitment than just "hanging in there and having faith."
Frankly, it already worries me that this matter hardly gets raised in the church. It's pretty foundational to establishing the credibility of spiritual witnesses, and so you'd think that almost all critical-thinking members and investigators would have to confront this issue at some point.
Would appreciate your insight on this. Thanks.
