Quick Thought

Hi Justin,

Here’s the point I was trying to make earlier—when it comes to theological truth, God doesn’t give us only revealed truth. He provides both (1) revealed truth and (2) intellectually derived truth from the things around us. It is not the case that he asks us to trust without have provided evidences of his reality. From the parting of the Red Sea to the resurrection of Christ, people have had real and tangible, empirical truths to confirm what has been revealed. God does not ever operate in a vacuum of one kind of knowledge or the other. But when a system of “faith” asks us to believe in revealed truths alone to the neglect of our intellect, we then have a system outside of the way God has always operated. It is a system we cannot test and found to be true. The Bible commands us to test everything and hold to the good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). We can test the Bible to see if there really were synagogues, cities by certain name, kings by name, religions by name, etc. We know about the exile of the Jews to Babylon or Assyria from sources outside the Bible. Descendents of these exiles still live in these regions more than 2,000 years later! By contrast, we cannot test the translation of the Book of Mormon and there are no other copies of this book. No other writings exist that tell us the same stories recorded in the BOM. Huge quantities of people, things and places are missing from the realm of physical evidence so there is no external evidence that points with certainty (as it does for the Bible) to the truthfulness of the BOM. We are dependent exclusively on the words of Joseph Smith for their origin. God has never operated this way and has always encouraged us to test the prophets to see if they are false. A real prophet will always pass with flying colors. Real Scripture that talks about real world events will have other sources talking about the same events. The Bible writers weren't the only ones to see and write about these things.

Ask yourself, is it really a valid principle to live by to say, “I ultimately need to take it by faith”? Does such a mindset allow a person to even look at the evidence? What if a Muslim had the same mindset? How could you ever use evidence to persuade them that they are wrong? This is a mindset that traps people and isolates them from the truth. It sounds like the kind of mindset Satan would use to keep people trapped in error. Catholics and JWs both do the same and unless they are willing to look at the truth you present to them, they will never change. They too say, “I need to just take it by faith.” People didn't question Jim Jones or David Koresh and we can see the error it led them to.

This is not to say that faith is never the only thing we have to go by. Faith asks us to trust in things future and not seen, but the reason we can trust certain things for the future is because they have proven to be trustworthy in the past. These are the things that can be tested (and should be tested! Thessalonians 5:21) and have been found to be true. God has give us the personal ability to reason these things out. Whether or not we accept what our intellect concludes is a personal and matter of spiritual import.

Your friend,

Greg