(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)
I recorded an interview on 1 Corinthians 14-16 earlier today with Hank Smith and John Bytheway for their Follow Him podcast. We had a good time. (At least, I did.) I’ll try to announce here when it goes up.
We went out to dinner with friends last night and then, together, attended a strong performance of Newsies at the Hale Centre Theatre. I’m not really into dance (which is putting it mildly), but the choreography was very good.
The very straight line visible across the Isthmus is the Διώρυγα της Κορίνθου or Corinth Canal, proposed in antiquity but not finally constructed until the late nineteenth century.
“If your arguments are really so good, why isn’t everybody convinced?” Critics of the claims of the Restoration sometimes demand that I answer that question to their unlikely satisfaction — seemingly unaware of the fact that not everybody is persuaded by their arguments.
But it’s a question worthy of consideration.
Another demand that is often directed at me and at others is “Show me your best single argument for the Book of Mormon!”
In such cases, I typically answer that it just doesn’t work that way. The arguments that I typically make for the Book of Mormon, and that others typically make for the Book of Mormon, are cumulative arguments. They don’t simply rest upon one Thermonuclear Factoid That Obliterates All Resistance. That answer is commonly received with skepticism or even cynicism, but it’s the truth and it’s what I expect. Although there are some strong cases to be made, there is no single argument or fact that will prove the truth of the claims of the Restoration beyond reasonable doubt in each and every mind that encounters it.
People are different, and different things stand out to them. They weigh things differently. Some are paying close attention; most are not. And there are even — I’ve met them — who so badly don’t want the claims of the Restoration to be found true that convincing them seems essentially impossible.
I think in this context of the atheistic historian Dale Morgan (1914-1971), who was once something of a fashionable darling of cultural Mormons. In 1945, he wrote a letter to the believing Latter-day Saint historian Juanita Brooks in which he stated the fundamental issue with unusual frankness and candor:
“With my point of view on God,” he said, “I am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith’s story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church.” (Dale Morgan to Juanita Brooks, 15 December 1945, at Arlington, Virginia. Transcribed in John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986], 84–91. The quoted passage occurs on page 87.)
Just as striking, I think, is the eminent New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel, who famously said,
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.” (Thomas Nagel, The Last Word [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 130-131.)
Late in his life but still a number of years (at least a decade) before his death, my father experienced a heart attack during the middle of the night while he was visiting with us from California. After we had brought him to the hospital and he had undergone some tests, the surgeon who would eventually operate on him took us aside and began asking us about my father’s quality of life: Was he happy? Did he want to recover? Somewhat surprised, we responded that, yes, he was happy, and that he was actively involved in tending to a large yard and garden, researching family history, tracking his investments, participating in church activities, and so forth. The surgeon then explained why he had asked such questions: Patients who don’t really want to live, he said, often don’t survive the surgery very well. In the worst of such cases, he said, there is relatively little point in performing it.
I see a parallel, in a way, in matters of apologetics: After years of interacting with disaffected members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some of them quite embittered, I’ve sometimes vowed to remember to first ask them a question or two: Do you want the Church’s claims to be true? Or do you ardently wish them to be false? If the latter, there probably isn’t much point in proceeding with any further discussion.
Even, though, when people want to be convinced, variations in background, comprehension, psychological make-up, intelligence, and a host of other factors will lead to a variety of outcomes. We see this every day: People who read and listen to the same news headlines will come to very different positions regarding those headlines. People obviously vote differently — and it simply won’t do to say of those who vote for different candidates than those that we prefer that they’re stupid, ignorant, and/or depraved. (Even though, in some cases, that may be true — there certainly are depraved, ignorant, and stupid people who go to the polls (though definitely not among my political faction!) –it simply isn’t true in the majority. Honest, informed, intelligent, good people can and routinely do come to different political positions and vote differently.)
(to be continued)
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