What is Truth? Part 3

Mormonism 101, a book by Mormonism Research Ministries, Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson, has helped many who want to understand what separates Mormonism from the Christian faith. Mormonism 101 is available at your favorite Christian bookstore or online at mrm.org. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism.

Question still resonates today. I want to bring something out when we discuss this topic today, because a Mormon could very easily say to us, well, wait a minute, Bill, you're a Christian. You take a lot of things by faith, don't you?

And I would readily admit, yes, I do. Well, how do you know those things that you take by faith are true if you can't prove them empirically, if I am trying to make the case that evidence is certainly important? Now, let me just explain this. The way I look at it, that to believe something that has not been proven is faith. And yes, there are a lot of things as Christians that we believe that we cannot prove empirically. For instance, I've often said, I can't prove that my sins are forgiven.

There's no way I can empirically test that. I can only go by the promise of Jesus himself, who said that when I put my faith in what he did on the cross on my behalf, and because I recognize Jesus to be a trustworthy source, that's why I believe that my sins are forgiven and that I believe something that is true. However, if I was to believe something and say it's faith to trust in something that's been disproven, that's where I say, I have to draw the line, because that's not faith to trust in something that's disproven, that's foolishness. And that's the real crux of what we're trying to discuss here, because you have a lot of Latter-day Saints who want to believe the things their church tells them, even when the evidence goes against it.

Now, they can certainly ignore the evidence, and that's what we've been talking about. In fact, in this series, we quoted Abdou Murray, who works with Ravi Zacharias Ministries, and he's written on this subject. He wrote a book called Saving Truth, Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World, and he says, our problem with truth isn't so much that we don't understand it, it's that we don't like it. And I think he's quite correct, or as I could say, there's a lot of truth in what he says there. People just don't want to have their truth claims upset.

I get that. But if it does not honor God to believe things that are false, wouldn't you think that if you are a believer and claim to be a Christian, that you would find it important not to believe things that are in fact false? We have a friend who actually took a camera out on the streets in Salt Lake City and asked different Latter-day Saints walking by if they would be willing to take a short interview on the question of, if Mormonism was not true, would you like to know if it was not true? And he was surprised that half of the people that he interviewed, several dozen, said no, they would not want to know. I think that's true with many people, and especially with Latter-day Saints, because listen, if you understand that Mormonism is not true, it really will radically change your life, especially if you live in a Mormon culture like where we live here in Utah, because the way that your friends are going to approach you, the way your relatives are going to approach you, the way your family, your wife, and your children, it's a very difficult thing. So do you really want to know the evidence? And according to what his survey showed, half the people are saying, I really don't want to know, I'd rather just believe in Mormonism even if it's not true, because it's more pragmatic for me.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all at that. In yesterday's broadcast, we introduced Kerry Muhlstein. Kerry Muhlstein, as I mentioned yesterday, is an Egyptologist. He's a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. He wrote an article in the Ensign magazine for December of 2018 titled, The Book of Abraham, Revelation, and You. And I think some of the things that Dr. Muhlstein says in his piece bring out exactly what we've been talking about. And quite frankly, Eric, for a guy of his caliber, it's a bit disappointing to hear some of the things that he says, because even though he admits that his views regarding the Book of Abraham, and we did discuss that yesterday, it's a part of Mormon scripture, and it's also a book that has caused a lot of Latter-day Saints to leave the Mormon faith.

Why? Because when they read the truth about the Book of Abraham, and how the book came about from some Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, allegedly translated, because they had been led to believe that his translation was an English equivalent of the Egyptian that was on the papyri, when they came to the realization that that's not the case at all, they felt that they had been lied to, and that Joseph Smith, in fact, was deceiving people into thinking just that. Yesterday, we were reading from the Gospel Topics essay, and this is found on LDS.org, titled Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham. And in this essay, and I read a portion of it yesterday, but I want to read a little bit more now, because it goes along with this idea of what the word translation really means to Latter-day Saints today.

And it's certainly not the traditional definition that some may assume. This is what it says, Joseph's study of the papyri, this would be the Egyptian papyri that came to him in 1835 through Michael Chandler, his study of the papyri may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings in the life of Abraham, much as he had earlier received a revelation about the life of Moses while studying the Bible. This view assumes a broader definition of the words translator and translation. According to this view, Joseph's translation was not a literal rendering of the papyri as a conventional translation would be.

Rather, the physical artifacts provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation. This, they catalyzed a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri. And Bill, how did they come to that conclusion? Because for many, many decades, Latter-day Saints were led to believe it was a literal translation, as you mentioned earlier. Why all of a sudden do they come up with this conclusion? Because scholars who are expert in Egyptology recognize that what the book of Abraham says does not match the papyri that it allegedly came from. And because of that, and that fact is really irrefutable, the leadership in the Mormon Church knew, we better back off of this.

We need to backpedal on this. And so they came up with this phrase about inspired translations, because it had to be something more supernatural rather than natural. You can't say inspired translation, because that makes no sense whatsoever. The Church needed to have said inspired creation, because it came out of the mind of Joseph Smith, and if that's the case, then the Book of Mormon. Does that come out of the mind of Joseph Smith? Well, we don't have those gold plates, but we do have the papyrus that the Book of Abraham was written. And I think that might be one of the worst things that could have ever happened to the Mormon Church, is to have that uncovered in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and then it was given to the LDS Church.

We have that today. We can see that Egyptologists can show us what that originally said, and what it said has nothing to do with what Joseph Smith has written, and is today part of the Pearly Great Price. Well, I want to look at just some of the opening statements that Carey Muhlstein makes in his article, The Book of Abraham, Revelation, and You.

And again, this is found in the Ensign magazine, December of 2018. It begins on page 54. He opens the piece by saying this, I have spent almost two decades studying the Book of Abraham and its history. I wish to use this book as an example to discuss an important issue, the relationship between knowledge and revelation. While education is valuable and important, as we become increasingly educated, we must guard against the tendency to respect the world's methods of learning more than God's.

Now, let me stop there, Eric, because that statement right there, I would say, okay, as a Christian, I can understand where he's going with this. For instance, if you were to take a certain worldview, let's say the Flat Earth people. The Flat Earth people certainly do recognize a certain idea of what our Earth is like. It goes against the grain of what everyone else seems to be saying, what science has said, what photographs from outer space looking at our world tend to tell us.

And again, that goes back to what I said earlier. If you believe in something that's unproven, that's faith. But to believe in something that's been disproven, that's foolish. We would say that those who believe in a Flat Earth are being foolish because they can't explain a lot of things. They can't explain climates, for instance.

I mean, how would you have climates and seasons if you had a Flat Earth? And they come up with all these highfalutin ways of explaining this that are just, you know, to many of us, just ridiculous. But he is saying, while education is valuable and important, as we become increasingly educated, we must guard against the tendency to respect the world's methods of learning more than God's. To a certain point, I know what he's saying here, because certainly what we believe as Christians seems to fly in the face of what some scholars, some secular scholars, are trying to tell us. Now, in these areas, such as the case of evolution, there's no way that they can really scientifically prove evolution, because to be proven scientifically, you have to observe it, you have to repeat it somehow.

They can't do that. And that's why we call it a theory. Exactly. Now, that has certainly changed since you and I went to school. When I was in high school, I remember in my biology class, the teacher making it very clear when discussing this issue that this was only a theory. That all of a sudden, over the years, it develops into a fact, into science, while denying the basic definition of what science is. But many have been led to believe this.

Okay, we have a different point of view. There's good people on both sides, but both cannot be right. So I would understand what Muhlstein's saying here is, as a Christian, I would go with what I believe God has revealed in the Bible, even though there may be some secular scientists out there that would disagree. Bear in mind also, folks, there's good scientists out there that do believe in creation, and do hold to the biblical model, and so we can't just ignore all them as well. Tomorrow, I want to look more closely at some of the arguments that Dr. Muhlstein makes, because I really think that some of his points are actually self-refuting. He uses this sharp sword to try and make his point, but I wonder if he realizes that that sword cuts both ways. And in some cases, I think the points he's trying to make actually work against him when it comes to defending the controversial portion of Scripture in Mormonism known as the Book of Abraham. you