Moroni's promise as a truth test

The Church's primary method for establishing its truth claims has success conditions that only a positive answer can satisfy.

What the Church claims

Anyone who reads the Book of Mormon and asks God with a sincere heart, real intent and faith in Christ will have its truth manifested by the Holy Ghost, and by that power may know the truth of all things.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Untenable. Decisive as to method, not as to religious experience: this procedure cannot distinguish a true church from a false one, and the features that make it unfalsifiable are stated in the Church's own sources.

The record

  • Moroni 10:4 tells readers to ask God 'if these things are not true' and promises that 'if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost'; v. 5 extends this to 'the truth of all things'.
  • D&C 9:8-9, the source of 'burning in the bosom', was addressed to Oliver Cowdery about translating: 'your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right', otherwise 'a stupor of thought'. The Church applies it generally as a pattern for revelation.
  • The promise specifies three preconditions that cannot be independently checked (sincerity, real intent, faith in Christ) and one acceptable outcome. It also presupposes the conclusion: 'faith in Christ' and the existence of the Holy Ghost are part of what is being tested.
  • Leaders teach that scientific methods are the wrong tool: 'scientific methods will not yield spiritual knowledge' (Oaks 2008); for religious truth use 'prayer, the witness of the Holy Ghost, and study of the scriptures and the words of modern prophets' (Oaks 2018).
  • Boyd K. Packer conceded to mission presidents that 'it is possible to mistake an emotional impulse for something spiritual' and that some promptings come 'from the adversary'. No independent criterion is offered for telling which is which.
  • Lawrence Corbridge (2019) told BYU students that the 'gloom' he felt reading critical material was not 'belief bias' but the absence of the Spirit and a 'stupor of thought' - i.e. negative feelings about disconfirming evidence are themselves counted as evidence for the Church.
  • FAIR's page on failed or conflicting impressions lists many possible explanations (false spirits, misinterpretation, others' agency, a test), none of which is 'the claim is false'.
  • The Book of Abraham essay applies the same method to a document whose translation it concedes does not match the papyri: the book's truth 'cannot be settled by scholarly debate' and is found through 'sincere prayer, and the confirmation of the Spirit'.

The moving target

  • 1830: Read, ponder, ask with sincere heart, real intent and faith in Christ; the Holy Ghost will manifest the truth.
  • 2008-04: Spiritual knowledge is a distinct kind of knowing, not reachable by scientific method.
  • 2018-10: Use spiritual methods for religious truth; be wary of anonymous internet sources.
  • 2019-01-22: Settle the 'primary questions' by the Spirit and the historical 'secondary questions' pale.

The exchange

LDS philosophers and FAIR, drawing on Alvin Plantinga; Dallin H. Oaks

Religious belief can be 'properly basic': like memory or perception, a spiritual witness can warrant belief without argument, and the believer is within her rights unless given a defeater (the Plantinga/Reformed-epistemology model, which LDS writers adapt to testimony). Oaks's three kinds of 'knowing' is a pulpit version of this.

The answer: Plantinga's model protects the rationality of a believer who has no defeaters; it was never an argument that the belief is true, and it is available to every religion with an inner-witness doctrine, so it cannot adjudicate between them. Latter-day Saints also have defeaters in abundance: the same faculty yields contradictory outputs across faiths and within Mormonism (FLDS, Community of Christ, Snufferites), leaders admit it can be counterfeited by emotion, and the Church's specific claims are historical and empirical (plates, papyri, Lamanite origins), where ordinary evidence is available and mostly unfavorable. A faculty is only warrant-conferring if it is reliable, and reliability is exactly what the cross-religion data undermines.

What they get right: It is true that nobody proves their most basic commitments, and that critics sometimes demand a standard of proof for religion that they do not apply to their own moral or political convictions.

FAIR; standard missionary teaching

The test is an experiment upon the word (Alma 32): plant the seed, live it, and judge by the fruits. The witness is 'holistic' - mind, heart and experience together - not a mere emotion.

The answer: An experiment needs a specified outcome that would count against the hypothesis. Here a good feeling confirms; no feeling means try again, be more sincere, or wait on the Lord's timing; a bad feeling is the adversary or a stupor of thought. 'Fruits' fare no better as a discriminator: devout Muslims, Witnesses, Adventists and secular humanists report good fruits from living their convictions. The test reliably measures whether a practice feels good and meaningful to the person, which nobody disputes.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Moroni's promise is not a test in any sense an honest inquirer would accept for any other claim. Its preconditions are unverifiable and include the conclusion ('having faith in Christ'); its only disconfirming outcome is reassigned to the asker's insincerity or to God's timing; contrary feelings are attributed to Satan or the absence of the Spirit; leaders admit the signal is confusable with ordinary emotion; and the method is explicitly insulated from external checks. The deepest problem is circular: the rule 'a warm, peaceful feeling after prayer is the Holy Ghost telling you this book is true' is itself taught by the book and the missionaries. One has to accept the Church's epistemology before one can use it to confirm the Church. The Book of Abraham essay shows the method doing real work: where the documentary evidence is conceded to be against the traditional claim, the reader is referred back to prayer. A method that returns 'true' for the Book of Abraham translation regardless of what the papyri say is not tracking the facts about the papyri.

The apologetic case

If God exists and wishes to be known by ordinary people rather than scholars, direct witness is exactly what we should expect, and it would not be publicly checkable. The conditions in Moroni 10 are moral, not evasive - relationships require sincerity. Millions report that the experience was unlike ordinary emotion and that it changed their lives for the better; on a Plantinga-style view they are entitled to trust it absent decisive defeaters, and skeptics cannot show from outside that no such faculty exists.

What would change this

Pre-registered evidence that prayerful inquirers with no prior exposure converge on LDS-specific propositions at rates above other religions' analogous tests.

Closely related

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.