Beggar's Bread

by Brian Horner
The Mormon attitude toward matters of faith is to eschew and even despise the use of their own minds. Mormons seem to carefully avoid the first commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind…” (Luke 10:27). There is no way I could ever enumerate the many instances when Mormons told me, in one way or another, that I was wrong for using my mind to actually think about the claims of the Mormon religion, or even my own Christian faith, for that matter.

I am fairly certain that this rank anti-intellectualism is due, at least in part, to the fact that the Mormon religion appears in world history for the first time in the United States in the early 1800s. This is a period when Christians were beginning to abandon the strong intellectual traditions of the faith, ceding the intellectual high-ground that we had occupied for some 1,700 years and turning instead to a purely emotion-based religion. Today there are many, in fact FAR too many, Christians who operate purely on the basis of their blind faith and the fear and even loathing of any form of attempting to arrive at or support Christian truth by using the minds that God gave them for that very purpose.

Anti-intellectualism is rampant in the orthodox church. But it is the essential sine qua non of Mormonism. That is most likely due to the fact that the definitive, distinguishing and essential claims of the Mormon religion, as found in the Book of Mormon (the BoM), for example, remain totally and completely divorced from all observable reality. The historical narrative of the BoM is not recognized anywhere outside the proverbial mental walls erected by the Mormon organization. Literally no one other than Mormons even pretends to take it seriously and Mormons accept it ONLY upon the basis of their own personal, subjective emotional reactions.

Based on these facts, Mormons appear to just assume without question that all matters of faith are should, by definition, be rightly separated from any form of intellectual confirmation or even consideration. As I mentioned above, this is not unique to Mormonism. There are far too many Christians who mindlessly tread down that dark trail of willful ignorance as well. This attitude reduces religious faith to something that is operationally indistinguishable from pure superstition.

Since this problem is so common in Christianity and so universal in Mormonism, I thought it might be wise to present what the opposite view looks like. Can matters of faith be studied objectively? Are you some kind of criminal for daring to question your own beliefs and then insist on valid answers? Must people of faith be totally indistinguishable from mindless, superstitious heathens?

No …well, at least Christians do not have to suffer such nonsense. Unknown to many Christians and virtually ALL Mormons the foundational, essential claims of the Christian faith can be and, for nearly 20 centuries have been, subjected to intense intellectual scrutiny. The consistent result remains obvious: there are solid historical, linguistic, documentary, archaeological and other forms of relevant evidence that strongly confirm countless claims found in the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ after his death on the cross is the most critical and important claim of the Christian faith. Without that being an actual fact of history, Jesus becomes indistinguishable from any number of soothsayers, messiah-wannabes, false prophets, lunatics and con men. The fact that Jesus rose from the grave is the one unquestionable component of the gospel of Christ that, if true, sets Jesus totally apart from all other founders of every single religion on earth.

The question is, is there any solid evidence and valid reasons that will remove this blessed event from the category of myth, fairytale, and superstition and place it in the category of historical events, right alongside other historical events that no one bothers to even question anymore?

Maybe yes, maybe no. See for yourself. Below is an example of a competent Christian apologist, Dr. David Wood (a one-time classmate of mine) taking on an atheist friend in a formal debate. Dr. Wood offers some examples (nowhere near a comprehensive list) of the evidence and arguments for the historical truthfulness of the Bible’s claims about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Today most people (Christians, Mormons, other faiths, atheists, etc.) are almost totally ignorant of the history and impact of the intellectual tradition of the Christian church on planet Earth. Christians have maintained the single strongest, broadest and best attested and confirmed worldview ever since the earliest days of the church. The list of Christian thinkers who established the intellectual foundations of Western Civilization is long both in names and in the length and number of historical periods that these Christians influenced. Spanning the spectrum of Western thought, from philosophy to the arts to the sciences; from J.S. Bach’s (a devout Christian) development of the equal-tempered tuning system that is the norm for all Western music to DNA research and astrophysics, the intellectual traditions of Western Civilization are derived from the fundamental elements of the Biblical worldview.

The overarching trajectory of the history of Western thought reveals an important pattern. Prior to the revelation of the Word of God and its eventual accessibility to the world, the ancient thinkers of the West (primarily the Greeks) considered the universe to be fundamentally chaotic. It was impossible to study the universe. Men generally attributed most or all phenomenon to the whims of mythical gods who held authority over one part of the creation or another. With the advent of the Biblical worldview that changed and the future was cast. The Bible represented the world as orderly – having been created by a rational God. Because of this understanding, the features and actions of the universe could be studied and measured and the influence of the universe’s particulars on each other could be observed and cataloged.

The Scientific Revolution was initiated by Christian men, such as Francis Bacon and Issac Newton who viewed themselves as privileged to be able to use the brain that God gave them to “think God’s thoughts after Him”. Using the “scientific method” that they developed on the premise of the observable order in so many phenomena around them, these Christian men concluded that intelligent beings created in the very image of God can learn how the universe actually works and they understood that their discoveries were adding glory to the Creator of the universe by observing his unspeakably awesome creation. The following short video explains.

Sadly, over time, the focus of science began to become so obsessed with the gift (the universe) that they generally forgot the giver – the Creator of the universe. Science eventually gave birth to a worldview that we know today as “scientism” – the philosophical view that ONLY science can determine what is actually known about any given phenomenon. All other epistemic methods are generally relegated to the categories of subjective and relativistic “beliefs” and cannot be used to determine actual knowledge.

What is so ironic is that those who propound and exalt scientism have forgotten that the foundation of their worldview is the Word of God which showed that the universe is indeed ordered and therefore accessible to rational inquiry. In other words, without the Biblical worldview, science would not have arisen. And if there was never any science, there could be no Scientism.

Be that as it may, I think Mormons should take a look at how today, an age in which the dominant worldview is scientism, Christians are able to answer even the toughest challenges to our faith. Here is one example. On the question of creation itself, what is the Christian answer? There are many ways to frame and communicate that answer. Here below is one of them. This is an example of loving God with all your mind as he commands.