It's a travesty that even serious thinkers refuse to engage debates on faith. For many who have faith in logic, reason, and scientific principles (you'll excuse the circular definition for the purposes of illustration here, I hope), faith has come to mean whatever is beyond their purview—something that's simply un-provable by empirical, objective means. But if faith truly can be defined as a motivating belief in a truth of which the evidence is not readily discernable, then the truths behind it can be verified, are acquired by a "scientific" process of hypothesis testing and confirmation of truth or rejection of falsehood, and it is therefore missing an opportunity to grow in knowledge and intelligence to simply bracket certain areas of inquiry as unfit for experiment, debate, or even serious thought.
Defining faith as a principle of action based on truth implies that it's more like what most would call knowledge than the unsubstantiated hokey claims of irrational people that non-believers often can barely tolerate. The first mistake in the application of the term faith is that it does not have to include a belief in something metaphysical. As much as I understand the physical and oft proven principles and laws behind the electricity that courses through the wiring of my home, I can never quite be certain when I reach for the switch that the lights will in fact turn on. I have faith in electricity enough to motivate me to flip switches on a quotidian basis. And not only in electricity, but in all the wiring, transformers, generators, and competence of the people who built and maintain them. And I'm very rarely disappointed in my faith—it's confirmed multiple times a day, to the point that it's so automatic for me to believe in all of it, I actually expect it to work all the time, and am frustrated in the exceptional cases that electrical service gets interrupted. Do I know electricity works? Yes I suppose you could say that, but objectively it is completely and totally unverifiable in the second before I flip that switch that it will actually produce the desired results. In that sense, it is faith that motivates me to flip switches, and not knowledge (which comes after the switch is flipped). The key thing about this example is that it demonstrates to what degree a belief in a true principle can be internalized to the point of expectation.
Of course, electricity is a completely empirically and objectively verifiable principle, and the evidence also comes back quite immediately. But the evidence that the light turns on (almost) every time I flip a switch confirms my faith (almost) every time because that faith is true.
And now it's time for a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that I had a false belief that electricity was the result of magic. Beginning with my belief, the same experiment of flipping a switch would yield the same evidence of the lights going on, but would be interpreted radically differently because of my base assumptions (which are false). Work with me here: really try to imagine that you sincerely believe that electricity is magic. You walk toward a switch for the first time, and you flip it: voilà the light goes on. You are flabbergasted. Now imagine that someone tries to explain it to you: there is a power running through wires and originating in a generator far away. They might even show you the wires. But remember, you already believe that electricity is magic, so now you have a choice: disbelieve your base assumptions, or imagine a way to explain them. Are you the kind that will question everything you believe in the face of something that doesn't fit? Are you the kind that tends to trust yourself first, and suspend belief in new explanations pending something that fits your own system of thought better? I bet that for most things, you have a better imagination than you think. Without meaning to imply complete fictions by using the word imagination, my experience has taught me that most people will tend to plug the holes in their belief system dikes that occur from the pressure of unexplained evidence by applying the quick-drying concrete band-aids of ever more assumptions. Their explanations are logical within their own belief system, and therefore "make sense", but since they are based on a primary false assumption or belief they appear to the outsider as all the more falsehood. Does is take much imagination to believe that the generator machine is magical too? That the wires simply transmit the magic? The human mind has proven quite fertile in this regard. Smash the generator, and the stubborn will insist that the magic left because of some sin committed. What other explanations can you think of off the top of your head? The magic deniers can show repeatedly and in many different ways that there is no magic involved, that it is a completely understandable physical phenomenon, and maybe you will believe based on the weight of evidence (or "testimony") garnered over time, or perhaps a single testimony in which you already have great confidence can convince you to disbelieve in the magic of electricity. But either of those methods will at some point involve your choice to let go of your assumptions, and to admit to yourself that they may have been false all along.
Now there are principles of truth that our current instruments have not yet allowed us to judge as objectively. Some principles have to be judged by more subjective criteria. I have faith that Jesus Christ is my Savior as well as the Savior of all mankind. There are quite objective proofs of that, but my original evidence can only be described as purely subjective. I assumed that, and when I acted on the assumption and prayed for Him to redeem me from what I have done to displease Him, accepting Him as my Savior, all according to the teachings I received from my earliest rememberings, my hypothesis was undeniably confirmed as true. I have also done many other things which have made an experiment of that faith, but in this particular case, I had a feeling wash over me of the purest love and peace and true lasting joy that I can remember. I've come close to it since at my wedding, and on the births of my children, just to give you the flavor of the feeling. I'm sure there's something in your experience that you can recall that will help you truly empathize with the feelings I'm talking about here. If you can't, maybe this scriptural list of the "fruits" of the Spirit of God (results that an experience with communication with Deity can provoke), as explained by the Apostle Paul to the Galatians will help orient you a little: Galatians 5:22. My experiment bore fruit enough to me that I now know that I cannot deny that God lives, loves me, and sent His Son to redeem me. There's more to that experience, but for the purpose of this thinking-through you now have sufficient detail to understand how personal and subjective the confirmation of my hypothesis was, and yet perhaps you've felt something akin to that and can, if not take the testimony as truthful on its face, at least empathize with it as my perception of the truth.
I belong to a community of like-minded believers, most of whom regularly retell similar experiences. If their premise weren't immediately dismissed by the scientific community as beyond reason, or beyond the testable, then the sheer number of their testimonies would provide any analyst with sufficient data to take these spiritual confirmations as not merely privately phenomenological. However, since the claim is based on something science currently considers outside its purview, it's understandable that even vast numbers of testimonies about the reality of such phenomena don't persuade. But it's clearly a choice that people make to only accept belief in things that they have evidence for already. Some things are true whether we believe in them or not, and some evidence we have only seems to confirm our beliefs because we already believe (as previously demonstrated). What I'm trying to get at is that there are cases in which, without really even believing yet, one must act as if something's true—experiment—after which the evidence will come. This direction of the process is not reversible, and those waiting for the experiment to prove a certain thing without having the willingness to experiment in the first place, clearly have the cart before the horse.
With this preliminary discussion on the nature of faith, belief, and evidence, we are now prepared to talk about seer stones, the urim and thummim, prophetic revelations, gold plates with ancient hieroglyphics altered from an even older Egyptian script translated by a farm boy with a 2nd grade education. Joseph Smith's story, and the origins of the Book of Mormon are truly fantastic tales, and provide excellent examples of the principles I'm trying to illustrate here. Non-believers, whose choice is to doubt, find the tales all the more unbelievable because of the facts of their origins and translation. Believers take the same uncontroverted facts and take them as evidence that God truly was intervening, otherwise something so fantastic could not have yielded the product it has. Both positions seeming logical from within, and choice of position determining interpretation of evidence.
PBS, in part three of their series called "the Mormons" began a framing of the prophet Joseph Smith in what makes perhaps chronological sense, but which emphasized an episode in his youth I had never before heard of: apparently (and I have no reason to disbelieve the basic facts of the presentation albeit they were presented exclusively by critics that betrayed their biases with judgmental language even while pretending to give a dispassionate delivery of the facts), he had been brought up on charges (and my sources claim was acquitted of them, a fact conveniently left out of PBS's treatment) in his early youth for divining for buried treasure. This was presented as a natural outgrowth of a fairly common desire on the part of a significant proportion of the poor frontier farming families to discover gold on their new property. Of course this framing is immediately recognizable by those outside a Latter-day Saint belief system as a powerfully explanatory economic motivation—and why not: follow the money back to the greed, and you have the beginnings of almost all charlatans. The problem is that such a framing of the context distorts the complicated reality of Joseph Smith's involvement in the beginnings of the LDS church, and serves to stoke almost exclusively the biases of those who are disinclined to believe his fantastic story. If your first inclination is to distrust such far-fetchedness, or to distrust the man Joseph Smith himself because of a prejudice instilled in you by a pastor, for example (which is understandable and understandably not uncommon), then this framing confirms your "faith"—you gather from this the common schema or script seen elsewhere in the world: poverty leads to greed leads to charlatanism leads to megalomania, and thus you've understood Joseph Smith as he lived in a time of religious over-credulousness and superstition. And the fact that I've never before heard this story (after 25 + years of activity and personal interest and research), also makes sense to you—that's something a cult like those Mormons would certainly want to keep hidden.
Let's perform another thought exercise here on this subject. Imagine that you are convinced that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that the translation of the Book of Mormon happened as he claimed in his official statements (which was fairly presented if you could ignore the framing PBS put around it). I know that may be hard for some of you, but follow me on this…Now imagine that you've heard this story for the first time: that Joseph Smith was claiming to use seer stones and receiving "revelations" long before he laid eyes on the "gold plates" from which the Book of Mormon was translated. Would that cause you to question your entire belief system, and re-evaluate a Joseph who you always thought used a seer stone for the first time during the translation of the Book of Mormon as perhaps being a common fraud rather than a true prophet? Maybe it would. I'm sure there are some of those out there. But for someone who truly believed that he was a true prophet, it's far more likely that the intellectually lazy would closed-mindedly defend, or put off investigation and thought, and that the more engaged would apply their educated imaginations to the problem and resolve it in such a way as to confirm their faith, not deny it (denial it is clearly presented to incite). Okay, so you're still a believer, and now let's take it for granted that all the facts about that additional information on Joseph Smith's history are true—does it really take that much imagination to come up with the idea that it's quite possible that God was somehow preparing the prophet for his later task of translation by means of the urim and thummim? If you're still following me, and are staying faithful to the perspective I'm trying to get you to take for a brief moment, I think you'll agree that it makes perfect sense.
As to the question of why the Church never mentions it, the answer is equally as clear. Far from having something to hide (which is the clear implication of the series as it flirts with imputing cult status to the LDS church—and is in itself false—it's obviously not the role of the Church as an organization promoting faith to provide in its worship service teachings the same kind of historical detail one might more rightly expect from a more academic institution, and Church-sponsored institutions have quite thoroughly documented this and other episodes in Joseph Smith's record in plain view of peer-reviewed journals, websites and other publicly available materials, none of which has ever been under any conspiracy to conceal), it's simply ancillary to any discussion of Smith's positive contributions to the system of beliefs. "Ancillary?" you ask. Yes, totally. "But he's the founder, so if he was a fraud that makes the whole church a fraud doesn't it?" Of course, when you put it that way, but if you do, you've fallen into the trap they laid by framing it as a question of fraud. The real question is much less was he a true prophet, and more how can you know if he was? If you need a documentary to prove the truth or falsehood of a man claiming to receive revelations from God then you've understood little both about how God's Word is transmitted to His children (us mortals), and how His Word itself says we should test claims to the status of prophet: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt 7:20). The fruit of Joseph Smith is the Book of Mormon. It is a verifiable text, which contains a promise from God (if you can muster some figment of sincerity in desiring to know whether or not it was revealed by Him) that is testable and yields the aforementioned subjective confirmation. Paul in teaching the wavering Corinthian Christians, besieged as they were by competing belief systems in that central trading city of the time, to stand fast in their faith in the fantastic story of a resurrected Lord, taught a truth that should equally apply here: spiritual things must be learned through the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:13-14). You must pray to know, and God will answer in His way, not any other. Facts, appropriately framed or mischaracterized as they may be, from any source, documentary, official Church document, anti-Mormon propaganda, or otherwise, can certainly provide extra testimonies to confirm the "truth" you already have faith in, pro or con as I have demonstrated. But if you haven't sincerely sought out the Lord's answer in prayer after honest, earnest study of the material in question (the fruits of Joseph Smith as a prophet—the Book of Mormon), you cannot truthfully claim to know if he was a fraud or not.
Defining faith as a principle of action based on truth implies that it's more like what most would call knowledge than the unsubstantiated hokey claims of irrational people that non-believers often can barely tolerate. The first mistake in the application of the term faith is that it does not have to include a belief in something metaphysical. As much as I understand the physical and oft proven principles and laws behind the electricity that courses through the wiring of my home, I can never quite be certain when I reach for the switch that the lights will in fact turn on. I have faith in electricity enough to motivate me to flip switches on a quotidian basis. And not only in electricity, but in all the wiring, transformers, generators, and competence of the people who built and maintain them. And I'm very rarely disappointed in my faith—it's confirmed multiple times a day, to the point that it's so automatic for me to believe in all of it, I actually expect it to work all the time, and am frustrated in the exceptional cases that electrical service gets interrupted. Do I know electricity works? Yes I suppose you could say that, but objectively it is completely and totally unverifiable in the second before I flip that switch that it will actually produce the desired results. In that sense, it is faith that motivates me to flip switches, and not knowledge (which comes after the switch is flipped). The key thing about this example is that it demonstrates to what degree a belief in a true principle can be internalized to the point of expectation.
Of course, electricity is a completely empirically and objectively verifiable principle, and the evidence also comes back quite immediately. But the evidence that the light turns on (almost) every time I flip a switch confirms my faith (almost) every time because that faith is true.
And now it's time for a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that I had a false belief that electricity was the result of magic. Beginning with my belief, the same experiment of flipping a switch would yield the same evidence of the lights going on, but would be interpreted radically differently because of my base assumptions (which are false). Work with me here: really try to imagine that you sincerely believe that electricity is magic. You walk toward a switch for the first time, and you flip it: voilà the light goes on. You are flabbergasted. Now imagine that someone tries to explain it to you: there is a power running through wires and originating in a generator far away. They might even show you the wires. But remember, you already believe that electricity is magic, so now you have a choice: disbelieve your base assumptions, or imagine a way to explain them. Are you the kind that will question everything you believe in the face of something that doesn't fit? Are you the kind that tends to trust yourself first, and suspend belief in new explanations pending something that fits your own system of thought better? I bet that for most things, you have a better imagination than you think. Without meaning to imply complete fictions by using the word imagination, my experience has taught me that most people will tend to plug the holes in their belief system dikes that occur from the pressure of unexplained evidence by applying the quick-drying concrete band-aids of ever more assumptions. Their explanations are logical within their own belief system, and therefore "make sense", but since they are based on a primary false assumption or belief they appear to the outsider as all the more falsehood. Does is take much imagination to believe that the generator machine is magical too? That the wires simply transmit the magic? The human mind has proven quite fertile in this regard. Smash the generator, and the stubborn will insist that the magic left because of some sin committed. What other explanations can you think of off the top of your head? The magic deniers can show repeatedly and in many different ways that there is no magic involved, that it is a completely understandable physical phenomenon, and maybe you will believe based on the weight of evidence (or "testimony") garnered over time, or perhaps a single testimony in which you already have great confidence can convince you to disbelieve in the magic of electricity. But either of those methods will at some point involve your choice to let go of your assumptions, and to admit to yourself that they may have been false all along.
Now there are principles of truth that our current instruments have not yet allowed us to judge as objectively. Some principles have to be judged by more subjective criteria. I have faith that Jesus Christ is my Savior as well as the Savior of all mankind. There are quite objective proofs of that, but my original evidence can only be described as purely subjective. I assumed that, and when I acted on the assumption and prayed for Him to redeem me from what I have done to displease Him, accepting Him as my Savior, all according to the teachings I received from my earliest rememberings, my hypothesis was undeniably confirmed as true. I have also done many other things which have made an experiment of that faith, but in this particular case, I had a feeling wash over me of the purest love and peace and true lasting joy that I can remember. I've come close to it since at my wedding, and on the births of my children, just to give you the flavor of the feeling. I'm sure there's something in your experience that you can recall that will help you truly empathize with the feelings I'm talking about here. If you can't, maybe this scriptural list of the "fruits" of the Spirit of God (results that an experience with communication with Deity can provoke), as explained by the Apostle Paul to the Galatians will help orient you a little: Galatians 5:22. My experiment bore fruit enough to me that I now know that I cannot deny that God lives, loves me, and sent His Son to redeem me. There's more to that experience, but for the purpose of this thinking-through you now have sufficient detail to understand how personal and subjective the confirmation of my hypothesis was, and yet perhaps you've felt something akin to that and can, if not take the testimony as truthful on its face, at least empathize with it as my perception of the truth.
I belong to a community of like-minded believers, most of whom regularly retell similar experiences. If their premise weren't immediately dismissed by the scientific community as beyond reason, or beyond the testable, then the sheer number of their testimonies would provide any analyst with sufficient data to take these spiritual confirmations as not merely privately phenomenological. However, since the claim is based on something science currently considers outside its purview, it's understandable that even vast numbers of testimonies about the reality of such phenomena don't persuade. But it's clearly a choice that people make to only accept belief in things that they have evidence for already. Some things are true whether we believe in them or not, and some evidence we have only seems to confirm our beliefs because we already believe (as previously demonstrated). What I'm trying to get at is that there are cases in which, without really even believing yet, one must act as if something's true—experiment—after which the evidence will come. This direction of the process is not reversible, and those waiting for the experiment to prove a certain thing without having the willingness to experiment in the first place, clearly have the cart before the horse.
With this preliminary discussion on the nature of faith, belief, and evidence, we are now prepared to talk about seer stones, the urim and thummim, prophetic revelations, gold plates with ancient hieroglyphics altered from an even older Egyptian script translated by a farm boy with a 2nd grade education. Joseph Smith's story, and the origins of the Book of Mormon are truly fantastic tales, and provide excellent examples of the principles I'm trying to illustrate here. Non-believers, whose choice is to doubt, find the tales all the more unbelievable because of the facts of their origins and translation. Believers take the same uncontroverted facts and take them as evidence that God truly was intervening, otherwise something so fantastic could not have yielded the product it has. Both positions seeming logical from within, and choice of position determining interpretation of evidence.
PBS, in part three of their series called "the Mormons" began a framing of the prophet Joseph Smith in what makes perhaps chronological sense, but which emphasized an episode in his youth I had never before heard of: apparently (and I have no reason to disbelieve the basic facts of the presentation albeit they were presented exclusively by critics that betrayed their biases with judgmental language even while pretending to give a dispassionate delivery of the facts), he had been brought up on charges (and my sources claim was acquitted of them, a fact conveniently left out of PBS's treatment) in his early youth for divining for buried treasure. This was presented as a natural outgrowth of a fairly common desire on the part of a significant proportion of the poor frontier farming families to discover gold on their new property. Of course this framing is immediately recognizable by those outside a Latter-day Saint belief system as a powerfully explanatory economic motivation—and why not: follow the money back to the greed, and you have the beginnings of almost all charlatans. The problem is that such a framing of the context distorts the complicated reality of Joseph Smith's involvement in the beginnings of the LDS church, and serves to stoke almost exclusively the biases of those who are disinclined to believe his fantastic story. If your first inclination is to distrust such far-fetchedness, or to distrust the man Joseph Smith himself because of a prejudice instilled in you by a pastor, for example (which is understandable and understandably not uncommon), then this framing confirms your "faith"—you gather from this the common schema or script seen elsewhere in the world: poverty leads to greed leads to charlatanism leads to megalomania, and thus you've understood Joseph Smith as he lived in a time of religious over-credulousness and superstition. And the fact that I've never before heard this story (after 25 + years of activity and personal interest and research), also makes sense to you—that's something a cult like those Mormons would certainly want to keep hidden.
Let's perform another thought exercise here on this subject. Imagine that you are convinced that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that the translation of the Book of Mormon happened as he claimed in his official statements (which was fairly presented if you could ignore the framing PBS put around it). I know that may be hard for some of you, but follow me on this…Now imagine that you've heard this story for the first time: that Joseph Smith was claiming to use seer stones and receiving "revelations" long before he laid eyes on the "gold plates" from which the Book of Mormon was translated. Would that cause you to question your entire belief system, and re-evaluate a Joseph who you always thought used a seer stone for the first time during the translation of the Book of Mormon as perhaps being a common fraud rather than a true prophet? Maybe it would. I'm sure there are some of those out there. But for someone who truly believed that he was a true prophet, it's far more likely that the intellectually lazy would closed-mindedly defend, or put off investigation and thought, and that the more engaged would apply their educated imaginations to the problem and resolve it in such a way as to confirm their faith, not deny it (denial it is clearly presented to incite). Okay, so you're still a believer, and now let's take it for granted that all the facts about that additional information on Joseph Smith's history are true—does it really take that much imagination to come up with the idea that it's quite possible that God was somehow preparing the prophet for his later task of translation by means of the urim and thummim? If you're still following me, and are staying faithful to the perspective I'm trying to get you to take for a brief moment, I think you'll agree that it makes perfect sense.
As to the question of why the Church never mentions it, the answer is equally as clear. Far from having something to hide (which is the clear implication of the series as it flirts with imputing cult status to the LDS church—and is in itself false—it's obviously not the role of the Church as an organization promoting faith to provide in its worship service teachings the same kind of historical detail one might more rightly expect from a more academic institution, and Church-sponsored institutions have quite thoroughly documented this and other episodes in Joseph Smith's record in plain view of peer-reviewed journals, websites and other publicly available materials, none of which has ever been under any conspiracy to conceal), it's simply ancillary to any discussion of Smith's positive contributions to the system of beliefs. "Ancillary?" you ask. Yes, totally. "But he's the founder, so if he was a fraud that makes the whole church a fraud doesn't it?" Of course, when you put it that way, but if you do, you've fallen into the trap they laid by framing it as a question of fraud. The real question is much less was he a true prophet, and more how can you know if he was? If you need a documentary to prove the truth or falsehood of a man claiming to receive revelations from God then you've understood little both about how God's Word is transmitted to His children (us mortals), and how His Word itself says we should test claims to the status of prophet: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt 7:20). The fruit of Joseph Smith is the Book of Mormon. It is a verifiable text, which contains a promise from God (if you can muster some figment of sincerity in desiring to know whether or not it was revealed by Him) that is testable and yields the aforementioned subjective confirmation. Paul in teaching the wavering Corinthian Christians, besieged as they were by competing belief systems in that central trading city of the time, to stand fast in their faith in the fantastic story of a resurrected Lord, taught a truth that should equally apply here: spiritual things must be learned through the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:13-14). You must pray to know, and God will answer in His way, not any other. Facts, appropriately framed or mischaracterized as they may be, from any source, documentary, official Church document, anti-Mormon propaganda, or otherwise, can certainly provide extra testimonies to confirm the "truth" you already have faith in, pro or con as I have demonstrated. But if you haven't sincerely sought out the Lord's answer in prayer after honest, earnest study of the material in question (the fruits of Joseph Smith as a prophet—the Book of Mormon), you cannot truthfully claim to know if he was a fraud or not.
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