Not Blind Faith, but Big Faith: A Scholarly Defense of Eyring’s Epistemology

A Response to LDS Discussions’ Critique of President Henry J. Eyring’s BYU-Idaho Devotional (January 14, 2020)

Introduction

In January 2020, President Henry J. Eyring of BYU-Idaho delivered a devotional titled “Not Blind Faith, but Big Faith,” in which he distinguished between a passive, uninformed credulity and a mature, committed faith anchored in the great foundational truths of the Restoration. The LDS Discussions blog responded with a lengthy critique asserting that Eyring’s “big faith” is, in fact, indistinguishable from blind faith and that his counsel to students amounts to an abuse of institutional authority designed to suppress rational inquiry.

This response examines that critique on its philosophical merits. The central argument of LDS Discussions rests on a naive evidentialist epistemology that has been thoroughly challenged in academic philosophy of religion for the past half-century. When assessed against the mainstream of contemporary epistemology — including the landmark work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, and others — the critique of “big faith” collapses. Moreover, the specific empirical claims LDS Discussions deploys against Latter-day Saint truth claims are substantially contested in the scholarly literature and do not carry the decisive, one-sided weight the blog assigns them.

We address each dimension in turn: the epistemological framework Eyring employs, the philosophical weaknesses of LDS Discussions’ evidentialist premise, and the specific empirical claims used in the critique.

I. What Eyring Actually Argued

President Eyring’s devotional made three interconnected claims. First, that members face genuine intellectual challenges to their faith and that these challenges deserve honest acknowledgment. Second, that the appropriate response is not to refight every subsidiary dispute endlessly, but to anchor oneself in what he called the “big, hard-to-comprehend truths” — the Atonement, the Restoration, and the reality of ongoing personal revelation through repentance. Third, that the legal principle of stare decisis (the doctrine that decided cases need not be relitigated from scratch each time new challenges arise) offers a useful analogy for how a person of mature faith can operate without epistemic paralysis.

LDS Discussions summarizes Eyring’s conclusion this way: “He is literally saying that he avoids any material or discussion that looks at the church because he already decided he’s going to believe no matter what the evidence is.” This is a significant mischaracterization. Eyring does not say he avoids all information. He says that once a foundational commitment has been tested and confirmed through personal spiritual experience, it need not be re-litigated from scratch every time a new allegation appears. The distinction matters enormously, as we will show.

II. The Evidentialist Premise of LDS Discussions — and Why It Fails

The entire LDS Discussions critique stands or falls on a single unexamined philosophical premise: that religious belief is only rational if it is proportioned to publicly available, empirically verifiable evidence. This is the position known as evidentialism, associated most famously with the Victorian mathematician W.K. Clifford, who declared in 1877 that “it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

The problem is that evidentialism, as a philosophical position, is widely regarded as self-defeating. Clifford’s own principle — that one must have sufficient evidence for every belief — is itself asserted without being derived from prior evidence. It is a philosophical commitment, not an empirically established fact. As philosopher William Alston observed, the evidentialist objection to religious belief applies with equal force to the evidentialist’s own epistemological framework. The demand “show me your evidence” must at some point rest on foundational commitments that are not themselves products of evidence-marshaling; otherwise, the regress never terminates.

“It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”
— W.K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1877)

Clifford’s principle is itself believed without evidence that supports it. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, arguably the most influential epistemologist of religion of the twentieth century, identified this problem as the central weakness of the evidentialist objection to theism. In his trilogy culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000), Plantinga demonstrated that the standard of classical foundationalism — according to which only self-evident, incorrigible, or evident-to-the-senses beliefs could be “basic,” with all other beliefs requiring inferential justification — is itself neither self-evident, incorrigible, nor evident to the senses. The evidentialist criterion thus fails its own test.

A. Reformed Epistemology and Properly Basic Belief

Plantinga’s positive contribution was the theory of Reformed epistemology, which argues that belief in God — and, by extension, belief in the doctrines delivered through the Holy Spirit — can be properly basic. A belief is properly basic when it is formed by cognitive faculties functioning properly in an appropriate environment, even without being derived from more foundational beliefs via argument. Examples of properly basic beliefs include perceptual beliefs (“there is a tree in front of me”), memory beliefs (“I had breakfast this morning”), and beliefs about other minds. None of these are arrived at by explicit inference from prior evidence; they arise naturally from the proper functioning of human cognitive equipment. Plantinga argues that belief in God, arising from what John Calvin called the sensus divinitatis — an inborn faculty oriented toward awareness of the divine — has the same epistemological status.

For the believer who has encountered God in prayer, in scripture, in personal revelation — who has experienced what Calvin called the testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum, the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit — that experience grounds a properly basic belief. It does not require external corroboration to be rational, any more than my belief that I am presently reading text requires me to construct a philosophical argument proving that my visual cortex is functioning correctly.

“The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.”
— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.7.4

This is precisely what President Eyring described when he spoke of “the relief and peace that comes as I daily renew my faith.” He was not describing an irrational suppression of inquiry. He was describing an epistemological anchor — a foundational, properly basic belief that does not require constant re-derivation from first principles in order to remain rationally held.

B. The Stare Decisis Analogy Is Philosophically Sound

LDS Discussions dismisses Eyring’s use of the legal principle of stare decisis as a rhetorical trick designed to stop students from thinking. But the analogy is philosophically defensible and tracks a well-recognized feature of rational belief maintenance.

Every rational agent operates with a background web of commitments that are not re-evaluated from scratch every time a new challenge appears. The philosopher W.V.O. Quine described this as the web-of-belief model: beliefs are not verified one by one against experience but are held in interconnected systems, and when a peripheral belief is challenged by new data, the rational response is often to adjust at the periphery rather than to abandon foundational commitments. The pragmatist philosopher William James, himself no friend of uncritical dogmatism, acknowledged in “The Will to Believe” (1896) that in genuinely forced, live, and momentous questions — such as whether God exists and is active in one’s life — the refusal to commit is itself a choice, and withholding belief in the absence of conclusive evidence is no more epistemically neutral than committing to it.

Scientists do the same thing. When a physicist encounters an anomalous experimental result, she does not immediately abandon the framework of quantum mechanics. She looks for errors in the experiment, alternative explanations, or reasons why the anomaly might be an artifact. Only after sustained, systematic failure to explain the anomaly away does she revise her foundational theoretical commitments. This is not blind faith in physics. It is rational belief maintenance. Eyring’s counsel to treat foundational spiritual commitments the same way is epistemologically equivalent.

III. The “Blind Faith vs. Big Faith” Distinction Is Real and Philosophically Grounded

LDS Discussions insists: “To now turn the phrase ‘blind faith’ into ‘big faith,’ the church once again wants us to believe that their words have no meaning.” This is a rhetorical conflation, not a philosophical argument. The distinction between blind faith and warranted faith has a rich and legitimate academic pedigree.

Blind faith, properly defined, means belief held in explicit contradiction to available evidence, or belief held without any cognitive grounding whatsoever. It is the “leap” to the irrational, the willful suspension of all epistemic standards.

Warranted faith — what Eyring calls “big faith” — is belief grounded in personal spiritual experience, confirmed through prayer and obedience, anchored in the foundational truths of the Atonement and the Restoration, and maintained rationally against challenges using the same web-of-belief logic that governs all rational inquiry. The person of big faith is not saying: “I refuse to look at evidence.” They are saying: “My foundational commitments have been confirmed through a mode of knowing that is not inferior to empirical observation — personal revelation — and I am not obligated to treat every new polemical challenge as though it overturns that confirmation.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (1976, 1984), articulates this precisely: the rational person brings “control beliefs” to any inquiry — commitments that shape how one weighs evidence and adjudicates competing claims. These control beliefs are not irrational simply because they are not derived from the evidence being weighed; they are prior rational commitments without which no inquiry is possible. The secular critic who demands that Latter-day Saints derive their faith commitments solely from external evidence is herself operating with unacknowledged control beliefs — including the commitment to methodological naturalism, the belief that spiritual experience is non-veridical, and the assumption that the consensus of critical historians constitutes the final court of appeal on religious questions. None of these control beliefs is derived from neutral evidence. They are prior philosophical commitments.

“The rational person brings control beliefs to inquiry that are not themselves products of that inquiry. To demand that the religious believer abandon all control beliefs while the secular critic retains her own is not a neutral demand. It is a demand for philosophical surrender.”
— Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 1984)

IV. The Empirical Claims: What the Scholarship Actually Shows

LDS Discussions reinforces its philosophical argument with a battery of empirical claims — about the Book of Abraham, DNA and the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, and polygamy — which it presents as decisively settled by scholarship. A fair assessment of the academic literature yields a substantially different picture.

A. The Book of Abraham

LDS Discussions presents the Book of Abraham as an “unquestionable fraud” by asserting that Joseph Smith’s translation of Egyptian papyri does not match what trained Egyptologists would produce. This claim is considerably more complex than the blog acknowledges. The central dispute turns on what source documents Joseph Smith actually used and what his translation process entailed.

The recovered fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri contain portions of the Book of Breathings, an Egyptian funerary text. Critics assume that these are the only source documents Joseph used. LDS scholars, including BYU Egyptologist Kerry Muhlestein (PhD, UCLA) and John Gee (PhD, Yale), have argued that the Joseph Smith Papyri collection was substantially larger than what survived the 1871 Chicago fire, that the extant fragments represent a small portion of what Joseph possessed, and that the relationship between the surviving fragments and the Book of Abraham text is more complex than a simple word-for-word comparison permits. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham acknowledges this complexity and does not concede the claim of straightforward fraud.

Moreover, the internal content of the Book of Abraham has attracted serious scholarly attention for its remarkable correspondences with ancient Semitic and Egyptian literary traditions. Hugh Nibley’s multivolume Abraham in Egypt (FARMS/Deseret Book), along with more recent scholarship in the Journal of Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture, documents themes, proper names, and narrative elements in the Book of Abraham that were unknown in Joseph Smith’s day and have since been confirmed by Egyptological and Near Eastern studies. The most charitable assessment of the scholarly record is that the Book of Abraham question is genuinely unresolved — not decisively answered against Joseph Smith.

B. DNA and the Book of Mormon

LDS Discussions cites DNA evidence as conclusively disproving the Book of Mormon’s account of a Near Eastern group migrating to the Americas. This claim, while widely repeated, misrepresents the state of the genetic evidence and the textual claims of the Book of Mormon itself.

The Book of Mormon describes a small family group — Lehi’s household and the companion party of Mulek — who arrived in the Americas around 600 B.C. Population geneticists who have addressed the LDS position, including Dr. Scott Woodward and Dr. John Butler, have argued that detecting a Near Eastern genetic signal from a small founding group arriving 2,600 years ago in a continent already populated by millions is, under standard population genetics models, essentially impossible. The founding group’s DNA would be swamped by admixture within a relatively small number of generations. Genetic bottleneck effects, genetic drift, and the sheer scale of pre-existing Native American populations make the absence of detectable Near Eastern markers in modern Native American populations entirely consistent with the historicity of the Book of Mormon as written.

Notably, critic Simon Southerton, whose 2004 book Losing a Lost Tribe provided the basis for much of this argument, subsequently acknowledged — in light of whole-genome sequencing advances — that the original categorical statement requires qualification. Whole-genome studies reveal complex admixture patterns in ancient American populations that are still being characterized. The DNA argument against the Book of Mormon, while not without force, is far from the settled “slam dunk” LDS Discussions presents.

C. The First Vision Accounts

LDS Discussions characterizes multiple accounts of the First Vision as evidence of fraud: the accounts differ, ergo Joseph Smith fabricated them. This argument founders on basic historiographical grounds. Multiple accounts of a singular personal experience that vary in emphasis, detail, and audience are the norm in ancient and modern testimony, not evidence of fabrication. The four canonical Gospels differ significantly in their accounts of the Resurrection appearances; no serious historian uses that as evidence that the Resurrection was invented. Eyewitness testimony in psychology and legal contexts routinely shows variation and compression over time without entailing fabrication.

The LDS Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on the First Vision Accounts, published in 2013, openly addresses the differences across accounts and explains the historiographical reasons why they do not undermine the credibility of the core event. LDS historian Richard Bushman, whose Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005) is the standard scholarly biography of Joseph Smith, treats the multiple accounts as consistent with the pattern of religious experience generally: recalled, re-articulated, and adapted to different audiences over time. No credible historian has proposed a plausible mechanism by which all First Vision accounts could be fabricated and all contrary witnesses silenced.

D. The Witnesses and Historical Evidence

President Eyring referenced early witnesses — Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, David Whitmer — who fell away from the Church yet maintained their testimonies of the Book of Mormon plates throughout their lives. LDS Discussions dismisses this as irrelevant because “they were enemies of Joseph Smith.” But the epistemological point stands independent of their later relationship with Joseph. None of the Three Witnesses ever denied having seen the plates and the angel Moroni, despite having every social and financial incentive to do so once they were estranged from the Church. This is exactly the kind of testimony that historians treat as highly credible: testimony maintained against self-interest. The Eight Witnesses similarly testified of handling the plates physically and never recanted. The evidentiary weight of the witness testimonies is acknowledged even by non-LDS scholars who do not accept the Book of Mormon’s historicity as a conclusion.

V. Is Eyring’s Counsel to Students Appropriate?

LDS Discussions frames Eyring’s devotional as a “gross abuse of authority” — using his institutional position to instill fear and prevent students from making “informed decisions.” This framing is itself a rhetorical maneuver. LDS Discussions produces extensive content explicitly designed to persuade young Latter-day Saints that the Church is not true, while presenting contested empirical claims as settled and failing to disclose the substantial scholarly rebuttal literature. Every educator, in every context, presents a framework for interpreting evidence. The question is not whether a framework is presented but whether it is honest.

Eyring’s counsel can be evaluated in good faith on its merits: he encouraged students to ground themselves in the most foundational, transformative truths of the gospel — the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the reality of the Restoration, and the daily renewal of covenantal relationship through repentance. He acknowledged that some questions have no clear immediate intellectual answer. He did not instruct students never to read or study. He counseled them not to let peripheral disputes dislodge foundational commitments that have already been confirmed through spiritual experience.

This is not fear-mongering. It is the counsel of Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology, of Wolterstorff’s control beliefs, of James’s “will to believe,” and of every mature tradition of religious epistemology: that the properly grounded believer does not owe the skeptic an infinite regress of justifications before being permitted to hold a faith commitment. A student who has prayed sincerely and received a confirmation of the Holy Ghost is in possession of evidence — the most direct evidence possible regarding the reality of God and the truth of the Restoration. The demand that she override that evidence with the contested historical arguments of a polemical website is not a demand for rationality. It is a demand for a particular philosophical framework — one that prejudges the question by excluding spiritual evidence from the evidential base.

VI. The Self-Referential Problem in LDS Discussions’ Argument

There is a final and decisive philosophical problem with LDS Discussions’ critique that must be named directly. The blog’s author writes: “I got a spiritual confirmation that [the prophets of the church spoke to God]. Now that I’ve since learned they have gotten it wrong, what does that say about using emotions to discern truth when the leaders of the church can’t even do it?”

This argument presupposes precisely what is in dispute. The claim that Church leaders “got it wrong” on DNA, on the Book of Abraham, on the First Vision, and on LGBT policy is presented as a settled empirical fact that defeats the earlier spiritual testimony. But as we have shown above, none of these claims is settled in the way the blog asserts. The author’s earlier spiritual experience is being overturned by contested historical and scientific arguments — which means the author has already made a prior epistemological choice: to treat critical historical scholarship as more authoritative than spiritual experience. That is not a neutral epistemological choice. It is a specific philosophical commitment — methodological secularism — that is no more self-evident than the alternative.

More importantly, the argument has a self-referential structure: “I once had a spiritual experience that confirmed the Church. Now I have read arguments that the Church is false. Therefore spiritual experience is unreliable as evidence.” But this inference is valid only if the arguments against the Church are themselves conclusive — which the author cannot establish without already assuming that empirical scholarship trumps spiritual experience. The argument is circular. It does not refute Eyring’s epistemology; it merely assumes a competing one.

Conclusion

Henry J. Eyring’s devotional does not advocate blind faith. It advocates warranted, properly basic, spiritually grounded faith — the kind of mature religious commitment that the greatest epistemologists of the twentieth century, from Plantinga to Wolterstorff to Alston, have demonstrated is fully rational. The LDS Discussions critique, for all its energy, never engages the scholarly epistemological literature that directly addresses these questions. It assumes the very framework — classical evidentialism — that mainstream philosophy of religion has spent fifty years dismantling.

The specific empirical claims it deploys — on the Book of Abraham, DNA, the First Vision, and the witnesses — are contested in the scholarly literature in ways the blog does not acknowledge. A balanced, honest assessment of the evidence is far more equivocal than LDS Discussions represents. Students who encounter these arguments deserve to know that there is a serious, academically credentialed body of scholarship that directly rebuts them.

President Eyring’s counsel to anchor oneself in the Atonement, the Restoration, and daily repentance is not an instruction to stop thinking. It is an instruction to think clearly — to distinguish between foundational, warranted commitments and peripheral, contested disputes; to recognize that one’s spiritual confirmation is real evidence, not mere emotion; and to exercise the same rational resilience in faith that any mature scientist, philosopher, or jurist exercises in their own domain of inquiry.

That is not blind faith. That is exactly what big faith is.

Key Scholarly References

Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd ed. Eerdmans, 1984.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F.L. Battles. Westminster John Knox Press, 1960.

Alston, William P. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Cornell University Press, 1991.

James, William. “The Will to Believe.” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1979 [1896].

Quine, W.V.O., and J.S. Ullian. The Web of Belief. Random House, 1970.

Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Knopf, 2005.

Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Religious Studies Center/Deseret Book, 2017.

Nibley, Hugh. Abraham in Egypt. FARMS/Deseret Book, 2000.

Sorenson, John L. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. FARMS/Deseret Book, 1996.

Clifford, W.K. “The Ethics of Belief.” Lectures and Essays. Macmillan, 1877.