"Please Don't Look Under the Hood": A Response to LDS Discussions

A response to the LDS Discussions blog post of January 23, 2019, which critiqued Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge's BYU devotional "Stand Forever." We address each substantive claim in turn, applying the same standards of evidence and logic the author invites.

I. The Core Charge: Suppression of Inquiry

The blog's central indictment is that Elder Corbridge's primary-versus-secondary-questions framework is intellectually dishonest — a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to steer believers away from troublesome evidence. "What greater admission," the author asks, "can you get from this church that their truth claims do not hold up than multiple leaders telling the youth of the church not to research it?"

This framing contains a category error so fundamental that it undermines every argument built upon it. Corbridge's framework is not a prohibition on inquiry; it is a proposal about epistemic ordering — the logical sequence in which questions must be engaged if one is to avoid an infinite regress of doubt. Every coherent system of knowledge, secular or religious, operates on exactly this principle. A physicist does not abandon quantum mechanics because every implication of the uncertainty principle has not been resolved; a historian does not reject the existence of Julius Caesar because every papyrus fragment has not been authenticated. One anchors belief in the best available evidence at the foundational level and proceeds from there. Corbridge is doing epistemology, not issuing a gag order.

The author's car analogy — "if I tell you not to look under the hood, you'd walk away" — is vivid but inverts the actual situation. The Church publishes its own Gospel Topics Essays, funds BYU's Near Eastern Studies department, houses the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and employs professional historians whose entire job is to examine "what is under the hood." A suppressor does not build the most exhaustive documentary archive of its own founder's life in the history of religious scholarship. The Church's transparency is imperfect and historically uneven, but the "sealed hood" narrative is not supported by the documentary record of the past two decades.

II. Primary vs. Secondary Questions: Logical Analysis

The blog objects that Corbridge's four primary questions improperly include belief in God and Christ, since those are accepted by two billion non-LDS Christians. Therefore, the author argues, the only genuinely Latter-day Saint primary questions are whether Joseph Smith was a prophet and whether the Church is the kingdom of God.

This objection inadvertently strengthens Corbridge's point. If God exists and Christ is the Savior — claims the author implicitly concedes are defensible since he does not argue against them — then the question of prophetic authority becomes of extraordinary moral and eternal importance. Corbridge includes the theistic foundation precisely because it is foundational: you cannot assess whether Joseph Smith was a prophet unless you first have a working framework for what prophecy and divine communication look like. The secondary questions — about papyrus facsimiles, DNA haplogroups, or temple ritual changes — are downstream of this. Their evidential weight depends entirely on assumptions about what God would or would not permit a prophet to do. Those assumptions are settled at the primary level, not the secondary one.

The blog also charges circularity: "Joseph Smith was a prophet because it's true, and it's true because Joseph Smith was a prophet." But this misreads the argument. The positive case for Joseph Smith's prophethood rests on independently examinable evidence: the witness accounts of the Book of Mormon translation, the historical context of the Restoration, the textual complexity of the Book of Mormon for a man of Smith's education, the convergent testimonies of multiple non-corroborated witnesses to the plates, and the early church's rapid growth under intense persecution. One can dispute each of those evidences — but that is a substantive debate, not a circular one. Corbridge's framework does not preclude examining secondary questions; it simply argues that unresolved secondary questions, taken in isolation, cannot override the cumulative primary case.

III. The Book of Abraham

The blog calls the Book of Abraham a "smoking gun" on the grounds that Joseph Smith's translation does not match what Egyptologists say the recovered papyri say. This is the single most commonly cited evidence against Joseph Smith's prophetic claims, and it deserves a serious answer.

The blog asserts: "we have the source material and academics have shown there was no long/lost scroll." This is asserted as settled fact, but it is not. What survived the 1871 Chicago fire was a partial collection of the original Joseph Smith Papyri. The Church's own Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges that scholars are "not in a position to state with confidence" that all relevant papyri have been recovered. FAIR LDS and Egyptologist John Gee of BYU have argued at length that the facsimiles and surviving text fragments were used as a catalyst — or that a now-lost portion contained the actual Abrahamic text — rather than serving as the word-for-word source material.

The blog dismisses this "missing papyrus" theory as special pleading. But consider the parallel: scholars regularly acknowledge that ancient documents referenced in existing texts have not survived. No serious historian concludes that because a referenced document is lost, the referencing document is therefore fraudulent. The burden of proof for the "no lost scroll" claim — the claim the blog treats as obvious — is not actually met by current evidence. What we know is that the surviving fragments are funerary documents. What we do not know is whether they represent the totality of what Joseph Smith possessed and consulted.

Furthermore, LDS Egyptologist Kerry Muhlestein and others at the Interpreter Foundation have argued that the relationship between Egyptian textual traditions in Joseph Smith's era and the Book of Abraham is more complex than a simple "he got it wrong" dismissal suggests. Critics are entitled to their interpretation; they are not entitled to call it an academic consensus when it remains an active scholarly debate among specialists, some of whom are not Latter-day Saints.

IV. Deutero-Isaiah and the Book of Mormon

The blog states flatly: "Deutero-Isaiah verses in the Book of Mormon show the Book of Mormon was written in the 19th century." This treats the Documentary Hypothesis on Isaiah as settled science. It is not.

The two-Isaiah theory rests on arguments from internal style, vocabulary, and assumed predictive impossibility — the premise that no prophet could have foretold Cyrus by name two centuries before his reign. That last premise is a philosophical assumption about the nature of prophecy, not a finding of textual science. Scholars who are committed to divine inspiration in the Hebrew Bible — not only Latter-day Saints, but conservative Jewish and Christian scholars — have contested the multi-author hypothesis on linguistic and structural grounds for over a century.

Avraham Gileadi's structural analysis of Isaiah — independently peer-reviewed and praised by non-LDS Hebraists — identifies a unified bifid structure spanning all 66 chapters that makes literary sense only if understood as a single coherent composition. The deliberate interlocking of themes across "First" and "Second" Isaiah militates against separate authorship. Daniel T. Ellsworth in the Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2017) demonstrated viable alternative textual assumptions that reconcile scholarly evidence with single-Isaiah authorship.

The blog's argument requires the reader to accept that the multi-author hypothesis is definitively proven. It is not. It is the majority view in secular biblical scholarship, which begins from a methodological naturalism that excludes predictive prophecy by definition. That is a philosophical starting point, not a conclusion of evidence. The Book of Mormon's use of Isaiah passages attributed to "Second Isaiah" is therefore not a smoking gun — it is a live scholarly question whose answer depends substantially on prior epistemological commitments.

V. DNA and the Lamanites

The blog asserts: "DNA studies prove that the Native Americans were from Asia, not Israel as Joseph Smith claimed." This conflates two distinct propositions: (1) that some ancestors of Native Americans migrated from Asia across Beringia, and (2) that no small group of Middle Eastern migrants could have arrived in the Americas around 600 B.C. The DNA evidence establishes the first; it does not establish the second.

As the Interpreter Foundation and BYU scholars have documented extensively, a founding group of 30 to 50 individuals arriving into a population of millions would, within a few generations, leave a genetic trace statistically undetectable by current haplogroup analysis. This is not special pleading invented after the fact — it is basic population genetics. The Vikings settled the North American coast around 1000 A.D. and left no detectable genetic signature in modern Native American populations. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when the expected signal would fall below the threshold of detection regardless of whether the migration occurred.

The blog also relies on an older reading of the Book of Mormon that treats Lehi's family as the literal ancestors of all Native Americans. The text itself does not require this. The Book of Mormon describes a land already containing many inhabitants. The updated 2006 introduction language reflects closer reading of what the text actually claims, not a "massive acknowledgement" of fraud. The DNA argument, to be decisive, would need to show that no small Middle Eastern migration could have occurred and been genetically absorbed. No geneticist has argued this.

VI. Adam Clarke and the Joseph Smith Translation

The blog cites a BYU study finding that Joseph Smith "plagiarized Adam Clarke's Biblical commentaries for the Joseph Smith Translation." The word "plagiarized" is doing enormous work here that the underlying research does not support.

Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon's 2017 study identified parallel passages between the JST and Clarke's commentary. Wayment himself — one of the study's authors — explicitly stated he does not regard this as plagiarism. He argued instead that Joseph Smith used Clarke as a scholarly tool in a process of inspired revision. Kent Jackson of BYU's Religious Education department published a detailed response demonstrating that in numerous cases where Clarke recommended multiple changes to adjacent verses, Smith adopted none of them — a pattern inconsistent with simple copying, and more consistent with independent inspiration engaging similar textual problems.

The Latter-day Saint understanding of revelation is not dictation by a divine robot. Joseph Smith described the process as involving his own intellect and study. D&C 9:7–8 explicitly commands Oliver Cowdery to "study it out in your mind." A prophet using the best available scholarly tools — even unconsciously — is not disqualifying evidence against inspiration. It is consistent with what the Church has always taught about how revelation operates.

VII. Elias and Elijah at the Kirtland Temple

The blog argues that Joseph Smith's vision of both "Elias" and "Elijah" in the Kirtland Temple (D&C 110) proves his ignorance because "Elias" is simply the Greek form of "Elijah" — they are the same person.

This argument is flatly contradicted by New Testament usage. In Matthew 11:13–15, Jesus applies the term "Elias" to John the Baptist — who was categorically not the prophet Elijah returned in the body. Jesus's own usage establishes that "Elias" functions in the New Testament as a title for a forerunner or preparatory figure, distinct from the specific individual Elijah who was taken to heaven in 2 Kings 2. FAIR LDS documents this usage thoroughly, and it predates Joseph Smith by eighteen centuries.

D&C 110 records that "Elias" appeared and "committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham," while "Elijah" appeared separately and "committed unto us the keys of" sealing power. These are two distinct missions — Abrahamic covenant authority versus sealing power. The distinction is theologically coherent and exegetically defensible entirely apart from the Greek/Hebrew translation point. The blog's argument collapses under elementary New Testament textual analysis.

VIII. The Transfiguration of Brigham Young

The blog cites the Transfiguration of Brigham Young as a faith-promoting story the Church teaches that "simply did not happen," based on historian Richard Van Wagoner's documentation of its apparently late development in the historical record. This is one of the blog's stronger historical arguments and deserves acknowledgment as genuinely complex.

Several important caveats apply. First, the absence of early written record is not conclusive proof that the experience did not occur. Oral transmission of significant events in tight-knit religious communities frequently precedes written codification. Second, the early accounts of the meeting that do exist record that Brigham Young spoke with unusual power and authority — the qualitative dimension of the experience is corroborated even if the visual miraculous element is contested. Third, the question of Brigham Young's legitimate succession does not stand or fall on this single contested narrative; it rests primarily on the consistent vote of apostolic quorum authority and the sustained institutional development of the main Latter-day Saint body under his leadership versus the fragmentation of splinter claimants.

The Church's current curriculum handles the transfiguration account with historical nuance; it is not the central argument for Young's legitimacy even in correlated materials. This argument is therefore weaker than the blog suggests.

IX. Cognitive Dissonance and the Epistemology of Spiritual Witness

The blog applies the cognitive dissonance framework to explain Elder Corbridge's emotional experience reading critical materials: he felt "gloom" not because the Spirit was absent but because the information contradicted his prior beliefs. This is presented as the scientifically correct explanation that supersedes Corbridge's own account of his experience.

This move is philosophically illegitimate and the blog's own logic undermines it. The same cognitive dissonance framework applies with equal force to the blog's author. When a lifelong Latter-day Saint encounters information challenging their faith, cognitive dissonance produces emotional discomfort. But when the same individual encounters arguments defending the Church, the cognitive dissonance of reconsidering their disaffection produces dismissal, rationalization, and motivated skepticism. The cognitive dissonance label is not a neutral diagnostic tool — it is a weapon that cuts in every direction equally, including against the author's own certainty that "the church is not true."

Furthermore, the blog's epistemological framework is internally inconsistent. The author simultaneously argues that (a) rational, scientific, and academic methods definitively refute Latter-day Saint truth claims, and (b) that Corbridge's emotional gloom is explicable by psychology rather than spiritual reality. But if (a) is true, then scientific methodology is epistemically authoritative. Yet that same methodology — specifically cognitive psychology — tells us that our subjective sense of certainty about truth claims, including the author's conviction that "the church is not true," is equally subject to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. The author's certainty is no less a psychological phenomenon than Corbridge's peace.

Corbridge's "divine method of learning" is not a rejection of reason and evidence. It is a claim that a certain class of epistemic access — direct spiritual experience — is reliable in ways that cannot be fully reduced to empirical inference. William Alston's Perceiving God (Cornell University Press, 1991) — a rigorous analytic philosophy argument — defends the epistemic rationality of religious experience against exactly the kind of dismissal the blog employs. Dismissing spiritual witness as mere psychology is not a scientific finding; it is a materialist philosophical assumption dressed in scientific clothing.

X. Revelation, the Mark Hofmann Forgeries, and Institutional Limitations

The blog asks why Church leaders were deceived by the Mark Hofmann forgeries if they are prophets, seers, and revelators. The Latter-day Saint understanding of prophetic authority has never held that the prophet operates as an infallible oracle in all matters. Joseph Smith himself stated: "A prophet is a prophet only when acting as such." The scriptural record of prophets — in both Old and New Testaments — is filled with moments of human error, misjudgment, and limitation. Peter was rebuked by Paul. Moses struck the rock.

Hofmann successfully deceived the FBI, the Library of Congress, leading historians, and the world's foremost experts in document authentication. His forgeries were so sophisticated that they were not detected by physical or chemical analysis with the technology available at the time. The fact that Church leaders were among his victims says nothing specific about prophetic authority — it says that Hofmann was extraordinarily skilled. The blog presents this as a damning indictment of revelation; it is, at most, evidence that prophets do not receive continuous omniscient surveillance of every potential deception in their environment. That is a straw prophet, not the Church's actual claim.

XI. Polygamy, Polyandry, and the D&C

The blog raises polyandry and the late removal of an anti-polygamy statement from D&C 101 as evidence of fraud and cover-up. The 1835 statement was appended to the Doctrine and Covenants in response to anti-polygamy accusations — a public denial at a time when plural marriage was practiced privately. Its subsequent removal is consistent with the Church's changed public posture after the 1852 official announcement of polygamy. The fact that this statement was removed is not evidence of revelation-tampering; it is straightforwardly explained by the shift from private to public practice and the recognition that the 1835 statement was no longer accurate.

On polyandry: the historical record is complex and requires more nuance than the blog allows. Some of Joseph Smith's sealings to already-married women appear to have been dynastic or eternity-only sealings without sexual component, as historian Brian Hales has documented across three volumes of careful primary-source research. The blog treats the most damaging interpretation as the only defensible one; the historical evidence permits a more complex picture even while acknowledging genuine moral difficulties in the practice.

XII. The Pattern Argument and the Weight of Evidence

The blog's most sophisticated move is its appeal to cumulative pattern rather than individual proofs: "It is the overall pattern that truly does the church's truth claims in." Cumulative case arguments are legitimate — and they cut in both directions. The case for the Restoration also presents a cumulative pattern that has persuaded millions of educated, thoughtful people across every culture and century since 1830.

Consider what must be true if the Church is fraudulent: Joseph Smith, with a third-grade education, produced the Book of Mormon — a 500-page ancient narrative with internally consistent geography, legal and poetic structures, and theological sophistication — in roughly 60 days of dictation with no substantial revisions or manuscripts. He accurately described ancient Near Eastern practices, including the literary form chiasmus, not identified by Western scholars until the 20th century. Eleven witnesses testified to physically handling the plates, and none of them — even those who later left the Church in bitterness — ever denied the physical reality of what they saw and felt. The Book of Mormon exists. The question is how.

The blog compares Latter-day Saint belief to flat-earthers and 9/11 conspiracists. This comparison is not an argument — it is rhetoric deployed in place of argument. Flat-earth theory denies observational evidence available to anyone with eyes and basic instruments. The Restoration's truth claims rest on historical and spiritual evidence that is not refuted by the same direct observation. Comparing them does not advance the evidential case; it signals that careful argument has been abandoned in favor of emotional persuasion.

XIII. Conclusion: Looking Under the Hood, Carefully

We agree with the blog on one essential point: intellectual honesty demands that believers look under the hood. The Gospel Topics Essays exist precisely because the Church has moved toward transparency about its own history. The Joseph Smith Papers Project — the most comprehensive scholarly documentary of any American religious founder in history — exists because the Church believes its history can withstand scrutiny. Corbridge himself read everything the critics produced and emerged with stronger faith, not because he suppressed the evidence but because he evaluated it within a coherent epistemological framework that took seriously both historical evidence and spiritual experience.

What the blog asks readers to do is not look under the hood. It asks readers to accept that the author's examination of the engine has yielded the only correct conclusion — and that anyone who reaches a different conclusion after looking under the same hood has done so through bias, fear, or self-deception. That is not intellectual openness. It is the same epistemic closure the blog accuses Elder Corbridge of promoting, deployed in the opposite direction.

The DNA question has a reasonable answer. The Deutero-Isaiah question is genuinely contested among scholars. The Book of Abraham question depends on unresolved questions about what papyri existed. The JST-Clarke parallels are explainable without fraud. The Elias/Elijah issue is not an error under New Testament exegesis. The Mark Hofmann deception proves nothing specific about prophetic authority. The transfiguration narrative is historically complex but not the foundation of Brigham Young's succession claim.

None of these answers is perfect or final. The Church has never claimed infallibility in its history, its leaders, or its scholarship. What it claims is that Joseph Smith saw the Father and the Son, that the Book of Mormon is a genuine ancient record translated by the gift and power of God, and that the authority restored through him still operates in the world. Those primary claims, examined on their own terms against the full weight of evidence, remain not only defensible but compelling. The engine runs. We invite you to look.

Sources and Further Reading

Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge, "Stand Forever," BYU Devotional, January 22, 2019 — speeches.byu.edu.

FAIR Latter-day Saints, "Isaiah and the Book of Mormon / Deutero-Isaiah" — fairlatterdaysaints.org.

FAIR Latter-day Saints, "Elias and Elijah at the Kirtland Temple" — fairlatterdaysaints.org.

FAIR Latter-day Saints, "Did Adam Clarke's Bible Commentary Influence the JST" — fairlatterdaysaints.org.

FAIR Latter-day Saints, "Book of Abraham / Joseph Smith Papyri / Identity and Nature" — fairlatterdaysaints.org.

The Interpreter Foundation, "Estimating the Evidence, Episode 4: On Nephite Genetics" — interpreterfoundation.org.

Daniel T. Ellsworth, "Deutero-Isaiah and the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2017).

Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon, "A Recovered Resource: The Use of Adam Clarke's Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith's Bible Translation," in Producing Ancient Scripture (University of Utah Press, 2020).

Kent Jackson, response to Wayment/Wilson-Lemmon — FAIR LDS, 2020.

Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Greg Kofford Books, 2013).

Richard S. Van Wagoner, "The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28/4 (1995).

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

Avraham Gileadi, The Literary Message of Isaiah (Hebraeus Press, 1994).