·S1 E50

Most LDS Faith Crises Start in the Wrong Place. Here's Where to Begin.

September 13

1h 8m

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Episode Description

Most people having a faith crisis are fighting on the branches — polygamy, DNA, the Book of Abraham, race and the priesthood — when the actual problem is buried somewhere underneath. What happens if you go all the way down to the roots and ask why anything exists at all?

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Jasmin Rappleye, Neal Rappleye, and Stephen Smoot sit down with Walker Wright, author of Nourishing the Roots: Seeking the Foundations of Latter-day Saint Testimony, published by FAIR. Walker takes a faith crisis apart from the bottom up — existence, intelligibility, morality, consciousness, God, the Resurrection, and the gold plates — and closes with the story of losing his sister at 11 and the years of atheism that followed.

===Informed Saints Credits===

Produced by The Ancient America Foundation

Producer: Spencer Clark

Hosts: Stephen Smoot, Neal Rappleye, Jasmin Rappleye

In this episode:

Elder Uchtdorf's roots-and-branches metaphor, mapped onto the first three temple recommend questions
Why a branch you're struggling with can sometimes just be pruned — and why you still have to face the hard issues eventually
Larry Corbridge's primary vs. secondary questions, and why an organism explains it better than concentric circles
Why no artifact from the ancient Near East or Mesoamerica will move a committed skeptic — and what "lucky guess" really means
Why nothing can predate existence, and what that implies about something self-existent, necessary, and eternal
Laws of nature, why math matches them, and Joseph Smith's revelations on the light of truth that was not created or made
Where objective morality comes from, and why the Holocaust is the test case
Andrew Ferguson on Thomas Nagel: why no materialist actually lives like a materialist
Fine-tuning and Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers — expand slightly faster or slower and there's no you
The multiverse, the inverse gambler's fallacy, and why it's fine-tuning with extra steps
The hard problem of consciousness, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", and how Mind and Cosmos got Nagel ostracized
Philosophical zombies, the China brain, and Alvin Plantinga on other minds and properly basic belief
Eternal intelligence, the mind of man, and the hierarchy of intelligences in Abraham 3
Miracles, divine healings, and what an exorcism implies about a hierarchy of spirits
Are Latter-day Saints materialists? Goodness, truth, beauty, and the telos of eternal progression
The Resurrection as the decisive revelation — Paul's undisputed letters, the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies, and a crucified messiah nobody expected
Why the eleven witnesses come up in every Christian-atheist debate, and why William Lane Craig and Trent Horn brush past them
Oliver Cowdery's hand in the printer's manuscript, Martin Harris's matter-of-fact language, and how early those sources really are
What kind of person could have written the Book of Mormon — Tolkien after twenty years at Oxford, or a farmhand with a stone in a hat?
John Clark's 1% problem and Matt Roper's work on anachronisms
Why Moroni's promise is a targeted spiritual experience and not Pam feeling God at Chili's
Walker's sister Nicole, the MTC moment that changed everything, and why a faith crisis is like a horror movie

Most LDS Faith Crises Start in the Wrong Place. Here's Where to Begin.

View Transcript

Episode Description

Never lose your place, on any device