Counterfeits, Confusion, and the Possibility of Transformation
A Philosophical-Theological Inquiry
Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez | 21 October 2026
Introduction
The conversation began with a column. Thomas read Isak the second part of Scott Lively’s “The Birth of Mormonism,” which argues that Joseph Smith’s church was the one fraud of America’s credulous nineteenth century that did not collapse but grew into an institution. Over the next three hours, the two men moved from that claim to a series of questions underneath it. How does anyone tell a true revelation from a counterfeit? Why does religion so often become an instrument of control? Who are the people of God? Can a person who has been changed expect that others can be changed, and on what grounds? Why would a good God make a world that contains a liar, confusion, and unfairness?
This essay treats each question as a problem. For each, it states the problem as sharply as the conversation allows, sets out the responses offered, and weighs them. During editing, I inserted post-production notes to correct facts and add relevant unspoken considerations. A closing section applies the whole to its intended purpose: a campaign to bring the nation to Christ. The aim is not a transcript or a summary but an argument: to see what follows if Thomas and Isak’s positions are taken seriously and pressed.
Problem 1: Discernment — How Is Jesus Different from Joseph Smith?
The problem
Isak put the skeptic’s question plainly. The charges that would be brought against Joseph Smith — that he claimed divine authority, revised an older faith, and attracted followers who wanted to believe — are the charges that were brought against Jesus. Both were killed by the establishment they challenged. Both built on a prior expectation: Jesus on Israel’s hope for a Messiah, Smith on Christians’ hope for a Second Coming and more. If a person rejects Smith’s claim, on what principle does he accept Jesus’ claim? Without such a principle, the believer’s acceptance of one and rejection of the other looks like an accident of upbringing.
Candidate solution 1: the test of fruit
Isak’s first answer to why people accept Jesus’ claim was the good Christianity does: the change of heart and the spirit that come over people who encounter Christ. Were it not for that, he said, he would think Christianity a fraud.
This test has scriptural support (“by their fruits ye shall know them,” Matthew 7:16), but the conversation itself exposed its limit. Isak and Thomas both said that the Mormons they know are good people who live out the light of Christ. If good fruit settled the question, it would settle it in Mormonism’s favor too. The fruit test can disqualify a teaching whose followers become worse; it cannot by itself distinguish two teachings whose followers both become better.
Candidate solution 2: the test of authority
The conversation’s decisive move came later. Thomas proposed, for argument’s sake, the strongest possible case for Mormonism: suppose every word Smith delivered were true, and the only falsehood was the claim that it came at the direction and with the authority of God’s approval. In that case, the follower would be following a spirit’s revelation rather than God’s. The consequence would extend beyond the content: accepting Smith’s revelation as God’s authorized message to man would set a precedent that truth comes through a man who announces a new revelation and declares earlier ones corrupted. Once people accept that precedent, the next man’s revelation can also be given divine standing, and a church can organize around whatever its current leader says. Isak named what had happened: the authority had changed.
The Christian and Jewish perspective is that God authorized his revelation over four thousand years, culminating in Jesus. The apostles warned against receiving any other gospel, even if it came from an angel of light (Galatians 1:8). That warning does not forbid all later revelation — the New Testament itself expects prophecy in the church (1 Corinthians 14) — but it does forbid a revelation that presents a different gospel or sets itself above the one already given. Smith’s revelation did both: it declared the prior transmission corrupted and established a new line of authority in himself and his successors. If the Bible’s revelation came from God, then a revelation like that did not. It came from a spirit other than God.
The concession made for argument’s sake should not obscure the actual case. LDS doctrine differs from the apostolic gospel on central points: it teaches that God the Father was once a man and has a body of flesh and bone, it replaces the Trinity with three separate beings, and it holds that faithful humans may be exalted to godhood. The hypothetical shows that even a perfect copy would fail the authority test; the actual teaching also fails the content test.
The test of authority asks not “Is this content good?” but “Where does this message relocate authority?” In Isak’s description, Jesus read the Scriptures as their author and spoke with authority (Matthew 7:29; Luke 4:16–21); He claimed the authority of being the fulfillment of what Israel had already received. Smith’s revelation claimed the same standing, so the decisive question is not only whether the message was true. It is what spirit gave Smith and his successors authority. What authority gave Joseph Smith the right to say the prior transmission was defective? The message of four thousand years ending with Jesus completes a lineage. Joseph Smith’s message retells that story with much additional material. Even if that story were completely true, if God did not authorize it to be told, it sets a precedent for telling stories that men receive from spirits. That is how other spirits come to influence men.
Candidate solution 3: the test of lineage and warning
Thomas also pointed to what the New Testament anticipated: an angel of light bringing another gospel (Galatians 1:8; 2 Corinthians 11:14). Smith’s claim — an angel, a new book, the prior church corrupted — matches the form the apostles warned against. By contrast, the Christian claim ends a four-thousand-year transmission that Thomas traced through the patriarchs, prophets, and Israel to Christ and the disciples.
Note: A historical consideration the conversation did not raise strengthens this test. The creed Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 is generally dated to within a few years of the crucifixion and names living witnesses to the resurrection whom readers could question. The plates on which the Book of Mormon rests were, by Smith’s account, returned to the angel and could never be examined.
Assessment
Of the three tests, the fruit test is necessary but not sufficient. The lineage test answers the question within the Christian frame, and the authority test does the most work because it explains why good fruit and true content can come from a false source. The inquiry’s answer to the skeptic is therefore this: Jesus and Smith differ not chiefly in the goodness of their followers or the plausibility of their stories, but in the spirit that delivered the revelation. A revelation that shifts scripture’s authority from God’s revelation through history to a spirit speaking through a man — whatever else it contains — is, by its own structure, a different religion (if we define different religions as originating in different spirits).
Problem 2: The Near-Perfect Counterfeit
The problem
The authority test raises a harder question. If a teaching can be true in every particular and still be a deception, then content alone cannot be the final criterion. But then what protects the believer from the same error? The Bible, too, came through human hands; Christians, too, have revised doctrine; Isak asked why everyone has changed the Bible so much and which version is right.
Candidate solution: Christ behind the text, tested in community and against provenance
Thomas answered that the question of versions, denominations, and doctrines is a distraction. The real question is what truth the Bible points to, and that truth is Christ — the conviction Isak’s mother returns to as our source of truth. The Bible is an imperfect instrument pointing at something perfect. The believer’s task is not to defend the instrument’s perfection but to find what it points at.
How do we do that without falling into Smith’s error? Thomas invoked Leonard’s teaching that each person is to be a prophet — to go to God and ask him to speak. Then he added the safeguard: since no one can be sure whether he is hearing the Holy Spirit or, like Smith, another spirit, believers must counsel together. “What did you hear, brother? What did you hear, sister?” A thing is established in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15; 2 Corinthians 13:1).
Of course, if all hear the same spirit speak, they will hear the same confirmatory message. This is in fact the Latter-day Saint method: Moroni 10:4 invites the reader to pray and receive an inner witness that the book is true. Communal hearing therefore cannot be the last check. What a community hears must be tested against things outside the hearers: agreement with the gospel the apostles already delivered, the public evidence of history, and the fruit of a teaching across generations.
So the issue of provenance arises again. How did the Bible come about? How did Joseph Smith’s revelation come about? Which one seems more likely to be the work of God in terms of method? Defenders of the Bible argue that God divinely stewarded His words over millennia, through many writers in many places who could not have coordinated, and that this stewardship itself indicates God’s hand blessing that message. Defenders of Joseph Smith claim the teaching was pure and uncorrupted because an angel delivered it directly to a single man seeking the true denomination. The circumstances surrounding Smith support that claim. Before the Book of Mormon, he was a paid treasure-seeker who looked for buried silver by gazing at a seer stone in a hat, and he was brought before a justice in 1826 on that account. He produced the Book of Mormon by the same stone-in-the-hat method, by the testimony of his own scribes. By his account, the plates went back to the angel. The papyri he said he translated the Book of Abraham from, rediscovered in 1967, are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts that say nothing about Abraham.
Assessment
This answer distributes revelation without dissolving it. It avoids two failures: the single prophet whose word is binding (the Mormon structure) and the isolated individual whose private impression is final (the structure of every self-made sect). It also matches Paul’s instruction that prophets speak two or three at a time while the others weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29) and John’s instruction to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). The criterion that ties it together is the one from Problem 1: every revelation is tested against Christ, and none may set itself above him. On this view, the believer is protected from the near-perfect counterfeit not by owning a perfect text but by keeping authority where the text locates it, and by checking every inner witness against the public record.
The answer has a cost the conversation acknowledged: it requires humility about one’s own hearing. Thomas said that no one knows in the moment whether he is Joseph Smith (hearing an angel of light) or hearing the voice of God. The community’s testimony, the apostolic standard, and the circumstances of the revelation give us indicators.
Problem 3: Religion as an Instrument of Power
The problem
Isak raised the history of race in the Latter-day Saint church: Brigham Young’s legalization of slavery in Utah Territory and his teaching that Black people bore the curse of Cain; the ban on Black men in the priesthood and Black members in the temples, kept until 1978 and defended with folklore during the civil rights era; and the 2013 disavowal of those explanations. Joseph Smith himself had been more equivocal — opposing immediate abolition, yet running for president on a platform to end slavery and allowing the ordination of Black men. Isak connected this to the antebellum South’s use of Scripture to defend slavery and asked whether religion is, at bottom, an excuse for wielding power over others.
Candidate solution 1: distinguishing concession from command
Isak suggested a distinction within Scripture itself. Some Old Testament laws regulated practices such as slavery because that was how things were then done; they told people to treat slaves rightly without commending slavery. Jesus, by contrast, nowhere endorsed slavery and preached freedom, including freedom from sin. This reading has a basis in Jesus’ own words about divorce: Moses permitted it “because of the hardness of your hearts: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). On this view, some law is concession, and the direction of revelation, fulfilled in Christ, is toward freedom.
Candidate solution 2: distinguishing revelation from institution
LDS history shows a church whose teaching on race tracked the surrounding culture: more open in its first years, hardened under Young, defended during the civil rights struggle, and abandoned when the culture moved on. That pattern is what one would expect if a doctrine came from the institution rather than from God. It confirms the conclusion of Problem 1: when a man’s word carries prophetic authority, the man’s prejudices and his era acquire that authority as well.
Note: The Book of Mormon’s dark-skin curse (2 Nephi 5:21; “dark and loathsome” is Mormon 5:15) falls on the Lamanites, who in the book’s own narrative are descendants of the Israelite Lehi. It is not directed at Semitic peoples, as Isak wondered. LDS tradition long identified the Lamanites with Native Americans; the exclusion of Black members rested on the separate “curse of Cain” folklore.
Assessment
Religion becomes an instrument of power when an institution claims the authority that belongs to God and then speaks with it on matters where it is merely repeating its culture. The remedy is not to abandon religion, but to keep it calibrated where it belongs. Christ’s teaching—love God, the first last, the greatest the servant, the neighbor loved as oneself—is the standard against which every church’s practice is measured, including its treatment of those it would rather exclude. Christianity has not escaped this failure; the antebellum South is Isak’s own example. But this failure betrays the standard of loving God and neighbor rather than expressing it.
Problem 4: Who Are the People of God?
The problem
The LDS discussion of the Jews — favorable in its official teaching, criticized for its eschatology and for proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims — led Isak to a question about American Christianity. Many Christians hold that Israel is God’s people, that its enemies are God’s enemies, and that Israel can therefore do no wrong. Isak objected that history and the Bible both show otherwise. If a Christian believes that Muslims, Hindus, and Mormons need Christ, consistency requires him to say the same of Jews. Yet that is hard to say in America, and criticism of the state of Israel is routinely called hatred of Jews. Are God’s people still a set-apart nation, or are they all who have met the God of Israel, who turns out to be the God of everyone?
Candidate solutions
Two answers compete within Christianity, and both claim Paul. One emphasizes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28) and that not all who descend from Israel are Israel (Romans 9:6); on this view God’s people are those in Christ, and the modern state has no special theological standing. The other emphasizes that God has not cast away his people and that his gifts and calling are irrevocable (Romans 11:1, 29); on this view Israel retains a distinct place in God’s purposes.
Isak’s own position, reasoned in the conversation, holds three things together. First, the gospel did not erase Jewish history; it is the next chapter. Second, Israel remains bound to obey God, and a Christian who believes Christ is the Messiah must believe that Jews, like all others, are called to him. Third, opposing a state’s actions is not hating a people, just as his criticism of America is not hatred of Americans.
Assessment
The framework Thomas set out later in the conversation answers this question. He described the standard he wants everyone to meet: that Jesus is Lord of all creation, and that the lineage running through the prophets and Israel arrives at Christ and goes out from him to the world. On that framework, Isak’s position follows. Israel’s calling is real, and it is a calling to Christ, not an exemption from him. The irrevocability Paul speaks of is God’s faithfulness to call, not a guarantee that a political state acts righteously. And because the God of Israel is the God of all, membership in his family is not a matter of race or culture — the point Isak made when he said that Jesus revealed a family deeper than any nation.
This position should be held together with a clear rejection of anti-Semitism, which Isak affirmed. Hatred of Jews as a people is hatred of neighbors and stands condemned by the same standard that calls everyone, Jews included, to Christ.
Problem 5: The Recurrence of Pharisaism
The problem
When Thomas asked what problem he was trying to solve, Isak stated a pattern. Jesus rebuked a religion that had become ensnared in its own laws. Yet every movement that comes after him seems to do the same: write a rulebook, draw a boundary, and produce more separation. Isak describes the result: a church that works smoothly can become a well-oiled machine of control, and its members slowly come to believe they have it right and are better, cutting them off from the world they were sent to reach. He prefers connection to religion — conversations with friends trying to learn how to be good and bear the suffering of being human.
Candidate solution 1: connection without institution
Isak’s preference is real and valuable: the conversations he describes are the kind that actually change people. But the solution has a limit, which Isak himself named. His doubt is not about God but about groups — about whether people can come together and get it right. Connection without a shared standard or structure cannot carry what Isak wants: for others to experience what he has. Transmission requires some form.
Candidate solution 2: freedom in Christ now, under Christ’s authority
Thomas’s answer located the failure precisely. The Mormons he has known are good people, but they submit to a prophet whose demands consume their lives — a point he credited to Isak’s father. He described the beehive symbol as apt: a hive of workers and drones serving a queen, which is not the kingdom of heaven. Obligation without end feels like slavery, and the promise that it will be good someday is a promise every false messiah has made. Against this he set the freedom in Christ (Galatians 5:1), which is for today.
Assessment
Pharisaism recurs whenever a community’s rules acquire authority independent of the one who gave the community life. The solution is not the absence of community but a community that keeps Christ as its authority and practices the shared discernment described in Problem 2. Such a community still has boundaries — Isak himself said it is not against God to tell some people they cannot come into his home — but its boundaries serve love rather than replacing it. The test of whether a church has become Pharisaic is the one Thomas applied: does it give its members the freedom of Christ now, or a burden in exchange for a promise?
Problem 6: The Object of Faith
The problem
After describing his beliefs, Isak said he might lack faith — faith that God can do anything, that faith can move a mountain. Yet he also said that he believes God is real, that Jesus did and said what is recorded, and that he has been changed. What, then, is the faith he lacks?
Candidate solution: separating capacity, will, and alignment
Thomas asked a clarifying question: is it faith that God can move a mountain, or faith that he will — because of prayer, desire, or grace? He said that he did not believe Isak doubted God’s ability. Isak agreed and said the matter is aligning oneself with God’s will, which Thomas restated as believing that such alignment has an effect. Isak said that he does see that effect, gradually rather than miraculously. He concluded that his doubt was not in God or in Jesus, but in whether a group of people could come together and get it right. When asked whether he could have faith that he could join with others and have an effect, Isak said yes.
Assessment
The distinction clarifies what kind of doubt Isak has. It is not unbelief in God’s power or in the efficacy of aligning with God’s will (1 John 5:14). It is doubt about other people’s willingness — a prediction about human nature. That reframes the problem: Isak’s question is not theological but anthropological. Can people change in large numbers? The next problem takes it up.
Problem 7: Can People Change at Scale?
The problem
Thomas stated Isak’s doubt in its strongest form. His own vision, including the purpose of his presidential candidacy, looks like tilting at windmills. People are formed by age ten, twelve, or fifteen and stay that way. Individuals change here and there, but entire religions do not turn around. Even a voice from the sky would be dismissed the next morning as a bad tamale. If that’s how people are, the vision is a dream and without power.
Candidate solution: the argument from the data point
Thomas answered with an argument that can be laid out in steps.
- Isak has changed. He said so himself, attributing it to conversations with Thomas, God, and his mother, and to the Sunday meetings. Thomas called him someone who “made it,” after about a year and a half of conversation.
- So, change like this through this kind of conversation is possible. It is not theory; it happened.
- God wants this transformation for everyone. Thomas found the alternative — a God who wants joy and peace for some but not for others he dislikes — absurd to the point of comedy. Isak agreed that God probably does want it for all.
- The change was transmissible. When Isak said a few days earlier, “I think I got it,” Thomas heard evidence that the method was good enough to affect someone else.
- A method that moves a person in the right direction can be followed further and refined — concentrated, clarified, illustrated, made more appealing — and taught to others who teach others, as Jesus taught twelve.
- Therefore, what God wants, and what has been shown possible in one case, can, with persistence, be extended.
Objections and replies
The obvious objection is that one case proves little; a single transformation does not show that millions will follow. Thomas’s argument does not claim that it does. Step 2 establishes possibility, not inevitability. The gap between possibility and realization is filled not by the data but by two further things: God’s will (step 3) and human perseverance (step 5). The argument’s conclusion is not “It will happen” but “There is no reason to stop, and every reason to continue.”
A second objection is that Isak’s change was produced by unusual conditions — long, personal attention from one teacher — which cannot be multiplied. Thomas’s answer was method: categorize people, find what works for each type, and build the means of reaching them: a school, a book, video, social media, speeches, groups, and devices that change how people’s brains resolve emotional trauma and their ability to comprehend — the color-and-light therapy and the Thinking Cap device he is developing for that purpose. The one-person-teaches-twelve pattern is how a personal method becomes a movement.
Note: Isak supplied independent evidence for step 4. He reported that his own conversations with others have become spiritual conversations, that he sometimes hears Thomas’s way of thinking in his own words, and that friends who ask about his sobriety have begun drinking less themselves. Transmission had already passed one more link.
Assessment
The argument from the data point does not answer the pessimist by predicting success. It answers him by showing that his premise — that people do not change — is false in at least one observed case, and that the conditions of that change are not unique in kind. Pessimism about human nature is a generalization; a counterexample defeats a universal claim. What remains is a practical question of method, a moral question of persistence, and a question the argument cannot answer by itself: whose work the change finally is. The next problem takes that up.
Problem 8: Method and Grace
The problem
The argument of Problem 7 is built almost entirely from human means: conversation, categories of people, strategies, media, devices, the twelve. Yet the goal — a nation brought to Christ and sanctified — is inhumanly high, and Thomas holds that no human effort can achieve it; it must be a divine move. This creates a dilemma. If transformation is a matter of method, then the project is a human program with God’s name attached, and its failure would be a failure of technique. If transformation is entirely God’s work, then method seems pointless, and one might simply wait.
Candidate solution: planting, watering, and the increase
Scripture refuses both horns. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44): conversion is God’s work. Yet Paul planted, and Apollos watered, and Paul does not call their labor pointless; he says only that God gave the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). The same pairing appears in Philippians 2:12–13: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, “for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” The human labor is real and commanded; its success is God’s. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).
The data point itself confirms this. Isak did not attribute his change to conversation alone. He named conversation with Thomas, with God, and with his mother, and he said that the God he knows now is the same God he has known since childhood, who has guided him all along. The method was the occasion; on Isak’s own account, the change came from a source the method did not provide.
This locates prayer at the center of the project rather than at its edges. Jesus, looking at the multitudes, told his disciples to “pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38). The great American awakenings were not engineered by any program. They came when prayer and preaching met a moment God chose: the revivals under Edwards and Whitefield in the 1730s and 1740s, the Second Great Awakening that Lively describes, and the 1857–58 Prayer Meeting Revival, which began with a handful of businessmen praying at noon in New York.
Assessment
The relation between method and grace is the relation between sowing and harvest. The sower cannot make the seed grow, but without sowing, there is no harvest. Method is therefore not a technique for producing conversions; it is faithfulness in sowing, done in prayer, with the outcome left to God. This answers both horns of the dilemma. The project is not a human program, because its success is not in human hands. It is not passive waiting, because faith, as Problem 13 argues, pays its dues. The proper posture is the one Thomas described: hold the faith that God wants the outcome, and act as though He will grant it.
Problem 9: What Is the Change? Repentance and Righteousness
The problem
Much of the essay’s language for transformation is the language of sight: a hat with a screen, windows onto God, higher resolution. That language is accurate as far as it goes, but it risks suggesting that transformation is merely a change of perspective — seeing the world more truly. Thomas names the goal as sanctification, and sanctification is more than seeing. It is turning from sin and becoming holy. Without that content, “bringing the nation to Christ” has no definite meaning a nation could recognize or measure itself by.
Candidate solution: turning, and the measure of the turn
The conversation contains the content, though it did not set it out as such. Isak described Christ as taking on everyone’s sins and God’s wrath. He described the sense of wrong that comes when he does, or is about to do, something wrong, and attributed it to God. He said that through Jesus, past evil no longer binds a person, but that this requires continuing on the path — seeking God and doing what Jesus said. His own change includes sobriety and the surrender of the life he had planned in his head. He compared himself to Peter, who failed and was restored (John 21:15–17). That is repentance: a change of mind that becomes a change of life (Acts 3:19; 2 Corinthians 7:10). “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Thomas’s platform provides the measure of the turn: an ordered test he applies to personal and public acts alike. First, is it righteous — is it what God judges and establishes, is it lawful before him? Second, if it is righteous, is it loving? Third, would I want it done to me — feeling the neighbor’s situation in my own body, mind, and heart, measured not by momentary appetite but by the self committed to righteousness and the soul’s eternal perspective? Love that bypasses righteousness becomes humoring, and humoring a neighbor in his sin is not love: “thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him” (Leviticus 19:17), followed in the next verse by “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Assessment
Seeing and turning are two halves of one change. The person who takes off the hat sees God and a standard; the person who repents begins to live by them. A campaign that offered only the first would produce people with a larger view and the same habits. The ordered test gives sanctification a public form: it can apply to a personal decision, a family practice, or a proposed law, and it can be argued openly. It also guards against the opposite error, the Pharisaism of Problem 5, because its second and third questions require applying righteousness with love and feeling the neighbor’s experience as one’s own.
Problem 10: The Hat with a Screen — Why People Cannot See
The problem
If change is possible, why is it rare? Thomas offered an image. People live wearing a hat with a little screen in front of their eyes. Wherever they look, they see only their own movie. By early adolescence, the hat is so firmly on that they don’t know they are wearing it and scoff at any suggestion that reality is anything other than what they see. This is the problem of epistemic enclosure: a worldview that cannot be questioned from inside because it supplies the very terms in which questions are asked.
Candidate solution: showing the holes in the screen
Thomas’s method is to show the person a place where their movie falls apart: it contains errors and cannot be trusted as the final standard and evidence of truth. His example was matter. Mass is made of atoms, atoms of protons and neutrons, those of quarks — and there the account stops. Where did quarks come from? As he put it, they arose from fields. Physics does not say where the seventeen or so fields of the Standard Model came from; they are simply given. Anyone who keeps asking “why?” and “where from?” must therefore conclude either that the fields have no source — that they came from nothing — or that they have a deeper one physics has not named. To rest on the first is faith of the same kind as belief in Apollo and Venus, and stopping at quarks and fields is like the falling studio light in The Truman Show: a sign the set is incomplete.
Against this, he offered a deeper account. Everything can be described in terms of conscious points; quarks and electrons are built from them; and conscious points come from the mind of God. The origin of God remains a mystery — the same place the materialist account ends — but the story is a level deeper and of far higher resolution, like 4K compared with 640 by 480, and it derives space, time, energy, and entropy from one source instead of leaving them as separate pieces to be trusted to experts.
Note: Conventional physics assigns the fields no origin. The Standard Model takes its fields as given. Proposed deeper theories — grand unification, string theory — would derive them from a more fundamental structure, which is then itself given. Some cosmologists do speak of the universe arising “from nothing”: Alexander Vilenkin’s proposal of quantum tunneling from nothing, and Lawrence Krauss’s popular A Universe from Nothing. But the “nothing” in those models already contains quantum laws, a point the philosopher of physics David Albert pressed in his review of Krauss. So the extrapolation in the text holds: every chain of “where from?” ends either in an unexplained given or in “nothing,” and physics supplies neither an origin nor a reason. Millikan’s oil-drop measurements of the electron’s charge were made in 1909–1913 (the electron had been identified by Thomson in 1897), and Gell-Mann and Zweig proposed quarks in 1964.
Assessment
The method is sound in form. It does not ask a person to abandon his screen on the questioner’s authority; it asks him to look closely at what his screen shows and notice where the picture stops. The strength of the physics example is that it meets the secular person on his own ground: the materialist believes he has escaped faith, and the example shows that he has only relocated it. The burden then shifts to comparing accounts by their explanatory reach. Thomas’s claim for the conscious-point model is that it reaches further — one source for all of physics, and that source is a mind. Whether that claim persuades depends on the model’s success as physics, which lies outside this conversation; but the argument’s structure does not depend on any one model. Its point is that every worldview rests on a given, and the person who sees that has taken the hat off far enough to ask which fundamental postulate is best. That lets him withdraw his allegiance from materialism as the ground of his morality.
Problem 11: Why Is There Anything — and Why a Liar?
The problem
If God is the source, why did he create? And why would his creation include the liar, the deception he enables, and the confusion that follows? This is the classical problem of evil in a particular form: not simply “Why suffering?” but “Why counterfeits that lead good people astray?”
Candidate solution 1: the loneliness of the One
Thomas began with creation’s purpose. God was alone in the beginning. The Father created the Son, but two is still lonely, so the Son made everything so there would be many to relate to. Each being has needs, and loneliness is painful, but the pain is answered when we ease each other’s burdens; loneliness makes companionship good. Thomas called this a sad story, but the only one we have. Isak’s response gave it direction: the work is to make the walk shared — to bring more people into walking with God, so no one is alone, because God did not want to be alone.
Note: The New Testament grounds creation in the Son (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16) and identifies God’s nature as love (1 John 4:8). Thomas’s account frames that love from the side of need — the One wanting relationship — and Isak’s response frames it from the side of mission.
Candidate solution 2: the necessity of every possibility
Thomas then turned to the liar. Referring to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” with its misunderstood man given over to lies, he said that this is the life of Satan. It had to exist because it is one of the polarities of possible existence, and a real creation must contain every possibility; a creation that left some out would be a staged game. God chose to reject the polarity of evil; He chose to embody love of the other and appreciation of being. But someone would lie, and the good would be lied to; some would believe, and colonies would form around lies, growing more believable as they grew larger. The most effective lie is the closest copy of the truth.
Thomas extended the argument to confusion. Without confusion, people would accept every pronouncement at once, and there would be no struggle, no victory, and no overcoming. He linked confusion to entropy, which counts the number of ways things can happen.
Note: In statistical mechanics, a state that can be realized in many ways — and therefore happens often — has high entropy, and a state realized in few ways has low entropy (S = k ln W). Applied to confusion: a world with many possible paths will mostly produce disorder unless something selects for order.
Objections and replies
This answer resembles two older ones. The principle of plenitude, traced by Arthur Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being, holds that a perfect creator brings every possible kind of being into existence. Irenaeus’s soul-making theodicy, revived by John Hick, holds that a world of struggle is necessary for forming mature persons. Thomas’s account combines them: plenitude explains why the liar exists, and the need for overcoming explains why confusion is good for us.
The standard objection to plenitude is that it seems to make God the author of evil. Thomas’s answer contains its own reply: God did not embody the polarity of the lie; He chose against it. The possibility was required; choosing it was not God’s. That distinction matches James 1:13, that God tempts no one. The standard objection to soul-making is that much suffering does not form anyone. The answer offered in the next problem — that hardship calls forth help from others, and that the help is itself the good — addresses part of that objection, though not all of it.
Assessment
The account explains what Isak most needed explained: why the world is full of near-truths and why sincere people follow them. It does not make the confusion less real, but it makes it intelligible. A world without counterfeits would be a world without the search, and the search — the pearl of great price, for which a person sells everything (Matthew 13:45–46) — is where finding becomes meaningful. On this view, Isak’s confusion is not evidence that something has gone wrong with his faith; it is the terrain faith was meant to cross.
Problem 12: Unfairness
The problem
Thomas suggested that what troubled Isak was a set of “what about” questions: what about people with other sexual practices, other gods, other customs and books, other politics, other classes, and other birth conditions? Each functions as a showstopper: if God were fair, how could it be this way?
Candidate solution 1: balance and the glory of God (Isak)
Isak corrected Thomas: he has come to terms with whataboutism, since it can be raised against anything. He holds that life is not fair by human judgment but balanced; every downswing has an upswing. He cited Jesus’ answer about the man born blind: neither he nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that God’s works might be shown in him (John 9:2–3). God is seen most clearly, Isak said, in those who are beaten down and still call themselves children of God, and in the weak who need food and shelter — present in the one who gives a cup of water, but especially, as Jesus taught, in the one who receives it (Matthew 10:42; 25:35–40). A world without unfairness would be easy and dull, leaving no room for character. Inequality should not be imposed, but it is part of life.
Candidate solution 2: difference entails a spectrum (Thomas)
Thomas added a structural argument. A created world must contain difference; difference means experiences are not the same; and if good and bad things can happen, they will, with an element of chance — like a pachinko ball that sometimes takes a bad bounce. This means that unfairness is not evidence against God. Arguments such as “I was born with a birth defect; how could a loving God allow such a thing to happen to a totally innocent child, so there is no God, or God is evil, or God made me this way” are theories that fail to fit the whole picture. The fitting response to another person’s bad bounce is to acknowledge it, help as one can — even a glass of water — and encourage endurance, because everyone carries a cross (Luke 9:23), including those who seem to have none.
Assessment
The two answers work at different levels. Thomas’s is explanatory: it shows why unfairness must exist in any real creation, and so removes it as an argument against God. Isak’s is existential: it shows where God is to be found within unfairness — in the sufferer who still believes and in the hand that brings water. Neither tells an individual sufferer why this particular bounce came to him, nor does either pretend to. Together, they establish that unfairness is not a reason to disbelieve, but an occasion to love. That is enough to dissolve the “what about” questions as showstoppers, which was the problem posed.
Problem 13: Hope, Faith, and Cynicism
The problem
If the price of a transformed world is almost beyond imagining, why not just live happily and settle for one’s own salvation? Thomas voiced the cynic’s position: he found the truth only after a long search, which is probably more work than most people would care to do. The difficulty of making that change, and the resistance to it, are so great that expecting it of your neighbor is almost too much, and thinking such a transformation could happen on a national or global scale is so unlikely as to be essentially impossible. In the face of such improbability, we might as well give up on expecting things to get better and just prepare for when Jesus returns and pray to get raptured soon out of this evil world.
Candidate solution: faith as paying the dues
Thomas distinguished hope from faith. Hope wants the outcome. Faith pays the dues and holds on until the outcome is real, even when it looks like a long shot. God wants the world brought along, and he knows the price. Isak rejected the cynic’s conclusion: giving up because others might not believe helps no one, and he wants others to experience what he has, and more. Thomas called that statement a testimony and the foundation of transformation: not a theory or a statistic, but “It happened to me, and it can happen to you.”
The escapist form of the cynic’s position also contradicts the commands given for the time of waiting. The servants in the parable are told to “occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13) — to trade with what they have been given, not to bury it. The disciples are sent to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19–20) and are called the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13–14), images of influence in the world, not withdrawal from it.
Assessment
This answer turns faith from a state of mind into a practice. It aligns with Hebrews 11:1, which calls faith the substance of things hoped for, and with Romans 8:24–25, which speaks of waiting patiently for what is not seen. The cynic’s error is to treat present evidence as a ceiling. The person of faith treats it as a starting point and acts as though the goal is reachable, because he has evidence (Problem 7) that it is reachable at least once, a God who wants it reached by all, and a promise that the increase is God’s to give (Problem 8).
Problem 14: The Many Religions
The problem
Isak said that the many religions are so close — each has part of the idea — yet so divided by history that unity seems impossible. Is every religion an equally valid path, or is one true and the rest false?
Candidate solution: windows onto God
Thomas said he is not a multiculturalist; he does not believe all cultures are equally valid, though each offers a valuable perspective on life. He took his model from Huston Smith’s account of Hinduism, in which each god is understood not as God but as a window onto God. Some windows open onto a shallow world, others onto a vast one. Christianity in its purest form encompasses them all, because Christ is the source of everything created (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17), including the Buddha and Muhammad.
He gave Buddhism as an example. The Buddha probably saw something deep — that everything is connected and life must be lived in balance — and the Eightfold Path teaches kindness, sexual morality, right treatment of others, and reverence. Thomas said he has found nothing evil in it, only teachings that go in the right direction and stop short in that they do not point to Christ. The question is what to focus on to see the Father, and Christ is the shortest route, because everything came from him; the long path to the Formless One reaches Christ along the way. The sincere Buddhists do not appear to be wicked; they do not have the liberty in Christ. They are aiming for liberation from the endless cycle of births and deaths, which is a very different goal than living a life of love guided by the spirit of Christ. The liar’s path is also a window, but a hard and sad one, because it moves away from God, making the path much longer; compassion dictates rescuing the drowning.
Assessment
This position avoids two errors. It is not relativism, because it ranks windows by how far they see and holds that one window — Christ — sees to the source. It is not blanket condemnation, because it credits what is true in other traditions and explains that truth: Christ, the source of all things, stands behind every window. The position also connects to Problem 1. Other traditions can contain much truth; what distinguishes them from the Christian claim is not that they contain none, but that they do not place final authority in the one from whom all truth comes.
Problem 15: Faith and Knowledge
The problem
Near the end, Isak described himself as a faithful, optimistic person with questions that need answering. He feels more secure in his faith about God and Christ than in his knowledge of politics and the world, and much of what he voices is his sorting of the ideologies around him rather than his own position. Is a faith that outruns its knowledge weak?
Candidate solution: knowledge in the service of faith
Thomas said that more faith than knowledge describes everyone, himself included. There is simply too much that we cannot see and know. His knowledge too is small compared with what is to be known. Regarding his faith in humanity’s salvation, he doesn’t know how it will happen, but he believes everything will work out and that everyone will come to know Christ. Faith needs an object to be known, but faith is by nature not yet manifest, hope is not yet present, and knowledge is always limited (1 Corinthians 13:12). Knowledge has a specific use: to fill the gaps where a particular question keeps a person from faith. He described his conversations with Isak as mapping a terrain of people moving toward God, with Isak representing one type — the searcher — distinct from those who are certain of their own systems.
Assessment
This answer reverses the usual worry. A faith that waited for complete knowledge would never begin, and a knowledge that tried to replace faith would end where the materialist account of matter ends: at a given that must simply be accepted. The proper relation is that knowledge clears obstacles and faith proceeds. Isak’s questions are therefore not a defect in his faith; they are the material from which he can build a method for reaching other seekers.
The Frame Applied: A Campaign to Bring the Nation to Christ
The conversation ended with Thomas saying the point of it all is to take it to the world. He has chosen a presidential candidacy as the vehicle to plant these ideas in the nation’s imagination as seeds. The goal is inhumanly high, and he holds that only a divine move can achieve it. The inquiry above provides the frame for such a campaign and sets conditions for it.
What the candidacy is for. It is a pulpit for sowing. A campaign reaches people who would never attend a church or read a theological essay, and it places moral and spiritual questions in the public square, where people decide how they will live together. Its proper aim is not to win obedience but to plant ideas — that there is a God behind the given, that authority belongs to Christ, that righteousness can be tested and argued for, and that change is possible — and to trust God for the increase (Problem 8).
The authority test applies to the campaign itself. Problem 1’s lesson is that authority must not shift from Christ to a man. A presidential campaign is the most person-centered vehicle in public life, and its message is easily heard as “follow the candidate.” The campaign must therefore point away from the candidate. Thomas’s stance already does this in part: he takes no money, calls his candidacy a witness, asks voters to write him in only if they are certain he would win, and otherwise asks them to vote for the best man on the ballot. Every position he advances is offered as advocacy with stated reasons, held open to a better argument, never imposed as final authority.
Law proposes; the Spirit converts. The inquiry’s own logic distinguishes what law can do from what only grace can do. A sanctified nation is a nation of sanctified people, and sanctification cannot be legislated. Prohibition is the historical warning: it legislated a moral outcome that the heart had not yet chosen and produced lawlessness and backlash. The Great Awakenings show the other order: prayer and preaching changed hearts, and reform followed. The political arm of the campaign proposes laws justified by the ordered test of Problem 9 — righteous, loving, and what one would want done to oneself — and argues for them by reason. The spiritual arm calls people to Christ by witness, and leaves conversion to the Spirit. Keeping these apart is not a retreat from the goal; it is the only route to it that avoids repeating the Pharisaic and institutional failures of Problems 3 and 5.
Seeds need soil. The parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3–23) says that most seed is lost without soil and cultivation. Isak was changed through eighteen months of sustained relationship, not through a broadcast. A campaign can sow widely, but those who respond need somewhere to go: small groups like the Christos Fellowship, where they are drawn into the kind of conversation that changed Isak, and where the one-teaches-twelve multiplication of Problem 7 can begin. The campaign’s reach and the fellowship’s depth are two parts of one strategy.
Speaking to a divided nation. The audience is plural: Christians of many traditions, Jews, Muslims, secular people, and Latter-day Saints, many of whom are allies on marriage and family. Lively’s distinction applies: people are very often better than the systems that claim them. This essay argues against an institution’s claim to authority, not against its members, and it does not depend on proving any particular Mormon claim false. Campaign speech can make the authority argument plainly while honoring the goodness of the people it addresses, which is itself the standard of Problem 9 applied to persuasion.
Faith and action together. The campaign is therefore an act of the faith described in Problem 13: faith that God wants the nation brought to him, joined to the labor of sowing, done in prayer, and measured not by votes but by whether the seed is sown truly and whether those who respond find soil.
Conclusion
The conversation’s problems converge on three ideas.
The first is authority. The difference between Jesus and Joseph Smith, the vulnerability of every church to Pharisaism, the use of religion to sanctify racial prejudice, the question of Israel, and the standing of other religions all turn on the same question: where does final authority rest? The conversation concluded that it rests in Christ, that every revelation, institution, text, nation, and campaign is measured against Him, and that the community of believers together discerns what He is saying, checking what it hears against the gospel already given. A teaching can be largely true and still deceive if it shifts authority away from Him. That is the core of the case against Mormonism, and it does not depend on proving any particular Mormon claim false.
The second is transmission. Isak’s doubt was never about God; it was about whether people can change. The answer is that one person has, that the change has already passed to others, and that God wants it for everyone. The change is not only a new way of seeing but a turning from sin to righteousness, measured by a test that can be stated and argued in public. Confusion, counterfeits, and unfairness do not count against this; they are features of a real creation, the terrain the search must cross, and the occasions for helping one another across it.
The third is grace. The goal is beyond human power. Method is sowing; the increase is God’s. Faith, on this account, is not certainty that the outcome is assured. It is the decision to pay the price of a pearl one has already found through prayer and labor, so others can find it too.
The conversation ended there. Thomas said he felt hopeful, and that the point of it all is to take it to the world. Isak said that they would make it happen.