falsifiability and Mormon apologetics

Back in early March, as part of my flurry of posts about the Kirtland Temple, I wrote something about some of the dubious historical bits associated with Latter-day Saint beliefs about the significance of a purported visitation of the biblical prophet Elijah to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple. That post has gotten a lot of hits over the past few weeks: According to my excellent, privacy-conscious analytics provider, it’s up to 70 hits over the past 30 days, 55 of which were over the week leading up to April 15th, when I got my last email digest.

My best guess is that the recent uptick is because of a sermon that Latter-day Saint prophet-president Russell Nelson gave at his church’s April 2024 General Conference on the importance of priesthood keys. Unsurprisingly, the Kirtland Temple played a large role in that sermon. Here’s the relevant passage:

[i]n the Kirtland Temple in 1836, the conferral of these three additional priesthood keys—namely, keys of the gathering of Israel, keys of the gospel of Abraham, and keys of the sealing power—was essential. These keys authorized Joseph Smith—and all succeeding Presidents of the Lord’s Church—to gather Israel on both sides of the veil, to bless all covenant children with the blessings of Abraham, to place a ratifying seal on priesthood ordinances and covenants, and to seal families eternally. The power of these priesthood keys is infinite and breathtaking.

Consider how your life would be different if priesthood keys had not been restored to the earth. Without priesthood keys, you could not be endowed with the power of God. Without priesthood keys, the Church could serve only as a significant teaching and humanitarian organization but not much more. Without priesthood keys, none of us would have access to essential ordinances and covenants that bind us to our loved ones eternally and allow us eventually to live with God.

Priesthood keys distinguish The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from any other organization on earth. Many other organizations can and do make your life better here in mortality. But no other organization can and will influence your life after death.

The only thing that I really have to add to my previous comments about Elijah and the Kirtland Temple after reading this passage is that the text of D&C 110 (even after its modification for canonization) does not associate Elijah with sealing at all. Nelson’s language about gathering Israel and Abraham echo Smith’s language, but Elijah’s keys are described in terms of “this dispensation” and “the great and the dreadful day of the Lord [being] near”—Smith seems to have associated these keys with an “almost-here” Second Coming rather than with any family theology or temple ordinance.

Here’s the thing, though: I meant (and still mean) what I said in my first post that I think believers ought to be given (at least some) space to sincerely believe in something of dubious historicity—and besides, my nitpicking here is really more a question of interpretation of an event than its historicity. If Latter-day Saint temple theology wants to focus on sealing, I think that’s fine, and if it wants to use the 1836 Elijah visit as a narrative basis for that theology, that’s fine, too.

What I really want to write this post about (and may well end up taking up less space than all this preamble) is Nelson’s choice to hinge the importance and exclusivity of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Elijah’s restoring the sealing keys in the Kirtland Temple in 1836. In (positivist) scientific inquiry, falsifiability is one of our core values. I’m not well read enough in the philosophy of science to really do this concept justice, but the way that I understand it (at least for the purpose of this post) is that in trying to determine realities about the universe, we clearly establish the conditions about which the reality that we propose should be considered false. That seems to be what Nelson is doing here: if Elijah had not restored the sealing keys in the Kirtland Temple in 1836, then the core truth claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fall apart, and the organization has nothing special going for it.

Nelson isn’t the only recent Latter-day Saint leader to have made these kinds of claims. In a 1986 General Conference address, Ezra Taft Benson famously described the Book of Mormon as a keystone: “Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, so does all the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.” Gordon Hinckley taught in relation to Joseph Smith’s First Vision that “Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud.”

As far as I can tell, the purpose of this rhetoric is to extend the logic of falsifiability further into the realm of scientific thinking. If a scientific hypothesis isn’t falsified, we hold that hypothesis to be true and respond accordingly (actual scientific inquiry is more complicated than this, but I have no interest in getting into those weeds). That which is falsifiable is, by extension, verifiable; that which is verifiable demands an appropriate response. If there’s a gamble for Latter-day Saint leaders in laying down a threshold of falsifiability, there’s also a lot to gain—it frames the religion’s truth claims as something to which any reasonable person must conform…

… assuming, of course, that the threshold for verification has been met. In the case of Elijah’s visit, in the case of the Book of Mormon, and in the case of the First Vision, there are compelling challenges to historicity, and there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that Latter-day Saints raises on the logic of falsifiability have been served poorly by that logic once they realized how compelling those challenges are. Personally, I don’t think believe Joseph Smith’s grove experience or the Book of Mormon are what Latter-day Saint leaders claim them to be. Yet, divorcing my overall faith from the logic of falsifiability and verifiability means that I can appreciate them for what they are without making my entire life hinge on them.

I like religion a lot better now that I can evaluate it in terms of the joy that it does (or doesn’t) bring me, and I wish Latter-day Saint leaders were less hung up on this logic of falsifiability. It has some rhetorical advantages, and it’s true that setting aside a need to be true would be a real blow to the historic and contemporary identity of the church. Yet, setting aside that logic would free church leaders from the burden that this logic assumes; dubious historicity is only a problem when historicity is everything that your church hinges on.

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