I don’t believe in magic, and I rarely believe in the improbable.
Growing up, I used to hear the question, “If there was an explosion at a printing company, is it possible for that explosion to result in a perfectly printed and bound copy of the Bible being created?”
The answer of course is “no”. No sane person would claim a fully printed and bound copy of the Bible could be created from a random explosion. The speaker then would continue on to point out that a person needs to create a Bible for it to exist. In the same way, a human being could not have been created by chance of evolution. Humans must have a creator if something much less complex, like a Bible, needs a creator.
I would take this analogy a step further.
According to atheists, if I am holding a Bible, where did that Bible come from? It came from a publisher. Where did the publishing company come from? Humans created it. Where did the humans come from? They evolved from organic sludge. Where did the organic sludge come from? From comets and space dust. And were did that all come from? From the Big Bang.
As I already stated, no sane person believes an explosion can create a fully printed and bound Bible. There have been 4,000,000,000 Bibles produced in the last 100 years. Atheists believe an explosion created billions of Bibles. I don’t.
God created us, and we printed the Bibles, not a chance explosion. Non-believers often mock the concepts of God or Intelligent Design, equating belief in God to belief in magic and fairy tales. To the primitive mind, no doubt, that seems true. However as I stated, I don’t believe in magic.
Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity, light, and calculus. All modern engineering, astronomy and science is possible because of his brilliance. He said:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton
According to one of the most brilliant minds in human history, our understanding of the universe is inconsequential compared to what we don’t know. We are taught by the Bible that God knows everything there is to know. That’s a lot more than we understand. We need to realize the ramifications of His vastly superior knowledge.
As the noted author Arthur C . Clarke stated:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C . Clarke
He was, of course, correct. I don’t believe in magic, but I believe in an omniscient God. I don’t expect to be able to tell the difference between his works and magic. His understanding of the universe far surpasses ours.
The Bible also teaches that God created the universe. Just to give that some context, with telescopes we can see 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. God created all those stars and their planets. That number of stars is so big it’s hard to comprehend. By number comparison, an average 80-year-old will take about 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime. To take one breath for every star God created, 1486 billion people would have to live 80 years. There are only 7 billion people alive on the Earth right now.
Not only do we not understand what God understands, we can barely begin to comprehend all of his creations. God is all knowing, all powerful, and loves us more than we can comprehend. God wants us to live forever. God wants us to be perfect.
There are limits to what we can achieve on our own. Perfection and immortality are beyond our reach. Humans falls short of perfection. We have regrets, sometimes big ones, that God call sins. Our physical imperfections also mean we all die.
God knows our limits. He knows we cannot become perfect without help. God provided someone to save us from our imperfections. God provided a Savior to help us overcome the limits keeping us from achieving physical and moral perfection. That Savior is Jesus Christ. Through Him, we will live again, and if we choose to seek forgiveness of our moral imperfections, He will forgive us of our past mistakes.
After realizing how vast God’s creations must be even if they were only the solar systems we can see and not vastly larger than that, we have to ask, …
Why would God care about such insignificant beings as ourselves?
According to the Bible, God created us in His image. Of all his creations, we are most like him. We are literally His children. As his children, He loves us more than we can even comprehend. Parents naturally care for their children and want them to succeed. God is infinitely more intelligent than any human parent. His decisions when helping us are often far beyond our comprehension because of our limited knowledge, but all His choices are meant to help us be happy in the end.
All religions explain the creation of the universe and our place in it, …
Why believe The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the correct explanation?
There is proof that the Church has the correct explanations. That proof is The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon teaches about God and Jesus Christ, and our relationship to them. It backs up and clarifies the teachings of the Bible. The Book of Mormon was written on golden plates by ancient prophets of the western hemisphere to explain the importance of believing in and following Jesus Christ.
The Book of Mormon starts out with a testimony of three witnesses of known honest men who lived in the 1800’s. Their signed testimony states they saw an angel from God. The angel showed them the golden plates that the Book of Mormon was translated from, and the voice of God commanded them to testify of what they had seen. All of those three witnesses turned their back on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. None of those three witnesses recanted their testimony
Even mostly honest people can lie or be deceived, what other proof is there of the Book of Mormon?
It is well documented that the total working time for the creation of the text of the 500+ page Book of Mormon was under 90 days. Other than spelling, punctuation and minor word changes common with translations, no second revision happened. Joseph Smith, the translator of the Book of Mormon, had little formal education. Joseph did not have vast writing experience. I have a four-year college degree in writing and over 10 years of editing experience. I have seen literally thousands of manuscripts by new authors. I know what writing by new authors looks like. I am thoroughly use to it.
In my professional opinion as an editor and author, it is not possible for a first time writer to create a 500+ page book in 90 days in a single pass with no revision such as the Book of Mormon. It can’t happen. The only explanation that makes sense is that he translated it, as he claims he did, because he could not have possibly made it up as a piece of fiction.
What if some other explanation could be found for the writing of the Book of Mormon?
The final proof is in reading it and then following its instructions.
“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”
-Moroni 10:4
I’ve done this final test, and learned from God that the Book of Mormon is exactly what it claims to be, … ancient scriptures written by prophets as a testimony of Jesus Christ.