50 Years Responding to Church Criticism: Why He’s More Sure Than Ever (with Daniel C. Peterson)

He stayed home from school one day as a teenager and picked up a book the family had inherited from his grandmother. It was an old novel called Added Upon, dated even then, an early telling of the plan of salvation that followed a group of characters out of the premortal life, through mortality, and into the resurrection. He has tried to read it again since and cannot. But that afternoon it caught him completely. For the first time he saw what human life was actually about, and the boy who had recently considered himself an atheist began to wonder if the whole thing might be true.

That boy was Daniel C. Peterson. He would go on to earn a doctorate at UCLA, learn more than a dozen languages, teach Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University for decades, lead the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, and become one of the most recognized defenders of faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints anywhere in the world. He can quote the Quran in Arabic. He has read the sharpest arguments ever written against the Restoration, on purpose and for sport.

In a recent episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam asks Daniel the obvious question. After a career spent reading the best case against the Church, why does he still believe? The answer has less to do with argument than you might expect, and more to do with a handful of moments he never arranged and still cannot explain.

The Night He Baptized His Father

Daniel grew up on the edge of the Church. His father was an inactive Lutheran, his mother a marginally active member, and for a stretch of his teens Daniel counted himself an unbeliever. After Added Upon caught him, he became the active one in his home while his parents held back. He and his father used to argue the gospel, never angrily, but with Daniel trying to win him over and his father raising objection after objection. Eventually Daniel decided it was hopeless and simply stopped bringing it up.

What he did not see was the reading his father had quietly begun on his own. His father worked through books by scholars like Hugh Nibley, and one day a thought arrived that had never occurred to him before. This might actually be true. Not just nice people and pleasant meetings, but true. That single shift pushed him over the edge. The Sunday before Daniel entered the mission home, his father asked the bishop whether he could be baptized that week. Daniel baptized his father on a Tuesday night and left for Switzerland a day later. It was, he says, a good way to begin a mission.

Reason Clears the Ground. It Does Not Plant the Tree.

Daniel is careful about what argument can and cannot do. He believes that because the gospel is true, reason and faith finally come together, even if they seem to fight in the near term. But he does not think a clever case can hand anyone a testimony. His own father is the example. Nibley's work did not convert him. It opened his mind to the possibility that the Church might be true, and the witness came from somewhere else.

He puts it in terms the philosopher William James once used. A claim has to become a live option before anyone will seriously consider it. Daniel has never sought a testimony of a flat earth, because he does not believe it is even possible, so he does not bother to ask. The work of evidence, then, is to clear away the obstacles, the seeming contradictions and plausible attacks that can knock a person off balance, so that faith has room to grow. Apologetics pulls out the tangled underbrush. The Spirit grows the tree.

The Book He Cannot Get Around

Ask Daniel for the evidence that moves him most on a purely intellectual level, and he points first to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then to the Book of Mormon. He has read scholars like N. T. Wright argue that the only explanation accounting for all the historical data is that the earliest disciples truly believed they had encountered the risen Christ, and that something transformed a defeated, hiding band into fearless preachers willing to die for what they had seen.

Then he turns to the book that occupied his career. Daniel has spent his life among the world's great religious texts, and he is willing to say the Quran is an impressive work, revealed to Muhammad across roughly twenty-two years and about the length of the New Testament. The Book of Mormon was dictated in about two and a half months. It is long, intricate, full of embedded narratives that double back on themselves, and the man who produced it never asked to have the previous day's work read back to him before continuing. Set aside every other detail, Daniel says, and the sheer existence of the book remains a challenge to anyone who rejects revelation. If Joseph Smith did not receive it that way, then how did he get it, and from where? The old manuscript theories, he notes, no longer have a serious academic backer anywhere.

What He Found After Fifty Years of Searching

Daniel does not pretend every question has a tidy answer. He has run into issues that puzzled him, places where he did not immediately know what to say. His approach in those moments is steady. There are things he knows and cannot explain away, so he is content to sit with the open question for a while. Across his life, problems that once troubled him have dissolved, sometimes because he learned something new and sometimes because he realized the issue never mattered as much as he thought.

He tells of a claim that knocked him back as a young man, that Oliver Cowdery had declared Joseph Smith a fallen prophet at an angel's command. Daniel went back to Richard Anderson's study of the Book of Mormon witnesses and learned the source was almost certainly a forgery with no known existence before 1906. The point he had missed was simpler still. Cowdery returned to the Church and was never asked about the pamphlet, because no one had heard of it. Daniel's conclusion after decades of looking is plain. There are no knockdown arguments against the Church. If they existed, he is sure he would have found them, because he has gone out of his way to look.

The Witness Underneath It All

For all the scholarship, Daniel says the real reason he believes is not academic at all. It is a series of moments that hit him out of nowhere, in specific places and at specific times, that he does not expect anyone else to believe on his account. As a teenager he looked through the glass doors of the Idaho Falls Temple, saw temple workers moving past in white, and felt with sudden force that he had seen this before, that it was a memory of somewhere older than this life. Another time he set out to give his son a blessing of comfort and heard himself promise instant recovery instead, words he had not planned, and within twenty seconds the child was well.

These are the drops, as Nathan describes them, that fill an ocean. No single one would convince a skeptic, and a person can always talk himself out of them, the way Daniel says Laman and Lemuel did. The Lord rarely clobbers anyone over the head with a sledgehammer. He sends hints quiet enough that we keep our agency to accept or reject them. Daniel has chosen, again and again, to pay attention.

Key Takeaways

Daniel C. Peterson's story is not really about scholarship, though he has more of it than almost anyone. It is about what reason can and cannot do. Reason cannot give a testimony of Christ; it can only clear the ground where the Spirit plants one, the way Hugh Nibley's books opened his father's mind without converting him. The Holy Ghost speaks just quietly enough that we can still choose, which means a person can always talk himself out of belief if he wishes to. God's timing is rarely ours, and an inspired impression may take a year, or a lifetime, to come true. God's pattern is to call the obscure and the unschooled, a farm boy in upstate New York rather than a council of scholars, to do what no scholar could. And the sheer existence of the Book of Mormon, dictated in two months by a barely literate young man, remains for Daniel the evidence he cannot get around.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com.

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Follow Daniel C. Peterson - Facebook: Prof.DanielC.Peterson | LinkedIn: @daniel-peterson-58967a15 | Foundation: Interpreter Foundation | Series: Becoming Brigham