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Like a lot of people who have gone through faith crises, I\u2019ve spent some time thinking through the alternative to belief in the Church\u2019s truth claims. If we assume that the Church isn\u2019t what it says it is, what is the best explanation for the Church and its related claims that make sense of the data? At the outset I should note that I am indeed a believer, and that this picture was developed from faith crises of the past and isn\u2019t reflective of anything I\u2019m currently going through.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Joseph Smith\u00a0<\/span>Trilemma<\/i><\/p>\n C.S. Lewis famously stated that the only logical options for Christ was that he was divine, evil, or insane, thus logically negating the option of the not divine, albeit good, wise teacher that is a favorite among a certain class of intellectual Christian. I\u2019m not going to argue for or against Lewis\u2019 trilemma here, but rather use it as a framework to approach Joseph Smith.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On the one hand, the Book of Mormon seems to logically close off the possibility of deluded-but-sincere. To create a complex backstory across multiple years, arrange for witnesses, dictate the manuscript, and arrange for its publication would require a lot of concerted intentionality. If the Church was based solely on a kind of beatific vision a la the first vision, I would definitely see this as a more plausible scenario, but the Book of Mormon seems to mitigate against the sincerity thesis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On the other hand, Smith\u2019s writings clearly impress upon readers the sincerity of his religious convictions. The nail in the coffin here for me was Don Bradley\u2019s excellent <\/span>piece<\/span><\/a> about the role of the Book of Abraham in the translation of the Kinderhook plates, which solidly convinced me that, whatever else can be said about the Book of Abraham translation, that Smith himself believed that the spiritually directed translation was valid, since, without a lot of fanfare that took almost two centuries to uncover, he privately used it as the basis for his attempts to translate the Kinderhook plates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Consequently, if I were to categorize Joseph Smith from a non-believing perspective, I think the story that best fits the data is that he started it as an intentional fraud, but eventually came to believe his own prophetic role himself after the Book of Mormon but by the Nauvoo-era.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n