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Show Page 184 he refers to his original encounter with the book that Parley brought him at the time of his nineteenth birthday. Orson says he heard the voice of the Lord - but does not elaborate. An examination of the Book of Mormon as exhaustive as Orson would wish remains unachieved, though some have approached it. Its "divine authenticity" can, of course, be arbitrated only in individual hearts, along with the doctrinal system it represents. However, Orson was convinced that a sound philosophical foundation for the faith, as symmetric as a mathematical proof, might serve to sustain a conviction among scientists and thinkers; for Orson, self-designated apostle to the world of secular learning, sincerely believed that point-by-point he could demonstrate the superiority of Mormon ideas over all other philosophical systems. His unstated inference - if Mormonism represents the true, normative, revealed religion, it should be relatively simple to construct proofs for its basic assumptions employing only the tools of logic. On January 31, 1851, Orson presented to the world his most carefully constructed thesis yet. Undoubtedly, in his own mind he was dissatisfied with Absurdities of Immaterialism because it had necessarily dealt with the ambiguities of Taylder's pamphlet - as a result, it lacked harmony, it did not "build," and it was by no means a complete exposition of his "intelligent matter" theories. So he picked up again, late in 1850, the same problems he had toyed with in the Messenger five years before. The result - a compact, seventeen-point excursus on "the self-moving forces of the universe," entitled Great First Cause. Here we have Orson, the descriptive physicist, the mathematician, at work. Gone is the hard edge of ridicule; what was "absurd" before is now only "erroneous." We hear a collected voice, the mitigating "if" clause, |