CES Letter Answers

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Testimony & Spiritual Witnesses ​

The CES Letter's testimony section opens with a psychologist's soundbite -- "Feelings Aren't Facts" -- and a marketing quote from Bonneville Communications about "HeartSell." Three epigraphs, carefully chosen to prime you before a single argument is made.[1]

Then come nine numbered points. Every religion claims spiritual confirmation. Paul Dunn made people cry with fabricated stories. You felt the Spirit watching The Lion King. The conclusion: the entire epistemological framework of the Church is broken.[2]

Every one of those points depends on a single premise -- that Latter-day Saint epistemology reduces to "pray and trust your feelings."

What if the CES Letter is attacking something the scriptures never actually taught?

The version it attacks doesn't exist in scripture ​

D&C 8:2-3 describes confirmation "in your mind and in your heart" -- two channels, not one.[3] D&C 9:7-9 requires you to "study it out in your mind" before you ask -- and provides a negative signal (a "stupor of thought") when the answer is wrong.[4]

Moroni 10:3-5 demands seven conditions: read, remember God's mercy, ponder, ask God, sincere heart, real intent, and faith in Christ. "Real intent" is the condition critics skip. It transforms the experiment from a passive feeling-test into a moral commitment.

The CES Letter attacks a caricature. Every argument in the section assumes the caricature is the real thing.

The "every religion" claim is never documented ​

"Every major religion has members who claim the same thing: God or God's spirit bore witness to them that their religion, prophet/pope/leaders, book(s), and teachings are true."[5]

Look at the evidence presented. All four testimonies come from Restoration splinter groups -- FLDS, Community of Christ, and other Latter-day Saint offshoots.[6] Same founding prophet. Same Book of Mormon. No testimony from a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew appears anywhere in the section.

The claim is "every major religion." The evidence is four groups that already agree on the Book of Mormon.

And here's what the CES Letter doesn't notice: all four groups testify that the Book of Mormon is true. Their disagreement is about post-1844 succession. Multiple independent communities converging on the Book of Mormon's truthfulness is convergent evidence for it, not against it.

LDS theology already predicts competing claims ​

The CES Letter presents universal spiritual experience as a devastating problem. LDS doctrine treats it as an expected feature.

Moroni 7:16 describes the Light of Christ given to every person. Alma 29:8 teaches that God grants truth to every nation. The 1978 First Presidency Statement affirms that "the great religious leaders of the world... received a portion of God's light."[7]

A Catholic feeling God's love during Mass is exactly what LDS theology predicts. The Light of Christ -- a general moral and aesthetic influence -- is theologically distinct from the Holy Ghost's specific revelatory witness.[8] The CES Letter collapses these into one undifferentiated category: "feelings."

Discernment is hard -- and scripture says so ​

The Paul Dunn case is real.[9] People do mistake emotion for revelation. The "Spirit at movies" point lands because the experience is familiar.[10]

Worth Acknowledging

Spiritual discernment fails sometimes. The question isn't whether that happens -- it clearly does. The question is whether occasional failure makes the entire enterprise worthless or whether it means the skill requires development.

Scripture doesn't pretend this is easy. "Try the spirits," John wrote, "whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1). D&C 50:17-22 provides a specific test for distinguishing true spiritual communication from false.

Elevation emotion -- the warm feeling from witnessing moral goodness -- is real. But it cannot explain specific detailed promptings, knowledge of things the person could not have known, or sustained life reorientation lasting decades.

The philosophical literature isn't on the CES Letter's side ​

The CES Letter treats spiritual experience as the opposite of rational inquiry. Philosophers who actually study the question disagree.

Alvin Plantinga argued that basic beliefs about God can be properly warranted -- the same way your belief that other minds exist is warranted without external proof.[11] William Alston showed that mystical perception is epistemically parallel to sense perception: both can misfire, but neither is discredited by the possibility of error.[12] William James identified the "noetic quality" of spiritual experiences -- they carry a sense of genuine knowledge, not just emotion.[13]

The CES Letter engages with none of this literature.

A system designed for growth, not shortcuts ​

Alma 32 reads like William James's pragmatism translated into scripture. Plant the seed. Observe whether it grows. Test it by its fruits over time. That's an experiment, not blind trust.

The data matches the model. Over 3,000 studies reviewed by Koenig, King, and Carson show that people who report spiritual experiences demonstrate greater psychological resilience, lower depression, and more prosocial behavior -- sustained across cultures and methodologies.[14] That's hard to square with the claim that spiritual experience is nothing more than emotional manipulation.

Bottom line: The CES Letter reduces testimony to "trust your feelings" and dismantles the thing it built. LDS scripture has always taught something harder -- study it out, seek confirmation in mind and heart, and develop discernment as a skill over time.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," p. 74. ↩︎

  2. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," pp. 74-79. ↩︎

  3. Doctrine and Covenants 8:2-3. "Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost." ↩︎

  4. Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-9. "You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right." ↩︎

  5. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 1, p. 75. ↩︎

  6. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 2, pp. 75-76. All four testimonies cited are from Restoration-tradition groups that accept the Book of Mormon. ↩︎

  7. First Presidency Statement, February 15, 1978. See also Alma 29:8; Moroni 7:16; D&C 84:46. ↩︎

  8. Doctrine and Covenants 84:45-46 (Light of Christ given to every person) and Moroni 10:5 (Holy Ghost as specific witness). See also Boyd K. Packer, "The Light of Christ," Ensign, April 2005. ↩︎

  9. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 6, pp. 77-78. ↩︎

  10. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 9, p. 79. ↩︎

  11. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ↩︎

  12. William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). ↩︎

  13. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), Lectures XVI-XVII. ↩︎

  14. Harold G. Koenig, Dana E. King, and Verna Benner Carson, Handbook of Religion and Health, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎

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