Having recently finished up a science-y degree, I am obviously well qualified to thoroughly and accurately discuss the cultural impact of fairy tales. Well, perhaps not. But perhaps my fresh memories of deep dives into the murky waters of f-ratios, geostrophic balance, sediment cores, and DNA cleaning have made me hungry for exploration in waters of a different sort.

The culture of today is focused on aesthetics. To some it may be no more than just a word, but to others it is the air we breathe. It is what we are trying to achieve in the way we dress, the way our room is decorated, the angle of our selfie or the appearance of the food on our plate at lunch. To some, aesthetics is the goddess of acceptance.

Relativism is often summed up with the phrase, “There are no absolutes.” Which, of course, is an absolute statement. So it refutes itself.

Seems like a trivial enough philosophy. At least it did, until I took “Philosophy, Science and Religion” from The University of Edinburgh, a MOOC at coursera.org. In it, the professor outlined a couple different forms of Relativism, some of which forced me to take it a little more seriously.

The history of Western civilization has seen major shifts in its major worldviews - from Christianity and other theisms, to humanism and beyond. It can be said that "Every cultural expression communicates worldview ideas," (Prof. John Stonestreet) and as a cultural expression, poetry communicates the ideas of its poets and the times they lived in.

One such idea is that of religious faith, faith in theism. Among others, this faith may be approached with a sort of 'blind faith,' confident in its Divine Revelation alone.

Penny Gullan and Peter Cranston, both professors of evolution, ecology, and genetics, are the authors of the latest edition of a widely-used college entomology textbook entitled, "The Insects: An Outline of Entomology". These two evolutionists begin the third chapter with this statement: "The dissected open body of an insect is a complex and compact masterpiece of functional design."

In the previous parts of this essay, we examined the written scriptures of the LDS (latter-day saints) church, discovering the flaws in them. In this part, we will examine the spoken scriptures of the Mormon church, demonstrating that the Mormon view of Scripture is incompatible with the orthodox Christian view. We will also examine these spoken scriptures to determine their trustworthiness.

In the last part of this essay, we analyzed the accuracy of The Book of Mormon using the external test. In this next part, we will move on to examine the Mormon scriptures through the second test: the internal test. We will use this test to determine whether or not the Mormon scriptures* agree with each other. After all, if they contradict each other, at least one, and possibly all, of them lose much of their credibility.