 Our next speaker will be Don Bradley, who's sitting over here, and Don is a writer, editor and researcher on Mormon Origins. And he has some fascinating things to say about Mormon Origins. For those of you who know him, man, it's a treat to talk with him about it. He is finalizing his master's degree, writing his first book titled The Lost 116 Pages, Rediscovering the Book of Lehi. I'm planning to pursue a doctorate in religious studies. Don is also an avid runner and hiker and a single father. He will be speaking on Joseph Smith and the technologies of seership. Thank you, Lincoln. Just a minute ago I decided I should check the schedule to see exactly when I was up, and I'm glad that I checked before Lincoln announced that I was up because that would have been quite a shock to me. In 1933, LDS theologian and General Authority BH Roberts wrote that he'd once examined the seer stone that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon and, quote, while handling it had the impression that doubtless it was radium or had been made radioactive by contact with radium and hence its power to become luminous when placed in the dark. Joseph Smith employed four such scrying stones to receive revelation and discern things not visible to the unaided eye. I need to make better use of the sound technology here, I'm being told. Four such scrying stones, a semi-transparent white stone, two transparent crystals that comprise the lenses of the ancient Nephite interpreters and what people have referred to as his chocolate-colored stone that reportedly shined in the dark while he translated the Book of Mormon. While Roberts believed the stone Smith used for translating possessed special properties, more recent Latter-day San interpreters like Grant Gardner have downplayed the stone and finding it to the psychological role of helping Joseph Smith induce a state of trance or high concentration. What did Joseph Smith think? Were these ordinary rocks he used to enhance his focus or were they extraordinary materials whose properties enabled him to access hidden channels of information? The prophet's actions indicate that he, like Roberts, understood the stones to have special properties as information media. For instance, as a teenager, Joseph Smith journeyed 150 miles out to Lake Erie and then back in order to acquire his white stone. Had he understood one stone to be as good for scrying as another, it's difficult to imagine that he would have invested so much into acquiring that particular stone. Smith viewed his seer stones as tools enabling him to achieve things he otherwise couldn't, that is, as technologies. The idea of optical technologies that could render the invisible visible was long familiar by Joseph Smith's time. It had been over two centuries since Galileo used the telescope to disclose the secrets of distant planets and a century and a half since, and you're going to have to, I look this up and I can't remember the pronunciation, Van Luen Hoek used the microscope to discover hidden organisms and since Newton used the refractive prism to discover the spectrum of colors within ordinary white light. In Smith's day, many, including his father, enhanced their vision using spectacles. It's thus perhaps not surprising that Smith's experiences with his scrying instruments mirrored the functioning of spectacles and other contemporary technologies that manipulated light. Joseph Smith understood the interpreters to function as spectacles. He described them as shape-like spectacles, wore them like spectacles, and called them spectacles. The way Smith experienced images through the interpreters also closely paralleled the functioning of another optical technology of his day. Smith's early confidant, David Whitmer, reported that when Smith used the spectacles to translate the Book of Mormon's Golden Plates, the image of a character in its English translation would, quote, appear on the lenses. Minister Truman Coe provided further details after hearing the prophet describe the process in Kirtland in 1836, quote, by putting his finger on one of the characters and looking through the German thumb, he would see the import written in plain English on a screen placed before him. Kind of like this, I guess. The interpreters' mechanical details, as relayed through Whitmer and Coe, have it functioning much like a slide projector here or more familiar to Joseph Smith, a 19th century slide lantern. And here's a place where I had intended to use technology, have images of slide lanterns. So basically, there are lanterns where, of course, there's a candle or a source of light in the middle. And then there are things that are kind of like little stained glass windows on the edges so that when the light passes through, it casts an image onto a wall. The interpreter's mechanical, a small image appearing on the lenses was projected in larger form onto the, quote, unquote, screen before him. While the form and function of the interpreters evoke the familiar technologies of spectacles and slide lanterns, the operation of Smith's other seer stones evoke one of the day's emerging technologies. I understand the connection. It's first necessary to know that Smith typically gazed into one of these stones only after shielding it from external light, for instance, by placing it into the bottom of his hat. With the stone in his hat, Smith would see a Book of Mormon character and its English translation written on the stone's surface, not an ink, but in letters composed of, quote, unquote, spiritual light. Joseph Smith's practice of staring into a hat might strike us as undignified, rather like Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe. However, Joseph didn't understand himself to be looking into a hat, but is using a hat to exclude ordinary visible light so as to better proceed the spiritual light of the stone. The effect wrought by the spiritual light within the darkness was transformative. The hieroglyphs on the Book of Mormon plates were reportedly set out in black against a bright background of gold. Conversely, the translated words Joseph Smith saw in the seer stone, included in his hat, were light against darkness. Thus, by the instrumentality of the stone, the record's original, untranslated state was inverted. Its meaning, previously hidden in the gold plate's black characters, now stood written in strokes of light, words ablaze against a black page of ambient darkness. Like the development of a negative into a photograph transposing dark with bright, Joseph Smith's process of translation rendered in place of opaque hieroglyphs, lucid English. In the literal etymological sense, this itself was photography, writing with light. It would be natural to assume that at this point, Joseph Smith was already familiar with the technology of negative photography, but he was not. William Henry Fox Talbot invented the process in England in 1834 and 35 and held back on announcing it until 1839 after the introduction of the daguerreotype. Smith's 1828 and 29 photographic visions transposing darkness with light, thus preceded negative photography by several years. It would be remarkable if the negative positive transformation and Smith's translation experience were unrelated to the near-contemporaneous, if slightly tardy, invention of negative photography. But it's clear, but it's unclear, rather, just what should be made of the parallel. Possibly, though the evidence for this that I've seen is thus far weak, negative photography had antecedents that Joseph Smith would have known of and his experience was tailored to imitate these, or to generate a free-wheeling theological speculation. Perhaps revelation was delivered to Smith in a way that anticipated photonegative technology, either as a sign to the seer and his associates or to help teach them that God uses technology like but exceeding what humankind develops. Whatever the answer to that riddle, we've seen that Joseph Smith used seeing instruments functioning in a way similar to both the familiar and the emerging technologies of his time, but if Joseph Smith understood the seeing instruments themselves as technologies, how did he believe they worked in scientific terms? In interviews with Smith's Harmony Pennsylvania neighbors, Frederick D. Mather gathered the following information about his use of seer stones or, as the locals like to call them, peak stones. Quote, when peaking, he buried his face in his white-stove pie-pat, within which was the peak stone. He declared it to be so much like looking into water that the deflection of light sometimes took him out of his course. And, uh, Joseph Smith's brother-in-law, Ruben Hale, is supposed to have made similar statements. According to the neighbors then, Smith explained that he sometimes failed to pinpoint a lost treasure with his stone because the image of the treasure was displaced as the light bearing it passed between mediums, namely between the air and the seer stone. The correct name for this phenomenon, which we commonly encounter when an object at the bottom of a pool appears in a false location or when a straw, straight straw, seems to bend in a glass of water, is not deflection but refraction. On Smith's explanation, the treasure was not where it had appeared through his stone because of how the light refracted when it entered the stone. However interesting this may be as a study in rationalization, it's much more interesting as a study in Smith's understanding of the spiritual light conveyed through his seer stone. To account for his scrying failures in this way, Joseph Smith must have understood the light focused by the seer stones as subject to the same laws of optics as ordinary visible light. To Smith and the spiritual light of his scrying was not an incomprehensible spiritual substance, a supernatural substance, but a form of natural light not visible to the unaided eye. What we learn from Smith's understanding of this light and of his seer stones is that the aspiration to interpret divine action in scientific and technological terms is not new with 21st century Mormon transhumanists. It was already a century old when B. H. Roberts offered his radioactive interpretation of Smith's stone. Scientific and technological interpretations of Mormonism are as old as Mormonism itself. The attempt to understand experiences of divine action and early Mormonism in terms of technology and scientific principles began contemporaneously with those experiences. Joseph Smith, while acting a seer, speculated on the scientific and technological basis of God's revelations to him, setting a precedent for such interpretations of divine action and Mormonism today. Mormonism is distinctive, if not unique, among the theistic religions in its relationship to science and technology. Unlike other theistic faiths, Mormonism understands God, not as supernatural, but as an integral element of the natural order, implying that divine powers can eventually be explained in scientific and technological terms and therefore acquired by others besides God. While other theistic faiths have modern thinkers who will sometimes speculate on God's use of natural law, Mormonism has a founder who believed God communicated with him via technology. Naturally, the horizons of Joseph Smith's technological imagination were bounded somewhat by his time, but as one who speculated that God gave revelation by advanced technology, the founder of Mormonism himself would have made a fitting speaker at the Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference. Can we similarly imagine Muhammad addressing an Islamic Transhumanist Association Conference, or John Calvin keynoting the annual conference of the double predestination as Transhumanist Association? Perhaps the reason we are here today, the reason Mormonism is the first religion in which the transhumanists thrive is that it is the first religion to have been founded by one. As you're starting out and perhaps the rest of your speech can kind of answer this already, but I was thinking of the question, how would you mesh this idea that the seer stones were technology that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph with the incidence of, was it Oliver Cowdery's attempt and failure to translate with him? Okay, so for one thing, Oliver's translation attempt wasn't through a gift as a seer. He's told that he has another gift, which one of his gifts actually is working with a rod, which I guess could also be seen as a technology. I'm not actually suggesting that the seer stone was a technology. Rather, I'm arguing that based on Joseph Smith's use of the phenomenon of the refraction of light to explain some of the what he experienced with the seer stone, he was viewing it in scientific and technological terms. I guess based on that kind of, from the Mormon perspective, do you think it's like the seer stone was more like training wheels or a Dumbos feather? Training wheels or what? Or Dumbos feather. Oh. Certainly the seer stone, I don't know, it certainly was a stage in Joseph Smith's progress as a prophet. So after the Book of Mormon revelations, he generally doesn't need to use the stone anymore.