Three Case Studies · A Theory of Everything

[A Theory of Everything](/#contents)

Chapter 6:

# [Three Case Studies](/case-studies)

Draft reconstruction, pending the author’s review

*   [The Lost 116 Pages](#the-lost-116-pages)
*   [The Star at Christ’s Birth](#the-star-at-christ-s-birth)
*   [Ephraim Hanks and the Buffalo](#ephraim-hanks-and-the-buffalo)
*   [The Pattern](#the-pattern)
*   [Notes](#notes)

[Next: Miracles Without Micromanagement](/miracles)

Abstract principles are easiest to test against real stories. Here are three, each showing the same pattern from a different angle. A need arises at one point in history, and the answer turns out to have been set in motion long before, or to take on its role only when the need arrives. It comes through ordinary means, and no one’s agency is overridden.

## The Lost 116 Pages

In 1828, Martin Harris persuaded Joseph Smith to let him take home the first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript, and the pages were lost.Martin Harris (1783–1875) was a prosperous New York farmer who served as Joseph Smith’s scribe for the early translation and later mortgaged his farm to pay for the first printing. The pages, translated from the Book of Lehi in Mormon’s abridgment, were never recovered. The events are recorded in [Doctrine and Covenants 3](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/3?lang=eng) and [10](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng). [↓](#note-1) It was a real loss, caused by real choices: Martin’s insistence, Joseph’s reluctant consent, and whatever happened afterward. No one was forced. Joseph was rebuked, and the work was interrupted.[Doctrine and Covenants 3:6–15](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/3?lang=eng&id=p6-p15#p6). The rebuke makes sense only if the loss was genuinely Joseph’s and Martin’s doing. [↓](#note-2)

Long before, Nephi had been commanded to keep a second, smaller record covering the same period, “for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not.”[1 Nephi 9:5](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p5#p5). Verse 6 continues: “But the Lord knoweth all things from the beginning; wherefore, he prepareth a way to accomplish all his works among the children of men.” In the Book of Mormon’s own account, Nephi was a prophet who left Jerusalem about 600 BC; his *large plates* held the history of kings and wars, and his *small plates* held “the ministry,” the more sacred matters ([1 Nephi 9:2–4](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p2-p4#p2)). [↓](#note-3) Centuries later Mormon, compiling the record that became the Book of Mormon, included those small plates with his own abridgment for the same stated reason, “for a wise purpose,” while saying plainly that he did not know all things.[Words of Mormon 1:3–7](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/w-of-m/1?lang=eng&id=p3-p7#p3). Mormon, a fourth-century AD prophet in the narrative, abridged the large plates; the small plates were added unabridged. [↓](#note-4) After the loss, the Lord told Joseph not to retranslate the missing pages but to translate from that smaller record instead.[Doctrine and Covenants 10:38–45](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p38-p45#p38). The revelation also explains why retranslation would have been unwise: those who had the stolen pages meant to alter them and then claim that Joseph could not produce the same translation twice ([Doctrine and Covenants 10:10–19](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p10-p19#p10)). That threat, too, came from free and hostile choices. [↓](#note-5)

**Here is the heart of the case.** God’s purpose was fixed, but what it fixed was not “Nephi’s small plates will be published.” It was something more like “the truths this record exists to carry will be preserved and will come forth.” That purpose did not by itself require the small plates. As long as Joseph still had the 116 pages, a finished Book of Mormon translated straight through Mormon’s abridgment would have met it, and the small plates could have remained a supplement rather than a necessity. Before the loss, histories with and without the small plates in the finished record were both still open.

Then Martin Harris chose, and the pages were gone. That free choice pruned every remaining history in which no second account of the same period could take their place, because in those histories the record could no longer come forth whole. Only then did Nephi’s “wise purpose,” a purpose Nephi said he did not know and Mormon did not claim to know, become definite. The loss is what made the small plates required. A free choice in 1828 settled which earlier history was the actual one.

It is as if all things are present to God at once. Scripture describes His knowledge in just those terms: “all things are present before mine eyes,”[Doctrine and Covenants 38:2](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/38?lang=eng&id=p2#p2). [↓](#note-6) and “all things are present with me, for I know them all.”[Moses 1:6](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/moses/1?lang=eng&id=p6#p6). Chapter Nine discusses how the model reads such passages about God and time. [↓](#note-7) On this model, that is not God reading ahead in a finished script. It is God holding the whole field of possible histories at once, so that a choice in 1828 and a commandment given more than two thousand years earlier can belong to the same answer. Chapter Eight names this pattern with a borrowed word, *collapse*: a field of possibilities resolving into one actual history. The word is an analogy for how possibility becomes actual, not a claim about physics.**A comparison from physics, and its limits.** In 1978 John Archibald Wheeler proposed a “delayed-choice” thought experiment ([Wheeler, 1978](https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-473250-6.50006-6)). A single photon enters an apparatus with two possible paths, and only *after* it is already inside does the experimenter choose how to measure it: in a way that reveals which path it took, or in a way that shows interference between the paths. The later choice determines which description of the photon’s journey applies. The experiment has since been carried out with single photons, the choice made at random after the photon had entered ([Jacques et al., *Science* 315, 2007](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136303)). The parallel is suggestive: a later choice settles what can truly be said about an earlier stretch of history. The limits matter as much. No signal travels backward, no recorded past event is altered, and many physicists argue the experiment can be explained entirely in ordinary forward time ([Ellerman, 2015](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40509-014-0026-2)). The photon is not an agent, and the plates were never in a quantum superposition. The comparison illustrates a shape, not a mechanism. [↓](#note-8)

Didn’t Nephi actually engrave those plates centuries earlier? He did, and the model needs no reversal of time to say so. Nephi engraved them, for reasons he was given in his own day, and Mormon really did include them. Nothing unmakes or redoes any of that. What becomes definite through the later choice is which *possible past* belongs to the actual history: a past in which Nephi made a valuable but supplementary record, or a past in which he made the record that saved the book.This is where the model departs from a common reading of [1 Nephi 9:6](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p6#p6), which takes the verse as God foreseeing this particular loss and preparing a remedy for it in advance. On this model the commandment did not have to be a response to a specific foreseen loss. God, knowing every possible history, prepared a way that would hold across all of them, and the later choice determined which of the histories containing those plates was the real one. The engraving was forward provision; its role became definite later. [↓](#note-9)

Agency is untouched throughout. Martin freely asked for the pages and freely failed to keep them. Joseph freely gave in, and freely accepted the rebuke that followed. Nephi and Mormon freely obeyed instructions they did not understand.**Why not simply prevent the loss?** The model’s answer is the first principle: God does not override a person’s agency, even to protect a sacred record. He protected the *outcome*, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, by a provision that held whichever way Martin and Joseph chose. [↓](#note-10)

The loss came late. It settled what had been needed all along. The work went forward. No one was a puppet.

## The Star at Christ’s Birth

The birth of Christ was marked by a new star. Matthew records the wise men following it,[Matthew 2:1–10](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/matt/2?lang=eng&id=p1-p10#p1). [↓](#note-11) and the Book of Mormon records that Samuel the Lamanite prophesied a new star and that it appeared as promised.[Helaman 14:5](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/hel/14?lang=eng&id=p5#p5); [3 Nephi 1:21](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/1?lang=eng&id=p21#p21). In the Book of Mormon narrative, Samuel is a prophet who preached to the Nephites about five years before Christ’s birth. [↓](#note-12)

If the star was a natural light in the heavens, the light that appeared that night did not begin its journey that night. Light from the heavens is old by the time it reaches us. The sign that answered a prophecy given in one generation, and that greeted the Savior’s birth in another, would have had to be set on its course long before either, through nothing more than the ordinary workings of natural law.What the star actually was is not known. Proposals have included a conjunction of planets (Johannes Kepler drew attention to the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC), a nova, and a comet, and none has won general agreement; some readers regard the star as miraculous in a way no astronomy will explain. The point here does not depend on settling the question. *If* the sign was a natural celestial event, it is a vivid example of a cause set in motion long before the need it served. Most stars visible to the naked eye are tens to thousands of light-years away, so their light left them long before the people who see it were born. [↓](#note-13)

That is exactly the pattern this model expects. God does not need to reach into the sky at the last moment. He sees the whole of history at once. Natural law supplies the local mechanism. Providence supplies the timing, through the coherence of the whole.

## Ephraim Hanks and the Buffalo

In the autumn of 1856, the Willie and Martin handcart companies were trapped by early snow on the high plains, and rescuers rode east from Salt Lake to reach them.Between 1856 and 1860 about three thousand Latter-day Saint emigrants crossed the plains to Utah pulling handcarts. The Willie and Martin companies left late in the season and were caught by early winter storms in what is now Wyoming. After Brigham Young called for a rescue at the October 1856 general conference, wagon teams went out from Salt Lake City. More than two hundred members of the two companies died. [↓](#note-14) One of them was Ephraim Hanks. By his own account, while camped alone in the snow on his way to the stranded Saints, he asked the Lord to send him a buffalo, and soon after praying he saw one close to his camp.From Hanks’s own later narrative of the rescue. In paraphrase: camped alone in the snow near South Pass in November 1856, he asked the Lord for a buffalo and then saw a bull within about fifty yards of his camp. He shot it, slept on its hide, and ate its meat. The next morning he killed a buffalo cow, loaded his horses with the meat, and that evening reached the starving Martin company. Long excerpts from the narrative are quoted in [“’I am ready now!’ Ephraim Hanks, handcart rescuer,”](https://www.deseret.com/2006/7/15/20784779/i-am-ready-now-151-ephraim-hanks-handcart-rescuer/) *Deseret News*, July 15, 2006. [↓](#note-15)

Think about what it took for that answer to be there. A particular animal had to have lived a particular life: born somewhere, wandering for years across the plains, surviving winters and hunters, and arriving at that place at that moment. None of those earlier events was caused by the prayer, in the ordinary forward-moving sense. Yet all of them form part of the answer.**The hardest objection.** The same winter that brought Hanks his buffalo brought death to many in those companies. If providence can arrange a buffalo, why not food for everyone, or an earlier start, or a milder autumn? The model does not pretend to answer this fully, and no honest account of providence can. What it can say is limited but real. Much of the suffering of 1856 flowed from human decisions, including the late departure, and the model does not allow God to override those. Natural law is genuinely law here; it is the mechanism providence works *through*, not something suspended on demand. And the model says God establishes conditions history must satisfy, not that every good outcome we can imagine is among them. That leaves real grief standing, and it should. [↓](#note-16)

## The Pattern

In each case, the same structure shows through:

*   A need arises through the real choices of real people.
*   God’s purpose for the outcome is fixed.
*   The provision that meets the need was set in motion earlier, often much earlier, and sometimes its role becomes definite only when the need arrives.
*   The provision arrives through ordinary means: a prophet’s obedience, the light of the heavens, an animal on the plains.
*   No one’s agency is overridden along the way.

This is what providence as a global constraint looks like from the inside. The answer does not have to be pushed into place at the last minute, because the whole history, from beginning to end, was always going to be one that held together.

## Notes

1.   Martin Harris (1783–1875) was a prosperous New York farmer who served as Joseph Smith’s scribe for the early translation and later mortgaged his farm to pay for the first printing. The pages, translated from the Book of Lehi in Mormon’s abridgment, were never recovered. The events are recorded in [Doctrine and Covenants 3](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/3?lang=eng) and [10](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng). [↑](#ref-1)
2.   [Doctrine and Covenants 3:6–15](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/3?lang=eng&id=p6-p15#p6). The rebuke makes sense only if the loss was genuinely Joseph’s and Martin’s doing. [↑](#ref-2)
3.   [1 Nephi 9:5](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p5#p5). Verse 6 continues: “But the Lord knoweth all things from the beginning; wherefore, he prepareth a way to accomplish all his works among the children of men.” In the Book of Mormon’s own account, Nephi was a prophet who left Jerusalem about 600 BC; his *large plates* held the history of kings and wars, and his *small plates* held “the ministry,” the more sacred matters ([1 Nephi 9:2–4](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p2-p4#p2)). [↑](#ref-3)
4.   [Words of Mormon 1:3–7](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/w-of-m/1?lang=eng&id=p3-p7#p3). Mormon, a fourth-century AD prophet in the narrative, abridged the large plates; the small plates were added unabridged. [↑](#ref-4)
5.   [Doctrine and Covenants 10:38–45](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p38-p45#p38). The revelation also explains why retranslation would have been unwise: those who had the stolen pages meant to alter them and then claim that Joseph could not produce the same translation twice ([Doctrine and Covenants 10:10–19](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p10-p19#p10)). That threat, too, came from free and hostile choices. [↑](#ref-5)
6.   [Doctrine and Covenants 38:2](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/38?lang=eng&id=p2#p2). [↑](#ref-6)
7.   [Moses 1:6](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/moses/1?lang=eng&id=p6#p6). Chapter Nine discusses how the model reads such passages about God and time. [↑](#ref-7)
8.   **A comparison from physics, and its limits.** In 1978 John Archibald Wheeler proposed a “delayed-choice” thought experiment ([Wheeler, 1978](https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-473250-6.50006-6)). A single photon enters an apparatus with two possible paths, and only *after* it is already inside does the experimenter choose how to measure it: in a way that reveals which path it took, or in a way that shows interference between the paths. The later choice determines which description of the photon’s journey applies. The experiment has since been carried out with single photons, the choice made at random after the photon had entered ([Jacques et al., *Science* 315, 2007](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136303)). The parallel is suggestive: a later choice settles what can truly be said about an earlier stretch of history. The limits matter as much. No signal travels backward, no recorded past event is altered, and many physicists argue the experiment can be explained entirely in ordinary forward time ([Ellerman, 2015](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40509-014-0026-2)). The photon is not an agent, and the plates were never in a quantum superposition. The comparison illustrates a shape, not a mechanism. [↑](#ref-8)
9.   This is where the model departs from a common reading of [1 Nephi 9:6](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/9?lang=eng&id=p6#p6), which takes the verse as God foreseeing this particular loss and preparing a remedy for it in advance. On this model the commandment did not have to be a response to a specific foreseen loss. God, knowing every possible history, prepared a way that would hold across all of them, and the later choice determined which of the histories containing those plates was the real one. The engraving was forward provision; its role became definite later. [↑](#ref-9)
10.  **Why not simply prevent the loss?** The model’s answer is the first principle: God does not override a person’s agency, even to protect a sacred record. He protected the *outcome*, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, by a provision that held whichever way Martin and Joseph chose. [↑](#ref-10)
11.  [Matthew 2:1–10](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/matt/2?lang=eng&id=p1-p10#p1). [↑](#ref-11)
12.  [Helaman 14:5](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/hel/14?lang=eng&id=p5#p5); [3 Nephi 1:21](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/1?lang=eng&id=p21#p21). In the Book of Mormon narrative, Samuel is a prophet who preached to the Nephites about five years before Christ’s birth. [↑](#ref-12)
13.  What the star actually was is not known. Proposals have included a conjunction of planets (Johannes Kepler drew attention to the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC), a nova, and a comet, and none has won general agreement; some readers regard the star as miraculous in a way no astronomy will explain. The point here does not depend on settling the question. *If* the sign was a natural celestial event, it is a vivid example of a cause set in motion long before the need it served. Most stars visible to the naked eye are tens to thousands of light-years away, so their light left them long before the people who see it were born. [↑](#ref-13)
14.  Between 1856 and 1860 about three thousand Latter-day Saint emigrants crossed the plains to Utah pulling handcarts. The Willie and Martin companies left late in the season and were caught by early winter storms in what is now Wyoming. After Brigham Young called for a rescue at the October 1856 general conference, wagon teams went out from Salt Lake City. More than two hundred members of the two companies died. [↑](#ref-14)
15.  From Hanks’s own later narrative of the rescue. In paraphrase: camped alone in the snow near South Pass in November 1856, he asked the Lord for a buffalo and then saw a bull within about fifty yards of his camp. He shot it, slept on its hide, and ate its meat. The next morning he killed a buffalo cow, loaded his horses with the meat, and that evening reached the starving Martin company. Long excerpts from the narrative are quoted in [“’I am ready now!’ Ephraim Hanks, handcart rescuer,”](https://www.deseret.com/2006/7/15/20784779/i-am-ready-now-151-ephraim-hanks-handcart-rescuer/) *Deseret News*, July 15, 2006. [↑](#ref-15)
16.  **The hardest objection.** The same winter that brought Hanks his buffalo brought death to many in those companies. If providence can arrange a buffalo, why not food for everyone, or an earlier start, or a milder autumn? The model does not pretend to answer this fully, and no honest account of providence can. What it can say is limited but real. Much of the suffering of 1856 flowed from human decisions, including the late departure, and the model does not allow God to override those. Natural law is genuinely law here; it is the mechanism providence works *through*, not something suspended on demand. And the model says God establishes conditions history must satisfy, not that every good outcome we can imagine is among them. That leaves real grief standing, and it should. [↑](#ref-16)

[PreviousProvidence as Global Constraint](/providence)[NextMiracles Without Micromanagement](/miracles)

A Theory of Everything · Draft edition, 2026

×

[A Theory of Everything](/)

*   [Before the First ChapterIntroduction](/introduction)

Part One · The Model

*   [Chapter 1Agency](/agency)
*   [Chapter 2God Knows Every Possible Future](/possible-futures)
*   [Chapter 3Divine Decree and Prophecy](/decree-and-prophecy)
*   [Chapter 4God Collapses the Mission, Not the Person](/mission-not-person)
*   [Chapter 5Providence as Global Constraint](/providence)
*   [Chapter 6Three Case Studies](/case-studies)
*   [Chapter 7Miracles Without Micromanagement](/miracles)
*   [Chapter 8Wave-Function Collapse as an Analogy](/collapse)
*   [Chapter 9Time as Actualization](/time)
*   [Chapter 10The Atonement Across Time](/atonement)
*   [Chapter 11The Light of Christ](/light-of-christ)
*   [Chapter 12A Unified View of Providence](/unified-view)

Part Two · Companions

*   [Companion AEchoes in Early Christianity](/early-christianity)
*   [Companion BThe Forty-Day Ministry](/forty-days)
*   [Companion COpen Questions](/open-questions)