There is a principle that sits at the foundation of everything I write, everything I teach, and everything I have come to understand about how prophecy is received or rejected in our day. It is simply this: what you believe does not just influence what you see. It determines it. Not partially. Almost entirely.

This is not a new insight. The Lord has always known it. It is precisely why He reveals truth line upon line and precept upon precept, giving people only what they are prepared to receive. He does not overwhelm a new believer with every commandment at once, because responsibility follows knowledge, and God is far too merciful to hold someone accountable for light they were never ready to carry. He calibrates what He teaches to what we are willing to live and willing to believe. That is not a limitation of God. It is a reflection of His patience with us.

The problem is that this same principle works in reverse. When we believe something firmly enough, we stop being able to see evidence that contradicts it. The belief becomes the lens, and everything that passes through that lens gets filtered, bent, and reinterpreted until it confirms what we already think. Facts do not automatically change belief. Evidence does not automatically produce recognition. Something else has to happen first, and that something else is humility.

A Tower Across the Lake

I want to show you one of the most striking examples of this I have personally encountered, and I want to be honest that it started out frustrating me before it taught me something valuable.

I have an online friend I will call Carl who believes the Earth is flat. I know that sounds almost impossible in 2026, but the flat Earth movement is larger than most people realize, and its followers are not all unintelligent. Carl is not unintelligent. He is, however, deeply committed to a belief. And that commitment does something to how he processes information.

Carl shared a video someone had made to prove the flat Earth theory. The video showed a camera shot taken from across Lake Ontario, looking toward Toronto. The CN Tower was visible in the distance. The person making the video argued that since you could still see the tower from that distance, the curvature of the Earth must not exist.

I have been to Toronto. I have stood on the glass observation deck of that tower, looking straight down nearly a quarter mile to the street below — one of the more humbling experiences I can remember. I have had dinner in the 360 Restaurant, the one that slowly rotates so you get a full view of the city and the lake while you eat. It is an extraordinary building, and I know exactly what it looks like at full height. So when I looked at the screenshot from that video, something immediately jumped out at me that the video's creator had completely missed.

Here is what Carl's video showed:

I took that screenshot, found an actual photograph of the full CN Tower, and lined them up so the tower appeared at the same height in both images. Then I looked at where the waterline fell in Carl's video compared to the full tower.

The water comes approximately one third of the way up the tower. The CN Tower stands 1,815 feet tall. That means more than 500 feet of the tower's base is hidden below the horizon, swallowed by the curvature of the Earth. Carl's own video, the one he was using as proof, was actually one of the clearest demonstrations of a spherical Earth I have ever seen. The evidence he presented proved the exact opposite of what he intended.

I made a short video walking through this comparison and shared it with Carl. I asked him what he thought.

He ignored me.

I tried again a week later. Carl finally responded with something to the effect that he was just presenting different points of view and it did not really matter what I thought. Then he kept posting flat Earth videos.

I tried once more a few weeks after that. He never answered. And the flat Earth content kept coming.

The evidence did not matter. Clear, visual, measurable, undeniable evidence did not move Carl one inch. And the reason is not that he lacked intelligence. The reason is that his belief had already decided the conclusion, and no amount of evidence was going to be allowed to threaten it.

This Is Not an Attack on Faith

Before I go further, I want to be very clear about something. This article is not an argument against faith. It is not a case for the scientific method as the only path to truth. I believe in things that no laboratory can prove. I have received personal revelation. I have felt the Spirit confirm truths that no amount of earthly evidence could have produced on its own. There are dimensions of reality that exist entirely beyond the five senses, and the person who demands physical proof for everything will miss them entirely.

Faith is not the problem. Faith is the path.

The problem is a specific kind of belief, the hardened kind, the kind that stops being faith and becomes a wall. Real faith is humble. Real faith says, "I believe this is true, and I am willing to follow where truth leads, even if it takes me somewhere unexpected." The hardened belief I am describing says something very different. It says, "I have already decided, and I will not be moved." That is not faith. That is pride wearing faith's clothing.

I have seen this dynamic destroy people's testimony of the Church just as easily as I see it keep people from receiving new truth. Someone decides the Church is not true, and then every interaction, every historical detail, every imperfect leader becomes confirmation of what they already decided. The belief came first. The evidence just gets assigned to serve it. I have watched brilliant people leave the Church not because the evidence demanded it but because their belief had already shifted and then went looking for reasons.

The solution is not to abandon belief. The solution is to hold our beliefs with open hands, to be willing to be taught, to be humble enough to let God show us things we did not expect.

When the Belief Is About a Person

Here is where this gets personal, and where it connects directly to why I wrote my book.

When I share the scriptural evidence that Donald Trump is the servant prophesied in Isaiah, confirmed by John the Revelator, and specifically identified by Christ Himself in Third Nephi as one of the great signs of the last days, the response I receive most often is not a careful examination of the scriptures. It is instant rejection.

The belief came first. The hatred came first, in many cases. And once that is in place, no scripture is going to get through. I show them Isaiah's description of a servant whose appearance would be marred more than any man. They read right past it. I show them how the prophecy requires that this servant be despised, rejected, and hated by his own people. They agree with every word of it. And then they cannot see that they are the ones doing the despising.

It is Carl and the CN Tower all over again. The evidence they are holding in their hands proves the point they refuse to accept.

I have written more directly about how hatred functions as a spiritual blindfold, and I would encourage you to read that article alongside this one. But the point here is broader than Trump. It is about the condition of our hearts when we approach any truth that challenges something we already believe.

The Kind of Belief That Leads to Truth

I want to close with what I actually believe about belief, because I do not want anyone walking away from this article thinking the goal is skepticism. It is not.

The kind of belief the Lord honors is the kind Alma described when he compared faith to a seed. You plant it. You nourish it. You watch it grow. And you are willing to follow it wherever it takes you, even if it grows into something larger and more unexpected than the tiny seed you started with. That is how God reveals truth. He gives us something small, something we are willing to believe, and then He grows it into something magnificent, if we do not kill it by deciding in advance how big it is allowed to get.

Carl killed his seed. He decided what the tree was allowed to look like before it had a chance to grow, and then he pruned away everything that did not fit the shape he had already chosen.

I am asking you to do something different. I am asking you to plant the seed, to look honestly at what the scriptures say about the last days and about the servant God has prepared, and to resist the urge to decide the conclusion before the evidence has been examined. Not because faith should be abandoned. Because real faith is brave enough to follow truth wherever it goes.

If you want to see what the evidence actually looks like, start with whether Donald Trump appears in biblical prophecy, or read about who the Davidic Servant actually is according to Isaiah. Come to it with open hands. That is all I ask.

Truth is not afraid of examination. And if what I am showing you is true, it will still be true after you have looked at it carefully. God does not need you to protect His prophecies from scrutiny. He just needs you to be willing to see.

Postscript: Donna

After this article was published, I received a comment from a reader I will call Donna. She wanted me to know that the evidence for a flat earth surrounded by an ice wall is far more extensive than anything I had cited, and that I simply needed to set aside my biases and study it properly. Water always seeks its level, she explained. Water cannot bend. A snow globe, she suggested, might help me visualize it correctly.

I pointed her to the images in the article — the ones showing more than 500 feet of the CN Tower's base hidden below the horizon — and asked how she explained them.

She declined to engage with the images. Instead she told me she does not argue with disbelieving minds, that I should study it myself rather than asking her, and that once a person discovers something for themselves it is far more satisfying. She closed by telling me that people who ask questions should prepare to be mocked by those who do not want to know the truth.

And then she said this — and I want you to read it carefully, because it is one of the most perfectly constructed sentences I have ever received in a comment:

She said this while declining to look at the photographic evidence I presented. She used the central argument of my article — that a made-up mind cannot be reached by evidence — as her reason for not examining the evidence. She proved the thesis of the piece in the very act of responding to it.

She closed her final message with something that stopped me cold: "I stand with Carl and the many others waking up."

She named herself as a second Carl without realizing it. And she did it in the comment section of an article explaining exactly what Carl represents.

I told her she had proved the point of the article, wished her well, and let the thread close. There was nothing left to say. The article had written its own sequel, and Donna had written it for me.

I share this not to mock Donna. I genuinely wish her well, and I mean that. I share it because if this pattern shows up in something as verifiable as the shape of the Earth, it most certainly shows up when the subject is prophecy, or a servant of God, or a doctrine that challenges something we have already decided. Carl and Donna are not outliers. They are all of us, in the areas where our beliefs have hardened past the reach of evidence.

The question worth asking is not whether Carl or Donna is wrong about the Earth. The question is where in your own life you are doing exactly what they did — holding evidence at arm's length because the conclusion was decided before it arrived.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.