You have clear answers in the catechism. I’m not sure what you believe given what your prophets have said and what I hear your apologists now say. Can you help me? Is there a catechism of the Mormon church that answers the following questions authoritatively? 1. Was Adam “our Father and our God”? (Brigham Young) 2. Was God the Father once as we are, a mortal man who became a god? (Joseph Smith) 3. Are human spirits eternal, pre-existing even God the Father when he was merely a mortal man? (Joseph Smith) 4. Were there gods before God the Father? 5. How did God the Father become a god? Who or what gave him the requisite powers? 6. Does the Father god-man have a wife, heavenly mother? Have they sired any children? 7. Can mortal human beings like you become a god? 8. Is the so-called Book of Abraham a “translation” of “papyrus” on which Abraham, “by his own hand,” wrote the book and that had “fallen into” the church’s hands? 9. If an Egyptologist translated the facsimiles, would what he writes match the “translation” in the Book of Abraham? 10. When did the catalyst theory develop? Who was the first to defend it? Was it after the findings of the Egyptologists about the book? There are many more questions I’d have, but I think that’s a good start—I’ve heard different answers from @ThoughtfulSaint , the prophets, and more conservative Mormons who are willing to defend them (versus changing them with philosophy).

I look to Christ through James, who says ‘faith without works is dead.’

Why do you intentionally downplay the evidence? There are many witnesses, including a German Protestant prince who saw Joseph fly and converted to Catholicism. It was controversial enough for Leibniz to mention.

Yes. St Ignatius of Antioch.

Anti-Trinitarian tries to use AI to refute the Trinity. It doesn’t go well.

He knew Polycarp and John, the beloved disciple. I'm going with him over Americans 2000 years later.

The Bishop of Rome’s authority over foreign churches is evidenced very early on in church history. Clement, the third Bishop of Rome after Peter, commands the Corinthian church by the authority of God, twice: He warns the Corinthians who ‘should disobey what has been said by him [i.e., God] through us,’ and commends those who would ‘obey what we have written through the Holy Spirit.’ 1 Clem. 59, 63. The authoritative tone of the letter is all the more striking when one realizes that St. John the Apostle was still alive and closer to Corinth. Still the Corinthians appealed to the Church of Rome, and received Clement’s response. In a letter to Pope Soter, Dionysius, the later Bishop of Corinth, confirmed that the Corinthian Church obeyed. The Church so highly regarded Clement’s letter that they read it in church alongside Scripture. Pope Calistus followed in that very early tradition. He promulgated a decree that sins like fornication could be remitted, and grounded that authority in Matthew 16. After Tertullian became a Montanist heretic he mocked the Pope for asserting authority as ‘the Supreme Pontiff, the bishop of bishops’ and ‘blessed Pope.’

No response to the challenge: Reception would make non-ecumenical some councils your Church says are ecumenical.

I think you’re missing his point. Catholics think Mary is a saint, so your alleged miracle doesn’t vindicate EO specifically. What might vindicate EO specifically is a miracle on an icon of a saint Catholics don’t recognize, like Mark of Ephesus. Cam is asking if you’ve got an example like that.

This is obviously true. Florence was more ecumenical than most ecumenical councils.

The Church of the East and the Coptic Church exist as counterexamples to your view that a council needs to be received ‘by the church as a whole’ to be ecumenical. That test would make non-ecumenical those councils that your Church says are ecumenical. Hence the dilemma.

They're philosophers. You don't need a PhD to be a philosopher, or else Aristotle wouldn't count as a philosopher. You'd know that, if you were a philosopher. But you aren't, unlike Noah and Joe.