This is taken from another site. Kerry Shirts has long been a staunch Mormon apologist. It seems he no longer is:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/59925-richard-bushmans-description-of-faith-crisis/page__st__20
Do you know how I came about finding all that material for my Mormonism Researched site? It was easier than falling off a log Glenn. I already had the answer. All I did was find as much evidence that arrived at the answer as i could find. I did it all exactly BACKWARDS Glenn. That is how apologetics work. The answer is the given, not what is being tried to discover and find. When you already begin with the answer it is easy to amass papers with gajillions of sources. One simply takes what suits one to show one's answer is correct. It is pure phony though. But as apologists we are only allowed one conclusion. It MUST support Mormonism. So I went overboard to try and show it does. This is why I personally now distrust apologetic materials, my own included.
Apologetics does it all backwards. I made some seriously impressive looking papers through the years, but when it dawned on me that all I was doing was picking and choosing and selective use of quotes to arrive at my answer I realized it was futile. You can find, pick and choose quotes from Albert Einstein to make it seem like he really believed in the God of the Bible, but it's futile, because in context he actually didn't believe that. So many of the sources we apologists have used are selections only, and the rest is left to the side because it doesn't jive with the answer (and testimony) we want it to arrive at so we do a huge snow job and use more and more until in the end it looks MIGHTY IMPRESSIVE! But it's all eyewash. I didn't use or read or see any other side. I worked with blinders on and found just exactly what I wanted to come to the conclusion that I wanted it to.
My study on mysticism demonstrated that to me a few months later after I had published it. My conclusion in that paper is not even the most likely one, but hey, I wanted it to encourage faith, to show that religion has the ultimate truth, yada, yada, yada. Re-reading that gave me a serious jolt, as a lot of the other stuff I read. The Egyptological materials is seriously more of the same. I am not repudiating it, I am saying my information is at best designed as being one sided and hence not accurate. I go through a trillion sources, take a sentence here, a thought there, interweave them all together into something that none of the sources were thinking of, but hey! It supported Mormonism, so I put it together. It's all fluff and phony man. I can go back through those exact same sources I used, and select parts and pieces I left out originally and come up with an entirely different paper showing how vastly wrong it all is!
Was the spirit guiding me? Oh you have no idea. I KNEW God was guiding me because all this would strengthen testimonies, and many others told me so as well. I had the zeal you see, but not the knowledge. Zeal and excitement and energy into doing apologetics is not God guiding the work. The ONLY correction to over misplaced zeal is MORE knowledge. Nibley has it exactly right. And the humility to change one's attitude, which precious few of us can or do. So now what? Why and how would God guide me to do something so silly? Of course, the real answer is i was deceiving myself and God has nothing to do with it. The interpretation that the warming in the bosom is God is just shadow and silly. It isn't God. I get the same feeling when I read science, atheism, philosophy, etc. It is the excitement of learning, of getting more knowledge that was happening.
God doesn't need any apologetics. Think about it for a sec. God needs help? Crimany in 2 minutes God could get it all straightened out. So the church teaches well God allows us to be involved in the process and its good for us. In this regard I suspect it could be. After all, knowing how I put all that stuff together and knowing how phony it is now, will certainly help me with anything else I do in life. But to research with the answer already given and pretend like everything we are bringing together to bolster our answer? That's a canard pure and simple. But this is how we are trained to think in religion. Science doesn't do it that way. Besides science is self-correcting with others coming in and verifying or refuting evidence. Conclusions are never hard and fast without a lot of corroboration. Religion never has done this. It always flies back to faith in light of the most absurd things said!
So, I am working through some things is all. Intellect is the only sure way to reason and think through things. It's the greatest gift we have been given, and to distrust it is to distrust the God who gave it to us. SHAME on us for distrusing our brains, our minds, and thinking.