Herein is the problem of a faithless generation. They cannot believe the things of God because those things require faith, and they do not have faith. Moroni tells us that Ether “did prophesy great and marvelous things unto the people,” but the people were untouched, “because they saw them not.” The people had already decided how they were going to process information, and the prophecies did not fit in to that worldview.
Of course, modern man has precisely the same problem. Those who do not have faith have a hard time acquiring it, because they assume that they must have something other than faith. They want science, not faith. They want experiments of chemicals, not an experiment of the heart.