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In this episode, Trent shares the three biggest problems he has when it comes to accepting the truth of Mormonism.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Recently I released an episode that showed the best way to defend the martyrdom argument for Christ Resurrection. I show that the disciple’s willingness to suffer and even die for belief in Christ’s resurrection is evidence they were sincere. They weren’t frauds who lied about the resurrection. They may have hallucinated or been sincerely mistaken, but the original witnesses of the resurrection were not frauds. I also talked in the video about how skeptics will say that if Christians believe the apostles were sincere, then they should also believe Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was sincere because he also endured violence, suffering, and he died while in custody of the authorities in a shootout at a local jail. At this point, Mormons will jump in and say, “See, if you believe the Apostles claims about the resurrection, then why not believe the claims of the 11 witnesses of Joseph Smith and the golden plates that he allegedly translated to tell the story that’s in the Book of Mormon.”
Now, I briefly alluded in the episode that the cases aren’t parallel. Smith took risks, but he also stood to gain rewards from his behavior such as the dozens of spiritual wives he had, some of whom were only 14 years old. Or the power he attained as a Mormon leader. He even became mayor of a town in Illinois and incited a riot that led to the destruction of a printing press that had criticized Smith for things like his spiritual wives. This led to his arrest and the shootout where Smith died in a Carthage jail in 1844. So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to present the three big reasons why I’m not Mormon. Now, these aren’t the only reasons, but they’re probably three of the biggest beyond just the fact that I’m not convinced of the supernatural claims made by Joseph Smith. The reason I’m not convinced of those claims deserves its own episode, but today I just want to focus on these big three reasons that stand out for me.
But before I share those, I hope that you will like this video. You’ll subscribe to our channel and if you want to help the channel to grow and get access to bonus content like our weekly patron only livestream, that’s every Wednesday night, 8:15 PM Eastern, 5:15 PM Pacific. All that and more is available to our supporters at trenthornpodcast.com. Definitely go and check it out. Now, the three reasons. Before I say though why I’m not Mormon, it’s going to be helpful to summarize some of the important elements of what Mormonism teaches. And a caveat, the Mormon Church, by church, I don’t mean a Christian Church, they just call themselves a church. The Mormon church is moving away from the term Mormon. They’re trying to distance themselves from it, but I still use the term because it’s the most efficient way to refer to the organization that I’m talking about. So, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon Church, believes that it’s restored the doctrines of the early Christian Church that were allegedly lost shortly after the death of the Apostles.
Mormons believe this restoration began in the year 1820 when a 14-year-old Joseph Smith Jr. prayed for guidance about which church he should join. Smith claimed that while he was praying in a wooded area in upstate New York, two personages identifying themselves as God, the Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him. They allegedly told Joseph Smith that he should not join any of the churches, and according to the Mormon Church’s website, it says the following, “As Jesus reestablished his church, he brought forth an ancient record that was translated by Joseph Smith. It is known as the Book of Mormon, another testament of Jesus Christ. It both supports and clarifies the Bible, ensuring that the teachings of Jesus Christ remain pure and correct. You can come to know that the Book of Mormon, like the Bible, is the word of God by reading it and praying to know if it’s true. If God answers that it is true. You will know that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that you have found Jesus’s true church.”
And so, what did Joseph Smith teach? I can’t unpack all of what Mormonism teaches in one episode, but here are the parts that I found most problematic. According to Joseph Smith, in 1823 an angel named Moroni appeared to him and revealed the location of a set of golden plates inscribed in a language Smith called Reformed Egyptian. Smith met with Moroni over a period of four years to prepare to translate the plates. Smith allegedly did this by peering inside of a hat and using a set of Sears Stones to illuminate the reformed Egyptian characters on the plates. Smith would then dictate the translation of what he saw to ascribe. In 1828, a wealthy farmer named Martin Harris offered to help Smith in the translation process, but Harris lost 116 pages of the translated manuscript Smith gave him.
Smith claimed God was angry about the loss of the pages and would now only let Joseph Smith translate from another set of golden plates. These plates told the same story as the original plates he translated, but from a slightly different perspective. Of course, if Smith were just dictating the story from memory and not actually translating, it would’ve been nearly impossible for him to reproduce what he originally dictated to Martin Harris and prove he was a legitimate prophet. Smith himself even described in the book Doctrine and Covenant Section 10 how his critics would have used the loss of the pages to try and prove that he was not actually translating the golden plates, but reciting a story from memory. Now, despite these challenges, in 1829, a school teacher named Oliver Cowdery helped Smith finish a translation, and on March 26th, 1830, the Book of Mormon was published.
So, what is the Book of Mormon about? The book follows the descendants of Lehigh, a man who was living at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. He traveled, allegedly, with his family from Jerusalem across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The Book of Mormon is divided into chapters based on the allegedly different authors who recorded the history of Lehigh’s descendants. The two primary lines of Lehigh were the Nephites and the Laminites, both of whom built really large elaborate cities in the new world and engaged in massive violent wars with each other. The climax of the Book of Mormon takes place in the third book of Nephi when Jesus Christ appears to the Nephites in America shortly after his resurrection and he preaches the gospel to them. The book concludes with the testimony of Moroni who was the only Nephite to survive the last battle with the Laminites in the fifth century.
The Laminites then became the ancestors of modern Native Americans. Before he died, Moroni allegedly gathered the golden plates that recorded the history of his people and buried them on a hillside. After his death, Moroni became an angel and he revealed to Joseph Smith the location of the plates, which turned out to be in upstate New York. So, Mormons believed that not only is the Bible a divinely inspired authority, but so is the Book of Mormon, as well as other works of Joseph Smith like Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. The latter book, the Pearl of Great Price contains something called the Book of Abraham, and this is supposed to be a translation that Joseph Smith made of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he bought in Ohio in 1830. The book claims to have been written by the patriarch Abraham and describes his journey from Canaan to Egypt.
In the latter part of the book, Abraham receives a vision from God that teaches him about the existence of things like premortal spirits, that there is more than one God, or a plurality of gods, and the council of Gods who met before creating the world. Smith completed a translation of that book in 1835, and its full text was published in 1842. In 1880, that book became part of the Mormon canon of scripture. So, it includes a retelling of the story of Genesis, but instead of saying God created the world, it says the Gods created the world. In fact, one of the defining features of Mormonism that makes it distinct from Christianity is that Mormons are not monotheists. They do not believe only one God exists. They’re not polytheists. They’re actually heno-theists. They believe there is one God called heavenly Father we are to worship, but many other gods exist, possibly an infinite number of them.
In a speech that Joseph Smith gave at the funeral for Elder King Follette, this is now called the King Follette sermon, Joseph Smith said, “I’m going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.” Mormons believe that God’s body is actually a glorified version of the body he had when he was a human being like us. God was once a man like us, but he has been exalted and he now rules with a glorified body in the heavens. According to the Book of Abraham, God rules on a throne near a star or a planet called Colab. So Mormons believe that there is more than one God and Gods can come to be or begin to exist.
They also believe that God and human beings are of the same species. Human beings are simply less developed gods and have the potential to be exalted, or become Gods provided they follow Mormon teachings. Joseph Smith said the following in the King Follette sermon, “Here then is eternal life to know the only wise and true God, and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you. Namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation.” But if the God of this world was once a man, then who created him and his world? Mormon teaching isn’t clear on this subject. It may be the case that this man, who is now the God of this world, was created by another God who was once a man, and that process has occurred infinitely into the past. Or a non-divine being within an eternal universe could have become divine and then created other deities.
All right, so that’s Mormonism in a nutshell, and what are the issues I have the biggest problem with? First, Mormonism rejects the existence of God. Now, Mormons of course say God exists, but we have to define the word God. If God is just a super being in the sky or the universe, then the new atheist had a point in comparing God to the flying spaghetti monster. If God were a being, you could always ask, “Well, what created God? Why does God exist? If God has no explanation, why does the universe need one?” Instead, God just is being itself. God is the infinite, undivided, eternal, all-powerful act of being. This means, for example, God is simple. He’s not composed of parts. God doesn’t think or react. All of his temporal life exists in one eternal now. God is not the equivalent of a cosmic genie on some distant planet.
If God were merely a being among other beings that could fail to exist, atheists would have a good point when they say, “Why do we need God to explain the universe? If God can exist without explanation, why not the universe?” But the arguments from motion, contingency, and causal finitism show that the existence of change contingent things that can fail to exist or causal chains shows there must be a cause that is an un-cause cause beyond space and time that exists necessarily and is just pure actuality. This also means there can only be one God because if there were more than one God, both beings would be limited in some way, or they would exist in a framework more fundamental than either of them, and that would be the foundation of reality and truly be God. In fact, Mormons don’t believe that God created the universe from nothing.
They believe that God made the universe, he created it from eternally preexisting matter. So, because I believe that reason shows the God of classical theism exists, I know the Gods of Mormonism do not exist, or at least these super-powered beings are not the true God of creation. And that limited changing human beings like me, can never be God. I can never be that which is pure actuality. I can be like God, I can share in God’s nature and be holy like God, but I can never be God. And for those who try to use the catechism and to argue against that and misquote what the church teaches, I have a link in the description on that, check it out. I’d also point out that the Bible teaches there is only one God. But that’s not the main reason I’m a monotheist. I’d be a monotheist even if I wasn’t a Christian or a Jew.
It’s true the early Israelites believed there were many gods and Yahweh was the only one that they should worship. But it’s important to remember that this early belief among the Israelites was not a mere henotheism that arbitrarily favored Yahweh over other gods. Ancient henotheism was not like Mormon henotheism because the first Israelites believed Yahweh was the incomparable creator. The deities of the other nations were lesser subordinate beings that at the time were called sons of God who we now recognized to be angels. Yahweh did not used to be a man who was exalted or divinized by some other being. In other words, the first Israelites worshiped Yahweh because they believed he was unique and supreme among all beings, earthly and celestial, and they eventually learned about his uniques supremacy in full monotheism. That’s why Isaiah 44:8, God says, “Is there a God besides me? I know not any.”
If the God of this world were omniscient, wouldn’t he know about the God that he worshiped when he was a man? God also makes it clear in Isaiah 43:10 that, “Before me, no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me.” Well, this can’t refer to false gods or idols because many of those are still formed to this day. The New Testament also firmly teaches there is only one God. St. Paul describes God as the only wise God in Romans 16:27 and verse Timothy 6:16 says, “God is the only one who possesses immortality as a part of his nature.” All right, reason number two, I need a map of the Book of Mormon, and there isn’t one. In my previous videos I’ve said that Protestants argue like atheists when they say the deutero canonical books of the Catholic Bible are not inspired because they have errors.
After all, atheists, they say the same thing about the proto-canonical books of the Bible. They have errors. They’re not inspired. If Protestants are allowed to talk about genre and non-literal interpretation and translation issues to show atheists the Bible is [inaudible 00:15:34], catholics should be allowed to do the same with the Deutero canonical books, and Mormons should be allowed to do the same with the Book of Mormon. That’s why I’m not a big fan of trying to disprove the Book of Mormon through alleged internal or external contradictions. There are many ways to answer alleged difficulties, but there is a huge difference between the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Most Bibles contain maps that describe where important biblical events took place. You can visit the ruins of cities described in the Bible, I’ve been to these places. If you get atheist, Christian, and Jewish scholars all together, they can roughly agree on where the events in the Bible allegedly took place and confirm the existence of cities and sites in those places, even if the atheist or the Jewish scholar denies certain miracles or specific historical events took place there.
But there is nothing comparable that can be said about the Book of Mormon. Some Mormons say the events of the book take place across North and South America. Others say it took place in Central America, in Panama or Mexico. And so other Mormon scholars say the events of the book take place in the heartland of North America in the US Midwest. That’s why some Mormons are conducting expeditions in Iowa to try to find the ancient city of Zaramela that allegedly had 100,000 people living in it in the fourth century, which would’ve made it one of the largest cities in ancient North America. But so far the expeditions have not been promising. In fact, according to the National Geographic Society, “Archeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemispheres past and the society does not know of anything found so far that is substantiated the Book of Mormon.”
To put this into perspective, it would be very difficult to defend the Bible if some Christians said the city of Jerusalem was in Israel and other Christians said Jerusalem was in Southern France and other Christians said Jerusalem was in India. So, I basically have pretty good reasons to think the Book of Mormon is not an historical account of past events. In fact, some Mormon scholars even lean towards the view the book is more of an allegory and is not historical, but that really threatens to turn Mormonism into something as irrelevant as Unitarianism that doesn’t need to be defended because it doesn’t really make claims about anything historical. On a related note, though, I don’t think Joseph Smith was a prophet because of the book of Abraham, not only is there a lack of evidence for the Book of Mormon, there is evidence against the book of Abraham.
What makes this document of interest to non-Mormons is that the book of Abraham contains three reproductions or facsimiles of the original papyrus that Smith translated. In the latter part of the 19th century Egyptologists looked at the facsimiles and they said that Smith’s translation of them was wrong. In 1913, the Mormon church responded to these criticisms of the translation saying that, “Well, they don’t tell the whole story.” They claimed that Smith’s critics were only able to judge translations based on the facsimiles of the papyri, not the originals. They said the facsimiles were only a small part of the originals. Perhaps if the translation, if they could look at the entire context of the original documents, they would see Smith had an accurate translation. Now, the papyri Smith translated were thought to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago fire of 1871. However, they were rediscovered in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966, and since then, both Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists have looked at the documents and they generally conclude that Smith’s translation has nothing to do with what they really say.
That the documents say nothing about the patriarch Abraham. They’re just Egyptian funerary texts. The text was buried with an Egyptian priest named Horace and was dated to the second century BC. It’s more than 1,000 years after Abraham lived. The figure that Joseph Smith said was Abraham in the papyri is actually the Egyptian God Osiris. The figure he thought was Pharaoh is the Egyptian God Isis. Now Mormon apologists have given different explanations for the discrepancy between what the papyri say and would Smith published in the book of Abraham. Some have said that Smith did not actually translate the papyri. He received the contents of the book of Abraham from God in a vision while looking at them. The papyri just kind of resembled what God showed Joseph Smith, even if the meaning of the papyrus had nothing to do with what he revealed to Smith. But this approach really doesn’t work because Joseph Smith said in his diary that he translated the original Egyptian of the papyri.
He made no mention of learning about the book of Abraham from some kind of revelation. We also have notes that Smith and his scribes took on the text explaining the various characters in the papyri. This document is referred to as the Egyptian alphabet and grammar. It shows Smith was attempting a translation. He wasn’t just receiving some kind of revelation. And as I said earlier, it doesn’t correctly explain the meaning of the characters in the papyri. I remember actually when the Protestant apologist, James White interrogated a Mormon apologist on this question, and the Mormon simply said that, “Look, God can perform miracles. And that’s what the Book of Abraham is.”
By saying that the Book of Abraham is one of the clearest evidences that the Book of Mormon is a fraud.
No, it’s not because I think the book of Abraham is beautiful and true, and you would think we have great evidence of that with the plate of Ola Sham and with the manner in which Egyptians were sacrificed. We know those things are both true and were verified.
You can think all you want-
It’s true. It’s fact. It’s fact. It’s fact.
Allow-
Egytian-
One and then two. Back and forth.
When you can forth turn an Egyptian funerary document into-
You believe in a talking snake, sir. God can work miracles. You believe in a talking donkey.
I will allow you-
God can work miracles.
I will allow that statement to stand because there is absolutely… That-
Can God work miracles?
You just-
Can God work miracles?
I didn’t pay you to say that did I?
Can God work miracles? Can God work miracles? Can God work miracles?
To identify the fraudulent utilization of an Egyptian funerary document-
Can God work miracles?
… As a miracle similar to what God would do, is unfortunately a level of deception that is very, very frightening to me.
I don’t think it is.
And I would say to-
Take that explanation or not. Finally, I’m not Mormon because I don’t believe in their claim that the church Jesus Christ originally established in the first century ever fell into a great apostasy. If you’ve ever had a Mormon missionary come to your door, they usually will say something about the great apostasy. What’s interesting is that Catholics and Mormons actually agree on a lot. We both agree that solo scriptura is false because God gave us an authoritative church with priests who’ve received holy orders. The bishops of Christ Church have divinely given teaching authority. Now, we do differ in that Mormons believe that their church has the authority to give new public revelation. While Catholics believe that the bishops of their church, of the church Christ established can only teach and guard the deposit of faith given to the apostles, there’s no new public revelation. That’s why the Mormon church can give new revelation on polygamy now being wrong in 1890, and blacks now being allowed to be in the priesthood in 1978.
So, we agree that Christ established one universal church. We just disagree about what happened to that church. Mormons say Christ’s church disappeared from the earth shortly after the death of the Apostles, and it was reestablished in the 19th century. Catholics, on the other hand, say the gates of hell never prevailed against the church. There are passages in the New Testament and the church fathers that refer to people rejecting Christ’s Church, but none of them ever talks about a total apostasy. Every one of these passages says that some people would fall away or some people would be false prophets, but none of these passages claims that the entire church would fall away, or that every bishop would be replaced with a false prophet. In Matthew 28:20, Jesus said, “I am with you always until the end of the age.” And Paul writes in Ephesians 3:20 through 21, “To him, be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen”
When Mormons say that manmade ordinances corrupted Christ Church, I would give the same reply I give to Protestants that make these similar kinds of arguments and show that what they call manmade ordinances are genuine development of doctrine or liturgical practice. All right, well, I hope this was helpful to you all. These aren’t, as I said before, my only three reasons, close runner ups include Mormonism mistaken Christology, [inaudible 00:24:38] and I do want to do a separate episode just on the golden plates. But these are three of the biggest things that cause issues for me when evaluating Mormonism. Although I would be happy to engage in a dialogue or a debate with a Mormon apologist on these issues in the future, for sure. But if you like more on this subject, definitely check out my booklet, 20 Answers Mormonism, published by Catholic Answers Press. So, thank you very much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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