Audio only:
In this episode Trent shares arguments from his recent debate against the Book of Mormon.
Transcription:
In 1986 The Mormon President Ezra Taft Benson said the following:
CLIP – “Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, so does all the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.”
So here’s five reasons to reject the Book of Mormon which, as a result, become reasons to reject the religion of Mormonism.
Number 1 – The Evidence for the Book of Mormon Isn’t Impressive
I’m not Mormon for the same reason Mormons aren’t Muslim. Many Muslims say the Quran must be divinely inspired because an illiterate shepherd could not have composed something so beautiful and complex. If Mormons reject that argument for Islam, then should understand why I reject similar arguments which claim Joseph Smith could not have dictated the Book of Mormon to a scribe over a 70-day period.
Milman Perry, one of the pioneers in studying oral tradition, showed that indigenous oral storytellers can recite epic poems over 300,000 words in length in a few weeks, so the Book of Mormon being recited in a few months isn’t impossible by human standards. Smith recited about 4000 words per day to scribes who wrote at a speed of 10 words per minute. That’s plenty of time to give a recitation and the Book of Mormon is also filled with stock phrases like “behold” or “and it came to pass” and recycled story structures that help an oral presenter recite it. Smith was also member of a juvenile debate society, and school children at the time could memorize things like the entire Gospel of Matthew in just a few weeks and give impromptu sermons that lasted for hours.
Moreover, unlike Christ or the Apostles, Joseph Smith and Muhammad performed no verifiable miracles to authenticate their status as prophets. All we have is a book that apparently no human being could create. The only thing that seems supernatural in the case of Mormonism are the three witnesses claiming to have seen an angel with Smith.
This could have been a demonic encounter. St. Paul even warns in Galatians 1 to reject angels who preach false gospels. But it could also be the product of excitable people prone to see visions around every corner. Consider the three witnesses of this alleged event.
First, there’s David Whitmer who said the angel had no appearance or shape but that it was an impression that he felt. He later left the Church saying, “God spake to me again by his own voice from the heavens and told me to ‘separate myself from among the Latter Day Saints.”
Second, there’s Oliver Cowdery, who also left the Church before briefly rejoining for a few months before his death. Cowdery claimed to see visions before he met Joseph Smith, he knew Smith for years before he became one of his scribes, and believed dowsing rods could speak to him.
Third, there’s Martin Harris who mortgaged his farm to fund the publishing of the Book of Mormon, which means he had a huge financial motivation to convince people of its truthfulness. And multiple sources describe Harris as someone who was easily spooked, like seeing the Devil in candlelight flickers. In 1842 John Clarke said of him, “Harris was ready to be duped by anything, no matter where he went he saw visons and supernatural appearances around him. Once while travelling “he met the Lord Jesus Christ, who walked by the side of him in the shape of a deer for two or three miles talking with him as familiarly as one man talks with another.”
Harris also admitted he saw the plates with spiritual eyes, causing some people to leave the Mormon church. Harris also left the Church calling them ‘latt er day devils.”
Finally, there is also no conclusive record of all three men seeing an angel at once. This would not be a case of group hallucination, but of a group of people being brought into the wilderness primed by Smith to see an angel and after praying ecstatically for hours they each finally “see” it in their own mind’s eye.
The alleged golden plates themselves could have been natural artifacts, or simply frauds. In 1843 brass plates were unearthed in Kinderhook Illinois and Joseph Smith claimed they referred to an Egyptian descendant of Ham, but the plates were created by a blacksmith as a hoax.
In 1845 James Strang, an early LDS dissenter, claimed to have a translated metal plates describing ancient peoples, and unlike Smith’s plates, non-Mormons confirmed their existence. Martin Harris, one of the original Book of Mormon witnesses, even became one of Strang’s followers for a brief period.
Mormons don’t believe in James Strang’s plates or the Kinderhook Plates, and I don’t believe in Joseph Smith’s plates.
Number 2 – Book of Mormon Geography is Abysmal
Many Bibles contain maps that describe where biblical events took place. If you get Christian, Jewish, and atheistic scholars together in a room they would agree on these maps, even though they’d disagree about what happened at these sites. But you can’t do that for the Book of Mormon.
In spite of all its geographical references, Mormons only know the events in the Book of Mormon took place somewhere in North and South America. Some Mormons say they took place in central America, others say as far away as the Great lakes or American heartland. That would be like Christians disagreeing on whether Jesus was crucified in Judea or England.
And the silence in the archaeological record is deafening. For example, one of the largest cities in ancient America, Chaokia, had about 20,000 people spread out over 100 earthwork settlements. But Zarahemla, a city in the Book of Mormon that had at least 100,000 people in it, has never been found. We haven’t even found a single example of Hebrew or Egyptian script that should be in the New World if the Jewish emigrants in the Book of Mormon really existed.
Mormons can’t even agree on which rivers or mountains are described in the Book of Mormon. Fletcher B. Hammond wrote in the Geography of the Book of Mormon that God changed the world’s topography after the fact so that faith would be required to believe in the Book of Mormon. How convenient!
Plus, the Book of Mormon contains things we know did not exist in ancient America. For example, it describes horses and chariots even though there were no chariots and horses were introduced after Columbus arrived in the New World. Some Mormons say the word “horses” refers to Tapirs, which resemble like big weird looking pigs, and the chariots were litters carried by other humans. But then why are the “horses” always mentioned with these “chariots” if they didn’t pull them and why would you want an overgrown pig with these chariots?
It’s no wonder the national geographic society has said “Archaeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemisphere’s past, and the society does not know of anything found so far that has substantiated the Book of Mormon.”
And while not every biblical event has archaeological confirmation, this is far different than an entire ancient history having zero archaeological evidence for it.
Number 3 – Joseph Smith was a False prophet
The book of Deuteronomy says a false prophet leads people away from the true God and fails to predict the future. Joseph Smith is guilty on both these counts. Therefore, we should not believe God used a false prophet like him to transmit inspired revelation.
In his History of the Church, Smith prophesied that Jesus would return sometime in the 19th century and that the government of the United States would be overthrown, both of which, of course, didn’t happen. Mormons like to say Joseph Smith predicted the civil war 30 years before it happened, but anyone at the time knew there were troubles between the North and South. Smith also predicted that “war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place” but no other nations fought in the American Civil war, which shows this was a false prophecy.
And Smith definitely led people away to believe in false gods. At the funeral for elder King Follett, Smith said, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!”
According to the Book of Abraham, which Smith also allegedly translated, God is a super powered man who rules near a star or planet named kolob. If Mormons are faithful enough, they too can become gods and rule over their own universes alongside the spouses they married in this life. But this contradicts a central truth about God: The creator is not and never has been a creature. The omnipotent God can become man, or assume a human nature along with his divine nature, but man cannot become God. The fact that Smith taught the contrary means he is a false prophet.
Speaking of the Book of Abraham, Smith claimed he translated an ancient papyrus written in Abraham’s own hand that talks about “the gods” creating the world. But even Mormon Egyptologists agree that papyrus is simply a collection of 2nd century Egyptian funerary texts that say nothing about Abraham and certainly weren’t written by him.
Some Mormon apologists say Smith was just using the papyri to help him write down visions he had, but in his own diary Smith claims to have translated the document. He even wrote an “Egyptian Alph abet and Grammar,” to help him translate, even though he wasn’t actually doing that. But it’s not only the Book of Abraham that reveals Smith was a false prophet.
This is a model of the Golden Plates, 2/3 of which were sealed and allegedly couldn’t be opened. That means there were at most 40 plates, each 6×8 inches that were supposed to have contained information present in the 270,000 English words of the book of Mormon. In order to contain that information, every character on this plate would have to represent 80 words. But ancient hieroglyphics don’t work like that. Actual ancient metal plates, like the plates of Darius, only contain about 200 words per page. Smith’s claim about t he “Reformed Egyptian” writing on the plates were simply part of his own imagination.
In 1828, Martin Harris offered to assist Smith in the translation of the plates, but Harris lost 116 pages of the translated manuscript Smith gave him. Smith claimed that God was angry at the loss of the pages and would only allow Smith translate from another set of plates. These plates told the same story as the original manuscripts, but from a slightly different perspective.
Of course, if Smith were just dictating the story from memory and not actually translating, it
would have been nearly impossible for him to reproduce what he originally dictated to Harris
and prove he wasn’t a prophet. Smith even describes in his book Doctrine and Covenants how his critics would have used the loss of the pages to try and prove that he was not miraculously translating the golden plates and so he wasn’t a prophet.
Finally, Smith did what many false prophets have done throughout history. He used his status to acquire power, such as by becoming a town mayor, running for President of the United States, and acquiring multiple wives for himself, some as young as 14-years-old. Smith lied to his wife about two of them, sisters Emily and Eliza partridge, and one Mormon apologist says “It is certainly true that Joseph did not disclose all of his plural marriages precisely when they happened”.
That’s one way to put it.
Smith also ordered a printing press to be destroyed for publishing works that were critical of him. He was later arrested in connection to this act and died in a shootout using a gun smuggled into the jail where he was being held. Joseph Smith was not a true prophet who died a martyr’s death. He was a false prophet who met the ignoble end of so many other false prophets throughout history.
#4 – The Book of Mormon’s Very Human Elements
The Book of Mormon is good and original. However, the good parts aren’t original and the original parts aren’t good.
When it comes to the actual original parts of the Book of Mormon, they lack a divine quality. While many non-Christians are familiar with eloquent biblical stories like the parable of the prodigal son or the sermon on the mount, non-Mormons are unaware of anything as eloquent in the Book of Mormon. Far from being divinely inspired, the book is barely inspired by human standards.
For example, Mark Twain thought the Bible was false, but he also admitted it had “noble poetry in it; and some clever fables”. When it comes to the Book of Mormon, however, said:
“It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle–keeping awake while he did . . . Whenever he found his speech growing too modern–which was about every sentence or two–he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” which was his pet phrase. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” END QUOTE
Indeed, the entire book feels like a mediocre novel delivered by a sermon that’s gone on far too long, as can be seen in over 1500 uses of the phrase, “And it came to pass” which help break up the narrative for someone orally presenting it. Smith’s presentation was also aided by ripping off hundreds of New Testament themes and imagery that he repackaged for characters in his story. Or, in one out of seven verses, Smith outright copied the King James Bible, including its grammatical errors.
The entire chapters of Isaiah that are copied can be explained by the ancient Americans regurgitating their alleged Israelite history, but that doesn’t explain copies of the New Testament they would not have known about being quoted. Moroni Chapter 10 directly copies 1 Corinthians 12’s list of spiritual gifts: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, and discernment of spirits.
But Moroni, allegedly living in the 4th century America, would have only known the Old Testament of his alleged ancestors. He could not have known about first Corinthians. That’s why in his defense of the Book of Mormon, Robert Bennett says Sm ith “inadvertently slipped into language with which he was familiar”, which we’d expect from a good story-teller. Indeed, Smith’s own mother said the following about him:
“During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them.”
Finally, there is the troubling fact that the basic story of the Book of Mormon, that native Americans were the descendants of Jews who emigrated to America in 600 BC, had already been published a few years earlier in a book called View of the Hebrews written by Ethan Smith. Fawn Brodie, the author of the first scholarly biography of Joseph Smith says, “the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence.”
Indeed, this idea about Native Americans was a common one in the 19th century so it fits within the claim that a human author concocted the story. Especially since the science of genetics proves Native Americans are not descendants of Jewish migrants, which disproves Smith claim that quote, “our western tribes of Indians are descendants from that Joseph which was sold into Egypt,”
Some Mormon apologists claim that the people in the Book of Mormon went extinct and did not leave a DNA record. But the Book of Mormon never mentions other people living in the New World besides the Nephites and Lamanites. These apologists just say such people’s must have existed because of the “unbelievably high population growth rate” in the book of Mormon’s narrative. Which can be more easily explained by the narrative being fictional.
#5 – Catholicism is true, so the Book of Mormon is False.
The Second Vatican Council taught that “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Mormons and Catholics agree that Jesus established a hierarchical, visible Church led by successors of the apostles who possess the priesthood. We just disagree with the Mormon claim that this Church left the earth for 1700 years until Joseph Smith allegedly restored it. After all, Jesus said the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church.
Moreover, this Church gave us sure knowledge of the very canon of scripture found in the King James Bible that Mormons rely on as a sacred text. But the Church that gave us the Bible authoritatively teaches that there has been no new public revelation since the time of the apostles, which includes the Book of Mormon. Therefore, one can make this argument:
- If Catholicism is true, the Book of Mormon is not divinely inspired.
- Catholicism is true,
- Therefore the Book of Mormon is not divinely inspired.
But even if you aren’t Catholic, the fact that Mormons cannot agree on where the events in the Book of Mormon allegedly took place, Joseph Smith was in error when he tried to divinely translate or prophesy, and the Book of Mormon contains obvious plagiarisms of works its authors would not have known about give us good reason to believe that the Book of Mormon was merely the product of human beings and not a divinely inspired text.