Main Page: Anti-Mormonism
Is There Any Evidence for the Book of Mormon?
"The Book of Mormon is the keystone of testimony. 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. The enemies of the Church understand this clearly. This is why they go to such great lengths to try to disprove the Book of Mormon, for if it can be discredited, the Prophet Joseph Smith goes with it. So does our claim to priesthood keys, and revelation, and the restored Church."
- Ezra Taft Benson
- Ezra Taft Benson
The Book of Mormon claims to be a compiled history about ancient peoples somewhere in the Americas. Unlike the Bible, which is universally recognized as an authentic compilation of ancient texts written by ancient people and describing real civilizations regardless of whether one accepts its theological content, the Book of Mormon's historicity is inseparable from its validity as a volume of scripture. Moroni, a character from the book resurrected as an angel, allegedly delivered the tangible physical plates it was written on to Joseph Smith, who allegedly showed them to several people and translated them by the power of God. So there's not much middle ground. The book is either divine scripture or a fabrication. (Some call it "inspired fiction," and I don't begrudge their right to believe what they want, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense.)
Critics are fond of saying that there is "not one shred" of evidence for the Book of Mormon. (It really is astounding how often that exact phrase shows up. It's almost as if they're repeating the same thing with zero independent thought - but nah.) Sometimes they'll get creative and list all the types of evidence there are no shreds of - archaeological, linguistic, genetic, and various other fields they probably know little or nothing about. Before I address this claim in more detail, let's get one thing straight. When they say "evidence", what they really mean is "proof." The two are not synonyms. Feeling so threatened by the possibility of the Book of Mormon being true that one is compelled to reflexively deny the possibility of any evidence for it existing is a just as dogmatic a way to look at the world as denying all evidence against it. You can believe the Book of Mormon is a fabrication without pretending nothing observed in the world bears any resemblance to it.
Those demanding proof of the Book of Mormon have missed the point. The LDS Church, like all religions, is based on faith. Specifically, it teaches that we chose in a pre-mortal existence to come to Earth and be tested on whether we would obey God. The test would be pointless if God showed himself to the world and said "Hey everybody, here I am! Look at me!" People would do the right things for the wrong reasons and be paralyzed with fear and self-loathing the moment they messed anything up. (Actually, a lot of people have that problem anyway.) Likewise, if the Book of Mormon were incontrovertibly proven by secular data to the point where only total morons wouldn't rush to join the LDS Church, it would ruin the test and the entire purpose of living on this planet. The church has never insinuated that the book will or should be proven this way. Having said all that, of course, there are a few shreds of evidence for the Book of Mormon.
Critics are fond of saying that there is "not one shred" of evidence for the Book of Mormon. (It really is astounding how often that exact phrase shows up. It's almost as if they're repeating the same thing with zero independent thought - but nah.) Sometimes they'll get creative and list all the types of evidence there are no shreds of - archaeological, linguistic, genetic, and various other fields they probably know little or nothing about. Before I address this claim in more detail, let's get one thing straight. When they say "evidence", what they really mean is "proof." The two are not synonyms. Feeling so threatened by the possibility of the Book of Mormon being true that one is compelled to reflexively deny the possibility of any evidence for it existing is a just as dogmatic a way to look at the world as denying all evidence against it. You can believe the Book of Mormon is a fabrication without pretending nothing observed in the world bears any resemblance to it.
Those demanding proof of the Book of Mormon have missed the point. The LDS Church, like all religions, is based on faith. Specifically, it teaches that we chose in a pre-mortal existence to come to Earth and be tested on whether we would obey God. The test would be pointless if God showed himself to the world and said "Hey everybody, here I am! Look at me!" People would do the right things for the wrong reasons and be paralyzed with fear and self-loathing the moment they messed anything up. (Actually, a lot of people have that problem anyway.) Likewise, if the Book of Mormon were incontrovertibly proven by secular data to the point where only total morons wouldn't rush to join the LDS Church, it would ruin the test and the entire purpose of living on this planet. The church has never insinuated that the book will or should be proven this way. Having said all that, of course, there are a few shreds of evidence for the Book of Mormon.
Spiritual Evidence
"I opened it with eagerness, and read its title page... I read all day; eating was a burden, I had no desire for food; sleep was a burden when the night came, for I preferred reading to sleep. As I read, the spirit of the Lord was upon me, and I knew and comprehended that the book was true, as plainly and manifestly as a man comprehends and knows that he exists."
- Parley P. Pratt
- Parley P. Pratt
This isn't what anybody came to the page for and may seem like a cop-out, but it's important and it needs to be covered. I promise to move on to more interesting stuff. Although the Book of Mormon and the LDS Church as a whole are based on faith, that faith isn't supposed to be blind. Moroni wrote near the end, "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truthof it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost." This sets the pattern for personal revelation that every Latter-day Saint is supposed to seek. They are entitled to direct confirmation or denial from God of any given religious principle or directive. I, myself, never prayed about the Book of Mormon. Its truth seemed so obvious to me from the first day I started taking it seriously (after a childhood spent rebelling against the church because it was "boring") that I never felt the slightest need. I don't say that to brag but by way of full disclosure. I had my own spiritual "knowledge" of the book's truth that nobody could take away from me. This knowledge kept me anchored, sometimes uncomfortably so, any time I experienced a faith crisis over historical or social problems. No matter how much doubt or confusion I experienced about the church, my integrity compelled me to stick with it because I couldn't deny my testimony of the Book of Mormon.
Many people nowadays insist that only emperically verifiable evidence is valid, but of course that belief is not emperically verifiable. Spiritual evidence is much like physical evidence, and the process of gaining a testimony is much like science, with this one crucial difference that gets people's knickers in a twist. Spiritual feelings and impressions virtually always come on a one-on-one basis. Science can verify that they happen by measuring people's brain patterns, but not their source, their meaning, or even what they actually feel like to the individual. They cannot be replicated, dissected, or peer-reviewed. They remain subjective. They're supposed to be. See my above comments on faith and God's plan. For many people, though, they may be so powerful as to cross the line from evidence to proof. But the Book of Mormon and the LDS Church have only been "proven" for those people, one at a time. Of course this also means there's a higher degree of uncertainty in spiritual methods. There's some uncertainty in scientific methods. None of us can ever really be a hundred percent sure that we really know anything about the universe at all. We don't know that our senses and logic are reliable just because our senses and logic tell us that they are, and we can't actually prove that everything and everyone beyond our own minds isn't a figment of our imaginations, or that we ourselves aren't the figment of something's imagination. (I shudder to think what poor sick deity or computer would dream me up.) Many people believe they've received spiritual witnesses of many different religions, and nobody can tell them they're wrong because nobody can read their minds.
Many people nowadays insist that only emperically verifiable evidence is valid, but of course that belief is not emperically verifiable. Spiritual evidence is much like physical evidence, and the process of gaining a testimony is much like science, with this one crucial difference that gets people's knickers in a twist. Spiritual feelings and impressions virtually always come on a one-on-one basis. Science can verify that they happen by measuring people's brain patterns, but not their source, their meaning, or even what they actually feel like to the individual. They cannot be replicated, dissected, or peer-reviewed. They remain subjective. They're supposed to be. See my above comments on faith and God's plan. For many people, though, they may be so powerful as to cross the line from evidence to proof. But the Book of Mormon and the LDS Church have only been "proven" for those people, one at a time. Of course this also means there's a higher degree of uncertainty in spiritual methods. There's some uncertainty in scientific methods. None of us can ever really be a hundred percent sure that we really know anything about the universe at all. We don't know that our senses and logic are reliable just because our senses and logic tell us that they are, and we can't actually prove that everything and everyone beyond our own minds isn't a figment of our imaginations, or that we ourselves aren't the figment of something's imagination. (I shudder to think what poor sick deity or computer would dream me up.) Many people believe they've received spiritual witnesses of many different religions, and nobody can tell them they're wrong because nobody can read their minds.
Internal Evidence
"[T]his book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history - perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands... None of these frankly pathetic answers for this book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator."
- Jeffery R. Holland
- Jeffery R. Holland
The Book of Mormon, by its own unlikely existence and persistence, provides compelling evidence of itself that should be taken seriously. Most people have never given it a chance. In fairness, most people don't have the time or inclination to read every religious text just in case it turns out to be true, but the more they know about how the Book of Mormon came about and what it claims to be, the more intrigued they should be. Nobody has yet replicated Joseph Smith's literary achievement. (This is covered in more detail in Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon Challenge.)
Though the Book of Mormon was written in language similar to the King James Bible, it follows Hebraic sentence structures and wording. Any non-scholar can see this just by comparing it to the Doctrine and Covenants, a series of new revelations written by Joseph Smith in English, or anything that he ever wrote himself. That's without getting into specific forms like chiasmus, a Hebrew technique that runs throughout the book and was little known or understood until the twentieth century. The technique, which highlights meaning by reversing grammatical structures in an "X" format with the most key point in the center, is more advanced than simple repetition. An even more recent discovery was that every writer has a distinct "wordprint", or pattern of words that they subconsciously use even when trying to imitate someone else's writing style. This finding has been used to determine the authorship of anonymous or disputed documents. A wordprint study at University of California, Berkeley found an astronomically high probability that each part of the Book of Mormon claiming to be written by a separate person was, in fact, written by a separate person. (In fairness it should be noted that some guy named Craig Criddle once retaliated with a "study" of his own and concluded that most of the book was written by Sidney Rigdon. How? By comparing it to four nineteenth-century authors and then concluding that because it was more similar to the writing of Sidney Rigdon than that of Solomon Spaulding, Oliver Cowdery, and Parley P. Pratt, he must have written it. Using the same "logic" and a wider pool of candidates, one could have just as well determined that it was written by Kurt Vonnegut.)
The Book of Mormon never specifies in modern terms what part of the Americas it actually takes place in, and the LDS Church has received no further revelation and has no official stance. This is a topic of scorn for many critics. However, the book is overflowing with geographical references and details that Mormon and Moroni apparently chose to include despite space limitations. These clues can be and have been used to determine where most cities and landmarks were in relation to each other, and to construct a remarkably consistent map of the book's geography. Several attempts have been made to overlay this geography onto real world locations. Most of the people who are into this sort of thing believe that the most plausible setting by far is Mesoamerica. Again, the church doesn't say whether or not the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica, but the correlations are striking.
Though the Book of Mormon was written in language similar to the King James Bible, it follows Hebraic sentence structures and wording. Any non-scholar can see this just by comparing it to the Doctrine and Covenants, a series of new revelations written by Joseph Smith in English, or anything that he ever wrote himself. That's without getting into specific forms like chiasmus, a Hebrew technique that runs throughout the book and was little known or understood until the twentieth century. The technique, which highlights meaning by reversing grammatical structures in an "X" format with the most key point in the center, is more advanced than simple repetition. An even more recent discovery was that every writer has a distinct "wordprint", or pattern of words that they subconsciously use even when trying to imitate someone else's writing style. This finding has been used to determine the authorship of anonymous or disputed documents. A wordprint study at University of California, Berkeley found an astronomically high probability that each part of the Book of Mormon claiming to be written by a separate person was, in fact, written by a separate person. (In fairness it should be noted that some guy named Craig Criddle once retaliated with a "study" of his own and concluded that most of the book was written by Sidney Rigdon. How? By comparing it to four nineteenth-century authors and then concluding that because it was more similar to the writing of Sidney Rigdon than that of Solomon Spaulding, Oliver Cowdery, and Parley P. Pratt, he must have written it. Using the same "logic" and a wider pool of candidates, one could have just as well determined that it was written by Kurt Vonnegut.)
The Book of Mormon never specifies in modern terms what part of the Americas it actually takes place in, and the LDS Church has received no further revelation and has no official stance. This is a topic of scorn for many critics. However, the book is overflowing with geographical references and details that Mormon and Moroni apparently chose to include despite space limitations. These clues can be and have been used to determine where most cities and landmarks were in relation to each other, and to construct a remarkably consistent map of the book's geography. Several attempts have been made to overlay this geography onto real world locations. Most of the people who are into this sort of thing believe that the most plausible setting by far is Mesoamerica. Again, the church doesn't say whether or not the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica, but the correlations are striking.
External Evidence
"It is the author’s opinion that all the scriptures, including the Book of Mormon, will remain in the realm of faith. Science will not be able to prove or disprove holy writ. However, enough plausible evidence will come forth to prevent scoffers from having a field day, but not enough to remove the requirement of faith. Believers must be patient during such unfolding."
- Neal A. Maxwell
- Neal A. Maxwell
Now what you've all been waiting for! If the Book of Mormon had only reflected the anthropological knowledge of Joseph Smith's day, it would have become less plausible over time. In some ways it did and in some ways the opposite happened. Critics of the Church are fond of copy-pasting lists of perceived anachronisms; discrepancies between what the Book of Mormon mentions being in ancient America (or Israel) and what is known from archaeology to have been in ancient America (or Israel). To begin with, the archaeology of the Americas is in its infancy and has excavated a single-digit percentage of known sites, but more to the point here, this list of anachronisms is much shorter than it was in 1830. No sane person expects to find a city labeled "Zarahemla" or a rock labeled "Nephi was here" in letters we can actually read, yet this is exactly what critics sometimes seem to demand. Some of the best archaeological evidences for the Book of Mormon are things that were discovered some time after it was published, like steelworking in ancient Israel, the Hebrew male name "Alma," the exact route through the Arabian peninsula described at the beginning complete with altars labeled NHM (Nahom), and advanced civilizations of millions of people with highways, towers, gardens, barley, and cement in pre-Columbian America. Do you think any Latter-day Saint familiar with the book was surprised when archaeologists discovered cement in pre-Columbian America? Of course not. Critics were, but they just quietly removed it from their list of anachronisms.
Hundreds, even thousands of parallels can be and have been drawn between what the Book of Mormon describes and what mainstream scientists have discovered. These parallels are of course only considered meaningful by LDS scholars and apologists; by definition, virtually anyone who takes the Book of Mormon seriously as a historical text belongs to one of the churches based on it. Like I said, its historicity is inseparable from its divinity, and that's a strong incentive for any non-believer who doesn't want to deal with some hard questions to avoid considering its historicity at all. The work of these scholars and apologists deserves to be considered on its own merits instead of dismissed out of hand because of their religious bias. Critics bashing the Book of Mormon on archaeological grounds often rely on sources from the 1970s or earlier when they could have read Mormon's Codex by John Sorenson. But again, LDS scholars and apologists aren't trying to "prove" the Book of Mormon to the world. They have faith in the Book of Mormon for primarily spiritual reasons, and their main audience is others who have faith in the Book of Mormon for primarily spiritual reasons and want to validate that faith. They're not trying to convert the world, because this isn't how people are converted to the Book of Mormon. I've changed my perspective since first making this page. I now believe the Book of Mormon is a fabrication. But I still won't go so far as to claim there's "not one shred" of evidence for it.
Main Page: Anti-Mormonism
Hundreds, even thousands of parallels can be and have been drawn between what the Book of Mormon describes and what mainstream scientists have discovered. These parallels are of course only considered meaningful by LDS scholars and apologists; by definition, virtually anyone who takes the Book of Mormon seriously as a historical text belongs to one of the churches based on it. Like I said, its historicity is inseparable from its divinity, and that's a strong incentive for any non-believer who doesn't want to deal with some hard questions to avoid considering its historicity at all. The work of these scholars and apologists deserves to be considered on its own merits instead of dismissed out of hand because of their religious bias. Critics bashing the Book of Mormon on archaeological grounds often rely on sources from the 1970s or earlier when they could have read Mormon's Codex by John Sorenson. But again, LDS scholars and apologists aren't trying to "prove" the Book of Mormon to the world. They have faith in the Book of Mormon for primarily spiritual reasons, and their main audience is others who have faith in the Book of Mormon for primarily spiritual reasons and want to validate that faith. They're not trying to convert the world, because this isn't how people are converted to the Book of Mormon. I've changed my perspective since first making this page. I now believe the Book of Mormon is a fabrication. But I still won't go so far as to claim there's "not one shred" of evidence for it.
Main Page: Anti-Mormonism
