Why 'No Evidence?' For the Book of Mormon
A non-apologetics point-of-view
Anti-Mormons always want to make a point that no “evidence” exists that proves the Book of Mormon. These same people can’t point to any evidence that proves that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead, which is the central event in all of Christianity. My purpose here is not to discuss whether or not evidence exists that would prove Nephites, Lamanites, and Jaredites ever existed here in the Americas. I have seen some very convincing evidence, but I had to go looking for it. What I want to discuss is how academic “proofs” of anything are often spurious because of human nature itself.
I believe it was Ezra Taft Benson who once said that there are two kinds of prideful people: the proud who are rich and the proud who are educated. Both of these kinds of pride, but more particularly the latter of the two, have much influence over the notion of Book of Mormon evidence. Living in the time of this present era, where we now understand that almost all the news we have consumed over our lifetime is fake and that much of the history we have learned is government propaganda, we should be more willing to question narratives and long-held mass assumptions.
Google filters searches to hide information that contradicts official narratives. Twitter, now known as X, censored a sitting president. The CDC and World Health Organization lied about the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of masks, and the efficacy of the vaccine against the virus. Politicians lie with impunity. Global warming/climate change scientists at East Anglia University omitted data that didn’t agree with their conclusions.
This is not new. In the nineteenth century, a farmer found a stone in his field with writing on it. He sent it to a scientist who examined it and said it probably was a Cherokee artifact. The artifact was photographed and displayed in a book cataloging American antiquities in the Smithsonian Institute. Decades later, another scholar looked at the picture of the artifact and recognized the characters on it as Proto-Hebrew, an ancient variant of Aramaic. In the photograph, the letters were upside-down. They read “Holiness to the Lord.” If you ask the Smithsonian today about that stone, they’ll tell you that they no longer have it and they don’t know where it is.
Similarly, there are ancient communities here in the Mississippi Valley whose dates of occupation coincide with the approximate years of Nephite narratives in the Book of Mormon. The geography described in that book also matches the geographical references in the book. There were ancient communities in the Great Lakes area of Canada that coincide with descriptions in the Book of Ether. They also found skeletons of men that were nine feet tall and women who were seven feet in height in those areas. They had implements made of smelted copper that came from Africa and from South America. Hardly any research is being done by non-LDS scholars on this material.
Why is that? It’s because of pride. Studying Book of Mormon archaeology is a professional kiss-of-death. Because no “reputable scholar” would research such a thing, any scholar that investigates those topics is automatically considered disreputable. It’s like studying UFOs or Bigfoot. No serious scientist is going to look into those topics. Anyone who does is labeled a conspiracy theorist. Yet just this year our own military and intelligence services admitted that they are in possession of craft and technology that did not originate here on Earth. They have held these things under secrecy and they have worked to reverse-engineer them. Think of all the investigators and authors they have vilified and ridiculed over decades, yet now they admit that the claims of many of these investigators were accurate.
The intelligence services went out of their way to purposely malign these researchers and discredit their research, knowing they were putting out disinformation. Likewise, anyone who found conclusive evidence of the Book of Mormon would be treated in a similar manner.
Additionally, scientists and researchers are not above petty jealousies. There were two rival scientists associated with the research on Pluto. One of them championed the cause of demoting Pluto from a planet to a Kuiper Belt object. The other was the lead investigator on the NASA New Horizons mission. They often issued press releases to steal one another’s thunder when a big discovery or announcement was about to be made. It was just a petty personal feud, but it showed how pride and ego could color the research and claims of scientists.
Several years ago, I encountered an anti-Mormon who came to my old web site who boasted of his educational credentials. He was a disaffected former member who was an influential contributor to a major ex-Mormon forum. His educational accomplishments included isolating melatonin and its workings in the body’s chemistry and he was involved with a company that was researching the possibility of using cryogenics to freeze people and reanimating them. He also did work for the federal government. With the information he gave me in his boasting, I was able to find out who he was. I reached out to him privately and confronted him about his credentials. He was a junior member of a team that worked with a prominent researcher who isolated melatonin. He wasn’t the principal investigator as he had claimed. I also traced that he was posting anti-Mormon commentaries on several websites using government computers. In other words, he was spreading anti-Mormonism on government time, using government computers. I didn’t dox him, but I did ask him to leave my site. He bellyached to his anti-Mormon chums for years that I banned him from my site. His pride was offended that he had been bested by a guy who didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree (at the time).
When I was a graduate student in history, one of my professors lambasted a historical writer. He said that the guy’s scholarship was outstanding, but that his conclusions were reprehensible. What were his offensive conclusions? He questioned the accuracy of the history regarding the Holocaust. This historian known for outstanding scholarship would never teach at any prominent university because his research contradicted accepted narratives that are politically loaded.
Today, we can see that history is being rewritten by authoritarian democrats who control the education establishment. They want to eliminate the accomplishments of white men in particular. The news media omits important facts. Social media and search engines bury inconvenient truths. People are awakening to the fact that much of what they took for granted as truth was never true at all. Honest George Washington was successful as a military leader largely because he had a talent for deception. The Constitution was written to make the Republic less democratic because the elites and bankers saw that the Articles of Confederation allowed common people to have too much power. Lincoln, although opposed to slavery, vehemently disapproved of equality for blacks and advocated sending them back to Africa. The KKK was a defensive response to the Union Leagues. No Republican ever owned slaves. The three billionaires who opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve went down with the Titanic. Democrats were behind Indian Removal, slavery, secession of the South, Jim Crow, black codes, and they fought civil rights all the way down to 1964. False flags have been a part of shaping narratives since the Spanish-American War. Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election and Trump didn’t lead an insurrection on January 6th. Putin is waging war in Ukraine to destroy US bio-weapons labs and US money-laundering/human trafficking networks.
There are so many known facts that began as conspiracy theories that being called a conspiracy theorist ought to be a badge of honor at this point. Yet if some “expert” stands up and says that there is no evidence that proves the Book of Mormon, people will just take that at face value because it harmonizes with the narratives they’ve already accepted? The average evangelical Christian is now aware that the government wants to censor them, limit their influence, control when and how they meet, and what they can do in the public square. They know they are being lied to daily. So why not take the next step and consider that everything they have ever been told about Latter-day Saints by the powers-that-be is also a lie?
Our entire secular society is built on a mountain of lies, layer upon layer of untruths, insomuch that anyone who tells God’s plain truth is marked as a kook. It may not be until the Millennium that all this false garbage is swept away and God’s truth reigns supreme. The Holy Ghost says the Book of Mormon is true. A testimony of it becomes the measure of all truth.