by

There has been much internet controversy in the bloggernacle and on facebook of late regarding the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Julie Smith recently wrote an excellent summary of why it is (or, at least, probably should be) beside the point. But I’m going to go one further. I’m going to state that the debate is, in its heart, inherently silly and self-contradictory. Allow me to explain.

Mormons believe in miracles. Angels visiting people (in the modern era). Miraculous healing. Language fluency in a couple of months. However, like the Vatican, we don’t embrace every possible supernatural faith event as being necessarily a miracle (or of supernatural origin). We are open to the possibility, but willing to test the hypothesis.

That paradoxical embrace is one of the things that makes Mormonism different (and worth believing in, in my opinion). However, it is also counter-productive when applied to the question of Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon mitigates against evidence for its own historicity. For example, in the 90s and 00s, there were several well-publicized works on DNA and how it demonstrated or failed to demonstrate the truth of the Book of Mormon narrative. That’s all well and good, but this is a text that states that, when God is so inclined, he can alter the skin tone of entire nations. This would seem to imply that God, in his infinite wisdom, is capable and willing to alter markers for ethnic characteristics down to the level of the chromosome. If you are a complete historicist, absolutely believing that everything that happened in the Book of Mormon happened in the manner that we today understand it to have happened in the Book of Mormon, then DNA studies are meaningless to you. God is the ultimate geneticist. However, this also means that those big projects (sometimes funded in Utah and environs) to provide genetic maps of world movements and to collect genetic profiles of people are just so much wasted money. If God is monkeying with the DNA, then DNA, now and forever, fails to tell us anything about the Book of Mormon (or history, generally).

Sure, you might say, that’s just one example. But there are more. The Book of Mormon claims that God mixes up geology, that God hides artifacts, and that God alters the course of heavenly bodies (and apparently the laws of physics). With the possibility of an interfering God on this scale, there is no evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon that can be trusted. All those Mayan sites and Guatemalan tours? Someone threw a dart at a map. Debates regarding whether north can mean east or deer could be horses? A complete waste of time. We have a terraforming God, active in history; no conclusion can be taken for granted.

The more you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon, the more you should embrace the lack of evidence for it. Shout it from the hilltops: There is remarkably little evidence to demonstrate that the events described in the Book of Mormon took place in the Americas and therefore I, as a rational person, must embrace the Book of Mormon as being an empirically true and accurate record of events in the Americas.

So, debating the historicity of the Book of Mormon in order to prove its worth, demonstrate its importance, or share your testimony is counter-productive. If you truly believed that the Book of Mormon is factually correct in every detail, then you’d never tell another soul about it and smile smugly to yourself as evidence for its historicity shrank and shrank. God moves in mysterious ways, indeed.