Part 16 - Occam's Razor

Rather than presenting additional arguments about the historicity of the Book of Mormon, in this post I want to summarize the arguments made so far (as well as arguments I intend to develop in future posts) and explain more about how their accumulated weight makes the case against the Book of Mormon very solid.  I have hinted at and skirted around this issue at the end of some previous posts, but in this post I want to make this point much more explicit.

This is closely related to Occam's Razor, a philosophical position which prefers simple models with few assumptions over complex models with many assumptions given equal explanatory power of the two models in question.  Complex models are not necessarily untrue, but adding complexity without increasing explanatory power makes a model much less useful and less likely to be an accurate representation of reality.

We can look at two competing hypotheses and examine them in terms of the simplicity and probability of the model.  Hypothesis one is that the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century creation written by Joseph Smith rather than a record of actual ancient Americans.  Hypothesis two is that Book of Mormon is a genuine record written by ancient Americans and translated by Joseph Smith prior to its publication in 1830.

All the evidence I have presented so far in these posts supports hypothesis one.  This does not absolutely prove hypothesis one, but the preponderance of the evidence definitely seems to favor it.  To support hypothesis two, believers typically appeal to faith and claim that the evidence is not important.  Apologist also claim that the evidence is not important or not convincing, but they do it with arguments rather than statements of faith.

In order to show that the Book of Mormon is an actual historical record of ancient America, apologists need to answer the following questions relative to the Book of Mormon time period.

• Why have no horse fossils been found?
• Why have no metal artifacts matching Book of Mormon descriptions been found?
• Why have no Egyptian-like inscriptions been found?
• Why is there no overlap between plants and animals mentioned in the Book of Mormon and those known to exist in ancient America?
• Why have no Semitic markers been found in Native American DNA?
• Why have no Nephite coins been found?
• Why does the Book of Mormon contain quotes from the King James version of the bible?
• Why does the Book of Mormon contain a mature Christology that was not fully developed until the fourth century?
• Why are there no linguistic markers in Native American languages that show a relationship to Hebrew?
• Why does the Book of Mormon contain so many early American ideas such as democracy and freedom of religion?
• Why is the Book of Mormon so wordy when space on the plates was scarce?
• Why are the characters in the Book of Mormon so poorly developed and unbelievable as real people?
• Why were the natives not decimated with disease when the Nephites arrived?
• Why did Nephite technology not spread to other parts of the Americas?
• Why is there no evidence for the huge final battle in which at least 230,000 Nephites were killed?

In contrast, the only thing that skeptics need to explain is how a man could make up a story that isn't true and get other people to believe it.  Given that humans have been making up stories for tens of thousands of years, it is far more likely that this is precisely what happened in this case.  Applying Occam's Razor, by far the simplest explanation for the existence of the Book of Mormon is that Joseph Smith, with or without help from others, created the Book of Mormon in the early 19th century.

One of the arguments believers put forward is that God purposefully withholds or hides evidence in order to test our faith.  This is really no argument at all but an excuse to explain the lack of evidence.  My former bishop said something like "Why would God make it that easy?  That would make faith unnecessary."  My bishop's appeal to the necessity of faith was an unquestioned assumption that was conditioned into him through his religious upbringing.  When viewed from a skeptical vantage point outside the religion it makes no sense at all except as a control mechanism to keep members compliant through ignorance.  The idea that faith is more important than evidence amounts to a tacit admission that the evidence does not fall in your favor.

Believers in Book of Mormon historicity also appeal to the idea that "you can't prove a negative" and "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  While these ideas are technically correct, they can be taken to absurd extremes.  Bertrand Russell used an analogy of a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars to explain this point.  You cannot prove that this teapot does not exist.  Space is too vast to look in every possible location.  However, most reasonable people would agree that there is no good reason to believe in this teapot and that the burden of proof would be on those who claim its existence.  Such is the case with the Book of Mormon.  Book of Mormon historicity is an extraordinary claim and and the burden of proof should be on the one making this extraordinary claim.  It would never be accepted by a skeptic without ample evidence to back up the claim.  There is ample evidence, but it decidedly falls against Book of Mormon historicity.

The term "proof" can be somewhat misleading in this context.  Very little outside of mathematics can be definitely proven.  In mathematics a valid proof can demonstrate with certainty that a conclusion is true given that the premises are true.  However, even mathematics has to start with unproven assumptions.  In the much more complex world of historical analysis it is a matter of probabilities rather than definite proof.  Believers may take comfort in the small degree of uncertainty in the skeptic's position, but this still leaves them with an extraordinary claim and virtually no evidence to support it.

In these posts so far, I have shown that multiple converging lines of evidence refute the historicity of the Book of Mormon.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there are 20 different pieces of independent evidence, any one of which, if true, is sufficient to disprove the Book of Mormon.  To be generous, we will grant each apologetic refutation a 50/50 chance of being valid.  The overall probability can be determined by multiplying each individual probability.  With 20 different pieces of evidence we multiply 0.5 with itself 20 times, or raise it to the 20th power.  This comes out to approximately 0.000001 or 1 chance in a million that the Book of Mormon is historical.  Of course this depends on the specific independent evidence, but it illustrates the dramatic effect of multiple lines of corroborating evidence.  In actual practice I would not give each apologetic explanation a 50/50 chance so I believe the actual probability of Book of Mormon historicity is even lower.

The problem with the theory of the trickster God that my former bishop espouses is that it leaves you completely in the dark.  How do we decide what to exercise faith in?  Without any evidence to support specific claims, why would we particularly choose Mormonism rather than one of the many other belief systems competing for our faith?  Science, logic, reason, and evidence may be imperfect, but they are all we really have.  Anything else is a random throw of the dice.