About a month ago I met some Mormon missionaries on my campus. They had a table set out on our main drag and were handing out free copies of the Book of Mormon. I have many bibles and a Quran but not a Book of Mormon, so if I could get one for free then all the better. The catch, of course, is that they request follow up appointments with you so that they can, well, missionize. For me that is just icing on the cake, so I gladly accepted one and set up a meeting with them. Yesterday I met with three Mormons in their little educational headquarters (conveniently) right next to my campus. This was my third visit with them and it lasted about an hour and forty-five minutes. Two of the three I spoke with before and the third individual was new to me. He is a graduate student studying bioinfomatics – which is actually quite fascinating – which means that he has a background in both the biological sciences and computer science.

To say that the conversation was productive would be erroneous. On the other hand, it was quite revealing. Revealing in the sense that I could witness precisely how these individuals had succeeded – despite my best exhortations – to self-delude themselves. They met up with me thinking that they would be telling me about God’s plan of salvation but instead I steered the conversation to a more important and more pressing question – why should myself or anyone believe Joseph Smith’s claims, and therefore the Mormon Church’s claims, about the Book of Mormon?

“Joseph Smith is either a fraud or was telling the truth. If he was a fraud then you can throw this stuff out and move along. If what he said was true, however, are you prepared to follow that truth?” was what they basically told me.

All of this I readily agreed with. Any reasonable person would have to admit that, if it could be convincingly shown that the Book of Mormon is not a fraud but a true part of God’s revelation then we should all be Mormons. All right, fine. For the next hour or so I probed into precisely why they believe it is not a fraud.

They gave me roughly two different answers. The first is the old ‘by its fruits you shall know’ type argument. In other words, if  you read the teachings and they make good sense and result in good things happening in your life then this is evidence that it is true. Well, that may be evidence but it is not compelling evidence – all of the above could quite easily follow from untrue beliefs.

The second is basically this: When reading and praying about the Book of Mormon they were overcome by an overwhelming experience that what Joseph Smith claimed was true and that he was, indeed, a prophet of God. Conversational Atheist has recently called this the “warm-fuzzy-feeling truth detector” – which is an apt phrase. We must have spent most of the last hour or so going round and round over this point. Unfortunately, it seems that this method of acquiring knowledge only ‘verifies’ things that cannot be otherwise independently verified. They just know it is true because they know it is true!

This is, plain and simply, an exercise in self-delusion. If you want to delude yourself into believing something that you cannot possibly know to be true – this is the way to do it. When I pointed out – repeatedly – the flaws in this kind of thinking and asked for other means of verification they would acknowledge my point but then go right back to promoting their own self-delusion and hoping that I was willing to delude myself in the same manner. You can watch a powerful example of this kind of non-thinking, or anti-thinking, in that same blog post by Conversational Atheist. It really is disturbing.

When I tried to steer the conversation towards questions of historical and physical evidence that would corroborate the narratives told in the Book of Mormon – that is, that a group of Jews migrated from Jerusalem to the Americas (by a small boat, of course) and founded two great civilizations there – I was basically told in no uncertain terms that this kind of evidence is irrelevant!

It is only irrelevant or unimportant if it doesn’t exist, and, of course, in reality it doesn’t. Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon around 1830 – long before we knew much of anything concerning the history of native Americans and long before genetic tests confirm their Asiatic, rather than Semitic, origins.

Here is the bottom line: The Book of Mormon is among the worst kind of historical evidence imaginable. It was copied from non-existent originals that were allegedly written in a language (Reformed Egyptian) that is not independently attested to either archaeologically or linguistically in the Near East or the Americas and is about a number of civilizations for which there is no independent historical evidence that they ever existed. That, my friends, is a clear sign of a fraud.