On January 19, 2020, the church posted an article on their official site titled "Elder Tad R. Callister: The Book of Mormon - man-made or God-given?" which is written by Tad Callister.

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For those who don't know, Elder Callister recently wrote a book that attempts to defend the Book of Mormon as a true historical work called A Case For the Book of Mormon. When his book was released, many people online noted how Callister used straw man arguments in order make his case in a way that avoided the real issues, and this article is a perfect example of how he does it. For those who are interested, there's a great podcast from Radio Free Mormon on Tad Callister's presentation from last August as well.

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A very basic summary from Wikipedia is that "a straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man.""

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Now before we get into the article, I do want to note that on this site we tend not to use or cite "logical fallacies" much at all because they are overused by many apologists as well as frequently misused in order to make a point seem stronger to their readers than it actually is. For the purposes of looking at this article, I just want to point out where Callister purposefully misstates the critical position in order to slay that defenseless straw man he creates.

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And now to the article:

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"This year we will be studying the Book of Mormon as part of the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum. A natural question that arises at some point is whether or not this book is man-made or God-given.

The initial argument by the critics that the Book of Mormon was man-made was based on the premise that Joseph Smith was too unlearned and “ignorant” to write such a comprehensive work and therefore someone allegedly much more intelligent than he, such as Sidney Rigdon or Oliver Cowdery, must have authored it. Later, arguments arose that Joseph copied it from the Solomon Spaulding Manuscript or that he suffered from a mental disorder that somehow endowed him, an untrained writer, with superior writing skills. These arguments, however, have been so thoroughly discredited that they are seldom mentioned anymore.  

So, the current argument being made is that Joseph Smith was a creative genius who read numerous books, such as “View of the Hebrews” and “The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain” and then copied ideas and stories from them. This, of course, is a total flip-flop, a 180-degree reversal from the original argument that Joseph was incapable, too ignorant to write such a book. Now, all of a sudden Joseph is a skilled, creative writer with genius intellect. Why the flip-flop? Because all the previous explanations for a man-made book had failed."

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You can see how Callister immediately tries to poison the well here by focusing on critical arguments that not only aren't made by serious scholars now, but ignoring the many valid arguments that have been made against the Book of Mormon's and its truth claims since it was published.

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Were there people who believed in the Spaulding manuscript theory? Sure, and there are ex-Mormons today that even bring it up from time to time, but no serious critics that I know of give it any weight whatsoever. This is a theory that apologists like to use to marginalize critics because the Spaulding theory is effectively a conspiracy theory based on old interviews with witnesses who claimed Joseph directly copied an old Spaulding manuscript that was stolen from the print shop, which makes critics look like they are grasping at straws to prove the Book of Mormon a 19th century work.

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But the problem is that many initial arguments about the Book of Mormon focused on how heavily it relied on the Bible along with the 19th century ideas that Joseph Smith would have been familiar with. Tad Callister knows all of this, but he also knows that by using these caricatures of critical arguments, he can then try to slay that straw man to promote faith among the members reading this and wanting to be assured there that the critics are wrong. For example, Mark Twain had this to say in 1890 about the Book of Mormon:

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“The book [Book of Mormon] seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” (Mark Twain, Roughing it, 1872)

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While Elder Callister focuses on the idea of the Spaulding theory, he completely ignores the real problems that critics have had with the Book of Mormon from the beginning. Anachronisms were known of from early on, Joseph Smith's reliance on the King James Bible was noticed early on as Mark Twain illustrated, and the issues around the Book of Mormon translation narrative were a problem whether it was the Charles Anthon meeting or even the Lost 116 Pages.

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Furthermore, the second argument that Callister claims as the current stance of critics is not an accurate framing either. The first chapter of the CES Letter links, unfortunately in my opinion, View of the Hebrews and The Late War to direct plagiarism claims, but again most scholars do not focus on these books as the main theories for the Book of Mormon or how Joseph Smith created it. From reading and listening to scholars and critics discuss the Book of Mormon, most will cite Joseph Smith's heavy reliance on the King James Bible as the greatest source for the Book of Mormon, which he then combined with stories he was familiar with and questions that those around him had in the 1820s to create the story.

 

To put another way, the point of citing View of the Hebrews and The Late War when discussing how Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon is to note that other people were writing about the very ideas that Joseph Smith brought into the Book of Mormon, and that Joseph Smith would have been familiar with both of thosee books, the King James writing style, and ideas of his milieu such as the Mound Builder Myth for Native Americans.

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The problem here for Callister is that he can not bring up the issues that critics have with the Book of Mormon in any kind of specifics, because he does not want members to be exposed to problems with the Book of Mormon. We've written about a few of them, but just a few issues that apologists do not have evidence based answers for:

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• Why does the Book of Mormon include Deutero-Isaiah passages that were written after Lehi left? Joseph Smith did not know there were multiple authors of Isaiah, and neither did the author of the Book of Mormon.

• The Book of Mormon is the record of ancestors of the Native Americans, but DNA has now shown that Native Americans came from Asia and not Israel. How did the Book of Mormon get this wrong, and why did Joseph Smith's revelations continue to get this wrong?

• How can the Book of Mormon include Christian practices that took centuries to develop before Jesus Christ even appeared in the Americas? In other words, why is the author of the Book of Mormon including practices that would not be introduced or developed until well after Jesus' death, yet very familiar to those in the 1800s?

• Why does the Book of Mormon include anachronisms not just of items (horses, steel, etc), but of concepts as well? The Book of Mormon is littered with 19th century ideas and language to the point that even LDS historian Richard Bushman concedes it is a 19th century production: "There is the fact that there is phrasing everywhere–long phrases that if you google them you will find them in 19th century writings. The theology of the Book of Mormon is very much 19th century theology, and it reads like a 19th century understanding of the Hebrew Bible as an Old Testament. That is, it has Christ in it the way Protestants saw Christ everywhere in the Old Testament. That’s why we now call it “Hebrew Bible” because the Jews never saw it quite that way. So, these are all problems we have to deal with." (Book Of Mormon Historicity, Mormon Discussions Podcast, ~8:28 m.m.)

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We have access to so much more information, Biblical scholarship, and history now than we did in the 1800s. The fact that it becomes easier to prove that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century work is actually a problem for the Book of Mormon instead of an admission that critics got it wrong, which is why Callister casts using this new information as a "flip flop" in order to poison the well with members.

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If a car mechanic originally thinks the car is stalling because of a faulty sensor but realizes after diagnostic tests that it's actually the fuel pump, does that make him a bad mechanic or imply that the car was fine all along? Of course not, it just means he tested what seemed to be the most likely cause and then his research led him to another conclusion.

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It would be like writing "Critics at first argued that the the Kinderhook Plates were faked with one technique to make the metal plates look ancient, but then they later changed their mind and argued that the plates were actually faked by using a different method backed up by new advances in science. Therefore it becomes clear that the Kinderhook Plates are indeed real."

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Last, Tad Callister is mocking critics for having different ideas today than they did in the 1830s, but he ignores that the church's own defenses and narratives have completely changed in the last 170 years as evidence has proven their claims to be untenable. For example:

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• I was told by the missionaries that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using the gold plates and urim and thummim. We now know he used a rock in a hat, and that the original narrative simply did not happen as taught.

• We were told the Book of Abraham was a direct translation of papyrus, but now that we have the source material and know it has nothing to do with Abraham, the church has given a number of different explanations including redfining what the word translation actually means.

• The Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham both teach that dark skin is a curse from God, but the church is now redefining the meaning of the word "skin" in order to avoid the racism that literally part of the foundation of the church.

• Joseph Smith originally taught the trinitarian view, but later changed in the mid 1830s to Jesus and God being separate beings. He even changed the First Vision in order to retrofit this evolution in theology, along with the Book of Mormon.

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I could go on all day as this same problem exists for Brigham Young teaching the Adam-God theory, Joseph Smith and why he entered into both polyandrous and polygamous marriages, how the church believed the Masons had the original endowment ceremony, why the church defended the Kinderhook Plates until the 1980s when science proved them a hoax, and so much more.

 

Why does Callister accuse critics of "flip flopping" when using new information and scientific advancements to assess the Book of Mormon while the church is given a pass for literally redefining words in order to paint a faith promoting narrative? Even LDS apologist Terryl Givens recently wrote about Joseph Smith using "bricolage" to write his scriptures, which is a scholarly way of saying that Joseph Smith cobbled ideas around him to produce scripture. Again, no apologist would present a theory so damning as that unless the evidence forced them to do so, so for Callister to mock critics for pointing out that Joseph Smith leaned heavily on ideas and materials near him to produce the Book of Mormon is grossly misstating both the critics while ignoring the reality of his own church's evolution.

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Back to the article:

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"Is there any evidence that Joseph was a good writer at age 23 when the Book of Mormon came forth and thus might have been its author? No. To the contrary, Emma Smith, his wife, noted: “Joseph Smith [as a young man] could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone dictate a book like the Book of Mormon.”

This is staggering when you think about it — to claim that Joseph Smith, who could not write a coherent letter, wrote the Book of Mormon, with all of its historical complexity and profound doctrinal insights, in a single dictation draft in approximately 65 working days with no notes in front of him and with only minor changes — mostly grammatical."

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First I want to note that the interview that Callister is noting here is from 1879, which was 50 years after the Book of Mormon was produced. Second, this interview (you can read the original here) was given by Emma shortly before her death, and in it she is painting  Joseph Smith in the best possible light as this interview is being given to her son.

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