Audio only:
Joe examines a common argument that LDS and Muslims share over their respect holy books, the Book of Mormon and the Quran.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to address a popular argument I’ve heard both Muslim and Mormon apologists make for why we should believe the Book of Mormon or the Quran is inspired scripture.
And the argument goes something like this, don’t the founders Joseph Smith and Muhammad were not smart enough, educated enough, brilliant enough to have come up with these incredible works on their own. You look at something like the Quran, you look at something like the Book of Mormon, and then you hear that someone who is either illiterate or poorly educated came up with it and you think, yeah, that seems to defy our expectations of what someone with that level of school could accomplish. And I think Christians mishandled this argument really badly on the whole. So I want to explore both the Mormon version and the Muslim version of it, and then why I don’t think it’s convincing. Now, I’ll address at the outset that I don’t think answering this disproves Islam or Mormonism, but hopefully it at least shows why this isn’t a good argument, even to Mormons or Muslims who may be watching.
So first, what about Mormons? Those members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? You’ll often hear the argument, Joseph Smith had very little school, and so when he is dictating into a hat the contents of the Book of Mormon, he clearly isn’t just making this stuff up because it’s ways too sophisticated for that. There are various forms of this argument, but Jacob Hansen laid this out. He looks at all of the intricacies in the Book of Mormon, and so he challenged his opponent in the debate over the book of Mormon Trent Horn to try to produce something similar to it.
CLIP:
So here’s what I want Trent to do. I want him to stick his head in a hat, and I want him to dictate eight single space pages every day for the next two and a half months and create a poetic and theological work with multiple narrators that predict specific undiscovered locations in the Near East, and that correctly predicts dozens of elements specific to those locations. He will also need to come up with over a dozen undiscovered names in the ancient Near East and dictate over a dozen poetic chiasm, including one on human redemption with 17 elements given in one order and then repeated back in reverse order, all with his face buried in a hat. Also, he’ll need to create multiple authentic Hebrew wordplay, predict the undiscovered name of ancient Israelite prince and create 300 names with plausible Hebrew origins without using the letters W, Q or X, he must do this stream of consciousness dictation in the presence of multiple witnesses, and he must do it in a single draft. And what he produces must be called genius by atheist literary critics 150 years from now.
Joe:
So look, I want to say a few things at the outset. First, Jacob Hansen is formidable. He is a very intelligent apologist for the church of Jesus Christ for Latter-Day Saints. I have the honor and privilege of debating him next month on the theme of great apostasy. He’ll be live in Draper, Utah, and I’ll put some details in the link below, but he holds his own very well and he’s presenting a pretty smart argument. There are all of these complexities to the Book of Mormon. There’s this complicated story that seems to hang together pretty well. There are these complicated literary structures, and we are to believe that the author is someone not even writing by hand, but dictating orally into a hat or from a hat as the case may be this really complicated plot in a way that is withstood over a century and a half of scrutiny and that people find really impressive and compelling to this day. And he did all this without any higher education, in fact, is a pretty remedial education out there on the American frontier, pretty impressive. That said, you’ll find Muslims making virtually the exact same argument saying, look at how brilliant, how complicated, how beautiful the Quran is. And Muhammad the purported human author was at least according to Muslim tradition, entirely illiterate. So Shabi Ali makes a very similar argument to the one that Jacob Hanson makes.
CLIP:
The prophet Muhammad Piby upon him himself wasn’t a school in reading or writing. According to Muslim tradition, the Quran seems to make reference to this in the 29th chapter when the Quran says you do not write it with your right hand, otherwise those who want to raise a fuss would cause doubt about this. So the fact that the prophet Muhammad piby upon him was not schooled in writing himself and he had to have other people write it for him is a further assurance to Muslims that he wasn’t making it up and he was just getting it as a revelation from God because if he were making it up himself, how does it come out with all of the beauty and elegance of a written text that the Quran turns out to have?
Joe:
You’ll notice that there’s even the same reference. Muhammad didn’t even write it himself because if you write it yourself, you can go back and you can fix all the errors. But Mohamed were told didn’t write it with his own right hand, no word whether or not he dictated it from a hat or not. But either way, let’s be clear again, the Quran is beautiful, complicated, lays out a coherent, more or less religion in theology, and people say, how could an illiterate person in the seventh century possibly have done that? Muslim cowboy makes a very similar form of this argument as well, and you’ll notice that things that he demands would need to be in this if it was manmade. It sounds very similar to Jacob’s list of his demands from Trent.
CLIP:
So if a man wrote the Quran, we already have a number of problems. If you’re going to write a book like the Quran and claim it’s from God, you can’t make any mistakes. The book can’t contradict itself, and you have to keep it consistent as you add to it over a period of 23 years and keep the message consistent. The grammar and style also have to remain the same. If a Quran is not from God, Muhammad would have to write it himself. That means in the middle of the Arabian Desert with no books around and being illiterate, he would have to know law, civil rights law, criminal law, family law, labor law, military law, personal injury law, real estate law and tax law. He would have to know history with little to no Christian presence in Mecca. He would have to know the stories and events in the lives of the prophets before him, the history of past nations, Judeo-Christian religious rulings, and he would have to know it well enough to somehow offer additional information and details not found in those books.
Joe:
And to be clear, in neither the Muslim, Northern Mormon cases, am I saying that’s the only argument people raise? They’ll also claim that there are these biblical connections and prophecies and other things that they allege prove their particular book to be true. In both cases, Christians look at it and say, those aren’t real prophecies, or that’s not really what the archeological evidence says, et cetera. I’m not going to get into any of that today. I’m just looking at what we might call the literary argument and the literary argument being the human authors are way too dumb or way too ignorant to have possibly come up with this on their own. It’s too beautiful, too brilliant, hangs together too well and has in some cases like esoteric knowledge of things that weren’t widely known. An ordinary person wouldn’t have just known that. That’s the literary argument.
And I think as Christians, we often handle it really badly because we often approach religions like Islam or Mormonism with a condescending error. We just treat it all as really stupid, and that’s wrong. It’s wrong on the level of charity for one, but it’s also totally self-refuting because the more you say, look at how dumb Joseph Smith is, look at how dumb Muhammad is. Then you say, well, wait a second. They preached really successfully in their day. Now granted, there was the use of force with the Navu Legion to a certain extent with Mormons and much more with the rise of the Islamic caliphate with Muslims, but nevertheless, even leaving out the conversions by the sword. It is simply the case that both Islam and Mormonism have grown pretty rapidly in the last few decades. So you can’t just write it off. It is strategically a very bad decision.
It is not just insulting, not just charitable, but the more you just sort of scoff, the less prepared you are. When someone says, well, I find this very convincing and I don’t see how a person with much less education than I do has written something I could never hope to write. Because I think most of us, if we look at the Quran, if we look at the Book of Mormon, can say, I don’t know. I don’t think I could do that. I’m reminded here of an argument that Richard Dawkins made back in 2015, and it’s such a dumb tweet that I think about it from time to time and 10 years later, I’m going to mention it again. He says, Bible and Quran, no articles, don’t worry about that. Bible and Quran were the best that Bronze Age desert tribes could do, but we’ve moved on.
And even at the time, others were doing it better. And this was a really dumb tweet for a lot of reasons, not least of all. As Dan McClellan of all people pointed out, Dawkins does not appear to know when the Bronze Age was because the New Testament, the Quran, at least much of the Old Testament were not written in the Bronze Age. But the more you just insult like, oh, these people lived in the desert and they lived in tribes, and then you’re like, but they wrote wisdom that even many non-believers find thought provoking and moving, and they’ve endured the last few millennia much better than say the God delusion has endured the last decade and a half. The more you denigrate the intelligence of their age or their tribe or their author, the more you point to it being plausible that these books are of divine origin.
So I think that this kind of, this scoffing indignant response not only is unhelpful, it actively helps the Muslim or Mormon or Christian Case because yeah, an idiot couldn’t have written the gospels or an idiot couldn’t have written, fill the blank, and yet there they are. So it looks like it’s providential. Okay, so what would be a better response to the argument? Well, I think the first thing to point out is the reason I’m mentioning both the l Ds and the Mormon, the LDS and the Muslim arguments simultaneously is because again, they’re using these very similar arguments that if they were valid would seemingly prove that the Quran is divinely inspired and the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired. But since the Quran and the Book of Mormon don’t agree with one another, leave aside whether they agree with the Bible or not. They certainly both disagree with one another.
These are incompatible conclusions. And so if you have an argument that if you followed it leads to two impossible conclusions, you’d have to believe in Mormonism and Islam and they’re incompatible. That tells us it’s not a good argument. We can see a sort of ad absurdum built into this that if you want to put it like this, I want Muslims who find this argument convincing for the Quran to listen seriously to the Mormon case and see why they think the Mormon case is wrong. And then notice that almost all those arguments are going to also show why we don’t find the Quranic argument effective. And similarly, I want Mormons to do the same thing to the Quran, say, look, the things you’re claiming, there’s these superficial things that sort of look miraculous or prophetic. They get some details kind of right archeologically, they get some facts about the world kind of right.
And also it is just a really beautiful book, and we don’t think the author is very well read if that’s a good argument. It seems to point to these opposite conclusions. You’d have to both accept, oh, I guess the Book of Mormon is true, and also accept, well, I guess the Book of Mormon is false. The Koran is true. And so that doesn’t disprove either the Quran or the Book of Mormon, but it does, it seems to me disprove this argument. It’s not a good argument. And in fact, I think we can go a bit further and say, why isn’t it a good argument? And I think this is going to reveal something really unfortunate about us. So imagine a world in which this maybe is not as hard to imagine as it should be. Imagine a world in which people just sat around in front of their computers all day and they never exercised and they had horrible diets and everything else, and then imagine they were just exposed to some incredible fe of athleticism.
Someone just does something shocking like Saquon Barkley jumping over a guy backwards, and they would say, oh wow, that is obviously a miracle because I could never do that. And it’s true they couldn’t do that. But the problem is with them, it doesn’t mean the thing is miraculous, it might just mean someone else is better at it. I mentioned this to say we are not just a physical equivalent of this dystopian example, but in many ways the intellectual equivalent, the number of books Americans read each year has declined precipitously from 18 and a half books a year to 12.6 books a year. So we’ve gone down by about a third, between 1999 and 2021. So if you want to put it in the opposite direction, we were reading about 50% more books in the late nineties than in the early 2020s. And I think it’s only getting worse.
The percentage of people who said they didn’t read a book during the last year was only 8% in 1978. You get into low teens and the nineties and it’s up to about a quarter of people by the early 2010s, and it seems to be going up. Now, granted, these are all different data sets, so you can find some variations, but the most recent information I could find from 2023 shows, 46% of Americans did not read a single book in 2023. So I would suggest regardless of how many degrees you have when you’re living in a culture that is this illiterate, that has this much of an opposition to reading than to say, Hey, compose a brilliant book. You don’t even have to say do it in six months or do it from a hat or do any, they just can’t do it because those mental muscles have completely atrophied.
But I think when you actually look at the world of Muhammad and the world of Joseph Smith, what we see is not that these figures were divinely inspired. What we see is that they were in many ways just better prepared to write a book like the Quran or to write a book like The Book of Mormon because they hadn’t been intellectually atrophying in front of their phone on an app. So let’s look briefly at the world of Muhammad. The first thing I want to point out is that of course Muhammad is from this largely illiterate culture. We don’t actually know if Muhammad himself was illiterate. There’s a popular story that he was, and that I think it’s somewhat of a motivated story because it makes Quran seem all the more miraculous. But the reality is pre-written cultures like oral cultures, we find people with these incredible memories that they’re really hard to believe. Lynn Kelly talks about this in her book, the Memory Code, where one of the things that she’s struck by is she’s doing unrelated research. She starts a second PhD dissertation because she’s just flabbergasted by how much just mentally retained by people in oral cultures.
CLIP:
My research includes commonalities from all indigenous cultures on how they memorize vast amounts of information because we are all using the same brain. They haven’t outsourced to writing technology and Google and store everything in memory. And by everything I mean massive amounts.
Joe:
In her book, she gives a bunch of different examples. So for instance, the African Dogon have 300 vegetables that are systematically classified. You’ve got a group in the Philippines who have 899 different categories of plants and know which of those are edible and which ones are used for medicinal purposes. There are people in Brazil and Peru who they gathered their traditional medical knowledge into a 500 page encyclopedia to ensure the information wasn’t lost. But prior to that point, those 500 pages of medical information were all floating around in their heads and not just like one person was broadly remembered by people in these tribes and cultures. And we don’t have a frame of reference for that. And so as a result, we just don’t take that seriously. I’m reminded here of headlines like this. One, gen Z woman asked how people remembered phone numbers before the year 2000 that, think about it like this.
I’m 40 as I seem to take a perverse fascination in mentioning a lot. I’m an old man, I’m going gray. And growing up, I had a bunch of phone numbers that I memorized, and then eventually I got a phone. And you know what I did? I stopped memorizing new numbers. I know my wife’s phone number and that’s it. And then I know a bunch of phone numbers still from my childhood. I could tell you the phone number that my neighbors had when I was eight. It is not information that does me any good, but there it is. And if you want to understand the difference between oral culture and written culture, you need to know this. Illiterate peasants weren’t idiots. And it is a gross misunderstanding from enlightenment smears against the so-called dark ages against medieval peasants to say, oh, they couldn’t read, therefore, they didn’t know the faith.
And if you read a book like Stripping of the Alters of Amon Duffy, you’ll see this demonstrably proved people in illiterate cultures, people who could not personally read, often retained enormous sums of information. But our brains and our minds are very efficient. And so if you don’t need to retain the information directly, you often don’t. There’s really cool information being gathered about this with married couples that frequently when you get married, there’s information you just stop retaining, which is why when you go into the kitchen, you say, honey, where did I put my keys? Because she knows where they are every time, and it drives her crazy when you ask, but you kind of know she knows better than you do. I’m not defending the practice. I may practice, it doesn’t matter. But the point there is there’s actually a great amount of research showing that couples remember things better when they are together.
So like stories and everything else, they play off each other, they build off each other, they prompt each other, and they do this very organically, but also they stop remembering certain information. So if you know your spouse is really good at knowing where all the stuff about the car is or remembering people’s birthdays or fill in the blank, it is pretty frequent that you just maybe not even intentionally, you just stop remembering that information. Well, similarly with the creation of written culture, as culture has become literate, they stop remembering huge 14,000 line texts. But before that, just like before, your phone numbers were all saved in your phone, those things were all committed to memory. And so you see this really clearly with the case of Homer, one of the things that for a long time researchers didn’t believe was that Homer wasn’t a writer, that the traditional understanding of Homer was he was a blind storyteller. He couldn’t write because he couldn’t see. And for a long time, we just sort of scoffed at that idea because of course, something as brilliant as the Odyssey could not have been composed by someone who couldn’t read. But then a guy by the name of Millman Perry revolutionized this and showed structures within the work that actually suggest pretty clearly that yet no, we find the same formulaic structure in oral recitation. These are little prompts that help you remember what it is that you are saying, what it is that you are reciting.
CLIP:
Millman Perry showed that he, Homer couldn’t have written the Homeric app because their earliest form, they weren’t written at all. Some other quite different creative process was at work. They had become what they became through some shadowy, traditional, apparently collective process, not by individual talent and artistry alone. They were the work of generations of illiterate oral poets who composed in real time, like on the fly, as they composed, as they sang. They couldn’t just stop in the middle of it. They couldn’t erase, they couldn’t cross out lines the way we do. They couldn’t start all over again. They were doing something entirely different from what writers in any age did
Joe:
And so the reality is what Homer shows, I think, is simply that there were times where people remembered way more than they do now, and that this doesn’t mean Homer was divinely inspired. This doesn’t mean Muhammad who also seemingly couldn’t read and write, doesn’t mean he was divinely inspired. It just means that we’ve largely lost the skill of just reciting even something as simple as the Homeric epics from memory. But people once had that, and now that is bafflingly largely the domain of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Okay, so someone for the world of Muhammad and kind the pre literate world, I think the important takeaway there is just people were not as dumb as we might imagine. And so if you’re downplaying how much Muhammad could remember or keep track of or any of this, I think you’ve grossly underestimated both Muhammad and the people of his age. What about the world of Joseph Smith? Now, this is a very different world. Unlike the world of the seventh century in Arabia, the 19th century in America is very much a literate age. If you want a great book on this and really deploring the shift away from this, I recommend Neil Postman’s book amusing Ourselves to Death. In there he says, it may be true, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, that the spirit that fired the American mind was the fact of an ever expanding frontier. But it is also true as Paul Anderson has written, that it is no mere figure of speech to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau.
And so I would suggest Joseph Smith actually neatly fits into the mold of a very literate 19th century American farm boy, somebody who grows up on the frontier with little to do other than memorized books. So people were shockingly literate. So before you have the issue of pre literate people committing a lot of information to memory just from storytelling and oral recitation, now you have people committing lots of information to memory because they’re doing menial labor that doesn’t take a lot of mental energy like plowing the fields while reading a book. And then they might read the same book over and over and over again because they have a somewhat limited library. Sometimes postman describes this cultural difference like this. He says, in a print culture, we’re apt to save people who are not intelligent, that we must draw them pictures so they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures and a field of concepts and generalizations to be able to do all of these things and more constitutes a primary definition of intelligence in a culture whose notions of truth are organized around the printed word.
Excuse me. And then he explains that in the 19th, 18th, and 19th centuries, America was such a place, perhaps the most print oriented culture ever to have existed. So there is this sea change between the world of Muhammad and Homer and the world of Joseph Smith, but they’re also both radically different from the world of today. Postman explains when, this is one of my favorite anecdotes from the book. When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, he was greeted like a superstar. He wrote to a friend, I can give you no conception of my welcome. There never was a king or emperor upon earth. So cheered and followed by the crowds and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds. If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home. If I go to the theater, the whole house rises as one man and the timbers ring again.
And the reason I mention all of this is to say the world of the 19th century had things like the Lincoln Douglas debates. This is what Postman uses to start. He points out that at these county fairs, Lincoln and Douglas, who were not at the time running for any national office, debated the preeminent moral issue of their day slavery. And they didn’t just have a series of 92nd soundbites like you might get in a debate today. They debated for something like seven hours with little breaks for dinner, and people were expected to follow seven hours of a debate. And that’s something that in many cases, we can’t do today. But that’s not because they were all divinely inspired. It’s because we’ve allowed our mental muscles to atrophy the idea that somebody, even with a limited formal education, could draw upon a vast resource of literary references, biblical references, archeological references of things that if you really get into the details of the Jacob and Trent debate were things that were knowable at the time. What emerges isn’t. Joseph Smith is clearly this divinely inspired author, but wow, people back then had an incredible gift that has been largely lost today. And it’s actually quite clear from Joseph Smith’s writing that he was very intelligent and could write and think in a way that a lot of people simply can’t today. This is one of the points that Isaac Kass makes in his review of the debate when he’s talking to Swan Sauna.
CLIP:
LDS Apologists love to say that Joseph couldn’t dictate a well-worded letter. We do happen to have a letter from Joseph Smith from 1829, the year the Book of Mormon was produced. I’m going to read the short paragraph and you can tell me if it sounds like he was incapable of dictating or writing a well-worded letter. He said, I would inform you that I arrived at home on Sunday morning the fourth after having a prosperous journey and found all, well, the people are all friendly to us, except a few who are in opposition to everything, unless it is something that is exactly like themselves. And two of our most formidable prosecutors are now under censure and are sighted to a trial in the church for crimes, which if true, are worse than all the Gold Book business. We do not rejoice in the affliction of our enemies, but we shall be glad to have truth prevail. There begins to be a great call for our books in this country. The minds of the people are very much excited when they find that there is a copyright obtained and that there is really a book about to be printed. So I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty well-worded letter. Seems pretty coherent. He uses long words correctly. It’s pretty educated. He didn’t have a lot of formal education, but it doesn’t, I’m not saying it’s high literature, but it’s coherent. It’s pretty good.
It’s
Actually a much better letter than most college graduates could write today. I bet. That’s right.
Joe:
So again, I don’t imagine any of this is some knockdown slam dunk argument that disproves Mormonism or disproves Islam. But I would say this, if your argument for why the book that you believe in has to be divinely inspired is that people today aren’t smart enough to be able to write it, that might be true. And I want to also be clear that even within the worlds that these guys are coming from, there is something clearly exceptional about Muhammad and about Smith, where they’re drawing people and they’re popular and they’re charismatic, and they’re convincing people in a way that ordinary people of their day clearly didn’t do. They succeeded. They’re exceptional within their culture, whatever you think of their religious claims. My point is simply none of that suggests certainly on its own that these religious claims are true, and we should probably find better arguments to use because from my perspective, this is largely more an indictment of our lack of cultural depth than it is any kind of proof for Islam or Mormonism. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heme. God bless you.