I’m still thinking about WJT’s BoM space exploration analysis. There’s an idea I can’t shake. The BoM is an utterly unbelievable book if you place it in the world we know and with humans as we understand them.

Why? Because the BoM simply does not allow it. It demands you either accept that it’s a made up story written by someone who had no real working knowledge of seafaring, population growth, war gaming, or anthropology (this description would obviously fit Joseph Smith) OR you accept that the BoM is describing events, people, and places that we either don’t know of or lack the experience and worldview to explain.

The BoM is filled with any number of examples but I’ll give you just a few.

How did Nephi forcibly remove Laban’s head and put on his outfit to make a reasonably good impersonator without having to explain why he was dripping in blood? Did Zoram just assume Laban was out on a killing spree? Maybe he hung Laban upside down before chopping his head off. Idk.

Here’s another: Jacob describes their civilization as possessing power akin to earth and water bending like from the Avatar TV series:

our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can command in the name of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the waves of the sea.

As an aside, there are trees that obey people featured in the Lord of the Rings as well, ents and huorns. But regardless, Jacob speaks of being able to command mountains, waves, and trees. Explain that in our world, please.

Another one: Mormon describes a land that can be cursed to the point that it apparently swallows up their buried treasures:

the inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasures in the earth; and they became slippery, because the Lord had cursed the land, that they could not hold them, nor retain them again.

And one of my favorites: The war that ended the Jaredite civilization beggars belief. Two opposing armies numbering in the millions getting slowly whittled down to a 1 v 1 death match? Please. You could simulate war games on a super computer from now to the end of days and I bet never once duplicate the 1 v 1 result. It is a patently absurd outcome. Oh and the last loser almost gets up after his head is chopped off. lolz.

These are utterly unbelievable tales if you read them from our modern understanding and place them on this earth with humans as we know them. The BoM only becomes believable in a magical worldview in which we suspend rational thought from our own human experiences. It simply does not fit the reality we daily experience. Reading the BoM with intellectual honesty demands that you choose between two possibilities. It’s either a made up tale or the people and places are simply different from what we know.

You could still place it on this earth but only if it was an earth that was once very different and with people capable of feats that are now foreign to humans. And that’s just about as crazy as placing it in Space.

“Yeah but ocean travels are pretty explainable so what’s that got to do with the Space analysis?”

Tying this back to the journeys across waters, consider how utterly unbelievable it is for Nephi and his small group of helpers to construct a ship that is deep-ocean worthy when he was required to create every raw material from scratch. Tools to build it? Sure, God says to go smelt some ore first. But how do you smelt it without a forge or some other way to purify it? And how do you do that without tools? How do you dig out the ore to make tools if you don’t already have tools?

Nephi says he made some bellows and struck two rocks together to make fire. Is this guy joking? Sure, just tan some hide real quick for a bellows and then just convert a forest into charcoal to keep a fire hot enough to do all this smelting for tools, nails, strapping, hinges, levers, etc. Who is chopping down all of those trees? He’s only got a handful of people to do all of this work after all.

Even if you solve all of that, how do a handful of people cobble together every other raw material to build this ship? God showed him how to do it? Great. You still couldn’t do it from scratch, not with 100 people. You’d have to develop dozens of different industries to put together everything you would need to build the type of vessel most of us envision.

How did they cultivate enough raw materials to make all the rope they needed? Or how did they waterproof the hull? Was there an anchor? How did they place the mast? What about material for sails? Did someone tend some sheep long enough to get the wool? Who spun that wool and with what?

And on top of all of that they had to put up a ton of food to prepare for such a long ocean journey.

You get the idea.

You think the Jaredite version is any better? Come on. They somehow accomplished the same feat of beach bum boat manufacturing that the Nephites did. Plus they supposedly had a specific boat to carry their fish in? Yeah a floating aquarium seems totally doable. And don’t forget the “swarms of bees” on a fully enclosed boat that’s the length of a tree. Guess they had bee suits? What a crock!

“Geez dude, calm down, just get us out of this mess before we end up on Exmo Reddit!”

Here’s the deal as I see it. We can still believe in the BoM if we entertain the possibility that these are people unlike us living in lands unlike ours and in possession of abilities and resources we simply can’t comprehend. Going that route leaves us with only a few options. Either this world is not what it used to be (possible), or the BoM did not take place here (also possible).

It’s not easy to make the BoM completely compatible with either option. I do agree it’s a little easier to place it on this earth if it’s an earth very different than it is today. But I am still partial to the Space version. For some reason it’s the one I want to believe.