Back 0n 30 March 2017, slightly more than two years ago, I published a column in the Deseret News about a book that I had just read and that I thought (and still think) some will find helpful:
“‘Answers Will Come’ shares how to cope with religious doubts, questions”
Last night, I picked the book up again and happened to notice on page 145 what the author, Shalissa Lindsay, calls “One parting thought . . .”:
Thank you for reading these pages.
Please let errors or weaknesses in this book strengthen your testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I have eighteen years of formal schooling. I have a laptop, word processing tools, an online thesaurus, and a digital gospel library. I received helpful suggestions from a dozen people. After every interruption or pause, I had to reread several paragraphs or pages to get back into the train of thought I had left. And after all of that, I still had to rework most pages many times to improve the flow and resolve inconsistencies in mood, tone, or logic. Writing this book took two years.
The Book of Mormon is twelve times longer and infinitely more complex and profound than this book. It involves hundreds of people, thousands of years of history, intricate Hebraic literary devices, powerful sermons, detailed foreshadowing, and complicated nuances of politics, economics, warfare, and human nature.
Joseph Smith had three years of formal schooling and no electronics. His wife said he dictated from no reference materials and never asked to have the prior sentences read back to him, even after long interruptions. He translated the Book of Mormon in about three months.
I testify that he did that by the power of God.
I think that Sister Lindsay makes a very important point here, and one well worth serious consideration. The sheer existence of the Book of Mormon is remarkable. That it came from such an unlettered and unbookish young man, that it was dictated so quickly, that (apart from the claimed golden plates) there was no preexisting text, that it is so complex — these facts are, in my judgment, extraordinarily difficult to explain away.
Some critics seem to think that all it took for Joseph Smith to dictate the Book of Mormon was a lively imagination. But, overwhelmingly, the people who speak so casually of creating a book are people who have never seriously tried to write a book. Lengthy, complex volumes don’t just “happen.”
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https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/04/the-testimony-of-somebody-well-qualified-to-make-this-specific-point.html?fbclid=IwAR0pZwJBRVexkg-m1k_ABlwVGSu_e0Wxt6MoDR1wAPdH4N9cMFs5BWfScU8
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