My testimony of the Book of Mormon

Previously, I gave my testimony of the divine creator of the Universe and Life. But in addition to the 3 key belief pillars of Christianity (Universe was divinely created; the Jehovah is that creator; and Jesus Christ is the God incarnate who died and resurrected to save the mankind), I have one more belief hurdle to clear as a Latter Day Saint: is the Book of Mormon true??Once again, if you are spiritually receptive enough to receive a direct answer to this question: I envy you; I myself have to slog through scientific evidence for it.

When I searched the Internet, I found plenty of detractors; according to them, Joseph Smith was a treasure hunter turned into a charlatan, who made up the whole Book of Mormon: all?77k sentences, 270k words of it, with passages stolen from the King James Bible.?Some speculate that he worked it out years in advance, while others postulate that he made it up on the fly, as he was dictating.?Still others think that he colluded with the scribes to plagiarize from prior literature, and point to the almost verbatim copy of Isiah, especially the latter part of Isiah appearing in 2 Nephi–thought by many Biblical scholars as having been written AFTER Nephi sailed to the Americas–as the evidence of the Book of Mormon being a fraud.

I summoned all my powers of clear thinking, to start with the objective, unbiased evidences about the Book of Mormon and its creation process:

1. Even in the supposed verbatim copy of Isiah, there are deviations.?2 Nephi 13:6 actually differs from Isiah 3:6 by a single NOT inserted.?If someone had decided to copy from Isiah, it doesn’t seem like it was done ahead of time.?And if Joseph were reading from the King James Isiah on the spot, the observed deviations are highly unlikely.
2. According to Royale Skousen–a BYU Biblical scholar–Joseph dictated the vast majority of the BOM to scribes, Oliver Cowdery being the chief among them.?The surviving manuscript shows a one-pass dictation interrupted only by instant spelling corrections.?This would be possible if Joseph were either reading from a written note, or reciting straight from memory.?Professor Skousen also claims that the Book of Mormon contains phrases and vocabulary from 17th century (2 centuries before Joseph's own time).
3. By all eye-witness accounts–including some non believers–Joseph was not reading from a written material, but rather mostly from the Seer-Stone and for sure with his face buried in a hat, which would rule out the possibility of reading from a written note.

So it seemed that Joseph has performed an oral recital of 270k words, and I wondered: is that even humanly possible??And it turns out: maybe!

• The Ancient Greek bards were able to recite from memory Illiad (at 52k words) and Odyssey (at 42k words).
• A legendary Buddhist monk Ananda putatively could recite all 10k chapters of the Pali Canon–which is even longer than the Book of Mormon.

Both the ancient bards and the Buddhist monks lived in oral traditions and had a lifetime of training.?Even the material being memorized and recited has structure, rhythm and rhyme, to be easily memorizable.?The Book of Mormon does NOT have such consistent structure, and Joseph does not seem to have received a special training in oral recitation.?So some critics theorize that Joseph was an extra-ordinary Genius who was able to dictate the Book of Mormon impromptu in one pass, to the scribes.?Let’s examine this claim:

• If Joseph was reciting from memory the content that he did not fully comprehend (because the Book of Mormon has a complex story and timeline, involving original names and places), the task is akin to reciting irrational numbers like the number π.?The World record for π recitation is 68k digits, and the record holder recites at the speed of 100 digits / minute.?Remember once again that the Book of Mormon is 270k words.?For someone who surpassed the recitation world record by factor of 4 at minimum, Joseph did not exhibit the autistic or obsessive compulsive behavior.
• The final materialistic explanation is then that Joseph was a literary genius that really composed the Book of Mormon in an impromptu manner–all 270k words, 77k sentences, with the multiple timelines and complex literature structures like Chiasmus, and an almost verbatim copy of long passages of King James version of Isiah, and some passages in the literary style 2 centuries before his days.?This is even more incredible than the Genius reciter theory; no human in history has ever done this!

Have you heard the famous Sherlock Homes passage:

When you have eliminated all the impossibles, what remains–however improbable–must be the truth?

Here, the only surviving explanation is that the Book of Mormon was divinely transmitted to Joseph.?Sure, it’s not as overwhelming as the Burning Bush experience, and you don’t know that the transmitter is the creator of the Universe, but you can’t deny that you are likely staring at a miracle.?And if a scientifically and logically arrived miracle doesn’t convince you to connect the dots, I doubt anything will; for there are people who would believe anything except God, such as the Multiverse theory that will allow for INFINITE trials at the universal physical constants and different forms of life. Since we cannot perform experiments for such conjectures, it is NOT scientific. Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci–the OG scientist–wrote in his Thoughts on Art and Life, Thoughts on Science (p. 141):

There is no human experience that can be termed true science unless it can be mathematically demonstrated.

I conclude–with a probability that is mind-bogglingly close to 1.0–the Universe, the Earth, and we were created by God.?There is even a mathematical possibility that our Solar System may be at the center of the Universe.?I have seen enough evidence that the Book of Mormon is a divine transmission to Joseph Smith.?Even though I may exercise my agency to insist on even stronger evidence, I have common sense enough to say: “it is enough my Lord, I believe, and I choose Thee”.?