Most people by now have learned that a PhD doesn’t always correlate with smarts…
Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend in previous chapters: a certain fascination with what an ill-educated 25-year-old, living 180+ years ago, could tell us about modern cosmology, human health, and the world we live in. This knowledge has interested Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scholars since the first years the Church was in existence (Paul, 1992). However, in the last several decades cosmology has exploded (pun intended) into a broader understanding that appears to us to more and more closely mirror what Joseph Smith began teaching in the 1830’s. We will spend much of this book reviewing these new discoveries. Of particularly interest to us are the implications of the extraordinarily tiny ratio of biosphere to the rest of the universe. What we can directly sense and measure is just 4% of what we know by indirect means to be out there, and the biosphere is an immensely tiny fraction of that (see the following chapters on Candles and Constants, Dark Energy, Biosphere to Universe Ratio – DNA and Poetry, and Intelligence Part III). Even if we count other populated worlds that Joseph Smith was the first to inform us about, where humankind can actually live constitutes an incredibly tiny fraction. Yet Joseph apparently understood many of these things by 1832 (D&C 76: 19-24).
Hugh Nibley published a book (Nibley, 1967) about things that Joseph Smith couldn’t possibly have known about, that nevertheless appear in the Book of Mormon and have been verified since that time in formal scholarship. These elements include things like the “borders nearer the borders” of the Red Sea – tribal borders that are mainly lava ridges perpendicular to the land-sea boundaries on the western side of the Red Sea that separate different grazing regions; and the name “Sam,” the name of one of Nephi’s younger brothers. This name was ridiculed in the 19th Century, but the Nag Hammadi documents discovered in the 20th Century in the Nile Valley have shown the name “Sam” to have been in common use among the traders of 600 BC. The Book of Mormon is full of other Semitic cultural artifacts, too, including those unusual phrase constructions (e.g., “And it came to pass,” “I dreamed a dream,” and so on; see Stubbs, 2016). John Welsh (Welsh, 1961, 1987) discovered Chiasmus, a reverse-repeat literary structure common in Hebrew which does not survive translation into modern Bibles – yet is found all through the Book of Mormon. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples like this.
We have some personal experiences that we could add to that huge and still-growing Since Cumorah list. Between us we have traveled along about 70 percent of the Lehite Trail in the Arabian Peninsula, and one of us served as chief scientist for volcano hazards in the US Geological Survey and helped monitor the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens. In the next few chapters, we will be providing abbreviated outlines of some of these experiences, and how they both connect to things described in the Book of Mormon – things that a farm boy in 1828 could not possibly have known. Joseph Smith dictated the content of the Book of Mormon in about 53 days. At the time he had approximately 3.5 years of formal elementary school education.
It’s remarkable what you can do with just a 3rd grade education.