Mormons believe that God inspired Joseph Smith to translate a set of golden plates that allegedly

contained the records of ancient Jews emigrating to America and founding massive civilizations

that were eventually visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection.

The translation of these plates is called the Book of Mormon and I've previously argued

that there are many reasons to doubt this claim.

Recently a Mormon apologist named David Snell criticized one of the reasons I gave for finding this implausible.

So in today's episode I'm going to engage his arguments and the arguments of other Mormons on this question.

The reason I gave was that the Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words long, but there were allegedly only 40, 6 by 8 inch

golden plates.

How could that much information have fit onto such a small space?

If you tore out every page of the modern finely printed 531 page Book of Mormon and placed it on the ground,

it would cover over 100 square feet of space.

But if you place the golden plates on the ground, they'd only cover 27 square feet.

The question then becomes, how could all of that information have fit

onto the much smaller alleged plates?

My answer is, there is no plausible natural way for this to have happened.

If the text doesn't fit, then you must acquit. The Book of Mormon that is of the

charge of being an authentic translation of ancient texts.

Now, Mormon apologist typically offer two ways of addressing this problem,

shrinking the words or expanding the translation.

In his response to me, Snell endorses the former approach.

Before I address his arguments though, I will make one concession, and that I misspoke when I

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